Homelab History ~|~ Gregory Dosh

Homelab History

December 20, 2025 Gregory Dosh ~4 minutes

The server and other infrastructure that powers my homelab has been sitting in my basement for quite a while, and has gone under many interations and moves, but I’ve never taken a time to document much of that. This is a rough sketch of the history of my homelab that I hope to update and edit with time and as I remember things.

2018

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

My homelab adventure started off with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ running Home Assistant a LONG time ago. About 2018 according to my earliest photos & code commits.

I loved the automation and integrations with some of the home technology of the era. Things like Philips Hue for controlling lightbulbs in my apartment, and the DreamScreen for adding ambience to the living room. I even created a Python library for controlling the DreamScreen so that I could interface with Home Assistant nicely.

A space scene is on a TV display in a living room. Behind the TV projected on the wall is an ambient glow that maches the scene on the tv.

I also contributed code upstream to Home Assistant to enable HTTPS for the Tomato Device Tracker integration. Back then I was running Tomato on a repurposed consumer router, I think it was an Asus RT-AC68U.

The combination of having a bit more powerful router software plus the Raspberry Pi got me interested in doing whole-home ad-blocking using Pi-Hole. It was during this time I was starting to also hit some of my initial performace limitations with the Raspberry Pi.

Namely, I was writing a lot of logs to the disk and it was chewing through the SD Cards I had at terrifying rate. I was looking into things like moving logs to RAM, disabling non-essential logging, and learning things like PXE boot, and Ansible to rebuild my systems faster after an SD card failure.