A brief overview of my home lab setup and what it is running.
Introduction
As the new year begins, I thought that I would take a moment to just give an overview of my home lab as it currently is configured, what I am using it for, and future plans that I have for it.
Hardware Component #1 – Switch
There are three main physical components that make up this lab. The first piece of hardware is just a 5 port Netgear gigabit switch that I bought a few years ago. In the near future I hope to upgrade this to a 16 or 24 port managed switch, preferably with PoE capability.
Hardware Component #2 – Laptop
The next part of the home lab is an old Dell Latitude laptop with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU, dual core with 2 threads per core, and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. This laptop is running Ubuntu desktop, on which I am running Jellyfin as a media server; Home Assistant for home automation; Graphana, cadvisor, Node_Exporter, and Prometheus for monitoring the servers; and Heimdall all in Docker containers. I also set up a Samba server that is sharing a 2 TB external hard drive to my network. My current plan for this laptop is to move these services to the last piece of my home lab, which I will talk about in a little bit, and either get rid of it completely, or use it for some backup servers just so I have some redundancy.
Hardware Component #3 – Server
So, that brings me to the last component in my home lab, which is an HP Proliant DL360p Gen 8, 1U server, which contains two Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2660 CPUs with 10 cores each for a total of 20 cores. It also contains 128GB of ECC DDR3 RAM and four 4TB SAS hard drives plus a 1TB SATA SSD. This server is running the Proxmox VE operating system. The only thing that I have running in it, however, is TrueNAS Core, which is sharing the four hard drives, in a RAID 5 configuration, to the network. In the future, my plan is to also have a DNS server, a DHCP server, and the services that are currently running on my laptop deployed on this server.
Conclusion
While a home lab can provide incredibly helpful service that make life easier or more secure, the main purpose for this home lab is to have a place where I can experiment, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and develop and sharpen my server admin/networking skills.
