We moved house this month. Most people, when they move, worry about the sofa fitting up the stairs and whether the fridge will survive the van. I worried about those too, but the thing that actually kept me up was the rack in the corner of the office: a small homelab that, over a couple of years, had quietly become load-bearing for the household. DNS, the file server, the cameras, home automation, the lot. You don't realise how much you've centralised until you're about to unplug it and drive it forty miles.
The move itself went fine. The homelab is what this is about, because moving a running system is a different kind of problem to moving furniture. Furniture doesn't have state.
the bit nobody warns you about: the house goes quiet differently
The first surprise was emotional, not technical. When you power down a homelab you've been tending for years, the room goes properly silent, and it's a strange feeling. No fans, no clicking disks, no little blinking lights you've stopped consciously seeing. I stood there for a moment longer than I'd admit. Then I labelled every cable, because the second surprise is always the cables.
I cannot stress this enough: photograph everything before you unplug a single thing. Every port, every label, the back of the patch panel, the way the drives sit in the bays. I took about forty photos on my phone and used every one of them at the other end. The version of me packing the rack knew exactly how it went together. The version of me rebuilding it at midnight in a house that still smelled of paint did not, and was extremely grateful to past me for the photos.
what actually broke
Three things, none of them the things I'd worried about.
The first was DNS, which is always DNS. I run my own resolver, and of course the moment it was unplugged for the journey, the whole house "lost the internet" as far as anyone non-technical was concerned. The router was up, the new line was live, but nothing resolved because the box that everything pointed at was in a van. The lesson wasn't new but it landed hard: your critical infrastructure shouldn't have a single point of failure that travels in your car boot. I've since got a secondary resolver that lives on cheap, separate hardware and stays put.
The second was the new connection itself. The previous house had a line I'd tuned over years. The new one was a fresh install, a different provider, a different sync speed, and a router I didn't trust. Half my homelab's assumptions about the upstream were quietly wrong. Port forwards pointed at an IP that no longer existed, the dynamic DNS hadn't updated, and my carefully crafted firewall rules referenced a WAN interface that now behaved differently. None of it was hard to fix. All of it was tedious, and all of it happened at once.
The third was the hard drives. Two spinning disks in the NAS did not enjoy the journey. They came up, the array rebuilt, and they've been fine since, but for an hour the file server was in a degraded state and I was very glad indeed that "the backups are offsite and recent" was a sentence I could say with confidence rather than hope. Cold spinning rust does not love being jostled in a van on a B-road. If you're moving disks, accept that one of them might not come back, and make sure that's an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe before you turn the key.
the small decisions that saved me
The thing that made the rebuild survivable was that, somewhere along the way, I'd stopped treating the homelab as a pile of pets I configured by hand and started treating more of it as something I could reconstruct. Not fully, I'm not going to pretend I had the whole thing in a tidy git repo with one-command provisioning, because I didn't. But the important services ran in containers with their config and compose files version controlled, so bringing them back up was mostly a matter of pointing them at the restored data and running them. The boxes I'd configured by hand and never written down were the ones that hurt.
That's the takeaway I'm keeping. The move was a forced disaster-recovery drill, the kind you never schedule voluntarily, and it told me exactly which parts of my setup I actually understood and which parts I'd just got lucky with so far. The containers came back in minutes. The hand-tended box took an evening and a lot of squinting at old config. Guess which one I'm rebuilding properly now.
The rack's back in a corner, in a different room, humming away. The lights are blinking again and the house feels right. It took a couple of evenings and a fair amount of swearing, but everything that mattered came back, and the things that didn't come back easily handed me a clear list of what to fix before the next move. There's always a next move. There's always DNS, too.