I’m trying to get some ideas of what is out there that can be done. I feel like I’ve been doing it for sometime, don’t really know what homelab is or encompasses, and want to know more.
So what got you started and what’s your favorite homelab project? Anything you’ve done or want to do?
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It started with a laptop with a broken screen (a Compaq Armada something).
It was my work laptop and instead of throwing it on the scrapheap I adopted it and took it home.It was trash for my Company. For me it was:
* A small NAS (one harddrive and one cdrom)
* A UPS for that NAS (laptop battery)
* A printer server (It had a LPT port)
* A router (US Robotics Courier modem on the serial port)I was truly sad when its motherboard failed a number of years later.
The favorite is not in the homelab but my workstation. Built on a HFX mini chassis with a Ryzen 3600 and a 1650 graphics card - zero moving parts and zero noise. You have to look at the power led to know if its on
Like most people I feel like my Lab got started from what should have been E waste and the previous owner had already determined that. Overall I continue to like my Unraid server because I keep adding disks and recently got a parity drive set up and It is shaping up nicely. Currently working on setting up a picture backup service for my family’s apple devices.
I started with a Pentium 1 200mhz with 8MB RAM, running Apache along with PHP4 and Debian Woody. Wrote my own blog on that machine.
Started running more and more services on it, e.g. IRC server, file server, print server, DNS server. Later on, I upgraded my deskop and turned my old AMD K6 300 into my router.
Wish I had blogged about the things I had done on the blog that I wrote back then.
Hah, pretty much the same for me. Pentium 200 MHz but with 48MB RAM, Debian 2.2 „Potato“ but upgraded to Woody soon. LAMP, FTP, Samba. Hosted my own website and a friend’s PHP project, some sort of newsletter management software iirc. Another Pentium machine got repurposed into a router running off a single floppy disk with the fli4l project. No disk drive, fanless, yet rock stable. I still have a screenshot of it reaching 1y uptime. This stuff really got me into IT. Good times.