One admin workstation
Cthulhu is the only general-purpose administration machine. Infrastructure management, SSH and dangerous buttons stay there; everything else is a client.
THE LAB TODAY
Built to be used, not displayed behind glass
STATUS: ACTIVE / EVOLVING
PRIMARY ADMIN: CTHULHU
“I try technology because I want to understand how it works. If it has no real purpose afterwards, it gets removed.”
Useful beats fashionable
Tailscale was tested and removed. Grafana was a fun weekend project and removed. UniFi Controller starts only when changes are needed. Technical curiosity does not obligate permanent operation.
Back up by pain
Important projects, configuration and hard-to-rebuild data get multiple layers of history. Downloadable games do not. Backup policy follows replacement effort, not raw size.
FIELD NOTES FROM THE LAB
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it becomes a story.
Real repair mistakes, weird upgrades, a Cisco phone running DOOM and an RX 9060 XT hard-lock investigation that finally pointed back to the PCIe path.
OPEN THE FIELD NOTES →COMPUTERS
Machines that actually get used
CTHULHU
Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Radeon RX 9060 XT, NixOS 26.05, Plasma 6 and the single administrative control point for the lab.PRIMARY WORKSTATION
OTHER WORKSTATIONSThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12, Katharina's Toshiba L500, workshop PC, Eee PC, Raspberry Pi and the former T480.CLIENTS · EXPERIMENTS · DAILY USE
RETRO PCA preserved Windows 98 SE environment with ICQ 2000b, games, WRP, ZIP media and Duke Nukem 3D.FROZEN LEGACY ENVIRONMENT
HOMELAB & INFRASTRUCTURE
Small rack, surprisingly long story
HOMELAB
10U rack, four Supermicro systems, HP ProCurve, QNAP, APC Smart-UPS and the HP MicroServer sitting on top.
NETWORKStarlink, OPNsense, purpose-based VLANs, three UniFi APs and dedicated 10G/40G point-to-point links.
STORAGEQNAP primary storage, TrueNAS backup, snapshots, independent history and tested disaster recovery.
ARCHITECTUREThe living map: 1G where 1G is enough, 10G/40G where moving data is the point, and a separate retro network where 1998 belongs.
RETRO & PRESERVATION
Old software is more interesting when it still talks
Windows 98 stays Windows 98
The retro workstation is deliberately preserved instead of continuously modernized. It lives on a dedicated Retro VLAN and is administered only from Cthulhu.
ICQ without the original ICQ
ICQ 2000b talks OSCAR to a heavily modified private compatibility service on the old Atom server. Linux/Pidgin can join the same little network.
WRP for an old web
A locally adapted Web Rendering Proxy gives the legacy machine a controlled path to modern content without pretending 1998 browsers are safe modern clients.
FROM THE RACK TO THE PUBLIC INTERNET
Worldnode grew out of the homelab
The first Worldnode
An Atom D525 box in the rack began as a low-power public server and data collector. It still works today as the lab's Swiss-army helper.
The current Worldnode
The public server now lives in a German datacenter near Braunschweig: Ryzen 9 9900X3D, 64 GB DDR5, 2×4 TB NVMe and Proxmox hosting separate Debian services.
World Observer
What began as one private Area51 experiment grew into 41 active public-data observers. The rule stayed simple: measure what happened, preserve what failed, invent nothing.
Why it ended up like this
There was no master plan to own a rack, 40-gigabit NICs, a private OSCAR server and a World Observer. Each part arrived because a smaller experiment became useful enough to keep. The lab is deliberately understandable, repairable and a little weird.
The machines changed. The question did not.