My Homelab Thoughts and Goals

After working as a Software Engineer for the last ~8 years, and specifically a DevOps engineer the last five, I have grown a large interest in self-hosting, homelabs, and security. This has lead me down the path of spinning up VM’s, clusters and tooling here and there to solve temporary individual needs and exploration.

Additionally, outside of tech, I am into other hobbies like photography and gaming. After a decade of taking photos, I have built up quite the archive of images. Unfortunately, they’re scattered around on multiple external hard drives and laptops as backups.

My goal this year is to document and build out a permanent homelab that solves some of the tooling problems I have, while letting me flex my networking and job experience.

Software Goals Before I start talking about hardware and what I want there, I felt like it was more important to talk about some of the tools that will be needed in order to dictate the hardware I’ll need. Here is a list of my software goals in no specific order:

  1. Image Gallery Tool (Immich, NextCloud Memories, Synology)
    1. This is pretty specific, but as a photographer, I’d like to move all my photos off of Google Photos or other cloud based image storage. I want my images to be mine and mine alone. Additionally, my wife loves the idea of storing our own photos. This would be something we share together.
  2. Password Manager
    1. We have become increasingly reliant on a password manager. As a family we share services and accounts for many things. Having a central place we can trust is a necessary tool for us.
  3. PiHole
    1. I have yet to use PiHole, but the option to remove ads from our lives sounds like an appealing and easy open source tool to implement.
  4. Plex / Calibre
    1. Who doesn’t love movies and books right?! I feel like this doesn’t require a large explanation, but I’d love to have a central place for media where my family can share.
  5. Pentesting VMs and simulated networks
    1. Although security isn’t my day-to-day job right now, it is something I am passionate about. I would love to have the tooling available to simulate corporate networks and just have fun on things like Hack The Box.

I am sure there are other software’s I am missing on this list, but these are the kinds of things that I am interested in and driving the build of my homelab.

Hardware Goals: Given the choices of software above, and the experience I want to take away from building this homelab, I have written out a few of my goals for the hardware below:

  1. Router that supports VLANs
  2. POE Switch
  3. Raspberry Pi Cluster (currently have 3x RPI 3b, 1x RPI 4)
  4. NAS (synology or build own)
  5. Rack mounted gaming PC
  6. Proxmox server (mini PC or old laptop)
  7. Shelves for my personal and work laptops
  8. KVM switch for PC and laptops

In another blog, I will go over the chosen hardware I have made to meet these goals.