just me and linux — Storage, networking, and self-hosted infrastructure — notes from running a small homelab.

Everything in this series on one page. Bookmark this one and skip the rest. Vocabulary, in one line each Term What it is U / RU Rack unit. 1.75 in

The technician reading your ticket is standing in a cold, loud room, in front of forty identical black boxes, wearing gloves, holding a tablet. They cannot see your monitoring. They

Everything up to this point stayed inside your cage. This part is about the handful of strands that leave it, and about the paperwork that governs them — because the paperwork

Your server's NIC cable probably travels about two feet. That fact shapes more of the datacenter than anything else in this series. This part is where switches physically

Every remote hands ticket you do not have to open is a win, and out-of-band access is how you avoid most of them. There is a second computer

"Send me a 3-metre DAC" is a complete, unambiguous, orderable request. "Send me a network cable" is not. This part is about being able to

You are sold a 30 amp feed. You can use 24 of them. If you also want redundancy, you can use 12. Power is the part of the datacenter that

A 42U cabinet does not give you 42U of usable space, and the sooner you internalise that the fewer awkward conversations you will have about why the new server does

I have never racked a server. I have opened a lot of tickets asking someone else to. That is the normal shape of this job now. You are a competent

The whole series on one page. Print it, pin it, put it in your runbook. Parts 0 through 6 explain why each of these works. This is the lookup table

Five parts in, we've covered sockets, counters, packets and latency. There's a gap, and it's the one that eats the most time on modern

"The site is slow." Three words, and almost no information. Slow where? Slow for whom? Slow by how much, compared to what? Latency work is mostly attribution — cutting