There’s a video of me discussing home lab with Bridges in Tech. You should absolutely check out Bridges in Tech, a community to support women of color in technology. https://bridgesintech.com/
Tag: presentations
History of my home lab
Putting together a history for two reasons: 1) I’m giving a talk on Wednesday and 2) It’s fun
My home lab traces back to my first Macbook in 2008. I wanted to run Windows, for reasons I can’t recall but probably were just, “I can’t”. A friend down the hall in my dorm did IT support for the college and gave me a key for VMWare Fusion. I never got Windows installed, but did get Ubuntu and Fedora installed. I was slightly familiar with GNU/Linux before and had even tinkered a little bit, but having a virtual machine on my laptop was next level.
Fast forward almost ten years and I’m working in technical support. Want to push my skills past a help desk into the world of cybersecurity. Someone gave me a list of tools to learn and off I went. Spun up virtual machines on my gaming desktop to learn tools and then learn the fundamentals and more. Slightly backward, but hey I’m getting there. Someday I’ll figure out how these computer things really work.
Today that gaming PC is just a sticker-laden shell of what it was. The case is there, but that may be it. It’s now a Frankenstein of server parts: An AMD Opteron 16 core server processor, 32GB of ECC RAM, a hodgepodge of hard drives, a cool server motherboard with IPMI, and four NIC’s. That’s just the big server. I have some Raspberry Pi’s, an Nvidia Jetson Nano board for AI development, laptops, small computers, and a full stack of Cisco Meraki networking gear.
What’s it doing lately? I host Plex on my NAS because I constantly blow away my hypervisor for some reason. The biggest benefit is that the NAS sucks less power I assume. Plus, it’s always going to be on anyway. The big server is mostly used for testing these days. I’m running NextCloud on a small computer with an Ubuntu server image. Another small computer is hosting the Security Onion stack as a SIEM.
Home lab resources
Giving a presentation on getting your feet wet in home labs, so put together a list of resources. Feel free to add to it!
Reddit.com/r/homelab is a great place for help, reassurance, community, pretty pictures
Check out this new to post: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/5gz4yp/stumbled_into_rhomelab_start_here/
They also have a wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/index
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ is also a good place to get inspiration/ideas
Hypervisor(This is where your lab systems go to live and you go to play!)
VirtualBox. Great for your laptop or desktop and can easily spin things up.
VMWare. The defacto standard I’ve seen in business is Vsphere ESXi. They also have workstation products like Fusion for Mac and Workstation for PC. Some items are free and it’s a solid type 1 hypervisor for home use. I’d start with this for a dedicated box!
Proxmox. An open source hypervisor built on Debian(Ubuntu’s parent). Uses custom layers to work with Linux KVM. A solid choice for a homelab and really popular with r/homelab folks. I’m currently using this.
Straight KVM. Cowboy up!
System and software images:
Windows 10 dev environment, which is great for testing and playing around with. 90-day license.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
Windows servers. Server 2019 trial. Hyper-V is free for perpetual use.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-2019?filetype=ISO
Want to hop Linux distros and play with either the most popular or strangest variants of GNU/Linux?
Ubuntu
I recommend the LTS (long-term support) version that’s most current
https://ubuntu.com/download/server
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
I would go with Ubuntu if you want to learn Linux or play with Linux. You will be told there is easier to set up distros and there are, but nothing is as popular which means you can always find an answer. You’ll be compiling your own kernel and pointing out distributions are for amateurs in no time. (no time being a relative and subjective term; my no time = 10 years)
CentOS is a good alternative for servers, is the latest upstream(or downstream? I don’t remember; it’s just slightly more bleeding edge) of RedHat, which has been the default enterprise Linux I’ve seen in the United States. It really does not matter; I thought at some point I should learn CentOS instead of Ubuntu or whatever else, but under the hood, it’s about all the same.
Networking:
Whatever you got! Really, do not worry too much about it for now.
Ubiquiti gear is great if you want to spend money. Works great for home and business. Lots of dashboards and easy to use.
PFSense. This is when you want to start getting into the weeds. It’s easy to set and forget, but if you want to start tinkering you can go all out.
Cisco? Chances are high the company you work for uses Cisco. You can get gear super cheap for your lab on craigslist usually. Or ebay. Anything less than 10 years-old should be okay.
Buying stuff
Ebay.com Craigslist.org Facebook marketplace Goodwill Tech recycling places (in GR we have CompRenew and it’s like a nerd vacation for me every time I go.) https://www.reddit.com/r/hardwareswap/
Watch out for things that may require a license. A lot of things work without licensing, but all the fancy bells and whistles get turned off.