How I Built a Production-Grade Homelab on a $200 Mini PC

I work helpdesk. I wanted to break into DevOps. So I did what any reasonable person would do, I spent three months building an increasingly complicated home server that nobody asked for. What started as "I'll just run Jellyfin on an old PC" turned into a full infrastructure project with containerized services, a monitoring stack, automated backups, infrastructure-as-code, and a CI/CD pipeline. This is a quick story of what I built, the decisions I made and the things that broke along the way. The Hardware I picked up a Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q for around $200 on eBay. These small form factor machines are practically designed for homelabs. Low power draw, quiet with 8th/9th gen Intel CPUs that have QuickSync hardware transcoding which matters a lot for Jellyfin. For storage I added a Terramaster D4-320 DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure with two 4TB HDDs, I had drives laying around that had ~12,700 hours on them, which I'll come back to. The two drives are combined into a single 7.