what is homelabbing?

Homelabbing is being a sysadmin as a hobby.

And it’s one of those hobbies that looks kinda weird from the outside, but just like minimalism, command-line tools and driving a manual transmission car, homelabbing can seem inconvenient on the surface, but can provide great satisfaction and opportunities to learn many amazing things.

Some people will have a network-attached storage device (NAS) for storing family photos and movies, etc. Some will host their own Minecraft server, or website. Those are all home labs.

In fact, this blog is a website that I’m hosting completely on my own server and eventually, I’ll have more than just this website. I hope to have some other services available to both me and the public.

hardware

Software is nothing without something to run it on. My weapon of choice is the old laptop I used in high-school. It’s a total piece, but that’s the thing about servers, they don’t need to be powerful at all if you’re just a budding homelabber. A spinning hard drive, 6GB of RAM, and a mobile processor work just fine for what I’m looking to do.

os

The OS my server is running is the Arch distro of Linux BTW. It’s what is most comfortable for me, and at this point I don’t need a desktop environment or GUI for my server.

services and future plans

Right now my homelab isn’t much with just nginx serving up this static website, but I have some bigger things in store. Some of the next things I’d like to tackle is self hosting my own search engine, git version control, and data backups.

your turn

Already, I’ve learned a lot just setting up my own homelab. It feels good to be taking the internet back and learning more as I do it. See why you should homelab here. Not everything has to be hosted on AWS, and it can often be more rewarding not too.

Already I can feel the satisfaction of owning and controlling all parts of my lab. The cloud of misconception I had about the internet is fading away as I realize how the internet works on a deeper more personal level.

Much like learning to use the command-line, homelabbing was a little clunky at first, but now I feel confident in my abilities. Even further, I feel like it is the superior way to a certain number of things. Here’s to learning more in the future by pushing outside of my comfort zone.

Thanks for visiting my homelab. Feel free to take a look at the other content that I’ve written.

-Exar