HomeLab: The Self Hosted Path To Leveling Up

Tom here from Learn Systems. I'm sharing this video for those of you that can't make it to my talk at MSP GeekCon 2025 or for anyone who does attend and would like to revisit the session.

This presentation, "Home Lab, the self-hosted path to leveling up," is aimed at people who want to get started in the Home Lab world. This talk covers how to build your own self-hosted private cloud that you can use to try new ideas, get hands-on with self-hosting, and level up your skills. I hope you find it helpful and as always check the links in the description below for deeper dives into many of the topics that I cover in this talk. So let's get [Music] started.

"Home lab, the self-hosted path to leveling up." I won't spend too much time on the about me page because there's a lot more detail if you're interested over at laurrensystems.com on the about me page there. But I have always lived in the Detroit area. My first computer was a TRS80. Working in tech since 1995. That's when I got an actual job working in tech, not just played with it as a hobby. Started Learn Systems in 2003. I'm a longtime open source advocate. And of course, the obvious statements like I make YouTube tutorials and run some forums.

Now, let's get to the agenda. What is a home lab? Home Lab project ideas, software choices, hardware choices. I'm going in this order, especially the project ideas, because too many people say, "What hardware should I buy for home lab?" And I always reply with, "What are you going to do in your home lab?" because that very much drives the hardware.

But there's a disclaimer. Like many in tech, I have strong opinions about the tools I use in my home lab. This talk is about getting you started on your own self-hosted journey. You are under zero obligation to copy and paste my exact setup. And maybe I'm just been on the internet too long, but I'm positive there's someone who has an opinion that will differ from mine and will then feel compelled to share that opinion. And uh, that's just something that happens. There is more than one right way to do this. This is something, especially when you're talking a lot about open source or self-hosted software. There's many tools that do similar things in different ways. So both answers are valid depending on your use case or just software you like more than others. But these are tools that I'm familiar with. So of course is what I'm going to talk about. But if you say, "What if I would like to substitute one for the other?" Absolutely, you can.

And uh, there's no requirement that you run Kubernetes in your home lab. This is something that starts controversy. That's why that meme is there. You can run it and if it's a great career choice to learn Kubernetes, but uh, we're not going to argue about that right now.

Why build a home lab at all though? And honestly, it's because testing new ideas, learning new skills, breaking things in hopefully non-production environments, although home labs can be considered somewhat production because it's your production environment, but it's way better than breaking things in the work environment where you often find yourself in a little bit more trouble or maybe upsetting some clients. And of course, running things locally. Lots of reasons there. Everything from privacy to just not paying $5 per month or whatever they're going to charge me for things. And of course, $5 is the basis. So many things cost much more than that. The price only ever seems to go up. Running things locally gives you a lot more autonomy and I feel a lot more control over things. And you know, that's just how uh things are moving towards is where I think everything as a service is just a bad idea. And I'm hoping and I'm seeing a lot more people get excited about HomeLab because not everything has to be as a service. You actually can be in control of your software.

But what is a home lab? Oh, this is where the controversy will start. Yes, all of these are Home Labs. Whether you stacked up some of these mini, I heard a lot of people refer to them as like the one liter or the small PCs, stacked them up and 3D printed a little holder for them and plugged in a switch. Uh, whether you're like my friend Mike and go all out and everything has to be color-coded right down to the power cord and every DAC cable, 'cause you know, why not? Or just having a full rack of things in your basement. All these are valid home labs. It's all about what you want to use and what you want to host. And I really am getting into these small home labs. And I think this is what's opening up a lot of opportunity, people, because you can build something that sits on your desk, a cluster of Raspberry Pies, or once again, more of these mini PCs and these mini racks. These are becoming another popular choice. They're lower power, they're low noise, and you don't have to uh, lug around a rack. This thing is something that would be easily picked up and moved. And for people especially in small spaces, maybe younger people who don't even have a house, this is like, well, easily set up in their office and not going to disturb people when uh, all the fans come on for them because these are generally all really quiet.

Home lab project ideas. That's where we have to start. And I think home automation is one of the easiest, most common ones to start with. And really, it's because we all want to automate something. And the excitement around that is really good because I'm like, I, I get giddy about it myself going, I don't want to have to use some cloud service to be able to talk to something. And it's defying the logic of why I love technology of saying I have to go out to the cloud to tell something to come on and then if the internet's down, I can't tell a thing to do something. That just doesn't seem right to me. And the Home Assistant is absolutely one of the most amazing projects that is very obtainable. It will definitely um, suck up all of your time, but not all your money right away. And I say that because Home Assistant is completely open source, free. It's run by a foundation, so it's not going to go away anytime soon. They've put a lot of work and energy to it. The community is amazing. And it's a time suck though because you get so caught up in doing it. I will admit that. It's also very obtainable because I run mine on a Raspberry Pi 4. It will run on a Pi 5, but it's not needed. um, unless you want to run more services on it. But this makes it very obtainable, very inexpensive, single device, and you can run a lot of extra services on here.

Now, they do sell their own devices if you didn't want to build this yourself, the Raspberry Pi. The Home Assistant can be purchased as a box that's still basically a Raspberry Pi. I believe it's a CM4 is what they're shipping those on. They have a couple different options, but this is really obtainable and really easy to get started with from a hardware standpoint. And things like this, these plugs are inexpensive. The light bulbs, these little water monitors here, and I've got some of these, you know, moisture monitors. I want to know if something's dripping. You can put this on a drain or maybe under a sink. I have several of them around the house. These are really easy things to set up. These all actually run on Zigbee. That's something that is easy for Home Assistant to integrate with Zigbee and Z-Wave and Matter. Um, all these different protocols. So, you don't even have to have a, a more exotic wireless infrastructure to set this up. And like I said, these are easily found on Amazon. A lot of people are getting into growing and this has been a really interesting watching people build out entire greenhouses, automated watering and lighting systems for plants. Uh, once again, all can tie into your home automation.

Now, what the dashboard looks like is really cool in Home Assistant. Easy on the eyes. I'm going pretty basic here. I didn't do too much with mine. This is actually my dashboard. If you spend some time over in some of the forums, you'll see extremely elaborate dashboards. And of course, there's a million YouTube channels on this. I've always kept it really basic uh, just so I don't get too caught up in it, but yes, you can get much more elaborate than this. I have it monitoring my space heaters, some moisture monitors. Uh, I even have it connected to smoke detectors. And then this actually runs my entire studio. This is how I control all the lights and cameras that are in my studio. Pretty simple to do. Uh, because once again, those little light switches I pointed to. I've got a whole "Getting Started with Home Assistant" video that I detail out a lot of the parts you can buy uh, with all the links so you don't have to try to figure out which ones are compatible. And of course, they have a long compatibility list.

Now, the language it uses is also really interesting because what makes this to be a very approachable project is being able to build automations by starting out with their tooling to say, "When," and add a trigger, and "If," add a condition, "Then," build an action. And this is what it looks like built out. I have one set up for a webhook that comes from something else. And what this webhook feature is actually something pretty powerful to me because now I can integrate with things that don't even natively have to talk to it. But there are APIs. You can do deeper integrations. But I can say, like, here's a webhook and if it's uh, before sunrise but after sunset, and then the full list over here is basically the camera system I have will send this webhook when it sees someone in or a vehicle in the driveway and turn my lights on and off. Turns all the outside lights on to uh, you know, sometimes welcome me home or anyone else who pulls in my driveway. And you see it's pretty straightforward the language they use. So I think this is a pretty fun project that's easy to get started with.

Media servers, of course, are absolutely a good goal to start with. Uh, man, there's so much media out there. Many of us, and if you got gray hair like me, probably have even a DVD collection. And I know people are thinking, but Tom, you must be suggesting that I pirate things instead of paying all those streaming services. And I'm not condoning or even suggesting that. I actually want to point out that the automatic ripping machine, go grab that Star Trek DVD collection you bought and rip it. You own it. You have the rights to it. There's a lot of media that you can still purchase. And I like the idea of owning the media because my problem, and many of you have probably experienced this, is you pay for a subscription fee for one of the services and then that service, because of lawyers or whatever goes on behind the scenes, loses access to the show that you may have originally subscribed to. You have no rights with media no more. And I think that concept is really sinking into people as they watch things where half a season goes on one service and another season goes on another when you're like, well, I just wanted to watch the show I wanted to watch and consume the media. And you, especially in the world of DVDs, many of us have bought this media and you know, dust it off. These automatic ripping machines, other than having the effort of putting it in yourself, or you could even automate it with a disc loader. There are some really cool tools to help you index all of it. Warning, and we'll talk about this more in hardware. This does, of course, start consuming a lot of space, especially if you're doing full Blu-ray rips. So, yeah, this is going to be the expensive part if this is the project you choose to get your home lab started with. But, boy, I think it's rewarding having your own media server.

Now, of course, many of you watching this channel, watching this talk, are working in the IT services space and you want to learn more about network security. Having something like Wazuh is amazing. Being able to play with these tools. So, are they the same as the commercial tools you may use every day in your job? Yes and no. There are a lot of comparisons to be drawn, but one of the things about running these open sources, you really get to see behind the scenes and have a deeper understanding because it's a much more manual process than set it and forget it with some security tool. You get a deeper understanding of how these tools work and how to integrate them. So just the process of setting this up and poking it at your own network and examining your own network traffic with any of these network security tools such as Wazuh, Security Onion, or pushing things over to Graylog will all give you really deep insights into it.

Now I've got a whole separate tutorial, "Open and Free Security Platforms for Your Home Lab." All of these tools, Graylog, Security Onion, and Wazuh, can be downloaded, set up for free. There's not any licenses attached to them. They do have options for upsells. So I'm not going to say that they're 100% you can get every single feature. For example, if you want enrichment of third-party data sources, you can do that, but many of those third-party data sources are going to have some expenses. But for the basics of being able to do threat hunting and logging, you get a lot for free and plenty for your home lab and printing for your learning journey on here.

Now, another thing that's become popular, of course, is self-hosting LLMs. And if this interface doesn't look a little bit familiar, if you've used any of the GPT interfaces, uh, Open Web UI has all those really cool features. Code interpreter, really nice ways it can interact and be prompted and pre-preconfigured. And this all can run self-hosted. Matter of fact, I'm not going to get too deep into it because it's own topic on its own that you can also find plenty of videos on, and I have a few. We're getting started with Ollama and Open WebUI. Ollama lets you run lots of these LLMs locally with Ollama. This is fully open source. To call the LLM open source is a little fuzzy because you don't actually have all the training model data, but they're free. You can download them. You can host them yourself. This gives you really strong controls over your own privacy. You can type things in that stay only for you to understand. They're only cached and held within the Open Web UI. So, you won't end up in a list if you just have a question that is something that you're curious about. And it's really something I think is really great being able to host these yourself. And have a really strong privacy controls that I don't believe exists for any of the other large commercial companies. I have absolutely zero faith in any statement they make that they're not using the data that I put in there for some other reasons.

And of course, you're saying, "But Tom, I like to do full-on automations with integrated things. I want to be able to do this in the cloud to attach things." Well, you can actually do that self-hosted a lot easier than you thought. Open source automation, including using this open source automation to tie to your locally hosted LLM. You can use n8n to also reach out and talk to APIs that are external. So, yes, you can do things like talk to Slack or do API calls from your self-hosted instance to wherever you want it to go. There's a massive amount of integrations. This allows you to build some really strong automations and I like the fact that you're in control of it. So, this is n8n and it's very similar to other automation tools you may find online that come with a subscription fee, but you get to manage it yourself. And there's, of course, the more things you have locally tied to it. It doesn't necessarily have to reach out externally, but I like that it does. So, you can build out your own actions. There's even some really cool integrations, I said, for LLMs and having the LLM spit back and forth the queries to help make decisions on this.

But what if I'm not at my home lab? How would I get to it? This question comes up a lot. Of course, you can have a firewall that has OpenVPN built in. You can have a firewall with WireGuard. There's plenty of options, but this is a whole other option. And this is a great company that I've done videos on, the Open Source Overlay VPN, NetBird. They're not the only overlay VPN out there, but they're definitely really cool because they are fully self-hostable because many of them don't allow you to host the control plane part. You only get to have the little open source client, but this is fully open source from top to bottom. Has a lot of integrations with third-party identity providers that also have options to be self-hosted. So, there's integrations for external just hosting it internally. It's a really cool project. So, shout out to uh NetBird and yes, uh, I've met them. They're super cool people.

Home Lab base OS software. Here's where the controversy really comes in because what you're going to run in your home lab and this is going to drive hardware choices. That's why we haven't got to those yet. Docker and containerization. Containerization is absolutely an awesome way to run all these different applications. You know, "docker pull" and instantly have something set up. This has really changed how quickly you can launch things. Used to you used to have to build a lot of stuff or just do a lot of configuration. Being able to pull things in containers and have everything in there. Docker is a wonderful way. And even if you don't have a full-out home lab with lots of things, lots of different servers, you can just run this locally on your system and get started with a lot of different projects. This is a really popular way to deliver things.

Now, I already know someone's probably left a comment or is thinking in your head, but Tom, you didn't mention Podman. And yes, I'm completely aware of Podman, and I'm not here to debate it. Podman is also a completely valid and solid choice. Docker probably has more documentation right now, but depends on when you're watching this, uh, the controversy will live on on the choices here. There are uh differences, but there's other people who are better at articulating the differences between here and why you should choose one over the other. And of course, everyone's going, "But Docker's a lot of commands and I, networking can be complicated and understanding some of the storage in Docker has some complexities." And I just really want to play with the application. Portainer is really popular. It's not the only solution for having a web UI for managing containers, but it's one of the easy ones because you can take those Docker commands, copy and paste them into your Portainer web UI, get the Docker stuff deployed, and not have to spend any time on the command line. It's relatively easy setup. It's got a nice web UI where you can just click on any of these. You can see logs. You can update the containers. You can see some of the storage. I, I really like this. And the nice thing is if you're doing some of this from the command line like I am, which is why it says there's some limited controls. I didn't build these for Portainer. Portainer can see the ones you did start or do manage from the command line, such as using Docker Compose, and at least can give you some visibility in there. So you can still do both where you run things from the command line or look at things for Portainer. And I think that's a great option.

Kubernetes comes up a lot and I get it. You don't get companies the scale that Google and many others operate at without massive amounts of orchestrated technologies such as Kubernetes. It's a wonderful thing, but too many people seem to start it and get stuck with it. And I say that because they realize things explode on update and they're like, "Wow, this is hard." Even companies that are built on Kubernetes, and we'll point at Reddit because you can find a write-up on their, I believe, roughly 12 or 13-hour outage they had. And it's because the Kubernetes upgrade went wrong. Kubernetes is a wonderful orchestration tool, but it's also really complicated and it seems to come up way too much, I think, in the home lab of, "You should be running Kubernetes for your home lab," and as if that's the place to start to orchestrate all those things versus just setting up a basic Docker container. And I get if you're going into that career, you probably should learn Kubernetes. But if you're not going into some type of role or planning to uh, wait on this challenge, I'm not discouraging people from it. I just don't want people to start at Kubernetes because they've seen it popular with a lot of uh, maybe YouTubers talking about it and thinking that's where they need to begin their journey. Probably not the best place to begin.

Virtual machines, definitely a lot easier to manage and that's where next we're going is of course virtual machines and there's more choices out here. You can just run VirtualBox locally, but XCP-NG and Proxmox are probably the two most popular. I will fully admit I am the big advocate of XCP-NG. But I will not deny the popularity and validity of Proxmox. I really like Proxmox, but XCP-NG is what we choose to use commercially. But both of these are open source. Both of these do not have any licenses required to get started or use them. They do both offer services, as in you can buy support for them, and that's great, but I like to say that you can use this for free. You can use these tools that are used in commercial companies and be able to build out your self-hosted private cloud with them and have an immense amount of control.

Now, Proxmox, nice web interface on there. Uh, big thumbs up to them having dark mode. It's still being very actively developed. The new features are being added all the time. I really like it. It's based on Debian. Then we have XCP-NG. Sorry that it's not in dark mode. Later here in 2025, they should have their new version of the web interface that will have dark mode. They are working diligently on it. But yes, I know, I, I'll take that hit. But both of them, I said, are valid. I like Xen Architecture because it also has full backup integration in here. So it's not just managing all the virtual machines. It also has the ability to manage all the backup restore, even does full validation testing because untested backups are wishful thinking. Therefore, you should test those backups. And that has entire automation in here, which I also have, including how to do device pass-through best practices, full automation for DR. I've got an entire playlist because I've, well, been a longtime advocate since they first started with XCP-NG. So I have a lot, you'll find linked down below on this if you want to get started on it. There are plenty of other YouTubers who have good playlists for Proxmox as well. So there's a lot of good information you can find on both. And of course, both have solid documentation.

Storage server. Hands down. I think TrueNAS is absolutely the most popular open-source storage server. It's been something I've run since in the days it was called FreeNAS. It's went through some name changes. It's went through some pain around their application changes as a storage server. I've always found to be very, very solid. They're starting to build in a lot of applications and there's been some missteps as there always are and they've had to change it. Matter of fact, they even started with Kubernetes and realized there was a lot of problems with their Kubernetes implementation due to complexity and they switched to a standard Docker install mentioned as a couple slides ago. Now, TrueNAS is really solid. It is a great place to store all your media and I would say some of the media apps run pretty well in there. Now, the app system, like I said, is still under kind of active development. So, sometimes between one version to another, there are things that go wrong. Uh, Nextcloud definitely being among them. But, nonetheless, this is a, a great tool to run as a NAS, a place you store all your data, and it has really good built-in backups on there because you still may want to back this up to yet another server. And I've even got videos on how you can set this up. So maybe you have another server in a remote location, maybe at a friend's house doing a buddy backup scenario as they refer to it. And this allows you to take two TrueNAS and back one up to the other. Of course, it does have the ability to back up to the cloud as well. So even might be some cloud expenses you have, but it's important to have your data backed up in case something really bad happens.

Now, Synology storage servers are also popular. I've talked a lot about them on my channel as well, just like TrueNAS. And Synology's got some really nice apps and that's one of the things that really sells it. The good and bad with Synology though is their recent changes. As much as they make a solid NAS, they're very performant. They're very easy to manage because of the web interface is just, you know, really one click and install the app and the apps have great documentation. Their recent hard drive lock-in, which is Synology prescribing which hard drives you can or cannot use. Please understand it is something Synology has decided. So, my past videos, I never talked about it, but very recently decided that they want to go forward with in 2025. This was something they applied to their commercial appliances, and they want to, they want to really push Home Lab users into this, and it's just uh, who talked them into that, I don't know. Um, I have a video where I rant about it as many others have been ranting about it. This has not made much of the HomeLab community um, really happy about it. So, I'm not writing them off just yet. Uh, I think community outrage and them seeing people complain about it may change. So, you're watching this right now in May of 2025 where they've announced it but have not implemented it. And I'm hoping there's a future where they go, "Well, maybe we shouldn't anger the community that seems to like our products."

Now, let's get into the hardware. Home Lab hardware. Ah, firewall. Firewall is hardware and software. I know, but this is kind of interrelated. pfSense and OPNsense, hands down, two of the most popular HomeLab projects. Netgate, the company behind pfSense, does sell their own hardware. OPNsense does have a company that sells some hardware, but it doesn't seem to be much availability here in United States. But if you're watching this and you're in Europe, yes, check out their website. They have information on that. But the Netgate hardware comes with a perpetual license for their pfSense Plus version. They have some inexpensive devices. But of course, either one of these you can load on your own hardware. These little boxes as shown here, kind of the generic no-name passively cooled firewall boxes if you will with many interfaces on them are very popular choices for pfSense or OPNsense. And I think in my preferences, of course, for pfSense, it is one of the best ways to really deep dive and understand networking because it doesn't just say, "Okay, here's some firewall rules." It lets you get into the granular details. It lets you really fine-tune any rule in an absolutely insane number of ways. Plus, it gives you visibility into everything from traffic flows, the states, the established states, etc. It lets you dump all this in via essentially built-in TCP dump. So, you can put this into Wireshark. You can even attach Wireshark to it for feeds. They've got a lot of cool tools in here that really let you understand networking at a deep level. So if you're on the path or in the path in your career to better understand networking, pfSense is one of those tools that will help you understand that. So even if you use a different firewall at work or something that doesn't give you all the details and just says, "We magically are next generation," but we're not telling you what all that means. pfSense to me is great because it gives you the behind-the-scenes details. It can make you a better network engineer.

And of course, we have UniFi. Now, if you watch older videos, I talk about how bad the UniFi firewalls were, and I do like their ecosystem. But after they released version 9 in 2025, and 9.1, which released in April of 2025, they have really leveled up the firewall. So, I think they're a solid choice even for the Home Labers. They even do have things that they never had before, such as easy packet exports and much better rule systems that are sane and easy to manage. They went with a zone-based rule system. Uh, if you're not familiar with zone-based rules, it's a way to group networks and apply a zone to them to apply rules in mass. I think this is a really nice way of handling it. They've got lots of functions similar now, closer to being on parity with pfSense, which I think is great and they're always innovating. But UniFi is not just a firewall. UniFi is different because they're also an ecosystem where you can get switching, you can get Wi-Fi, you can get it at scale and many businesses use this. There's no license fees in this, which is making it really popular in HomeLab. Makes it hard to recommend because the license is changing with so many other companies and they don't always have perpetual licenses and those licenses, even if you were to go to eBay to buy some used hardware, you're like, well, how does the license apply to this and will I be able to get it? Is it still in support or will it just quit working? Especially companies that only let you tie to their cloud. Therefore, you're very locked in. The way UniFi's ecosystem works is they let you self-host the controller or some of the devices can come with a controller built in. It does not need any cloud access at all to function, which makes it a pretty popular choice as I said for the home lab. But RGB dumber genius and I bring this up because uh, this is one of the features that they have that I really was loving all the angry people that says, "Why would anyone do this?" and I'm like, "Oh, they know their audience," because I absolutely think it's cool that they have it. As kind of a side note with their switches that yeah, it does kind of up the selling in a commercial environment. It looks pretty. In the home lab environment, uh, style points are something you definitely get on the internet and uh, offering RGB lights that light up different network ports. To me, it's just really cool. But let me know what you think in the comments.

Switches that aren't UniFi. Yes, I'll at least give a shout out to another brand. I mean, Netgear and all them are out there, but uh, MikroTik really, I think they are the absolute runner-up to UniFi. Once again, license-free, so you don't have to worry about that. There's plenty of used ones you can find. There are new ones are very affordable. You can find these on Amazon. And I will tell you, this little one down here, the 10 gig one with the four ports, the bottom, smallest one. That thing is amazing for being able to get 10 gig and roughly right now it's uh, selling for about $129. That's inexpensive. And they have a lot of features. Now, they're a little quirky. There's a bigger learning curve compared to the nice interface that UniFi has, which is one of the reasons they don't have the same level of adoption, but there is a lot of power once you take the time to learn them. So, I'd say these ones are pretty good. Now, I know there's a lot of other switches out there in the commercial market, but once again, some of them have can have, I should say, confusing licensing, and that means if you buy it, will you be able to use it? Will the license restrict certain features? Not really an issue with MikroTik. So, that's one of the reasons I left them on the list here.

Servers. What gives people feelings of power? Money, status, or having a full rack at home. This is me standing next to one of two racks that I have. Uh, but with great power comes a great power bill. So, let's talk about this. Used servers are great. And man, my friend just bought a really cool GPU server. So, for some projects, because it started with, "Hey, I can run a GPU at home," to, "I can run eight GPUs at home in one box." And there is some really good deals to be had on eBay. I've actually bought a lot. Specifically, we'll call out, and no affiliation I have with them, but Unix Surplus, I bought some good storage servers from them. There's a lot of companies out there that have really good deals on stuff because the large cloud providers unrack things that maybe aren't that old but still have a lot of life in them. Of course, something you have to really take into consideration first, especially with some of the commercial hardware in the storage space, double-check that the voltage matches something you have available, whether it's the number of amps it draws or if it's 120 or 240. And people in Europe are going, "Huh, you guys have 120?" Yes, off-topic, but that's something to consider on these. Second, they pull a lot of power. Third, they make a lot of noise. Uh, make sure you have somewhere that is rational to have these older servers. The fans make a lot of noise, but there's deals to be had out there.

Servers, Raspberry Pi. Now, we can roll back a few slides and think here and say, well, can I even run a home lab on Raspberry Pi? Yes. Things like Docker, absolutely. Things like Portainer, that'll run on here. The virtualization is great as I mentioned earlier, but that's going to be your x86 non-ARM systems. The nice thing about the Raspberry Pies is there's a ton of projects as I mentioned like the first one, Home Assistant, and many of the other ones on that list will run on here. So, you do have to check what can or can't run before you start your project. But, I think Raspberry Pi servers and some of these mini PC uh, type servers are really solid, especially the Minisforum ones, Beelink, and ZimaBoard. ZimaBoard just released a new model. I haven't tested it yet. I have tested the old model, but all these are really cool tiny little mini PCs that run x86 if you don't want to run the ARM stuff like a Raspberry Pi, but they make really cool home labs. That particular one right here, the Beelink one, uh, is one I've spent some time with and I was shocked at how well it runs virtualization. Uh, Minisforum is making a whole lot of really cool HomeLab stuff and these are much lower wattage than those servers. They're reasonably priced. Be careful if you buy some of the generically branded ones. The only way I can describe it. Check the memory in them because many of the cheapest of the cheap ones will put in some really weird off-brand memory both for the maybe NVMe drive in it and the actual RAM in it. And that sometimes doesn't hold up as well and causes them to crash a little. But at least brands like Minisforum and Beelink, I call them out because my experience with them has been that they put actual brand-name memories in them like Kingston or Crucial.

And of course, I did this whole thing on building a mini PC and this is its own rabbit hole and turning it into a NAS. And this is kind of a fun, what for me at least was a thought experiment, but we're actually seeing a lot of these mini PC manufacturers come out with these. And I think that's a neat thing that they're building lower small NAS because now you wanted to run TrueNAS, but you're like, well, I don't want to buy one of those giant big boxes and it's just beyond my needs and of course I don't have space or don't want to consume several hundred watts and listen to fan noise. Uh, building these out of mini PCs is becoming a more affordable option. There's lots of projects out there you can find where people are sharing their DIY ideas and that's kind of why I started this. This one talked about just the hardware used, but of course I'm just stacking a bunch of drives in a little 3D printed holder, and it actually worked quite well. Now, this is another thing you can find a lot of. The downside of these is a lot of them, it's hard to find 10 gig, but there's enough of them out there with two and a half gig, and one gig is probably fine for a lot of your home lab needs. There's a ton of these used. Maybe you install a lot of these at clients, but these little mini PCs from Lenovo and from Dell or HP have become a pretty cool option. The Intel NUCs are floating around out there and there's, you know, some life left in those as well. And I know there's some newer versions of them coming out made by, I don't believe they're made by Intel now. I believe a few other people picked them up, but there's a lot of options out there that are low-powered and very reasonable.

Now, some final thoughts on all of this. Start with a goal and build your way to it. This is something that I really try to tell people is don't say, "What hardware should I buy for home lab?" Because I always say, "What are you going to do in your home lab?" That really then drives it. And you start with the goal. I want to automate something in my house. I want to have a self-hosted LLM. Because then we can build the parts list to it. And this is just a, to me, a great way to do your home lab journey. And you can work your way there as opposed to start buying stuff and then have a bunch of things you wasted money on and just don't use.

Engage with the communities, Reddit, Discord, etc. You will find a lot of love in those communities. I know someone's going to say, "But isn't there some controversy as well, especially people who are strong and opinionated and will just tell you to read the fine manual?" Yes, please ignore those people. I'm always in my forums are an example of that place where I do a lot of moderation to keep out people who, well, aren't helpful. And there's also uh, I'm going to throw out there, ChatGPT is actually wrong sometimes, but it can be helpful in suggesting uh, your way through and getting your home lab started.

Document your journey. This is huge. You set up something like Home Assistant. You went through some complexities and then you later on want to go through and say, "How did I do that again?" Documenting it is great, especially if it's a career choice for you to get into this. I will tell you as an employer of people and have reviewed résumés, résumés are boring. Blogs about what you've been doing can be more interesting than your resume going, "Oh, wow. This person really took the time to show me that they know how to document a project, that they have the ambition to finish a project." If you're working in tech, documenting your journey and being public with it is great. You see this on a lot of people who are doing some of the hacking things as well. If you're someone who spends time doing some of the hacking challenges like TryHackMe and then doing write-ups, uh, that's something if you work in a real-world scenario when you do an investigation for security or you set something up for a client. Most companies will expect you to have some level of documentation. So treat your home lab the same way. It's great practice and will really, you know, show employers that you have that ambition to do that.

Back up your data and configurations. I can never say that enough. And untested backups are just wishful thinking. Go through some level as much as possible, even if it's just a home lab of validation. Make sure you didn't do something crazy like, "Oh, I have all my passwords backed up, but I also encrypted that backup and I can't get to my password manager or my locally stored passwords because I have them in the backup that I can't restore because once I lose it, you can kind of start to see where the cycle goes." Walk through what a full restore looks like. Walk through where you keep that encryption. If you want to encrypt things, and many of them, and as I had mentioned like TrueNAS can back up to the cloud. One of the tools it has if you're using their what they refer to as True Cloud Backup. It will ask you for an encryption password. You don't have an option not to use it if you didn't document it or if you documented it and you saved using something local like KeePass and now you don't have access to KeePass because you've lost your computer due to some disaster and you're trying to restore. You could see where that well can be a problem. So untested backups for wishful thinking. I just really hate the emails or people that reach out to me that lost those keys to their encryption and they're stuck. They know where the data is. You're so close to restoring it. I just feel bad for those people. So, I'm hopefully heading them off from creating anymore.

Where to reach me? You can find me at laurrensystems.com. And uh, thanks. Hopefully you enjoyed this presentation. All those links are down below. Of course, I got a lot of playlists on my channel for some of these things for deeper dives. Appreciate all of you for watching this and take care.