/home

/homelab

What even is a "homelab"?
Usually a type of old hardware or dedicated server that runs on your local network. In my definition it is functioning as a sort of personal sandbox or playground.
Since starting my CS degree I think practically all of my social media algorithms new: I need one!
Because of that I often checked eBay or other sites to look for a cheap but somewhat beefy old laptop or mini-pc. And one day I found one aaaand I bought it. It's a Minisforum um773 lite. It basically has everything I need, 32gb of RAM, a Terabyte of Memory and a decently enough AMD CPU. So now that I got the hardware to build my own Playground to make, break and fix things, how did it go?

/opening the infinite box

I felt like there are countless possibilities and things I wanted to do now that I got the hardware. But one thing that made me really look into homelabbing was eventually replacing some of my subscriptions I have. Meaning I want to create my own cloud storage, maybe provide some backups for my close friends, make my own network ad-free and just tinker around with networking or hosting a game-server on my own hardware, while making it accessible for my friends!
Some of the projects I Wanted to tacke because I got into homelabbing are:

It just made it possible to look into so many different things. Eventually I started the project. I just wanted to set the pc up, give it a fresh install and then move on from there.

/the beginning and the problems

So without hesitation I went ahead and did what most of the videos I had seen did. I went ahead and installed proxmox VE to have a nice starting point for as many different things as I want to run on the pc, which I name "ARES" btw.
After I installed it and had to learn the hard way, that I can not set it up as .255 domain I was ready to go. So I dove into creating a server while also making it possible to connect to from outside of my own network. Maybe this was a bit of a harder task than I imagined if I am being honest. But I went ahead and started reading and watching different solutions. In the end I felt a little bit overwhelmed of what I needed to do that I wanted to start at a simpler project that is not a possible security risk.
That's why I wanted to set up pihole and clear my network from ads all along. Well. Long story short: I found out that the Router I got from my ISP is not able to change his DNS. This meant that I had to set up the pihole as DNS and DHCP as well.

/the status quo

After these headaches and problems I decided to put it to rest. For now! In the few days that I looked at the homelab and tinkered around with it I had installed a view VM's and learned quite a lot about networking for myself. But since Easter was around the corner and I was not able to tinker around more I put it to rest since I was way to attracted to keep this blog running and make more use of my domain.
I still plan on doing all of the projects but since I do have quite a lot of courses this semester I had to force myself to not dive deeper straight away and prioritize university for now. But I am not gone for long - that I am sure of. I've already ran into some more usecases for my boy ARES and I will be happy to make good use of him in the future, when I need him to help me with more projects I will realize with Jaegerlab.

/admitting loosing the battle, but not the war

I want to conclude that I was overwhelmed by what I had to do and that it would be a way harder setup and time then I eventually had thought it would be. But nonetheless I did come out with more knowledge then before and since I did not loose the interest in hosting my own things, I will certainly come back as soon as time allows me to or the current main Project of creating my own web-portal needs me to make use of ARES. At least for now I did move my view further out in the real web rather than staying in my local one for now.