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4 reasons why every PC enthusiast should build a home lab
PC-building has become a lot more accessible in recent years. As long as you do enough research beforehand and follow the instruction manuals, you shouldn't have any issues assembling your ideal rig.
The same can be said for home labs. Despite sounding rather complex, building your home server is as simple as assembling your PC. If you have not put together a home lab already, here are four compelling reasons why you should.
While it won't be as capable as a PC, a laptop is more than enough for an entry-level home lab
Automating tedious tasks
Just let your server machine deal with the annoying stuff
From managing your smart home gadgets to creating monthly backups of important documents, there are a lot of monotonous tasks that can be solved with automation. Installing a dedicated NAS OS and Home Assistant on virtual machines/containers can provide a centralized interface to automate all your maintenance tasks.
Once you include automated surveillance tools like Frigate and the ability to set up VMs that can automatically filter harmful traffic on your network, it becomes clear why a home lab can make your life a lot easier.
Testing (and breaking) virtualized environments
Without worrying about losing important data
One of the biggest advantages of virtual machines and containers is that you are free to experiment with them to your heart as content. Whether you delete essential files or install conflicting packages, all the changes will be made inside virtualized environments, and it is easy to undo all the damage by restoring to an earlier snapshot.
Although VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Pro, and other Type-2 hypervisors provide decent virtualization provisions, they can not rival the high performance and superior features offered by their bare-metal counterparts. Since most home labs run on Proxmox and other powerful virtualization tools, you get even more options to try out your wacky ideas. As someone who has spent a lot of time working on insane projects like running macOS apps and gaming inside VMs, I found a home lab to be the best addition to my computing environment.
Self-hosting your favorite services
A dedicated container for every app!
Self-hosting your own servers for essential services has become a common trend in the computing space - and itâs one I fully support. Be it a media-streaming Jellyfin server or a personal CasaOS cloud, home labs are built for self-hosting applications. Besides providing full control over your privacy, hosting your own apps can save money you will otherwise spend on commercial services.
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I admi will that self-hosting can have its drawbacks. Unless you have set up a couple of clusters spanning a couple of PCs over different locations, high availability will always be a problem, especially for critical services. Likewise, certain services, like email servers, require a lot of fine-tuning that is often not worth the effort. But for most other apps, you have will a much better time self-hosting them on your home lab.
It's a solid learning experience
You'll learn many skills from your home lab, including the ability to control your rage
As someone who built a home lab just to experiment with DevOps and networking, I can heartily recommend doing so if you have a keen interest in technology. Managing containers and virtual machines is one of the first things you will do with a home lab. Soon, you will end up battling with VLANs, bridges, NATs, and a plethora of other networking aspects on your VMs. And that is before you include the security, remote access, scripting, and clustering techniques you will learn after spending hours troubleshooting.
Most, if not all, of these skills translate over to professional tools, and running your home lab can grant some hands-on experience in managing servers. While you probably won't bag a handsome job just by including the words home lab under your work experience, running one will definitely help you hone your skills in the sysadmin field.
Its also a lot of fun
Let us face it: many users (myself included) assemble home labs and purchase enterprise-grade equipment because it a lot is fun. But the reason why I did not include this in the list is that the hobby can get rather addictive and can end up taking over all your free time. If you are not careful, you will end up with huge electricity bills, an angry spouse, a messy computing lab, and a server riddled with all sorts of cool projects that you probably would not ever use!
