I maintain and “babysit” a homelab to experiment with technologies and infrastructure, as well as to provide various services that I can make use of personally.
Non-exhaustive list of hardware:
- Network: MikroTik, Ubiquiti EdgeMax, Juniper, HPE Aruba — no need for Cisco or Arista, I get enough exposure to those at uni and at work
- Servers: Various SFF/Tiny PCs and Thin Clients, running Proxmox VE
- Storage: TrueNAS box with off-site backup to a Synology NAS
I’ve experimented with too much software to list, however here’s the mainstays:
- Plex and Jellyfin for media
- NGINX for web hosting and reverse proxying
- dump1090/VirtualRadar for ADS-B aircraft tracking, along with SDR#
- AdGuardHome for DNS ad-blocking and local DNS resolution
- DokuWiki for documentation
- WireGuard to provide site-to-site connectivity
I’m fond of networking and infrastructure, so one of the most useful parts of the lab is the ability to set up and tear down various VMs and virtual networks to test protocols, operating systems, and configurations. For example, I’ve used virtualised Arista EOS to test routing protocols and configurations, and PfSense to provide a fully isolated virtual network for testing Active Directory across various operating systems.
I’m not sure it can be considered a part of the homelab, but you accessing this site through a Hetzner VPS, which hosts a static copy of this site generated by Jekyll and deployed via GitHub actions. It’s powered by ARM, which I think is pretty neat!
Currently, I’m eying up how a dedicated server in the cloud might fit into the lab to reduce my dependence on third-parties like Cloudflare. I have also been investigating some fun retro experiments, such as providing internet access to vintage hardware by setting up a dial-up server using physical hardware.
Feel free to get in touch with any questions about specifics!