A homelab is a place where you can safely perform experiments, consider it your own sandbox.
My lab consists of 2 HP servers and an old thinclient running Docker.
If you are considering a homelab make it your own, with whatever tools you have at your disposal.
You don’t have to spend lots of cash on your homelab, I sourced the thinclient from ebay for £50 and the 2 HP servers were hand me downs. And this is perfectly fine, all you have to do is source some disks and memory and you’re ready to go.
There is some further detail on my blog posts, click learn more.
Don’t forget just because your homelab is at home, don’t skimp on security. A good firewall, only allow administrative connection from inside your network, use one time passwords, authentication tokens etc. I will list some of the software I use below.
There is some further detail on my blog posts, click learn more.
I run 3 subnets in my lab, my infrastructure network, LAB network and a sandbox network for intricate testing, sometimes I also use my sandbox network for locked down temporary inbound connections.
I have a standard router with a 28 subnet range from my ISP. Behind that I run a firewall in a VM with it’s required interfaces plugged into my router.
I also run a small router for my backup line with it’s own Dynamic IP for temporary connections.
Each of my subnets are in their own Zones, meaning, I can segregate my subnets from each other.
There is some further detail on my blog posts, click learn more.
Selection of software really depends on what you would like to do, I run 2 hosts that in turn run a series of VMs, I can spin up a VM in a matter of minutes and do what I need to do.
I also run my thinclient as a Docker host, this allows me to spin up a container or a series of containers for my needs.
There is some further detail on my blog posts, click learn more.
