How I Am Building My First Home Lab From Scratch

It is some time I am tinking of selfhosting some stuff and more and more time I read post/see video about HomeLabs. So I start thinking about making one.

So what is a HomeLab?

A homelab is a self-contained IT environment that you design and control. It usually includes basic infrastructure like compute, storage, and networking, along with a hypervisor or virtualization layer (container). Some setups are modest and run on a single machine, while others resemble mini datacenters with multiple nodes and a shared storage such as SAN or NAS.

StorMagic - What Is a Homelab and Why Is It Important? ↗

So you can make a HomeLab with everything you havbe home, like an old pc or an potato-server.

In my case I am thinging to buy/recicling:

• A low powered PC
• Some LARGE storage (SD? HDD?)
• Cables

At the time of the writing I don’t buy anything for the project but I am planing to buy some things…

What I want to run on it? ¶

First thing: what I want to have as a service on my HomeLab?

• Feed reader: I read a lot of feed from the web
• Hosting for photo raw
• Tracking for books
• Tracking for anime/tv series/movies
• Tracking for manga
• Ad-Block for all the network
• An eBook manager library, if I can a software where can I add book on the fly with the WiFi, no cable
• Some home assistant/home automation

I thing this is all I need as a start. But searching online I found that it will be something problematic with only this stuff. I need to add more software/network tools.

So what I need to add? ¶

• A domain name: real or not¹

• A local DNS for the domain
• A private Certificate Authority or automated reverse proxies for the local domain
• A tool for manage and deploy Docker or other type of container on the network
• A tool for backup
• A centralize authentication system for the app and the server/servers
• A dashboard as Home so I can go too every system
• A local documentation for personale use

If I not have all of this stuff the HomeLav will become something difficult to setup, mantain and manage.

So what now? ¶

And now I am reasearching for the config, waiting for the parts, looking for the software and reading post and watching video about how to set up a HomeLab in my home (like where to put it). And I want to write more post about my homelab in the next future but it will be possible only when I have some hardware for build it. Ok I have some hardware for testing but I prefer to build it with the “final” hardware not the temp one.

The next post will be about how I set up all the things but It will not be a tutorial, it will be more like a diary about testing. At the end of all I will post some tutorial or, if I find something specific or something I find curiosus.

Written by a human