Homelab Fundamentals!

The basic idea with a homelab is that you are building a dedicated environment to learn and play with computers, networking, and security. This is something you do on your own time (when you have the time, lol). The goal of learning needs to be part of the process of troubleshooting in your homelab where you will break things often. Having such a lab environment will give you practical skills you can apply to your career in IT/IS. The ideal hardware for a homelab should be spare parts, computers, networking equipment, etc. My personal homelab is made up of SBC (Single Board Computers) because I like low power consumption devices with a small form factor. I will post more about my personal homelab in the future!

Homelab Design Basics.

My foundational rules for a homelab especially for a student are twofold: keep it simple and fill a core need you have. If you need storage for files on your network, build a NAS (network attached storage) using a spare dekstop you have lying around. Do not try to go from zero to sixty by building a small data center in your basement. Instead start by building and designing infrastructure with a small footprint that fills your core objective.

Permission For Mistakes.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes and learn how to fix them. You will make many mistakes and it's okay to make them! Here's a list of mistakes I've made in my homelab: locked myself out of the root account, blocked my own IP because of fail2ban on SSH, overzealous use of the rm -r -f command where I deleted important data accidentally (good backups are nice), and so many other lovely errors. This is part of the learning process where persistence is the key :)

Final Thoughts.

You don't have to know everything, but the only way to find what you don't know is to learn by doing practical projects. I strongly encourage my students to build a homelab because of the distinct advantages it gives them. I'm always impressed by folks who have a homelab on their resume when I'm part of an interview panel.