Overengineering your home net

If something is worth engineering, it's worth overengineering. Witness my home network, the Nerdhole. There is nothing improper about the term "Nerdhole." It means a dwelling dedicated to Nerdish activities. In my case, I am setting up my home network to such standards that a small company could do the same. There is a progression to the amount of engineering needed as your organisation grows. It goes something like this:

1. A single PC or laptop. - You bought a computer in the shop. You turned it on, signed away your soul to its Maker, and now you are happily putting all your deepest thoughts in the Cloud. This works well for a while, but something is wrong. It takes a lot of time to start programs, the battery runs out in hardly any time at all, and you get the creepy feeling that you are being... watched. You are no longer happy with what the PC shop put on your machine, and you re-install the operating system from scratch, being very careful to choose only the things you really need. You spend time learning about all the settings, and disable most of the stuff. And it works! Knowledge is power, and power is addictive.

2. Choosing your operating system - Your current unnamed software provider is doing things that you are no longer comfortable with. It is time for change. You download an operating system of your own choosing, and install it yourself. With the laptop lying in tatters, you are on your phone constantly, trying to find out why it isn't working, and have to dig into things like BIOS settings, boot devices, UEFI vs Legacy. And then your laptop starts working. You bask in the glow of no longer being a mere user, a mere consumer. You are now... root! You own your computer again, and are fully in charge of it. Freedom!

3. Getting more kit - Almost without you noticing, bits of electronics start appearing in your home. You now have more than one computer. One for the day to day work, emails, web browsing, and the others for tinkering with. Maybe it's a tiny Raspberry Pi sitting on your desk with all its electric entrails hanging out. Maybe it's your old PC that is now running Linux because Microsoft deems it unworthy of Windows 11. You no longer want to plug everything in your broadband modem, and WiFi is clearly not cutting it anymore. So now you have a Gigachad Ethernet Switch. More and more things in your home are now on all the time!

4. Chaos and order - You now have four or five computers. Each computer holds some kind of essential information, but where did you put that Spaghetti Carbonara recipe? You take a deep breath, and buy a bit of kit, maybe a NAS, to put all your information in one place where you can at least find it. There is now a computer in your home that you use all the time... without touching it! You have a server. It's better, but you keep having to fiddle with the settings so you can read the files on this computer from another computer. But usually you can get it to work.

5. Get organised - You've had a visit from a friend and showed him your pride and joy. He tells you that chmod 777 is like inviting the Devil into your home, only worse! You are now setting up an authentication service (FreeIPA) and pointing all your Linux computers at it. You set up proper security with Samba and NFS, so all of your computers can poke into the same storage without letting just anyone who wanders into your house do what they will with your data. It takes a lot of research and a lot of trial, error, and heartbreak, but in the end, it works! Also, you now have one friend less.

6. Gainful employment - Someone at your place of work (a small company) has noted that you are "good with computers" and thus you have been promoted to "System Administrator." Which is nice. They now come to you whenever their laptop is misbehaving, which is less nice. But still, you have the Knowing of Linux, and you set up a reasonable bunch of services, so that all the computers know each other's name and number. You persuade the Boss to buy a NAS like you have at home. But now, something changes. You are no longer just a power user... you are a Sysadmin. You are no longer doing this just for yourself; there are people relying on your handiwork for their daily work. They don't know an IP address from a colour pencil, and it's okay for them not to know. They have their own things to worry about, and the least you can do is keep their equipment happy.

7. IT Department - The bags under your eyes become too dark even for the Boss to ignore, also as he so charmingly puts it: if you jump in front of a train then the company is stuffed. You get an Assistant. Together, you can do anything. You can now at least take turns on the sleepless nights. And then one fine day you find that the file server is no longer serving files, so you set about fixing it. And find weird things. You certainly did not configure it like that?! Who, besides you, could have done such a thing? Your Assistant walks into the room, eyes aglow, eager to tell you about the brilliant idea he had. Severe beatings are not legal in this jurisdiction. It is time for...

8. Change management - With the company growing larger, you have acquired a few more bright-eyed enthusiastic coworkers, who all want root access to the shinies. And they get it. And they all work at cross purposes. And they don't follow the agreements you made. So one fateful night you say that enough is enough, and you change all the root passwords to something only you know. And none of you bastards touches anything without first explaining what and why! You install a piece of software where problems are logged, and their solutions written up. A wiki appears with all of your decisions documented in an orderly fashion. And since you can prove that the on-call person will have more chance of a quiet night if everyone behaves, peace and quiet returns. And all is well, for a while.

9. Raising the standards - Your company keeps growing. You now have about a hundred machines, and you have run out of literary characters to name them after so they are called prdlnx025 and so on. Your little IT department runs like a well-oiled machine. All the users are happy. Then, one of the vague yet menacing money people wanders in asking about the customer database. You say it's up and running and happy as usual. your financial bod smiles: "But is it... compliant?" So suddenly, a load of non-technical and annoying work lands on your desk. You need to write up how the database is secured. How the customers it contains can verify that their information is correct. How you guarantee that nothing... happens to it. How you guarantee that random admins can't make off with the information. Which is an bit of an bugger because at this moment you have no such guarantee. You need to convince everyone that none of you smelly Linux nerds can touch the goodies. Your well-oiled change management is no longer enough. You need a methodology. You go to a few courses, and learn to tell an Incident from a Problem, a Request from a Change, and seemingly out of nowhere, a web database appears where you have to write down everything you're planning to do, when you are planning to do it, before you are allowed to do anything. You meditate for a while on that word. Allowed.

10. Virtual Insanity - Hype, hyper, hypest! Hypervisors enter the building. These are big fat machines that pretend to be a lot of smaller machines. Time was when every time you needed a new web server, file server, or database server, it meant a trip to the computer room and disemboxing a new slab of electronics. But no more! Today, you buy or lease a big fat machine and you can set up an entire datacentre just by pointing, clicking, and typing. And as if by magic, a new server appears on the network! Next to this thing stands a massive rack of disks that you can split up into little blocks, and then give those to your new server, and it'll believe that it has a spinny disk! The only small nagging doubt is that you don't actually own any of these disks. The Box Grocer has stuffed a lot of storage in it, but if you actually use it, you get a cheerful letter and a bill. A monthly bill. And if you don't want to pay that bill, your data goes foop. You have put your crown jewels and your core business on a rental. But no worries, it'll be fine. You are assured of this.

11. Neverending improvement - Much to your surprise, another department has sprung up. They aren't system administrators, they are developers. They come with demands for all kinds of software and machines. And a coffee machine the size of your main server that distributes all kinds of vaguely coffee-themed products except... coffee. They want to set up something they call a CI/CD Pipeline. Apparently, the idea of actually finishing a product before you unleash it on an unsuspecting world is outdated. These days, we deliver products one tiny bit at a time. There is some kind of logic to this, because people these days are less and less able to describe what they want, make a decision, and then stick to it. Words like "rapid transformation" and "dynamic environment" are heard. You let it wash over you, get them the machines they want, and let them get on with it. As a side effect, you lose sight of what's running on your servers, and who is running it. But we have people to take care of that now, so all is fine.

12. Entfremdungseffekt - You are sitting at your desk, tapping away at a severely locked-down laptop, approving changes, until it hits you. You do not remember the last time you actually opened up a command line on a computer. Everything the company wants is automated. You actually automated most of it. Most of the servers you work with don't even exist anymore - they are data structures in a database and you don't even know which country they are in. You still have some machines, but due to new company policies you no longer even know who is logged in on them anymore. You are no longer a technician. You are now a secretary. Nothing against secretaries, they are amazing at dealing with many streams of squishy corporate information at once. But if you wanted to be a secretary, you would have become a secretary. You are an engineer. And you are no longer doing any engineering.

And it is at that point that you start to build the most over-engineered, over-designed, and over-the-top home laboratory.