I often get asked by my wife, my kids, my friends, etc.: “What is a home lab?”. A home lab is a set of computers and other devices that are used to do “self hosting”, experiment with new technology, and otherwise learn new skills. By “self hosting” I mean running things like this web site from my home, rather than paying someone like Amazon Web Services to host it for me. To set up a home lab, you need (at a minimum) a router, a firewall (if it is not built into your router), a network switch to connect all the components together, and at least one computer to act as your server. Most people also have a special type of storage device called a Network Attached Storage or NAS. Think of a NAS (such as a Synology, QNAP, etc.) as your own personal cloud. These devices can pretty much do everything for you that Google cloud or Apple iCloud does for you.
Some people take this hobby to an extreme and build out server racks (like the ones in the picture above) full of servers, storage arrays, network switches, load balancers, firewalls, routers, uninterruptible power supplies, and even more. These same enthusiasts delight in buying used enterprise server equipment with tons of memory, massive CPUs with dozens or even hundreds of cores and are in a sense creating their own data center or cloud.
When I first started on this journey, I longed for this kind of massive hardware. That is until I saw my electric bill. My first server (a refurbished HP Z 640 workstation with an i5-2690 CPU and 128 GB of RAM) was using more than 70 watts at idle, and often much more. But lately, I have been chasing a goal in the other direction, to reduce my power usage to minuscule amounts. The “server” that this website runs on (which sits on a shelf in my office) uses only 9 watts on average. That’s not bad!!
If you looked in my office you might not recognize that I am running my own home lab/self hosted server environment. I will do a more detailed post on what equipment I am running another time, but the core of my setup is an HP mini PC with a core i5-12500T low power processor.
Aside from this mini PC, I have a NAS device to store my data, and a wired network that feeds from our Xfinity cable modem. Its not a giant setup, but there is a lot more here than meets the eyes!
So what do I DO with my server? Well, saving all the technical details for another post, at a high level, I run a couple of WordPress based websites, I also host a NextCloud website (think of this as my own Google storage, but it runs here locally and I am not worried about losing data or data security!). I also run a few other apps that mainly are accessible only from within my network (i.e., they are not exposed to the internet) including Grocy, which is a recipe manager, as well as it keeps track of the food we have on hand, Photoprism, which is an AI powered photo management suite with facial recognition, Tracks which is a “getting things done” software package for organizing my life, LeanTime, a project management software tool, and Joplin, a note taking tool that will eventually replace Evernote for Lee-Ann and I. I also have software to store all of our critical data/files in our NAS and ensure that it is backed up nightly to another storage device here in our home as well as to the AWS cloud. In the future I plan on running Home Assistant to automate our lights, thermostats, etc. and Bitwarden to manage our passwords
By now you are probably saying, well, I could do all of that through Alexa, or Google, or any number of other cloud based offerings. And you are 100% correct. But the beauty of doing all of this myself is really three fold: First, if its here, then I have no worries that Amazon, Google or anyone else is spying on me or perhaps stealing my data. Second, it is really fun and I am keeping my “boomer” brain sharp by doing this. And third, I can make the software do what I want, and customize these services to my liking.
One disclaimer as you read my home lab blog. I am not trying to create a complete guide to teach you how to do what I have done. I will provide links to some of the useful YouTube channels and other resources I have discovered along the way, but these blog posts are not meant to be complete or all inclusive. Please be sure you do your own preparation and research. My main goal is to just describe the journey I took. But that journey was definitely not the most optimal way to get into the home lab/self hosting hobby.