The Dead Man's Switch
My wife doesn't know how to start the array. If I don't come home one day, none of it gets fixed.
My wife doesn't know how to start the array.
She doesn't know what an array is. She doesn't know that the reason the smart lights stopped working is because Home Assistant lost its connection to the server, or that the reason the server lost its connection is because the DNS resolver went down, or that the DNS resolver went down because Cerberus rebooted after an update and nobody told it to come back up.
She knows that stuff stopped working, and she knows I'll fix it when I get home.
If I don't come home one day, none of it gets fixed.
The Thing Nobody Talks About
There's a whole category of homelab content about building things. Setting up servers, configuring automations, tuning media stacks. Everyone loves a build log.
Nobody writes about the end state.
What happens to all of this when you're gone? You've spent years building something that runs your house — your lights, your cameras, your network, your media, your photos, your documents. You understand every piece of it. Your family uses it every day and has no idea how any of it works.
That's not a technical problem. That's a responsibility you took on when you decided to be the person who runs the infrastructure.
Day One Without Me
I've actually thought through what happens. It goes like this:
The FiOS router is in a closet. I replaced it with my own equipment years ago — better performance, more control, all the good reasons. My wife has never touched it. The day I'm gone, the first time something goes wrong with the internet, she's going to need to plug the FiOS router back in just to get WiFi.
That's day one. She can't call Verizon support for help with my custom setup. She'd need to factory-reset to a configuration she recognizes.
From there: Home Assistant goes down first. It always does — it's the most fragile thing I run, the most dependent on everything else being healthy. When HA goes down, the automations stop. The lights stop responding to schedules. The cameras stop recording to the local NVR. The little quality-of-life things I've built over years just... stop.
Then Plex. Nobody can watch anything. The library I've spent a decade building is sitting on drives in a chassis that nobody knows how to power on correctly, let alone mount the array and start the media server.
And the NAS. 120 terabytes of photos, documents, videos, memories. Accessible to exactly one person, who is no longer available.
I Have a Document. It's Out of Date.
A few years ago I wrote everything down. Network map, passwords, which box does what, how to restart things. It took a few hours and I felt responsible and organized when I was done.
I haven't updated it since.
The network has changed. I've added hardware. I've migrated services. I've changed passwords. The document is a snapshot of a homelab that doesn't quite exist anymore, written as instructions for a situation I hope never happens.
That's the honest state of most people's disaster documentation: it exists, it's incomplete, and you know it.
The Data Buddy Problem
The concept I keep coming back to is a data buddy — a person I trust, who actually understands technology, who gets the keys when something happens to me.
Not a lawyer. Not a service. A person who knows what a NAS is.
The problem is finding that person. It has to be someone who would actually do something useful with the information. Someone who could walk my wife through the basics, or at minimum help her understand what to shut down gracefully and what to just unplug. Someone who wouldn't be overwhelmed by a 54U rack and a 24-bay chassis.
I have a few candidates. I haven't had the conversation yet. That's on me.
The Dead Man's Switch
The technical solution is a dead man's switch — an automated system that monitors whether you're still around, and if you stop checking in, sends a package to whoever you've designated.
There are services that do this. Dead Man's Zero. Google's Inactive Account Manager, ironically. You configure a check-in interval, designate recipients, attach a document or set of credentials, and if you don't check in within the window, it sends.
I could also build one. A simple script that pings me every 30 days — respond to confirm you're alive, miss three in a row and it triggers. The whole thing runs on the same infrastructure I already maintain. Which is either elegant or concerning depending on how you look at it.
The problem with the automated approach is that it requires me to keep checking in forever, or to remember to shut it off before I go on a long trip with no connectivity. It's another thing to maintain. Another thing that can fail.
But it's also the closest thing to a guarantee.
The Letter
My son is 8.
He has a ProtonMail account I set up for him. He doesn't really use it yet — he's 8. He sends me memes sometimes. But it's his, it's private, and it's not tied to Google.
I've been thinking about putting something in there.
Not just passwords. Not just a network diagram. Something that explains what all of it is. Why I built it. What the NAS is for and why the drives matter. What Home Assistant does and why I spent so many weekends on it. What the rack in the corner of the basement actually contains.
And then instructions. If he wants to keep any of it running someday, some notes on how. If he doesn't — which is also a completely reasonable answer — what can be shut down cleanly, what needs to be copied off first, and what he can just unplug and forget about.
Maybe he reads it at 18 and decides to pick it up. Maybe he reads it at 25 and calls someone who can help him recover the photos. Maybe he reads it and unplugs everything and moves on with his life, and that's fine too.
The point isn't to make him maintain my homelab from beyond the grave. The point is to not leave him and his mother standing in front of a rack they don't understand, trying to figure out which blinking light is the problem.
The Document I Actually Need to Write
Here's what I know needs to be in it, in order of importance:
1. The photos are on the NAS. Here's where it is, here's how to access it, here's how to copy everything off it onto an external drive. This is the only thing that can't be replaced.
2. The network map. What each box is, what it does, and what happens if you unplug it. Which things can be unplugged safely and which ones will take everything down with them.
3. The passwords. Not all of them. The important ones. The router. The NAS. The accounts that matter.
4. What to just turn off. Plex, Home Assistant, all the self-hosted services — none of that needs to survive me. Shut it down. Call Verizon. Get the normal router back. That's fine.
5. Who to call. One or two people who could help if this document isn't enough. People who would actually understand the situation and know what to do.
That's it. One page. Maybe two. The goal isn't a manual — it's enough for someone who loves you to not feel completely lost.
I Haven't Written It Yet
I'm writing this article instead, which is a form of procrastination I'm comfortable with.
But I'm going to write it. Because the alternative is leaving people I love standing in a basement trying to figure out why the lights aren't working, and that's not the kind of person I want to be.
If you've built something like this — a homelab, a home network, a self-hosted stack that runs your house — you owe it to the people who live in that house to document it. Not for you. For them.
Write the document. Have the conversation with your data buddy. Set up the dead man's switch.
And maybe put a copy somewhere your kid will find it someday.