Tour My Homelab
Click here for the hardware.
Click here for the logical architecture.
What is a Homelab and Why do I Have One?
When it comes down to it, a homelab is nothing more than a safe place to tinker. It’s an environment where you can build things, break things, and fix things without the worry of getting fired for it.
I have one for a couple of reasons:
- Getting my hands on a keyboard, building, breaking and fixing things is something I’m passionate about. It energizes me.
- I don’t get to do enough of it at work.
Homelabs and Self-Hosting
There is a fine line between having a homelab and self-hosting. I would say most people (including myself) blur this line regularly and significantly.
Hosting services like plex, jellyfin, nextcloud or mealie is one way of using your homelab. These services provide great alternatives to cloud-hosted solutions, allowing you to use the service without a subscription and even without an internet connection in some cases. You get to own your data and be free from the worry that it will disappear from whatever platform that you’re currently subscribed to. Not to mention, you get to learn things while you build and maintain it.
However, once you cross over into a production mindset. Once you have anxiety over your uptime… You no longer just have a homelab. You have production, self-hosted servers.
I am admittedly guilty of this. When my family tells me that Jellyfin isn’t working, I spring into action like an on-call sysadmin. What I also know, however, is that if my homelab caught fire and disappeared tomorrow, I would just build another one. That is, after taking a moment of silence over my lost data of course (but that’s what off-site backups are for).
This doesn’t mean you should avoid self-hosting. But, for your sanity, it’s critical to preserve the ‘homelabiness’ of your homelab. Maintain a mindset that, if disaster strikes, it’s just a homelab. No one is getting fired.
Should I Have a Homelab?
If you’ve read this far, you have proven your curiosity. Therefore…
Yes! You should absolutely build a homelab.
What Counts as a Homelab?
Some people think that in order for something to qualify as a homelab, you need to have a data center in your house; something that looks like the photo above. This is not true. I’m here to tell you that, if you own a computer, there is no barrier to entry in building a homelab. You don’t need whatever you think you need to get started. You don’t need a server rack. You don’t even need a server. You just need an imagination and the hardware you already have.
Start with some virtual machines on your laptop. Build a Linux VM. Learn Linux. Learn Docker. Experiment with Kubernetes. Learn to Code. Write your own webserver. The possibilities are endless.
As with any hobby, of course, it expands and grows over time. And some weirdos grow an affinity for unnecessary expansion (yes I’m talking about myself again). What starts as nothing more than a virtual machine running on your laptop, can quickly expand to a 42U rack full of hardware running in your garage. And that’s where the tour of my homelab begins.