Personal project
A more maintainable homelab
Practical lessons from working with TrueNAS, HexOS, Home Assistant, and OpenClaw.
- My role
- Owner and builder
- Year
- 2026
- Topics
- Technology
Context
A homelab is a place to try things, but it is also infrastructure you have to live with. My work with TrueNAS and HexOS has become an exercise in making experiments easier to operate and recover.
The approach
Start by inspecting the real system. Preserve the complete configuration and create a recovery point before a change. Afterward, verify both service health and the ways I actually use it.
Recent work included recovering OpenClaw state during an upgrade, checking local access separately from remote access, and investigating a certificate-trust problem in Home Assistant.
What I learned
The lesson I keep coming back to: a change is only finished when it is verified and the next recovery is easier. Durable configuration, explicit health checks, and useful runbooks matter as much as getting a service started.