Hello guys. First of all, I’m sorry if sometimes I speak broken English as it is not my first language. I am a 18 year old from Spain and I am currently studding a middle grade in computing and networking (Grado Medio en Sistemas Microinformáticos y Redes, in case another Spaniard is reading) to hopefully become a sysadmin. I have been building a homelab for the past 2 years approximately and this is my current setup. Bare in mind that I have never had a job and all of this was bought with my allowance.
Current homelab under the desk
In the top right we have a HP 260 G2 mini, running a i5-6200U, 8gb ram and a cheapo 120gb sata ssd. This is my main server as it’s low power and runs the most critical services. It runs Windows Server 2019 and hosts though Hyper-V a vm with my openvpn instance for remote access, as well as a Ubuntu Server 22.04 vm for general testing. This is the machine I use to manage all of the rest and remote through RDP from class to mess around when in bored in lessons.
The server to its left its the first server i built. Its running an i5 3rd gen (cant remember the specific model rn) 8gb of ram and 4x1tb hdds. This machine is running truenas core and has those 4 drives in a zfs pool running raidz-5. This are second hand hard drives and this redundancy has already saved my ass once. I don’t run this server 24/7 due to the electricity prices in Spain right now and I’m not accessing files enough to justify the cost.
The server at the right consist of an i5-4460, 16gb of ram and another cheapo 120 ssd. I run Windows Server 2019 in it and mainly hosts my test vms and heavier workloads the hp cant handle. I again can’t run this 24/7 due to the cost it has.
Below all of this is my tp-link gigabit switch. It ain’t fancy that’s for sure but i got a great deal on it. I would also show you my router but it’s in the living room and its just a isp provided s***box. Maybe looking to test build a opensense router just for fun, as i cant convince my parents to change it permanently. For those interested, I have a gigabit fiber internet connection with the spanish isp Digi. If any other homelaber has Digi you know the pain in the ass it is their stupid CG-NAT system. At least I can say its cheap, 20€ a month for gigabit, so cant really complain.
I am currently looking to setup WOL so i can power all of the machines remotely through the hp, that runs 24/7 because of its low power.
Any feedback or ideas for improvement or really any comments are more than welcome.
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Muy bueno 👏
Next, I would pick modern workload software to learn. By workloads I mean cool open source software out there. A lot of people are finally moving from VMs to containers in their home labs.
- docker - modern way to run workloads is containers and it isn’t too bad to pick up. Portainer ce is free for a small number of nodes if you want a GUI.
If you are studying computer science / learning coding on your own, it’s a great way to deploy your code
- kubernetes (ex: k3s) - these can also be super light weight (k3s is super light weight) and is an incredibly popular way to run resilient container systems.
Both approaches will lead you to things like lets encrypt for certs, tons of cool free apps out there like grafana / Prometheus to learn monitoring, home assistant for light bulb control 💡, and increased Linux experience. Heck, you can connect both to your truenas storage over nfs. Explore ceph ( micro ceph for microk8s) or longhorn if you want to create distributed, replicated storage for app data in k8s.
Have fun out there and sorry for just convincing you to buy more crap with the money you don’t have 😁👍🏼😆