Building a Homelab, On The Cheap

Back in the mists of time, BC (before children), I had a house that wasn't knee deep in Lego, half drunk cups of squash, and discarded socks. I also had a spare bedroom, which was mine. I had a desk with room for several monitors, a good office chair, some piles of interesting technological stuff, and a set of shelves loaded with cobbled together PCs filling the room with their soothing hum. It was my homelab. I could tinker with things, build them, break them, fix them. It was great, and as I was at university at the time it was a great way to learn.

Then I had children, and my room was mine no more. Desk and computers were relegated to the garage, which was OK, if a bit chilly. Then we moved, and I no longer had a garage. I now have a leaky car port where not even the bravest of techies would think of housing kit. My desk, my chair, and all of my toys were relegated to the loft and, because it was such a ball-ache getting up there, the computers slowly died until only one Frankenstein's Monster of a file storage host remained, usually switched off because the UPS I'd scrounged up years earlier was fucked, and climbing up there after a power-cut was just too much of a pain.

Until now. During some recent work moving a client site I casually asked if the two servers that we had replaced over a year ago and had been sat there ever since had anything planned for them. The response was a very pleasing "as long as you wipe them it saves us paying to dispose of them...". Sweet.

Now I am the proud owner of a Dell T110 II with a Xeon processor, 32G RAM, and a 1TB mirrored drive on a hardware controller, AND a Fujitsu TX100, also with a Xeon, 16G RAM, and 2x 500GB drives.

I had not realised how much I missed being able to get my geek on at home. It's great. Since I've got them I've configured the Dell as a ESXi 6.7 host on which I'm running some Windows stuff, some Ubuntu, a VPN appliance, and I'm starting to learn how to use Docker. I know, a late comer, but I never really had a use for it before. I have to say I love it, and will be doing another post about what I'm running.

The Fujitsu has had its 500GB drives swapped with 4 1TB drives I had sitting about (I am a terminal IT kit scrounger) and is running FreeNAS with a RAID-Z configuration which gives me just shy of 2TB of space with a bit of redundancy. Again, I'll probably do another post on this, along with some hardware upgrades that I've bought parts for (SSD drive for OS storage on the VMWare host, and mirrored SSD drives for the boot partition on the FreeNAS) amongst other things. I'm also going in to overdrive scrounging and borrowing network kit so I can bring myself back up to speed on that side of things.

Something I've found very useful that I don't remember being a "thing" BC, there seems to be a thriving community of homelabbers both on Reddit, and on personal blogs, and it's really interesting and motivational to see what other people are doing, and what the hardware I have is capable of.

Watch this space for some renewed enthusiasm and may some labporn. How exciting.