My homelab is mainly for learning network security best-practices and self-hosting services to reclaim some of my data from cloud providers. It’s stable, centralised and functional. The specs are as follows: Intel N100 with 8GB of RAM (which has been enough for me so far), 1x 1TB NVMe SSD and 2x 2TB HDDs in RAID 1. The SSD is limited to one PCIe 3.0 lane, but I’m on a 2.5Gb LAN, so the speed is applicable and it is suitable for my applications.

This server is a single Proxmox VE 9.0.11 node, which I host my services on. I have one Linux Container that manages Docker containers (for isolation and resource efficiency) - Immich for photo backups, Nextcloud for file storage, Paperless for documents, my password manager, Syncthing, Pi-hole and Caddy as a reverse proxy. I have a Windows Server VM to use as a sandbox for learning AD and I also run a pfSense VM, to teach myself about firewalls and network security rules. Clustering with k3s would be my next major learning step but I am still learning about Kubernetes.

My gateway is a consumer router flashed with OpenWrt, running a dynamic DNS client and a WireGuard server for remote access. A high-priority upgrade would be getting VLAN-capable 2.5Gb switches - I have some experience with Cisco networking equipment at Uni but I would like to apply it at home. Furthermore, an IPMI device such as a NanoKVM would be useful. My DSL WAN connection is also a bottleneck (no direct fibre yet). Additionally, all my hardware is currently in one location, so a goal of mine is to set up a remote backup at a friend or family member's house. A low-priority nice-to-have would be migrating to a motherboard/CPU combo with more SATA ports and ECC memory support, as long as I can maintain low idle power consumption.