this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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I was reading a homelab discussion about NUTs (Network UPS Tools) that left me scratching my head and wondering "...why? Is complexity for complexities sake part of homelabs? Isn't this a huge overkill for one machine? Just...use a UPS? "

Then I got to thinking more broadly about homelabbing and I started to wonder if there weren't maybe (at least) two different schools of thought.

Using home media as example -

  • Store the original.
  • Detect the client.
  • Transcode when required.
  • Monitor the GPU.
  • Add reverse proxy et al
  • Track bandwidth.
  • Add user accounts
  • Add failover.
  • Graph the result.
  • Dashboard.

Vs

  • Store a common compatible file for your devices.
  • Play it directly.

Which school of thought are you and why?

PS: not throwing shade. I get it; for some people, complexity, learning infrastructure, practicing skills for work etc is part of the why. For me, complexity as recreation is suspiciously like work after work.

Perhaps there's an odd Venn diagram between homelabbing, interest in ownership / useful capability and infrastructure that could make for a fun discussion. For you, is homelabbing a means to an end or is it an end in itself?

EDIT: Feel free to consider "home-lab" and "self hosted" as synonyms for the purpose of this discussion (although I am aware they are somewhat different in scope).

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[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

I bet another reason is security. You might not trust the NUT software. It might be proprietary, and even if its open source, it might not be scrutinized enough to be safe.

Using separate hardware, lets you take in the power loss signal from the NUT and then convert it to a channel you might trust more, like an http request over wireguard. Alternatively you could use a VM with usb passthrough on the main PC...though usb passthrough still has risks.