- Date
Home Lab
My “home lab” started with just a raspberry pi running Pihole. Then I started working with routers/switches at my IT/networking job, and ended up buying a managed switch and pfsense router for myself to mess around with at home. My IT/networking job turned into DevOps, and I started learning things like Terraform and Ansible.. at the same time, my coworker told me about a free hypervisor called Proxmox. Things quickly progressed from there, and now my current compute/networking inventory is:
- Netgate 2100 running pfSense firewall/router
- 2 old laptops running proxmox
- 1 8-bay NAS server running proxmox
- Cisco SG-300 managed switch
- Brocade ICX 8450 managed switch
- Ruckus R750 Wireless Access Point
In terms of applications, I now have:
- pihole
- several docker hosts
- a kubernetes cluster
- immich
- komga
- samba
- MacOS VM
- home assistant
- plex
It has really become quite a fulfilling hobby and there’s always something interesting to do. Here is my backlog of things I want to do in the lab:
- add 10G networking to NAS server
- deploy a kubernetes cluster on proxmox using terraform, including proxmox CSI integration
- make a proper 3+ node proxmox cluster
- set up the brocade switch only using Ansible (i just bought it recently)
- set up netbox for inventory management
- add an ELK stack for logging/metrics
- deploy a CI/CD server, maybe gitlab