An Opinionated Guide to Homelabbing

I love homelabbing. There’s something exciting about having your own compute and corner of the internet in the era of the cloud.

Homelabbing has not been without its headaches. I’ve put myself in many different pickles and this guide aims to provide high level guidance towards practices that I believe will make your homelab journey more enjoyable.

These thoughts are presented in no particular order.

Don’t run suspicious services from your homelab

If you are running a suspicious service from your home IP there’s a non-zero chance that companies like banks will block your IP from their networks. I met someone at DEFCON who ran a TOR exit node from his homelab, got blocked from accessing his bank’s website at home, and then had to VPN out before he could access his bank’s website again.

That’s a headache. Your homelab should be a place for experiments that don’t overflow into your regular digital life.

Avoid opening up your homelab to general internet access

Avoid allowing the internet to access services on your home network. There are so many wonderful cloud options with free tiers that solve this problem that I really don’t think it’s worth potentially getting your home network ransomwared.

You really want your buddies from across the planet to access the Minecraft server in your homelab? Consider a zero trust VPN solution like Tailscale.

Use a dedicated router

The router will be your first place to debug problems. Life will be much easier when you only worry about one piece of hardware rather than a virtualized router VM. I promise you will not be in a ‘curious debugging’ mood when the router craps out at 8:30am on a workday. You’ll just want to press the power button, grab a coffee, and come back to it working.

I’ve found a lot of success with a Protectli box running OPNsense as a dedicated router.

Leave your daily driver out of the picture

I use computers daily but that doesn’t mean I homelab daily. Avoid experimenting with mission critical computers. I leave my Windows desktop on a dedicated subnet away from all the other nonsense. I don’t run any containers or goodies on the desktop even though it has spare compute. This helps me avoid having homelab nonsense from overflowing into my regular digital life.

Always give yourself a safe spot that won’t be messed up.

Avoid the power hungry servers

Some days you’ll find an absolute steal on https://labgopher.com and convince yourself that you’d be stupid not to buy the server. The real cost of some homelabs is not in the hardware but the electricity costs every month. A lot of the enterprise hardware that gets sold on eBay these days isn’t nearly as power efficient as their mondern counterparts.

Look for power efficient boxes like Intel NUCs and Chromeboxes. They aren’t as cool as the massive 4U blade in your rack, but your wallet will be happy.

Look up YouTube videos on how noisy a server is

Let’s say you do end up buying a used server from r/homelabsales. You plug it in and the monster sounds like a jet engine taking off! Always YouTube the server’s startup sounds. For folks who live in tiny shoeboxes like myself, consider avoiding any sort of server noise altogether.

Not everyone will appreciate the experiments of your homelab. If you share a network with folks who are not tech savvy, give them a safe space away from your experiments. They won’t find it cute when your update to the DNS blocklist inadvertently blocks all DNS queries.

Raspberry Pis are great - but avoid hoarding them

I love Pis - they are a big reason why I got into homelabbing, but it’s way too easy to get into a ‘just one more Pi’ mentality. Realistically a bigger server blade could match the price and beat the performance of multiple Pis. Get a few dedicated Pis for the fun stuff - RetroPie, PiHole, Home Assistant, and then move on.

As an aside I don’t recommend getting Pis to build a Kubernetes cluster. It’s fun to see the number of nodes in your cluster increase, however the ARM CPU architecture of the Pis isn’t supported by many of the common homelab services out there.

Get an uninterruptible power supply

You’ll be spending a bunch of money on servers so you should spend money to help protect them. I thought a UPS was overkill for a long time. The same night after I installed my UPS the power tripped three different times. I’ve never looked back since then.

Remember that a UPS is NOT a backup power supply. A UPS only gives you time to shutdown the homelab safely, nothing more.

Get a server rack

Is it total overkill? Absolutely. Will you have to explain the rack everytime someone new visits? Yes.

A server rack gives you a centralized place to store all the junk you’ll accumulate in the homelab journey. That alone is worth its weight in gold.

Get a label maker

As more junk floods your server rack, you’ll quickly begin forgetting which charger goes to which box. Get a cheap label maker off eBay, label everything, and thank yourself next time you need to move and rebuild the lab.

Document EVERYTHING

I binge homelabbing. I’ll spend weeks not touching my homelab and then I’ll spend weeks where every spare moment is spent tinkering with it. If you are anything like me you will forget how/why you did certain things in your homelab. Document everything so the next time you go a few weeks away from the lab you can return without losing any progress.