> At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far.

Anyone can throw together a bunch of parts and software to run Internet-facing services from a closet. That doesn't mean that you're safe from issues that Oxide aims to solve, especially at that small scale.

My homelab (which hosts my blog and a couple of other things) runs off a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard ordered on AliExpress, featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. Yes, that's a mobile CPU shoehorned onto a desktop platform with a funky mounting bracket to take AM4/AM5 coolers.

Anyways, I wanted to run SmartOS on it, but this system is so janky that the Illumos kernel couldn't find any PCIe devices at all. After spending an afternoon reconfiguring PCIe bridges by hand with the kernel debugger in an attempt to troubleshoot PCIe initialization, I gave up and installed Proxmox.

Admittedly, as far as janky hardware this takes the cake, but the point stands. To paraphrase Bryan, buggy firmware is the sysadmin's worst enemy.