It’s incredible how much you can accomplish with determination and repurposed hardware.
I started my lab three years ago, with a single used desktop workstation from my local enterprise recycling company, thanks Comprenew, and a network switch. From that modest setup, I’ve built a full home lab environment that mirrors many enterprise setups. The fact is, you do not need a massive budget to start learning and innovating.
Pickup a refurbished system with enough SATA ports for a boot drive and a few refurbished NAS drives, plus at least two network interface cards, and your possibilities are truly massive.
Here’s what I’m currently running, on that very machine:
🔹A Proxmox Server Solutions VE server hosting my VMs and LXC containers.
🔹A TrueNAS Scale virtual machine acting as my NAS, and docker container host.
🔹My Netgate PFSense firewall VM to manage and protect my network from the baddies. 🔥
🔹A Secure, remote access VPN, using WireGuard. 🔐
🔹My dashboard splash page for centralized access to all of my services using Dashy
🔹A Pi-hole container for network-wide ad blocking, and DNS look-ups. 🥧
🔹Cloudflare tunnels for secure, proxied access to my sites and services. 😶🌫️
🔹My personal website, hosted in Docker, Inc. 🕸️
🔹My Jellyfin Project media server for streaming all my own content to my family and friends. 🪼
🔹An Immich photo storage server for organizing and backing up my photos.
🔹Wazuh XDR for endpoint security monitoring and analysis across all of my systems.
🔹Syncthing for secure, decentralized file syncing across my network.
🔹An OpenWebUI server integrated with an Ollama API to interact with self-hosted LLMs through a clean and intuitive interface. 🤖✨
To ensure resiliency, I back everything up through a Proxmox Server Solutions Backup Server that stores snapshots to an SMB share hosted on a secondary system.
What started with just a vision has grown into a versatile, self-sufficient infrastructure, entirely self-hosted, secure, and scalable. ⚖️
If you’re thinking about building your own lab, don’t wait for the “perfect” equipment or conditions. Start with what you have, be resourceful, and keep learning. The skills you will develop along the way will bolster your confidence and inspire you to do more.
If you’re looking to start-up your own lab, and have any questions about how you can get started, feel free to contact me I’m always happy to point others to the resources that have helped me out along the way. 🤟
#Homelab #Networking #SelfHosting #Virtualization #Cybersecurity #Proxmox #TechInnovation #LearningByDoing