This is when it all began. I expressed discontent to a co-worker aboutbout wanting to have scripts that run constantly all the time for various purposes. And he talked about just having a computer running all the time that would run those for you. We talked a little bit more about what I would come to know as self-hosting or creating a home lab and I asked him how to get started. He recommended keeping an eye out in Goodwill for old computer towers. It wasn’t until a year later that I actually spotted. A couple since it appears they go fast at Goodwill and other places. But I ended up finding two Dell Optiplex 3020s from 2013 that were fifteen bucks each. I bought them both and Started getting my hands dirty with the hardware side of things. There were many long conversations with AI about learning what was what, and me constantly sending photos of the computer’s interior to AI to learn different colored cables and different parts of the inside of a computer. I cannot understate this enough. There is nothing more valuable than Touching the physical components of a computer to best understand resource management. Digitally. It was not a plug-and-play experience. Both of the hard drives had been removed, so that was my first challenge figuring out what the heck to buy and where to buy it from. I ended up getting an old silver cheap hard drive for one of the computers and a nice SSD for the other one. All the parts that AI recommended were all taken, and I was starting to see the restrictions on availability of parts in this current time period. I also bought additional RAM and maxed out one of the computers and move that old RAM stick to the other computer. Finally the computers were about ready to go, but I still had to go through the issue of getting an OS installed on them. This would have been fine, but my work laptop, which is my only, which I use as my personal computer, only has or doesn’t have access to any USB drives or removable media. So flashing something would be hard. I ended up having to go home and flash a USB to where I could get the OS on the computer. I ended up going with Debian after more AI conversations, you’ll start to see a theme here where I have a decision in front of me and we’ll go on a long research train about which is best, make a decision, and then reevaluate it a week later and continue the process.Debian was a good choice to start though. I followed some guidance online and loaded it up with some Docker containers. But before I did all that, I finally was able to SSH into the box and that was like a huge win that set off the positive feedback loop, I guess you could say. There was a weird feeling of joy that I experienced when I was finally able to SSH. There were a lot of hiccups along the way. Anyway, let’s see. I don’t quite remember the order in which I started setting things up, but I just followed self-hosting guides about what people typically will host, like a media stack with Plex or Jellyfin and Piehole and other stuff, and started deploying a bunch of things and having fun with it.