The delightful rollercoaster ride of hardware hunting in South Africa—a journey filled with the occasional "are you kidding me?" moment.
Picture this: I'm on a quest to assemble the ultimate homelab, armed with nothing but determination and a questionable sense of direction. My initial plan? Start small and work my way up. Easy, right? Wrong. Turns out, finding hardware in a smaller South African city is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Everything's either out of stock or comes with a lead time longer than a Shakespearean epic. But fear not, for luck decided to grace me with its presence when I stumbled upon an OrangePi5Plus at a local electronics store. It was like finding a diamond in a sea of... well, not diamonds. Without hesitation, I scooped it up, ready to conquer the digital frontier.
As if sourcing hardware wasn't challenging enough, I soon realized that my ISP-provided router was about as reliable as a melting teapot. Cue the dramatic music as I embarked on a quest for a more robust solution. Hours of scrolling through online platforms later, and voila! I found the MikroTik hAP ac2, the knight in shining armor to rescue me from the clutches of unreliable networking. Add a network switch and voila!
Let's not forget the thrill of the second-hand market—a treasure trove of bargains and surprises. From Intel NUCs to Lenovo ThinkCentres, it was like stumbling upon a gold mine of tech goodies. Eventually, I settled on a 5th gen i3 CPU, a quirky addition to my hardware family that's sure to keep things interesting.
But hey, no journey is complete without a few bumps in the road, right? Like the time I thought running bare-metal Debian was a brilliant idea, only to realize that setting up a backup system was about as fun as watching paint dry. Thank goodness for Proxmox LXC hosting, a lifesaver that's as efficient as it is light(seriously, have you seen the size of those LXCs?).
So here I am, navigating the wild world of hardware with cautious optimism and a healthy dose of humor. They say hindsight is 20/20, but hey, where's the fun in knowing everything beforehand? Join me as I dive headfirst into the next chapter of this adventure—operating systems, here we come!