Tell me your home lab mistakes 😬

[nixxblikka]

My biggest mistake: Starting a homelab

[joshua_lee]

My biggest mistake is buying old Dell servers and expect them to be power efficient.
I've cut my power draw in half switching to consumer gear.

[andreaswss]

Biggest mistake ever is to tell your wife it’s price…

[DigitalSpaceport]

I'm going to need a lot more beer to have this conversation

[leafdriving]

My Favourite Mistake: Try someting new which all included takes hours to install. Then something goes BREAK ALL wrong... spend hours tring to fix, end up re-installing from start, and figuring out it was something stupid and simple and didn't need a re-install at all. I will repeat this mistake till I die.

[frankoptis]

I was a server admin at our university, trying to compile a custom kernel with xfs support for one of our servers around midnight. Everything went well and I wanted to delete the source code directory because I no longer needed it. I typed "rm -r /" instead of "rm -r ./", therefore wiping the whole system and I had to start all over gain. It took me the whole night...

[MrShiffles]

Buying gear in haste without thorough research...been doing the old "Amazon return shuffle" lol

[groto]

That time back in college when I messed up a diskpart command and deleted my RAID5 array

I never recovered and neither did my data.

[elib]

Biggest mistake starting to homelab second biggest is breaking my “production” proxmox cluster

[OtakuGenx]

Mine was not planning for the sound levels of older 1U servers. Bought 3 for an XCP-ng cluster, now trying to sell them because I want to sleep.

[dustind]

Making a backup today.. Thanks for the reminder

[migillett]

Forgot to turn off the power supply to my server. Removing my RAID card when I tapped the power button and I heard a "pop." That RAID card never turned on again.

[ericturner]

Lost power during a motherboard firmware update. It was truly bricked at that point. Had to send it to the manufacturer for repair. Never update firmware during a storm unless you have it on an UPS.

[jason-budney]

Looking back I'd say trying to do everything on one machine. A forbidden router on steroids was like playing with a house of cards, one thing broke and you rebuild from the ground up every time. I always seemed to have issues with backups too.

[jabolkok]

reseting pfsense with all set up (pppoe, vpn, ..) reinstaling and it still didnt work. replaced parts with other routers - still no work. contacted isp and got info i somehow didnt pay 1 bill from 3 months ago.

[TheVideoGameVault]

"I'm sure this Unifi update will be okay..."

[Don_Roberto_Hardelone]

I mixed sata power cables from two different brands of power supplies. The result? 3 dead hdds from my NAS. I couldn't figure out why Truenas wouldn't show me the drives plugged in. It was already destroyed

[SilentChappie]

I updated my proxmox instance without making a backup. It’s using an older kernel even when rebooted. Now the vms won’t start up. Time to rebuild from the ground up.

[NFMorley]

Not having a NAS & single-source backup plan/routine sooner - it took a number of evenings to try and work out exactly which folders on each of my multiple cloud accounts, machines and external drives were the most recent/accurate when trying to combine them back together into one scheme (as well as wondering how I ended up with the same stuff stored in 5 different places!).

[tumblwd]

Ordering parts for my server when I was too tired to read descriptions, mistakes are expensive or maybe just an opportunity for a new build.