So I recently began my new semester and I have gone into thinking planning and researching on how to integrate my projects into my home lab.

The goal of the upgrade is so to complete new projects and make use of free time.

The three project I took on this semester:

  • GNS3 - goal is to do at least one really complicated network infrastructure
  • LoRa - group project, my goal is to learn how i can integrate LoRa in any home lab
  • Individual Research - Securing a Kubernetes Cluster

Something I always try to do is implement what I study and learn in my home lab that way I can have the projects and most of the times redoing them in my home lab lead to me making it more difficult or looking on how to allign them with my current set up. Example of that is when I was studying about ELK stack, and did it normaly in University. Later on I decided to integrate it with my home lab so I made it in way where I can monitor the Kubernetes cluster. Or another where I used ec2_service_discovery in a Grafana Prometheus deployment which I later used in kubernetes as kubernetes service discover, which can track if new nodes appeared and if they can be monitored.

So back to the topic - Home Lab upgrade.

I have made a big research about what is the best approach, let me fill you in on how my home lab is right now

  • Beelink s12 pro mini - Proxmox server with PfSense Home Assistant and a Linux Server
  • Cisco SG200 switch 24 ports, 1GB speed
  • WiFi Router(old Zyxel)
  • 3x Raspberry Pi 5 8GBs
  • ESP32 with BME280
  • Personal Computer(potential future project so not touched right now)

So my thought process lead to a few ideas:

  • new mini pc (dell optiplex)
  • A cisco Router
  • new wifi router
  • start the project with the big pc

So the main route I am currently considering is getting the new mini pc, spend a few days setting it up to be a part of a proxmox cluster. Than copy the GNS3 server side to a VM there. that would let me start already on the GNS3 project, also this way I can create a second etcd node on it, that way I will have kubernetes high availability, and also l wanted to look for way to use it as backup.

Another deeply considered thing is buying a server but I am worried about noise and electricity bill(still an option tho).

As for the other things, the cisco router is something I will buy second hand so i will just keep an eye on second hand webstores and when I find I will add it. As for the WiFi I will look into one with vlan possibilities or something interesting. And the project with the big PC is to set up dual boot and create my Linux machine, since I dont really have a powerfull Linux machine, I have a way to Start the computer remotely and way to ssh, by using Magic packets and TwinGate. So this way I can maybe use it for university.

Home Lab new Ideas