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Cover image for Why you may need a dedicated homelab.

Why you may need a dedicated homelab.

Mike on February 08, 2019

There comes a time in a developers life, when their bottleneck becomes their machine they are operating on. Maybe you want to learn new tech? Play ...
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Dangeranger • Edited

There is also a dedicated community reddit.com/r/homelab for this that can be of help or inspiration.

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Kasey Speakman

I did one at home. For the network side, I used some Ubiquiti equipment. For example, the EdgeRouter X is hard to beat for $50 and it will NAT a full gig of internet traffic. I also have it programmed (from command line) with zone-based firewall between VLANs, time-based rules, etc.

As a dev, I learned a valuable strategy from the way their command line tools work. The device configuration is stored as JSON in MongoDB. And their command line is basically just a wrapper for setting values at a JSON path. You can look at a JSON config and figure out what command you need to run. And vice versa. And the CLI still manages to feel similar to other kinds of routers like Cisco. Brilliant design.

I used my old gaming computer to host VMs.

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Nucu Labs

Very nice introduction, I'm just starting out with my home lab! Everything is on my old laptop so far, plex, vsftpd and dnsmasq.

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Joris

I couldn't agree more. I have almost exactly the setup you describe! You don't need that much hardware actually. Be careful with old (1u) rack servers. They eat power and are incredibly loud! I have a Dell T110 that is absolutely perfect. It is designed for small office use and it is power friendly and quiet. I can't tell how much I have learned from setting everything up. You'll run into all kinds of interesting problems that you'll learn to solve. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

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Bob van Donselaar

I have been wanting to get into this, this is a great starting point for some further research, thanks!

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Chris McKay

I used to have one of these, but time and kids haven't permitted it. I think maybe it's time to start again 😁

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May Meow

I already have homelab, and running Giltab server locally with runners (in cloud and my pc) and one mastodon instance on raspbery pi which have data stored on primary server. I have opened ports for gitlab to internet so (maybe its wrong question) but its necessary to hide real ip (my wan IP) address or its doesnt matter?

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Ibrahim Imran

Yes If You don't THEN Hackers Can TRACK your IP

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Ben Halpern

I'm getting more into this stuff and homelab is a good word for this.

I also love /r/battlestations and would love to bring more content like that onto DEV. 😄

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levarmorris

Definitely interested in getting more stuff in my homelab so far I have a box using unraid, but I want to learn how to do more. The next thing that I've seen that has a lot of setup/tutorial already is pfsense.

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Michael Maitoza

Hi Mike. From what I actually understood of this article this sounds like a great idea. I am, unfortunately, not very familiar with some of the things you were talking about, but I do have my friend google, so I will look into this further. Thanks,
Mike

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Ibrahim Imran

Battle stations for gamers are for comfort though.........

Plus cool RGB lights!

Only problem is Their very heavy.........

You'd need a van to move it!

Besides that it's amazing!

You could make an ULTIMATE Homelab If you combined battle stations AND homelabs

That would be AMAZING!

But expensive... Those things cost 12 THOUSAND to 15 THOUSAND US Dollars!

But combined with A Homelab? man that's gonna come in the Thousands.....

But if you're willing for amazingness COMBINE them!

When you code with the lights off and set the RGB lights to green Its gonna look like your an extreme coder!

That's what I think

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Facundo

I think this can also apply for a Raspberry Pi if you are thinking about small projects.

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Nicolas Quijano • Edited

Wow, that is quite beyond my P133 PC conversion to linux router and firewall for my PPoE home ADSL connection in the early aughts 😁
Actually inspired me for my long term plan, which ultimately has me working remotely while globetrotting on the cheap : could have my #homelab stashed at friends or family once I take off and still use it for testing and deployment, even have a few production, money earning instances running on it.
Great article !
Cheers

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Karl N. Redman

Very inspiring!

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Ben Dowen

Reminds me, I really must move beyond my Raspberry Pi 3 and reformat my old gaming PC into a home lab. I think it has 12gb of ram and a gen1 i7 920.