Homelab

When your wife calls you if something isn't working. If there's a family facing service it's no longer a home lab, its home prod.

When you have weekly change control meetings

Home Lab is a lab environment to test out stuff and, rebuild things to test out something else.

Homeserver would be something more longlived.

Home Datacenter when you have more compute and storage in your basement than your whole town combined.

Diagrams are one thing, but traces are another. Have you thought about using something like Rack space or Netbox to create a source of detailed truth and document device inventory, their ports, and the connections between everything?

If you can't power it off without losing services or data then it's not a lab. Don't get confused by this sub where people call their home infrastructures "lab".

When you can format it, to try something new.

If you can't?... It became production

When it starts to carry any level of production workload from an outside network :)

It stops becoming a "homelab" when it's impacting your family.

My entire "homelab" is contained in one box- if something fails on it, no one cares- it won't impact anyone. My home network consists of a simple mesh network.

This is something I don't think a lot of people consider. If you're the one that set this up, and you expire tomorrow, do you really want the burden of figuring this out on your spouse/partner/kids???

The Lorem ipsum is the best part.

Also most people don’t add monitors to their network diagrams. That’s just a flex.