Homelab

3 mins read

Homelab

I’ve had a homelab running for close to ten years. It started as a place to study for certifications and never stopped being useful. These days it runs media, hosts game servers for friends and family, and serves as a testing environment for whatever I’m evaluating for work. The rack in the corner is just always on.

The hardware

Everything lives in a Navepoint rack. The main compute node is a 2U Rosewill case built around my old desktop hardware, running Proxmox. A Synology NAS handles storage, currently sitting at 40TB usable. A UPS keeps everything alive through power flickers, which happen often enough where I live that it’s not optional.

Networking is a Unifi Dream Machine Pro as the gateway and firewall, with multiple APs throughout the house. Since I’m renting and can’t run ethernet through the walls, I use COAX as the physical backbone with MoCA adapters on each end. It works well enough that I stopped thinking about it.

Homelab topology diagram

What’s running

The main Proxmox VM is an Ubuntu server running Docker. Most of the interesting things live there.

The *arr suite handles media automation: Sonarr, Radarr, and the rest of the stack doing what they do. Plex sits on top of it and has been running continuously for six years. It’s the longest-lived application in the lab and the one I’d rebuild first if I lost everything. I recently added an HDHomeRun tuner with an OTA antenna feeding live TV directly into Plex. That setup replaced YouTube TV, which had climbed to 90 dollars a month. The tuner and antenna were $300 upfront. It pays for itself in four months.

I also run web-based emulators so my kids can play the same games I grew up with, N64, SNES, the classics. And I reverse proxy several game servers for myself, friends, and family. If someone wants to play something together, I’d rather host it myself than depend on a third-party service.

What I’ve used it for

The lab has been a reliable place to get hands-on with things before they show up at work:

  • EVE-NG for network topology practice and cert studying. Nothing builds intuition for routing and switching like building the environment yourself.
  • Kubernetes clusters when I wanted to understand what I was actually deploying, not just what the docs described
  • Ansible playbooks written at home before I adapted them for production infrastructure
  • Okta in a personal tenant before doing identity integrations for a client
  • Docker back when it was new enough that it wasn’t yet obvious it would be everywhere

The pattern is the same every time: run it at home first, break it a few times, understand why, then bring that to work. The lab has never stopped paying for itself.

Just set up

The HDHomeRun OTA setup is the most recent project and probably the most immediately satisfying. Antenna on the roof, tuner in the rack, live TV in Plex on any device in the house. Free, indefinitely.

Gaming

I started on the N64 with Pokemon and Starfox, moved to PC gaming on Windows 98, and I’ve kept up with every generation since. I own at least one of every major console. At some point the collection became its own kind of infrastructure problem.

Gaming and homelab work are the same activity with different stakes. You poke at a system until you understand it, and then you poke at it some more.