My tech life series (part2) - Home Labbing

Computers have been a very important part of my life.

My first exposure to computers was through the computers of friends and family as well as computers at the school PC lab. We used to tinker with MSX Sakhr and writing very simple basic programs and using GO to draw simple shapes. I was then exposed to more powerful computers over the years.

I remember asking my parents for a computer from a very early age.  My father, God rest his soul, finally caved in and we got our first computer which as a PC compatible i386 which we subsequently upgraded to to an i486DX2 which ran my favourite games like Doom and Street fighter 2, flight sims like Strike commander and TIE Fighter. It cost a pretty penny then and thinking back it must have been a big investment for my parents. I was actually pestering them for an "Apple" PC but my beginnings with the PC started with intel and DOS. To my patents I am truly grateful for their sacrifice and investment.

As I graduated from school and went to college, I got to upgrade my PC even further and even got my first graphics card. I switched to windows and a new world opened to me. The windows experience was surely an order of magnitude better than old pure text MS-DOS.

I also remember how we used the net at the beginning. The sounds of dial up modems still resonate in my head and I remember hogging the phone line to connect and raking up phone bills that my parents did not appreciate. Then came ADSL and the era of always on Internet. It sure was a new world then to have the net at your fingertip any minute of the day or night.

Throughout college I upgraded my PC several times and I got to know more and more the hardware and software sides. When I graduated college, my first Job was a sort of an IT manager of sorts, so I learnt a lot from the daily running of dozens of PCs connected to a network for the first time. This period meant that I was able to tinker and trouble shoot both hardware and software at my workplace and get a feel for PC tinkering.

Until the 2010s I only got may PCs pre-built so I did not have to tinker that much with the innards of the machine. But i finally got the courage to completely build my own PC from scratch. It was a tense experience but very fulfilling and I am looking forward to my next build. 

Around the time I was an IT guy at my previous workspace i got my first laptop. It was awesome to have a PC you can take with you everywhere and through i years I have moved between no less than 10 laptops with different specs and OS. As I transitioned to teaching Japanese, having a laptop at all times became a must!

While I am still fascinated by the hardware side of the PC. I am finding myself much more interested in the Software and Networking side. 

 

My current obsession is Home labbing, which is such a deep and fulfilling hobby that is really neat and meaningful.

In the age of ever growing enshitification of the internet and the tech companies becoming hell bent on syphoning every byte of data from the user, home labbing comes as a means to fight back and grab hold of the digital sovereignty of the data that we rightfully own. 

Home labbing is simply making an infrastructure that allows you to host your own data and services in a way that is fully controlled and transparent to the user.

I think the simplest form of a homelab is a PC connected to a network and a simple way to share your files between the PC and a simple Data storage. In most cases people start with a simple NAS (Network Attached Storage) that is accessible either locally or across the internet. No need to rely on cloud storage and associated privacy and storage limits. You own your own data!

 

The next step is to host your own services. Think of it of a way to access useful applications such as a local media server. You host your own media like movies and shows and stream them from that server to devices on the network. It does not stop there, as you can host cool services such as Pihole for network wide Ad-blocking and Immich for picture sharing and Jellyfin for streaming your own media.

Another major part of home labbing is setting up a smart home! You can wire up your network to control different facets of your home like lighting, power monitoring and consumption and even adding a way to run local surveillance network that does not rely on cloud infrastructure of another third party.

A home lab also makes you more  hands on with your network as you design it to be as secure and transparent as possible.

Currently I am running my own NAS with Truenas as an operating system. On my NAS i have several media sharing services like Jellyfin for media and Immich for pictures. I also run my own local network controller to keep tabs on what my network is up to! Of course I have Pihole for Ad-blocking.

On a physically separate network I have Proxmox Hypervisor running Home Assistant, a second pi-hole instance and other virtual machines. On the Home Assistant Virtual machine I have frigate for Local video surveillance of the house with image recognition through a Coral TPU.

My future next steps for hosting will be to set-up a connection from outside the network to access my local services through the internet. this will be done by either Tailsacle or Netbird or a Cloudflare tunnel. But opening up your network to the outside net is a bit risky for me so going through this step-by-step.

The Pros setting a home lab:

1. It is a very deep and rewarding experience that will make you feel that you finally own the data and resources that you have.
2. You get to tinker with hardware and software and you develop a feel for solving problems and challenges. 
3. Data Sovereignty! You own your data and you won't have that data be scraped by third-parties especially for AI training and advertisement.
4. You gain deep insights to your network and its security.
5. You become a part of a community that is greatly becoming ever larger each day. 
6. It is so much fun!

The cons are:

1. Just like the pros the hobby is deep and you can easily find yourself spending time and money of lots of projects and ideas.
2. It can cost a real penny if your are not careful. That extra 10GbE Network switch you are oogling might not be really that necessary!
3. Your network means that you are also responsible for its maintenance, upkeep and security. You have to fix any problem by your self but with good old Google sensei and some common sense you can trouble shoot most problems.

So this is homelabbing in a nutshell! I hope that you are interested now in trying your hand at it! I promise it will be an awesome experience!!

Here is a part of my own Home Lab. Running Proxmox with Home assistant on a VM (Virtual Machine) on a Mini PC with another Mini PC running OPNsense firewall.

 Some people really go out on their HomeLab setups! Just check the Net and the subreddits for some really bonkers set ups!  Check this one out that I just goggled on the Net!