Home lab
Table of Contents
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? #
- Traefik: A reverse proxy
- Proxmox: To manage different VMs
- PiHole: To block Ads / Trackers
- Home Assistant: To control my smart home / other IoT devices
- JellyFin: To Stream my media
- Portainer: To Manage my docker containers
- Minecraft Server: To play with friends (When I’m free)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is to connect my computers to the 2.5Gbps switches.
- 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.