Home Lab Overview July 2022
I’ve been doing Home Lab for a few years now. I started out with utilizing my old gaming laptop running Proxmox and a custom built PFSense box. After needing more resources I added an old Lenovo think server into my lab and then pulled the trigger on a full server rack not long after. My current hardware is using a Star Tech 12U Rack for storing all my equipment, PC Engines apu2 board for running PFSense, a Dell R410 server which is running ESXI and a iDRAC connection, and a TP-Link 24 Port Gigabit Switch, and a ARRIS Surfboard SB6183 for a modem.
The purpose of my home lab was to help grow myself as a cyber security professional. Sometimes you might see something at work or while reading an article and think that might be fun to play with or learn. That is where a home lab comes in perfect. You can take many applications and discover how to setup and build them, configuration, and how they can all work together. Some services are also great to host for personal use.
Some of my most used services I am running is PFSense, Splunk, Portainer, Nextcloud, and JellyFin. There are more services I use within my network some are to play with and see how I can utilize them at home and some others are just play with something new.
Over the past year I have migrated most of my services over to Docker containers. As much as I learned by finding every dependency for an application or figuring out the one little error that broke everyting I found Docker containers to be simiplier to get an application up and running. Using Docker-Compose also allowed me to have easy .yml files of all my main services ready to deploy at any given notice. This also allowed me to understand and learn containers which has benefited me in my career.
Diagram
As my home lab as grown and become more complex I have needed to develop a diagram in order to reference of where certain services are located and how they are able to communicate with each other. I created the below diagram using https://app.diagrams.net/ which is my personal favorite diagram creation tool.
