Two Services I Never Opened

I’ve been meaning to run an AI agent at home since the spring. I even said so, in writing — at the end of What I Run on My Homelab I wrote that the next thing was a model I could run locally, in its own container, without shipping everything to the cloud. This week I finally sat down to do it. I’d even picked what to run: Hermes, Nous Research’s self-improving agent — the start of the personal assistant I’ve been wanting, something with its own memory that gets a little better the more I use it.

The agent went in fast. The rest of the night went to everything I had to clear out of the way first.

When I opened Proxmox to spin up a container, I noticed what I’d been ignoring for most of a year: my host was still on Proxmox 8, and Proxmox 8 goes unsupported in August. Two months out. The upgrade I’d been putting off had stopped being optional, and it wasn’t going to be a small one.

Nothing looked broken

When I wrote about this setup in the spring, I called it “a one-time setup plus a bit of maintenance.” That was the kind of thing you say before the bill arrives. The host jump — Proxmox 8 to 9, Debian 12 to 13 underneath — was the big piece, the kind you read the release notes for twice and back up before you touch. But it wasn’t the only one. Every service I run had quietly fallen behind too: containers I hadn’t logged into in months, several versions back, a few needing config changes I’d skipped because nothing was visibly wrong.

That’s the whole point, actually — nothing was visibly wrong. The stack had been drifting in the background for the better part of a year, and it kept working, so I never looked. A deadline I didn’t choose was the first thing in a year to make me.

The upgrade turned into an audit

Going container by container, I couldn’t avoid asking each one a question I never otherwise ask: do I still use this?

For a couple, the answer was no. I’d set up RedLib and SearXNG — a private Reddit front-end and a self-hosted search engine — back when I was filling out the privacy layer, and in that same homelab post I wrote about both like they were part of my daily life. They weren’t. I’d stood them up, felt good about it, and gone right back to the regular sites out of habit. I hadn’t opened either in months. So instead of upgrading them, I deleted them.

I would never have done that on my own. Left alone, I’d have kept both running indefinitely, because deleting something I’d bothered to set up always felt like admitting the afternoon I spent on it was wasted. The forced pass flipped the default: every service now had to earn its place again, out loud, and keeping one was no longer free. Most of them made the case. Two couldn’t.

Renting never makes you look

This is supposed to be the part where I admit the famous downside of self-hosting — that the upkeep is mine, that nobody else runs the migration at 3 a.m. — and I do own all of that. But the upkeep isn’t really the difference. The difference is that I got made to look.

A pile of subscriptions never forces the question. The dead account, the service I used twice, the plan I always mean to cancel — they sit on someone else’s server, billing quietly, and no deadline ever drags them in front of me to ask whether I still want them. Renting is frictionless exactly because it lets things accumulate in the dark. The labor I keep filing under the cost of self-hosting is the one thing that ever hands me an honest accounting of what I’m actually running. The bill is the only thing that turns the light on.

Now everything has to make its case

So Hermes is running, on a host I trust again — the thing I sat down to do. But it isn’t what I’ll take from the night. What stuck was the two services I removed, and the question that pulled them out, because it’s the same question Hermes will have to answer the next time I’m in there: not is this interesting to set up, but will I still be opening it once the novelty’s gone.

I’ll find out in a couple of months, the next time something goes unsupported and I’m back in the stack, one container at a time, making each one say what it’s still for.