Why I have a homelab
My first computer became my homelab. It’s where I test things before I trust them, and it has three jobs at once: learning, being useful at home, and giving me real infrastructure to work on outside of a job.
Reading about virtualization, DNS, or directory services only goes so far. Running them, breaking them, and fixing them is how the concepts stick.
What it runs
The lab runs Proxmox VE, an open source hypervisor built on Debian. It hosts multiple virtual machines and self-hosted services, including Nextcloud for file sync and sharing.
It’s also where I do security testing. See the Splunk SIEM lab for the security side of my homelab work.
Where it’s going
The goal is an environment shaped like a small company’s, not a collection of hobby services. That means building it in the order a business would need it:
- A working Windows domain. A Windows Server domain controller with Active Directory, integrated DNS with forward and reverse lookup zones, and DHCP, with a client machine joined to the domain. Active Directory is the environment most sysadmin roles actually run, so it comes before anything else.
- Useful services. Things that solve a real problem at home, such as file shares and backups, rather than whatever is most popular.
- Backups with tested restores. For the hypervisor and the domain controller. A backup that has never been restored is still a hypothesis.
- Monitoring, so failures get noticed before they get discovered.
How I document it
Each piece gets written up as it’s built, not afterward, including what went wrong. The wrong assumption and the fix are the most useful part of a write-up, both for me later and for anyone trying the same thing. Those write-ups will land on this site as each phase is finished.