Self-Hosting Everything, Including the Single Point of Failure

Homelabbing is genuinely fun. I want to say that upfront, before I tell you about the time I locked myself out of my own infrastructure for an afternoon. The premise is compelling: you have a VM, you have K3s, and the open source ecosystem has basically everything you'd pay a SaaS for. Keycloak for OIDC. Forgejo for Git. Headscale for VPN. ArgoCD for GitOps. A few YAML files and you have a self-hosted stack that would make a startup founder weep. And for a while, it works beautifully. Ansible (yes, Ansible — I've since retired it, but that's another post ) kept everything converging to the right state. ArgoCD synced my apps from a Forgejo repo. Kubectl reached K3s over Headscale. Users — well, me — logged into Forgejo via Keycloak OIDC. My custom Keycloak theme was hosted on Forgejo. It was elegant. It was self-referential. It was fine, right up until it wasn't. The Dependency Graph Nobody Warned Me About Let me draw the graph for you: ArgoCD deploys everything, including Forgejo, Keyc