We moved house at the weekend, and the part everyone warned me about, the sofa that wouldn't fit through the door, was fine. The part nobody warned me about was the homelab. Two and a half years of carefully accreted cabling, all of it obvious to me and to nobody else, reduced to a tangle of unlabelled leads in a removal crate. I had told myself I'd photograph the back of the rack before pulling anything. I did not photograph the back of the rack.
So Sunday evening was spent on the floor of the new study, surrounded by switches and a UPS that weighs more than the cat, working out from first principles which port went where. The bit that stung was discovering how much "documentation" lived only in my head. The DHCP reservations, the one VLAN that exists purely because of a decision I made eighteen months ago and can no longer justify, the patch panel numbering that follows no scheme at all. It all worked because I remembered it, right up until I was tired and in a new room and didn't.
Power came back, the NAS came up clean, and after an embarrassing half hour the network came back too. The cause was a cable I'd swapped into the wrong port because the new room is mirror-image to the old one and my hands kept reaching for where things used to be.
The lesson is the dull, correct one: label your cables, write down your VLANs, and assume future you will be moving house at 11pm with a torch in their teeth. I'll get to that. Probably before the next move.