Choosing Your Problems

There is something quietly unsettling about the moment you realise how much of your life sits behind someone else's door.

I had been thinking about building a homelab for a long time. The idea had always lived in that particular category of things that sound exciting in theory but feel expensive and complicated in practice. Turns out, it is both. It has always been expensive, something that is not helped by the current rise in the price floor driven by the mad gold rush that is the AI boom, or bubble, depending on who you ask. The entry points can be quite low, but I know myself too well to settle for the least expensive option. I have always lived by the mantra of buy cheap, buy twice, a lesson I learned the hard way when building the very computer I cannot play my games on right now, because Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has deemed it so.

But a fun project for another time. Something to do when you had more space, more money, more of whatever it is you tell yourself you need before you start. The kind of thing that sits in the back of your mind like your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Sometimes the moment is chosen for you, and you wish you had listened to little Jiminy, because you are locked out of the systems you built on someone else's foundation. That system, in my case, one Microsoft account. Locked out because.......reasons.

Story time... but the short version.

It started with following advice that, looking back, I probably should not have followed. But there is something to be said about listening to someone you believe knows more about how a system works than you do, because you are ultimately going to them for help. Following that guidance triggered a series of events in Microsoft's system that ended with me locked out of my account. The process of getting it unlocked has been an exercise in how to not get frustrated at people who are just doing their jobs, and eventually led to me sending a signed letter. Yes, you read that right. A letter. Snail mail. In 2026. Before I could get to someone who could maybe, possibly, help with getting my account unlocked.

The whole situation made me rethink how much of my data is entirely out of my control. It is one thing to accept tracking cookies on a website. It is another to get locked out of a file you downloaded from a different service because you did not want to get locked out of it on that service. That, ironically, is not even the biggest irony of the situation. But that is a story for another time.

My First attempt at a home server was setting up a Plex media server. It never really stuck. Which is ironic, because Plex is supposed to be the easy option, the one designed to get out of your way and just work. I think the difference now is that I am coming at it with a clearer sense of why, rather than just because I can.

This second, more focused attempt is being hosted on a laptop I bought over a decade ago for my Computer Games Development degree at UEL. An Intel i7-4720HQ paired with a GTX 960M and 16GB of RAM, genuinely capable hardware for its time, and I will not hear otherwise. It carried me across lecture halls, propped open on library desks, running Unity builds and rendering scenes without complaint. My partner in crime during my YouTube video creating days too, for those who remember that chapter. It has been sitting in a drawer for a few years, which felt like a waste. Turns out I just needed the right platform to make the self-hosting dream a reality. Enter Proxmox VE.

Proxmox VE as the hypervisor. Lightweight LXC containers rather than full virtual machines. Jellyfin for my collection of films and TV shows. Samba for file sharing across my network. Syncthing as my replacement for OneDrive. Navidrome for my music collection. Tailscale stitching everything together so I can reach it securely from anywhere without exposing a single port to the open internet.

This week I spent an evening properly hardening it. Firewall rules per container with default drop policies. Fail2ban watching SSH and the Proxmox web UI. Two-factor authentication on the admin account. Root login disabled. The kind of work that is unglamorous but necessary. The kind of work that reminds you that owning your infrastructure means being responsible for it.

There is so much that can still be done with this setup, and even if I can already envision some frustrating nights ahead, I am looking forward to every second of it.

That is really what this comes down to. The problems do not go away when you self-host. They just become different problems. Problems you choose. The late nights debugging a networking issue only to come to the realisation that leaving it with the default settings is the cleanest most stable way for it to just work. The config changes that break things. The moment a firewall rule you wrote locks you out of your own server and you have to wait an hour to try again. These are not problems that happened to you. They are problems you walked into with open eyes, and there is a meaningful difference.

Dealing with a corporation that will not respond is a problem you cannot solve. It is a wall. Debugging your own infrastructure at 11pm is a problem you absolutely can solve. It is a puzzle. The struggle is the same category of inconvenience on paper. In practice it feels nothing like it.

I find that I do not mind. Partly because I am an IT engineer by trade, so this is familiar territory. But also, if I am being honest, because the Microsoft situation has left me with considerably more free time than I expected. My Xbox account is tied to the same suspended account. Which means no Xbox. Which means I have spent more evenings than I would like to admit staring at a library of hundreds of unplayed games sitting in the Epic Games Store, untouched, waiting. Moving to Steam is probably overdue. Actually playing the games I have hoarded over years of free giveaways is a problem I would genuinely like to have.

There is something clarifying about the work itself, though. About knowing exactly where your data is, how it is protected, what is running on the machine serving it. About not having to wonder whether a company's priorities have shifted, whether a service you depend on will exist in two years, whether the thing you paid for is really yours.

A company can sunset a service, update their terms, or simply decide you are no longer a customer they want, and the thing you paid for disappears. This is not hypothetical. It happens. Watching it play out across industries, it feels less like an edge case and more like the logical conclusion of a model where convenience was always the trade and ownership was never really part of the deal.

I am still dependent on services I do not control for plenty of things, some things are a little too complex to do alone. I am also not naïve enough to think that running my own infrastructure makes me immune to data loss or failure. Hard drives die. Proper backups are on the list. There is always more to do.

The next step is storage. A proper NAS. I have been looking at UGREEN (which at the point of publishing this, I am already using, I do need to start publishing these on time). Synology is the name that comes up most in this space, and it is a good product, but Synology has also spent recent years making decisions that feel uncomfortably familiar. Locking users into their own drive ecosystem. Making it harder to run your own software on hardware you paid for. I am not naïve enough to think UGREEN would be any different if they reached the same scale. But they have not done anything wrong yet, and crucially, I can wipe the thing and run whatever I want on it. That matters.

As for drives, I am still working out what I actually need. Right now everything I own fits on a 2TB drive, not counting games. Not that I can play them anyway. But the plan is to start buying films physically and digitising them for personal use rather than paying a platform for the privilege of access I do not really own. A decent Blu-ray rip is not small. A collection of any size adds up fast. So I am thinking about what I will need in two or three years, not just what I need today.

In the meantime, I have an Xbox external hard drive sitting idle for obvious reasons. There is an old saying in IT: there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. I understand where it comes from. I have seen it play out. But it has never been my philosophy and it is not about to become it. The Xbox drive buys me time. That is all it is for.

The foundation is there. The server is running, the containers are locked down, the VPN is routing correctly, and the whole thing is accessible from anywhere without a single open port. That is more than I had six months ago. It is also, genuinely, just the beginning.

The laptop that got me through university is doing that now. A decade later, different context, same principle: figure out how it works, make it do what you need, and own the result.

That feels worth something.