My Home Lab Journey
Hosting your own server at home is often called a “Home Lab”. My Home Lab journey started with a former professor donating a bunch of servers due for replacement to his students. Until this point, I had only been playing around with Raspberry Pi’s, so I was very excited when I received a HL Dell Poweredge Server Rack server.
The server was stocked with
- CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v2 @ 2.60GHz (6 Cores)
- RAM: 8x 16 GB DDR3 2Rx4 PC3L 12800R 11-12-E2
- Storage: 3x 300GB HDD SAS 6Gbps RPM 10k AL13SEB300
A lot of horsepower for a student. But I put it to good use.
My Setup
Over time I reached this Setup
- I setup a XCP-NG Hypervisor for virtualization to deploy a range of ubuntu VMs on it.
- Xen-Orchestra VM was used a management interface
- A VM with Wireguard setup for VPN access to my home network
- A Docker Server to host a range of containers
- A self hosted Gitlab instance along with Gitlab CI Runners.
- Portainer for container management
- Nextcloud for my personal cloud
- Collabora as an online cloud based office suite integrated with Nextcloud.
- And Syncthing for end-to-end file synchronization
- with which I synced my digital notes
- And KeepassXC Password Manager database files
I was very happy with my Dell Server until my father pressed me to shut it down to avoid excess power waste. So as a replacement, I installed a Synology NAS with container support as a replacement. Synology offers a DynDNS service and reverse proxy configuration out of the box, which allows me access my home lab from anywhere with a synology address as well as allow me to configure subdomains to directly forward to my containers.
Want to me to write about something in more detail?
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- Using one repository to manage all docker containers with Docker Compose: Click here
- Use RenovateBot on Gitlab to Automate Dependency Management: Click here