Icon of a computer screen showing a graph structure Max Pereira
The Wide World of Homelab

What's a Homelab?

Basically, a homelab (or home lab) is a smattering of enterprise (or not-so-enterprise) equipment interconnected in a home environment for experimentation with various technologies. Typically a homelab is tailored to one's particular interests, whether it be networking, cybersecurity, Windows domain administration, Linux, virtualization, containerization, etc. There is not one single correct way to build a homelab. A homelab can consist of thousands of dollars of rack-mounted enterprise equipment or it can consist of free recycled computers from an e-waste bin sitting on an IKEA table. The flexibility and relative unserious nature of "homelabbing" is part of the great fun of it.

My Homelab

I've been running a homelab in various forms since I was around 13. For the first iteration in my parents garage, I was running a Dell PowerEdge R710 server purchased off eBay kitted with dual Xeon processors and 196GB of RAM, which was both loud and power hungry (thanks to my parents for putting up with it!). In my current apartment lab I'm running a small form-factor PC as my main hypervisor, which consumes less than 10 watts of power at idle and is virtually silent. With the advent of containerization I can run many services on this host (16 and counting) without even getting close to maxing out the i7 or 24GB of RAM it has.

Below is a list of the services I'm running and technologies I'm learning. Recently I've been having fun learning DevOps focused technologies like Terraform and Ansible. I was able to find and modify a Terraform provider for Proxmox which allows me to spin up new Ubuntu VMs and automatically configures them with an Ansible playbook.

Services

Service Description
Proxmox Virtual Machine hypervisor
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Docker container host
Terraform Virtual Machine orchestrator
Ansible Virtual Machine configurator
Docker Container engine
Pi-hole Local DNS & DHCP server, adblocking
Home Assistant Home automation platform
Node-RED Flow-based visual home automation tool
OpenVPN VPN server
nginx Static content hosting
Portainer Web-based Docker container management
Snapdrop Easy file sharing between network devices
Vikunja To-do list and reminders
Kanboard Kanban boards
Grist Databases and spreadsheets
Bookstack Documentation & knowledge management
Mosquitto MQTT broker
MediaWiki Personal Wiki

Homelab Resources

A big part of the fun of running a homelab is participating in the community. In addition to being a great resource when you get stuck or to find something new to try in your lab, it's also just plain cool to see other peoples' builds. Below is a brief list of some good resources and content.

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