I opted to load it with 2x8 GiB of DDR4 RAM and 480 GiB of mSATA storage. It’s a silent, well-built unit that comes with a dual-core i3-7100U and 6x Intel Gigabit NICs. This means the homelab is going to be implemented by a bare-metal hypervisor 1, on a host computer with a low noise, power, and physical profile. Since I like quiet and despise both heat and clutter, the first major constraint was that this homelab needed to be virtual. In this section I discuss the major constraints and design decisions that guided my approach. RequirementsĪ homelab can take many forms, from an array of physical computers mounted on racks, to a book-sized unit hosting a virtualized computer network. I’d be curious to see if I could break into my own network – and what that would look like from the perspective of a sysadmin. My short-term goal is to learn system administration (things like configuring firewalls and networks, managing security policy, etc) but eventually I want to learn more about network intrusion detection. Many of them have to do with learning something. There are a lot of reasons you might want to build a homelab. Aside from these, there were also many valuable snippets of information, forum posts and docpages scattered throughout the internet, which have been cited where appropriate. Homelab writeup series really helped me to get started. One of the best belongs to Dan Ford, whose excellent That said, my hope is that other people with similar goals can learn from my experience and save themselves from navigating seas of browser tabs in search of enlightenment.īy the time my homelab took shape, I had made use of all sorts of resources on the topic.

My goal is to avoid having to rediscover all of the little hazards that can (and did) result in hours of frustration. This writeup is largely for documentation purposes – it’s written as a note to my future self who might look to recreate this setup and wonder why certain design decisions were made.

It turns out that the journey to setting up a homelab is filled with trapdoors and snake pits.

Pfsense proxmox