The box that ran everything started dying in April.
Not dramatically. Machines almost never die dramatically. It started with instability... the kind you explain away once, side-eye twice, and start losing sleep over the third time production goes down while you're in the middle of something else.
The host under my entire stack... public site, analytics, security tooling, the AI crew's memory layer... was getting flaky. And flaky hardware only trends one direction.
Here's the thing about a homelab that lives in a 40ft fifth wheel: there is no second team. No vendor escalation. No change advisory board. No maintenance window negotiated three weeks out. There's me, a crew of governed AI instances, and a reclaimed Dell T3600 about to get the biggest promotion of its second life.
So we didn't try to heal the sick box. We built a new hull alongside it and started moving the ship... plank by plank... while it was still sailing.
