For as long as I’ve worked in tech, I’ve had some kind of homelab (even if I didn’t call it that at the time). It started as a hand-me-down desktop that I used as my first Linux server in my childhood bedroom and eventually grew to a few devices stacked in a rack, some smart plugs on a VLAN, and a handful of bash scripts glued together to make things work. But over time, it started to feel more like a pile of parts than an intentional system.
This post is the beginning of a series documenting the rebuild – both as a technical reference and as a way to keep myself honest. The new setup is focused on designing and building something resilient, extensible, and useful. Something that helps me grow as an engineer, experiment freely, and run serious infrastructure on my own terms.
The Old Setup: Just Enough To Be Dangerous
(Evidently, I never took a picture of the old rack with all of the equipment in it. This picture shows the in-progress version of it without the Mac Mini and such. I’ll be better about documenting my builds in the future!)
The most recent iteration of my homelab was small, straightforward, and (at least for a while), good enough:
Compute Mac Mini (M1, 8GB RAM) Beelink SER3 mini PC (Ryzen 7 3750H, 16GB RAM)
Storage Synology DS819 NAS
Networking UniFi Dream Machine SE UniFi UAP AC Pro
Power Tripp Lite SMART1500LCD UPS CyberPower CPS1215RM PDU
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