I credit homelabbing through my twenties with just about everything good that's happened to me in my career. I certainly didn't end up being moderately employable because I'm smart, charismatic, incisive, creative, lucky, educated, diligent, connected, handsome, sanitary, interesting, or thoughtful; no, it's because I have a tendency toward obsession, delusions of grandeur, and absolutely terrible impulse control.
So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do.
The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch.
So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.
So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do.
The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch.
So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.