xlinux

Home Lab

I've always been a geek. I got my start with tech when I was a kid, but it really took off when I was in high school.

Home Lab 1.0

Years Active: 2003(?) - 2008

I had a few servers. One server was running Windows Server 2003 and was my Active Directory DNS server. My dad ran cables on two sides of the house. Everything came into our basement where I had a "server rack". The cable that ran to my bedroom was the "East Net" and the cable that ran to the living room was the "West Net". I also had a clubhouse (converted shed). I had a couple old routers I put DD-WRT on and used to form a wireless bridge. Since my bedroom was on the side of the house with the clubhouse, it was easy to setup. In the clubhouse, the other DD-WRT bridge acted as a switch. I had a few desktops in here that I was able to connect to the network. In my bedroom, I had my desktop, an HP desktop running Ubuntu, and a Dell desktop also running Ubuntu. On the "West Net", was my mom's computer with the shared printer, a DD-WRT router acting as a WAP, and my dad's laptop and occasionally my mom's laptop.

Home Lab 1.5

Years Active: 2009

When I moved to Sandusky, OH to work at Cedar Point, I didn't really take much with me. I had my desktop, laptop, and a couple wireless routers. Not sure if any photos exist of this setup but I'll look and update accordingly. I'm calling this "version 1.5" because it really wasn't any sort of improvement over my original.

Home Lab 1.5.1

Years Active: 2009-2010

After living in Sandusky, I moved to Orlando, FL. I didn't have a setup right away. Just a Windows XP desktop and my laptop. Several years later, I moved into an apartment with my useless roommate who moved out on me. He wanted to be in this apartment but the only thing they had was a 3 bedroom. The third bedroom was used as an office. I had a Linux server setup and a Windows Server 2003 AD server. There wasn't anything special here. I had started my web hosting business at this point so the AD network was called "nodespace.local". Again, this wasn't much of an improvement over the last revision, hence why I am calling it "version 1.5.1".

Home Lab 2.0

Years Active: 2010-2012

Finally, this is where things finally moved along to the point where I felt like it was enough to call it a major revision. By this point, I had moved out and on my own into an apartment from my old coworker. I resetup things but being broke (my salary was $38,000/year or somewhere around there), I didn't have much to invest. So I got some old desktops from work to use as servers. I forget what I all had here, but I found some old Cisco phones at work and brought them home to learn with. I setup a Trixbox PBX and ran phones around my apartment. The below is when I was getting started. That one cable on the ceiling was going to the phone in the kitchen. Later, I got more phones setup, including one in my bedroom. In the next picture, you can see where I cleaned up the cables using actual cable mounts.

Home Lab Hiatus

No, I didn't start giving my home lab any fancy names. From 2012-2019, I was basically on a break from home labbing. I tried to get back into it when I bought my first home. Unfortunately, I lacked money and skill and used some equipment here and there. I did have a single Dell PowerEdge R210II running Hyper-V, Proxmox, and XenServer eventually going back to Proxmox. It ran a few VMs like AD, NeoRouter, etc. Nothing fancy. Eventually, I bought a dedicated server coloed in Buffalo NY. I used this as a "lab" with ZeroTier. That Dell PowerEdge R210II would run some stuff in my home, mainly just a local DNS server, maybe a Linux server or two. It wasn't very powerful and the drive was kind of slow for what I was throwing at it. So it really didn't make much since to keep it going.

Home Lab 3.0

Years Active: 2019-2022

Now that I was able to invest a little more, I got a dedicated server in North Carolina and installed Proxmox on it. I also added a pfSense VM. With this, I setup an IPSec tunnel so I could have these servers on my network. This grew out a lot thanks to me moving to Unifi. This let me get IPSec tunnels all setup and until I get another house, everything just lives in the North Carolina data center. I know this diagram is labeled as "Current Home Lab", but it's not really current anymore. Things have been consolidated greatly and I actually have servers that I run again in my house.

Home Lab 4.0

Years Active: 2023-Present

I'll need to type this up!