Homelab

Origin and Hardware

My interest in “Homelabbing” arose long before I was familiar with the term Homelab. I have always been curious, and drawn towards things that are unfamiliar to me. I am also a builder and problem solver by heart, which has given me a broad understanding of tech and maker-culture.

My lab started almost 4 years ago, when I wanted to set up my own DNS server at home, to add network wide ad-block (Pihole). As I learned more about Linux and containerization I quickly got drawn into the hobby of self-hosting web-services.

Raspberry Pi's are great, but it takes ages to build docker images, so it wasn’t long before I upgraded it to a Lenovo Tiny M73 workstation with 8gb ram and a 4th gen i5. This was a big step up, which enabled me to host a lot more services and experiment more with building and deploying my owner docker images.

As I wanted more storage, and the expansion ports on a mini pc are limited, I upgraded to a slightly larger Mini PC (Asrock Deskmini x300). The specs mentioned 3 m2 slots and 2 sata slots which would be perfect to build a low power NAS as the max power draw less than 50w.

I quickly learned that the low power motherboard obviously wasn’t able to power two 10TB Ironwolf HDD’s, so I had to hack up a solution with an external power supply. This was a bit of a mess (See picture below) and the flaky setup also led to occasional smart errors from the HDD array so I knew I had to move to new hardware soon.