10 Home Lab Mistakes I Made (So You Don’t Have To)

They say that you learn more from mistakes than when things go successfully. I can definitely attest to that fact. I have had some horrible crash and burns in the home lab. But, when the smoke clears and dust settles I have come out a better engineer for it. Mistakes are difficult and challenging sometimes to overcome, but it does cause you to have to face the fact that YOU didn’t do something right or didn’t plan for something you should have planned for. I would like to share with you some of the best mistakes I have ever made in my home lab so you don’t have to repeat those and have a laugh or two at my expense 🙂

Mistake #1: Reloading the wrong server

This I have to say is my most epoch fail. I had a three node VMware vSAN cluster at the time running on (3) Supermicro home lab servers, the SYS-1028D, Xeon-D systems. I had a disk failure in node #3 in my cluster.

However, due to not having labels on my servers and a few other unfortunate events, I thought I was powering down (long pressing the power button) on the failed server. Instead, I poked a healthy server in the eye and reloaded the wrong server!

Unfortunately, I didn’t really have real-time alerting in the lab at that time to tell me “hey you idiot all of your services just went down, you did something wrong!”

By the time I realized what had happened, the damage was done. The system was wiped, and I lost all my data, since now instead of having one failed node in an HCI cluster, I had two out of three toast.

It felt like a gut punch, but here’s the silver lining. I thankfully had a successful real-world test of my backup process, not because I wanted to test it that way but had to. Luckily they came through for me. I also learned the importance of labeling and documentation, even in a home lab.

We all might tell ourselves, this is just for fun and learning and messing around, but at the end of the day, we all sink hours upon hours into our home labs. Don’t toss all of that away by skipping just a few minutes of labeling and making sure everything is clearly tagged, and now I keep meticulus up-to-date notes on what’s running where.

Lesson learned: Documentation and backups aren’t optional (even in a home lab) they’re survival skills.

Mistake #2: Putting a Windows VM on the Internet

Early on in my lesser experienced days, instead of setting up VPN access which seemed too cumbersome to me at the time, I spun up a Windows workstation and exposed it to the Internet as a jumpbox. I had a good password on it, firewall rules in place, but didn’t really think about scoping it down or introducing many other needed security defenses.

While it did meet my needs as a quick and easy way to log into my lab, it wasn’t as secure as it needed to be. In just a few days, I noticed suspicious activity and of course brute force attempts hitting that VM. That was my wake up call. I tore down the ingress NATs immediately and dove much deeper into network security.

That mistake forced me to learn much more about firewalls, VPNs, zero-trust solutions and the importance of not exposing management tools or machines directly online.

Lesson learned: never put a workstation or admin endpoint directly on the Internet. Use VPNs, reverse proxies, or secure access solutions instead.

Mistake #3: Losing all my Docker-Compose work

I think this is one that many if not most of you can relate to – spending weeks or months hand crafting a Docker-Compose file, tweaking YAML files or some other meticulous config (way before AI can help us) and then after a crash and burn (reloading the wrong server 🙂 or some other event), we lose it all!

If you are like me, I have told myself before, “oh I will remember how or why I did that”. But, then months later, you actually don’t have a clue about how you made it work and all ofd your handcrafted and meticulous work is down the drain.

It was painful for me, but it pushed me toward a new skill: version control. Now, every Compose file and Terraform config I create goes into Git. If I lose a server, I don’t lose my work. I just redeploy from code.

Lesson learned: if it’s not in Git, it doesn’t exist.

Mistake #4: Not labeling network ports or cables

I used to think, “It’s just a few cables, I’ll remember what goes where.” That worked for about a week. Fast forward, and my setup had turned into a spaghetti mess with various projects and new gear. We have probably all this experience as well. One weekend I moved a switch, unknowingly unplugged a VLAN trunk, and half the lab went dark.

Some time later (maybe hours?), I traced it to a single unlabeled cable. That was the last time I trusted my memory instead of a label maker and also using display-string configuration or other vendor specific config that allows you to label your ports in software, so you know what each port actually is.

Lesson learned: More documentation lessons here. Label every cable and port. It’s boring, but it’s the kind of boring that saves hours of troubleshooting (which is even more boring).

Mistake #5: Running Everything on a single drive

I think we have all done this when starting out – running critical services on a single SSD, NVMe, or spindle. Let’s just say, I have done this and have been bitten by it more than once. You start out doing this for ease and less hassle. And, when starting out you think things are not “critical” until you lose them.

All of the sudden, the drive fails and your data is gone. That data could be an important VM, containers, or persistent data for your Kubernetes node. My failures in this regard forced me to think about redundancy with any type of storage.

Now, I run things like mirrored drives, ZFS pools, and redundant storage wherever this is possible or makes sense. So the moral of the story is, redundancy matters, even in a home lab.

Keep in mind too, if you don’t design your storage for redundancy, this might be acceptable, BUT, make sure you have backups of your data as you will be designing not for redundancy or high availability of your data but for disaster recovery.

Lesson learned: storage isn’t glamorous, but it’s the backbone of your lab. Don’t ignore it.

Mistake #6: Skipping snapshots before upgrades

I’ve lost track of how many times I ran an update or upgrade in my lab without taking a snapshot first, either intentionally, or just simply forgetting. Whether it was Proxmox, ESXi, or pulling a new Docker image, I would just roll the dice and YOLO it. And more often than not, something broke.

Those times when I thought to myself I know I should take a snapshot in case something happens but I just don’t want to take the time to do it, when something breaks and it tends to do that especially when you aren’t prepared, I have regretted it.

Without snapshots, rolling back may be super painful if possible at all. I’ve had to rebuild from scratch, wasting hours of time, simply for not taking 2-5 minutes to create a snapshot. So, now, snapshots are just second-nature and part of the routine when testing things. They are like cheap insurance when something fails.

Lesson learned: always snapshot before upgrades.

Mistake #7: Overcommitting hardware

One of the easiest traps to fall into is cramming too much onto your home lab hardware. At one point, I ran Kubernetes, databases, Docker stacks, and multiple virtual machines all on one small form factor PC. It worked… until it didn’t. The CPU throttled, the RAM maxed out, and the whole thing locked up and then your home lab experience turns into a dumpster fire. If your home lab server looks like the below, you are probably overprovisioned 🙂

That experience taught me to plan workloads and monitor usage. Now I spread things out more intelligently and keep an eye on resources. You can do this easily with free and open source solutions like Prometheus and Grafana, or using tools like Netdata or CheckMK.

Lesson learned: just because you can run everything on one box doesn’t mean you should.

Mistake #8: Skipping power protection

I operated without a UPS for quite some time at first since I didn’t want to spend my home lab budget on what I thought was something I didn’t need and wanted to spend it much more on flashy server gear. However, after several power flickers and other power outage events and datastores that went missing, I decided this was a worthy investment.

Since then, I make sure every one of my nodes sits behind a UPS. Even an inexpensive one can save you days of rebuilding.

Lesson learned: Power protection isn’t optional, it’s absolutely necessary if you are concerned about your data and equipment.

Mistake #9: Forgetting IPs and VLANs

This is definitely a common one. Especially when you expand beyond a simple VLAN 1 network and have 5 or 10 VLANs and subnets, it gets difficult to remember which VLAN goes with which IP range and vice versa. Not only is this a guessing game, it can create outage events by mis-remembering your address space and accidentally duplicating one of your production IP addresses in your lab.

I now faithfully use phpIPAM to keep this information documented in my home lab. phpIPAM also has a built-in scanner that can keep your subnets documented with the current “live” addresses and the ones that were seen at one point but are now dark. This is tremendously useful.

Lesson learned: Documentation or the lack thereof is a common theme in most people’s home lab mistakes that leads to other mistakes being made. Make sure to document your IPs and VLANs before they come back to haunt you.

Mistake #10: Underestimating heat and noise

These are two things that you may assume that won’t bug you. However, if you share the room where your gear is in for another purpose, I can tell you from experience, it WILL bug you after some time. You have to think about things like airflow, and if you stuff servers into a closet, you need to make sure you have some way to escape the hot air.

If you don’t this will cause noise to go up exponentially as well since the servers will ramp up to compensate for the heat and it will also shorten the lifespan of your equipment. Drives will fail more often, etc. Also, if you have a family that shares the house or space with you, they probably won’t be happy.

Balance power with being practical. While I love “big iron” servers that you find in enterprise datacenters, these are just no longer practical for my purposes. I can do basically everything I need to do with a few mini PCs. These are generall much more power efficient and they produce less heat and noise as enterprise servers.

Lesson learned: your lab lives in your house, don’t ignore noise and heat.

Wrapping up

I hope you have enjoyed some of my “war stories” of home lab mistakes I have made. Mistakes can definitely be frustrating, costly, and most certainly humbling. But I wouldn’t trade them. I have honestly learned more from the mistakes than the successes and this is part of the fun. On the other side of a mistake that leads to a mishap, you become a better engineer professionally, and definitely much better at running a home lab and self-hosting services.

A lab is a safe place to fail as you can break things, rebuild them, and come away with lessons that will benefit you for a lifetime of working with technology. Let me know in the comments your home lab mistakes if you want to share those with everyone so we can all benefit and learn from your experience!