HomeLab

Originally this was going to be about creating a HomeLab and decided to tell the story of mine that you can still learn a ton from. Ultimately everyone will be different and why this decision was made, so you can get an idea, let your imagination run wild and build the next Epic HomeLab!

TekTinkers HomeLab

In the beginning:

My Home Lab started off as a 250GB NAS (Network Attached Storage) to be able to store and share files with other computers on the same network. Then then grew to allowing multiple systems on the network to game with/against each other, then serviced a whole dormitory via Wi-Fi to build my first gaming network with file sharing. The last addition was adding VPN capabilities (back then it was done by establishing an IPSec Tunnel) for file sharing and streaming my ripped DVD’s across the internet.

A LOT of cool things were accomplished on this first HomeLab, but it was never intended to be a “HomeLab”. It’s intent was just to have a USB external drive to put my ripped DVD’s on because I was tired of carrying around cases and folders of DVD’s.

This was done while I was in the USAF (United States Air Force) and stationed in South Korea around 2005. My roommate filled the room up with tons of stuff when all I had was my computer, some clothes and bedding stuff. He asked, “Where is all your stuff, is that all you brought?” Everything I had, pictures, movies, music was all ripped onto my PC, even all my documents were scanned and in a digital file cabinet except the documents that were required originals, those I had in a small shoe box. The Wi-Fi was spread across the dorms with extenders down the hallway, but only the most hardcore gamers found it initially. While my roommate was into Flight Sims, I told him I would foot the internet bill if he didn’t complain about what I was doing (all legal) and I would help him with his PC. At first he was hesitant, but got hooked when others in the dorm were playing Falcon 4.0 with him, creating whole squadrons and sharing skins. My roommate then was leaving for Hawaii and wanted to know if he had to buy SSD cards for his camera. When he found out he could fill up his SSD card and upload the pictures to our dorm room’s NAS, he was super excited, tried it out and was blown away. That saved him hundreds of dollars in SSD’s.
Lastly, like my roommate, my time to go visit with my parents had come. Wanting to test out streaming a movie from South Korea to California, Jurassic Park was ready to go in an *.avi format. The quality wasn’t the greatest, but it was still able to do it which to me was just amazing. Returning back to my dorm I was greeted with a meeting in my supervisors office with a few other higher ranking individuals, wanting to know what I was doing while in California and what kind of data I was transferring. Apparently, this was an unrealized technology at the time, South Korea and the US Base had some rules in place that my IPSec Tunnel went around, that I had ZERO clue about. Everything was went through, my interrogation ended and I continued to watch my DVD’s, ripped from my PC.
(Soon after Slingbox and Netflix streaming services were announced.)

The learning years till now:

This time frame was around my last years in the military to just before building the Garage LAN. Influenced by the most negative and horrible divorce custody anyone could ever experience, Microsoft Family Safety was my solution. Having networked my two kids computers and my own together for school and Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, preserving that NAS was essential along with monitoring and managing what my kids had access to. Tracking everything my kids were doing and how much screen time they were getting, my son still managed to play something like 46 hours of Halo in a 24 hour period. Still a great running story to talk about, that at the time, screen shots were taken and passed around for a laugh.
The NAS was still running strong, sharing files became the backbone of the network along with some P2P (Peer to Peer) gaming.
Having an inspiration to start my own business, the HomeLab had to grow from just a NAS to a Web, Database and Storage server. After getting this built then my kids asked to be able to play Minecraft, my initial answer was “No, that is a game for little kids”, but we see how that turned out. LOL!
At this point the HomeLab was a NAS, Web, Database, Storage and Minecraft server to include some dabbling in BitCoin mining, which was cool but ultimately torn down for the Garage LAN. This turned into a lot of traffic for a Linksys home router bought from BestBuy, needless to say, upgrades were in order. Before buying a bunch of hardware, I decided to go to school and learn more about Computer Stuff which now utilizes the nomenclatures of, “Information Technology”, “Information Systems” and “Computer Science”. Finding that Network Administration within Information Technology followed along with what was being done in the HomeLab, the decision was clear, take those classes. Not knowing what I was doing, just selecting what I was interested in for the HomeLab, I finished Network Administration with focuses in Microsoft and Linux, Cisco was next but I never got around to finishing that unfortunately.
Because of these classes, my Garage LAN became the new HomeLab and whatever I learned was applied to the development of the Garage LAN.

The HomeLab went from a NAS;
to a NAS, Web, Database, Storage, Minecraft Server;
to a VMWare ESXi HA FO Cluster of three Xeon Silver 4116 CPU’s on Supermicro motherboards, 256GB of DDR4 RAM and Raid 5 Samsung QVO 2.5″ SSD’s, 20 person Garage LAN (the house could support 20 more), all supported on a 10Gbps network that was bottlenecked by Comcast Business’s SUPERIOR bandwidth speeds of 35Mbps Upload / 250Mbps Download. I was hosting my own music server, movie server of my personally owned and ripped DVD’s, digital file cabinet, SteamCMD game servers (Ark and others), Minecraft servers, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP), Honeypots, a Jump Box and a Steam Cache server.

Wanting to scale down, Intel NUC’s were purchased as i7’s, the RAM was maxed out (64GB) and as much storage as possible was put in each NUC. Due to VMWare’s ESXi 6.7 not being compatible with the new Intel NUC’s, Windows and Hyper-V were utilized for all virtualization of servers listed above.
Note: Going from Enterprise hardware to Intel NUC’s is awesome due to low costs, however losing the longevity of Enterprise hardware and things like dual PSU’s for failovers and not being able to split up resources as efficiently were draw backs. For a HomeLab though, I found for my needs it wasn’t necessary, but I say that and currently I have 3 ESXi hosts running from upgraded CPU’s from the 4116’s. LOL
This is because I’m almost done with my Bachelor’s and I’ve been using the hardware to get hands on experience while I’m learning. This has led to some servers being suddenly wiped out, which the community is not afraid to share their opinions about. Hearing the never ending frustrations that have seemingly turned into a meme as well, especially with the Minecraft Server, I’ve learned to be a better Administrator. Things like, weekly system checks, backups, traffic auditing, version/update reviews are all practices that have kept things running a lot smoother and the community harassment to a minimal amount. Currently, I am exploring how to build up the Minecraft server to support 500 players while staying true to the Java/Vanilla survival experience, randomized spawns throughout the world and max view distance then have a 2nd world similar but generated as Amplified, both servers rendering to all players smoothly.
Every time my thoughts drift back to the day my kids asked to play Minecraft and my reply was, “No, that is a kids game” and then I think about where that kids game has gotten me, I just laugh, its hilarious.

HomeLab Recommendations

Using what you got:

If you have a PC or Laptop and you want to get a HomeLab going without the expenses of buying more hardware, you can most likely virtualize on the system you have. Downloading and installing software like Oracles Virtual Box and a couple *.iso files will get you started with being able to play with things like setting up your own LAMP server, learn Linux, host your own game(s).
Personally, game hosting is the best in my opinion because you’ll throw yourself to the wolves. As soon as you start a server, you’re telling the world you’re ready for abuse and willing to learn. You’ll get everything from hardware stress, network stress, traffic stress, bots, hackers, crackers, trolls, griefers and more now that AI and Quantum computing have arrived. There will be times you’ll break and cry all night long from frustration, you even might just delete a whole server out of anger to make the world pay, trust me, this is all normal… and expected. On the plus side, you’ll either be a part of or grow your own community of supportive people. They might want you to build a webpage detailing out everything you did so they can show their friends or learn themselves.
You can setup a dual boot/OS pc and have both Windows and Linux setup together on the same system. While I encourage to try this out, I’ve found it to not be as stable as running Windows as your main OS and using Oracles Virtual Box or even Hyper-V if you’re running Windows Pro. If you can spend a couple bucks and upgrade your Windows Home to Windows Pro, you’ll get Hyper-V to enable and utilize which is what I recommend. I’ve found that utilizing a bunch of 3rd party software always ends up creating problems somewhere down the line. My Main PC is running Microsoft Windows, so I utilize Microsoft products whenever I can before venturing out into the wild Internet to find a solution. To make things easier, I’ve built my Resources Page for people to benefit from what I’ve already found that works for me in the wild internet.

Repurposing old hardware:

This to me is my favorite thing to do and why I am like a packrat with all my hardware. With virtualization though, there hasn’t been a need for me to hold on to everything and why I will sell or give away hardware to friends in the community.

<Story Time>
My dad liked to take a once a year trip to the desert with his Jeep to go wheeling with his friends. We would arrive Friday night and leave Sunday afternoon. Because this was an organized event called the Tierra Del Sol, Saturday Nights would mean everyone registered could meet in the middle of the main wash at the setup stage and join the raffle.
One year my dad won a few prizes like a winch, rock rails, lights, etc, he made out pretty good. To my surprise he asked anyone in his group if they wanted anything he won and the members that needed things were given them. I asked why he didn’t charge money for them or sell the items in other ways, his reply was, “We are a group and some peoples Jeeps are better setup than others. Giving these items away to people in our group, that I don’t need, only strengthens the group and its capability.”
<End Story>

I’ll ask around to individuals to see if they need anything and if no reply comes back, sure I’ll sell stuff online. Maybe there are times when people ask me if I need anything, either way, collecting and trading hardware is awesome and when a project comes up, you’ll probably have what you need if it can’t be virtualized. Or maybe you just want to have your new project completely isolated because you have ZERO idea what will happen.

<Story Time>
I setup Kali Linux on a laptop and left it for my son to play with. 10 minutes later, Viruses, Worms, Trojans were released on the network, everything was lost and died. Not his fault, completely mine and why I isolate things now. LOL
<End Story>

An old PC that has been thrown into the closet for possible use down the road is perfect. Pull it out, fire it up, write down what its specs are and see if it meets the minimum requirements for Windows Pro, or a Linux Distro like Mint or Ubuntu. Maybe there is a Linux distro out there that can be installed and utilized as a HomeLab within its self! DistroWatch is a great resource for finding out what a lot of these distro’s can do. Maybe all it needs is an additional stick of RAM and a Hard Drive or Solid State Drive, you can install Windows, turn it into a NAS by sharing folders and files, setup and configure Remote Desktop so it can run without a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Additionally you can run music servers on it, game servers, NextCloud which is super powerful and capable on it’s own, a lot of these things you can find on the Resources Page too.

Buying new hardware:

Typically, I do not recommend this option for newbs, but because of the rise of AI (CoPilot is my favorite), you can tell it what you want to do and ask for a suggestion of hardware to get for your first HomeLab project and get pretty good results.
Why do I not recommend this for newbs, because after the hardware comes software and configurations of networking and then administration of it all. No one really thinks about this but the software part can really do a number on an individual to the point of giving up. Then it’s not fun, the embarrassment of buying all new hardware to have something epic and cool sets in, the trolls begin to meme and it goes downhill from there.
This is why I recommend Virtualization at first, figure all that frustrating stuff out and after you figure out how it all works, build it. Or, Build a machine that is a Type-1 hypervisor and join the ranks of being a badass.

<Note>
Type-1 Hypervisor is virtualizing straight from hardware
Type-2 Hypervisor is virtualizing within an OS like Windows Pro, Windows Server
<End Note>

Don’t get me wrong, buying new hardware is like Christmas each time a UPS or FedEx truck shows up at the end of my driveway. Yes, this article seems like I am discouraging from buying new hardware and yes, I am. But just know that deep down inside me, there is an inner-child that becomes way to overly excited as I research new hardware. Additionally, it is absolute 100% torture waiting 7 days for an arrival of an item.

NUC (Next Unit Computing):

These are small PC’s, about the size of a deck of cards, developed originally by Intel. Sold to ASUS you can still find them for sale today on Amazon or the SimplyNUC store. NUC’s can either be bought pre-configured or as barebones. If you purchase them as barebones, you will need to purchase RAM, Storage and get an OS (Operating System). To me, buying as barebones is better because I can either use old hardware to install and buy new hardware to get the NUC ready for what I want it to do. NUC’s are very low powered and have passive cooling so they are silent when running. Adding an additional USB Ethernet Port isn’t a bad idea as this will give more options for virtualizing when setting up the network configurations. Most NUC’s, the ones I have anyway, have wireless, Bluetooth, IR capabilities built into them along with integrated graphics and audio. These truly are little badass machines and I love mine. Perfect for a HomeLab, running all 11 of mine at one time would total 704 Watts since each is 64 Watts. This is why I’ve just decided to build up my enterprise servers since they are utilizing up to 700 Watts each and can manage a whole bunch more traffic. I think as time goes on, I finish school, get a travel trailer to take to conventions and festivals, the NUCs will end up around the house, in the travel trailer, maybe the shop or work busy doing cool stuff.

Conclusion:

Start by virtualizing everything first, as much as you can anyways. This can be a super fun endeavor that can be applied to Comptia certifications and a resume, depending how far down the rabbit hole you go.
Take the challenge and throw yourself to the wolves by hosting a game server that is public. Please post your stories in the Discord, we need the laughs.

<Story Time>
Our Rust server was running smoothly, honestly didn’t think we would have any issues with it and it had a player cap of 100 players on a 10Gbps network. Our friend Tweak was streaming to an audience of around 1,000 viewers and I asked him if he could have his community help out with a stress test of the Rust server by logging in and playing for a bit. He gladly announced it to his audience while laughing and asking me if I was sure, LMAO. I had no clue what was coming. He announced the server information and about 7 seconds later, traffic peaked and the server crashed. Not only did the community login at one time, they threw everything at it from a DDoS attack to just straight black hatting the network and shutting down other servers leaving a trail of *.txt files telling me how they got there. HAHAHAHA
Tweak is a great creator and you can find him on YouTube!
<End Story>

Take pictures!!!! If there is one thing I regret is all the pictures I could have taken during my journey that I did not. Take your pictures and put them on a self-hosted NAS, you’ll thank me later.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. No question is a stupid question unless you’re asking if you should store your mouse in a locked drawer because you’re not sure if your cat will eat it. Ask away, the nerd community is strong and while there are a lot of dickheads trying to be the next Linus or Know-It-All, there are always people like me that are willing to help. In the long run, there is just WAY to much for one person to “know it all” and if we work together, help each other, we will accomplish our goals.

Special Thanks

Blaaq for making me create this page