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Testing new waters with a home lab setup

modi123

modi123

I am the Santa now!
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Preface: I'm in a spot upgrading my daily driver PC and it occurred to me that it also maybe a time to look into this 'home lab' thing. I'm a developer by trade, and the extent of my networking knowledge is pretty basic - can I wire up a home router, get things on it, etc.

My current set up is pretty much everything on my mainbox.. MSSQL instance, XAMPP, various VMs with Virtualbox, external storage for backups, etc. Residential cable modem and some home router.

The thought is - at the 30,000ft view - to pick up a tiny pc off Woot (or fleabay) to run Proxmox on. From there spin up an ubuntu server with MSSQL and XAMPP for a starter. Those would only need to be accessible to my main windows box.

From what I gather then the gold plating would be a tailscale or headscale instance to connect a future purchased NAS system for external (off network) access for me and the family and serve as replacement for my current backup drives.

The Woot mini pic is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75Q G2 Tiny PC, AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD. I figure RAM and SSD are a skosh weak, but I can work with it to get my feet wet.

In the general, hand waving motion, does this make sense or do I have things grossly incorrect?

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Good call. Looks like that mini pc from Woot uses DDR4 SODIMM.

While I may not need the machine working 24/7/365 for just mssql and xampp if phase 2 with an externally accessible NAS device I can see that uptime changing.
 
I repurposed my old Crosshair VI Hero and AMD 5950X for a home server. I bought 64G of ECC UDIMMs for it, loaded up ProxMox and have a VM for pfSense to do my routing duties and another VM running Ubuntu server for PiHole and Plex. I have since spun down a Windows 11 instance, a Minecraft server instance and a Foundry VTT server instance as they are currently not being used and have really only scratched the surface of what this setup can do. I am also running a Dell T340 with 32G of ECC RAM and 8x8TB HDDs under bare-metal TrueNAS as my storage server. The Dell was given to me for free as an office discard (CPU was bad, believe it or not - a $20 fix). All of this was set up before PC parts prices got stoooopid, of course.

Welcome to the fam, man.
 
If you're just getting your feet wet, I would consider getting an older full blown server that will come with more ram and capabilities. Once you know what you need, you can upgrade/add to your lab.

The other area I would consider is the network itself. Used enterprise routers are cheap, pfsense is free, and both can run the more industry standard ipsec clients that virtually every device has built-in as standard. You can also 'lab and learn' this too, especially if your cable modem will give you more than one public IP address if you put a switch after it and multiple routers/devices.

Welcome to the fun!
 
SamirD said:
If you're just getting your feet wet, I would consider getting an older full blown server that will come with more ram and capabilities. Once you know what you need, you can upgrade/add to your lab.

The other area I would consider is the network itself. Used enterprise routers are cheap, pfsense is free, and both can run the more industry standard ipsec clients that virtually every device has built-in as standard. You can also 'lab and learn' this too, especially if your cable modem will give you more than one public IP address if you put a switch after it and multiple routers/devices.

Welcome to the fun!
Click to expand...
just understand most ppl don't have the ability to store and rack old enterprise gear. To the OP think 10gb networking if you plan to have proxmox use remote storage in any capacity
 
Ah, yeah, I was just more or less going to into this using my residential Netgear router. Forgot I may need something more beefy.

I'll add that to the list of things to consider. I appreciate the feed back.
 
Vengance_01 said:
Good luck being able to go to sleep. Most enterprise servers are loud as f unless it's a tower based server.
Click to expand...
Not when they're off. If you're just starting out, you don't need it running 24x7. Once you figure out what you need, you get the more expensive smaller whatever and then sell off the big one or keep it around as offline backup, ha node or whatever.
 
There is a range of enterprise equipment from the early and mid 2010s that is in a sweet spot of readily available, amazingly affordable, and surprisingly capable and resilient.
 
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