A Beginner’s Guide to Homelab

metricv Posted on 4 days ago 6 Views

What is Homelabbing?

Homelabbing refers to the practice of creating a personal computing environment at home to experiment, learn, and manage various IT tasks. It is an increasingly popular hobby among tech enthusiasts who wish to deepen their understanding of computer systems, networks, and emerging technologies.

This usually involves setting up a mini server in your home that serves all kinds of content, just for you.

What do you achieve with homelabbing?

  • Personal Storage: Most people will configure their homelab with a server that has lots of storage to store family photos, movies, documents, etc.
  • Home Media Server: The server can be configured as a streaming platform and index media.
  • Game Servers: Host a game (such as Minecraft or Palworld) and play with your friends.
  • Break free from big corporations: For some people, the main goal of setting up a home lab is to avoid using Google, Microsoft, or Apple suites. This gives more control and privacy over your data.

Setting Up Your Homelab

  1. Define Your Goals: Determine what you want to achieve with your home lab. Are you looking to explore cloud technologies, enhance your cybersecurity skills, or simply have a place to test new software? Your goals will guide your setup and resource allocation.

  2. Choose Your Hardware: Depending on your objectives, you can start with a single computer or a collection of devices. Consider using older PCs, Raspberry Pis, or second-hand servers to keep costs down.

  3. Select Your Software: Decide on the operating systems and software tools you'll use. Popular choices include Linux distributions for their flexibility and open-source nature, as well as virtualization platforms like VMware or Proxmox.

  4. Plan Your Network (Optional): For most homelab tasks, a single server is enough. However, if you want high-availability setups or want to experiment with networking skills, you may need some network planning and simulation.

Each of these is a separate task. So please click the subtitles to learn more!

  • r/homelab is the community that welcomes all kinds of homelab questions.
  • r/selfhosted to find what you can put on your server
  • r/sysadmin to learn about Linux skills. Note that you may not want to post here unless you are a professional
  • r/ShittySysadmin, which we all are
  • ServeTheHome news and forums about exciting new hardware or deals on old ones.