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Home lab

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Home Lab
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Today I will be writing an introduction blog post for my home lab. I have been working on this for awhile now, and I think it is time to share what I have been doing.

What is a home lab? #

A home lab is a place where you can experiment with new technologies and learn about them. I can range from anything from a single raspberry pi / laptop all the way to a full on server rack full of servers.

What am I hosting on my home lab? #

  1. Traefik: A reverse proxy
  2. Proxmox: To manage different VMs
  3. PiHole: To block Ads / Trackers
  4. Home Assistant: To control my smart home / other IoT devices
  5. JellyFin: To Stream my media
  6. Portainer: To Manage my docker containers
  7. Minecraft Server: To play with friends (When I’m free)
  8. NAS: To host my files

Hardware #

These are the main components which I use to run my home lab. Each of them are attached with affiliate links, so if you are interested in buying them, please use the links below.

  1. 2 x PCs running i7 4770k & 32Gb RAM (Something like the old Dell Optiplex)
  • This is where most of my VMs are running.
  • They are configured to have different VLANs and subnets to separate internal services from external ones.
  1. 1 x Unifi Dream Machine Pro
  • The main router that I am using.
  • If you are planning to use this, turn off ssh when not in use.
  • Also only allow the web interface to be accessible from the internal network.
  • They also have a VPN service that you can use to connect to your home network.
  1. 1 x NETGEAR JGS524E 24 port
  • This is mainly to connect to other computers in my house
  • I have also configured this to have different VLAN tags to allow some devices on the guest network.
  1. 2 x TP-LINK TL-SG108-M2 8-port 2.5Gbps
  • This is the main backbone of my server.
  • The computers running my VMs are connected to these switches, together with my router and access points.
  1. 3 x 2.5Gbps Gigabit Network Card
  • This is to connect my computers to the 2.5Gbps switches.
  1. 1 x QNAP TS-264-8G 2-bay NAS
  • This is the main NAS that I use to store my files.
  • The main reason I chose this was that it had 2 x 2.5 Gbps ports.

Home Lab Files #

For those who are interested to run any of these services, I have uploaded my ansible files to my github repo to run.

For the next few blog posts, I will be explaining how I’ve set some of the more interesting services up.

Throughout this journey, I have learnt a lot about networking, docker, ansible, and many other things. I’ll more in the following blog posts coming up.