What is a Home lab, and why tech enthusiasts should build one
“With the ever-changing tech landscape, having hands-on experience is more valuable than ever. While textbooks, YouTube videos, and online courses provide a solid foundation, nothing beats the practical knowledge gained from working with real systems. That’s where the power of the home lab comes into play. It’s a dedicated space where you experiment with various software and hardware, including desktops, networking gear, and Chromebooks.”
A home tech lab is not something that just appears overnight. It grows over quite a time. There is also no set way to do it, but the core of it is usually some form of self-hosting some services, whether on a humble Raspberry Pi, a mini-PC as a server, or a NAS. You start out with one thing, and you keep adding to it, and then upgrading parts as your lab grows.
Apart from skills development, saving money by hosting at home, you also end up with lots of flexibility with what you do.
Bear in mind though if you grant access to the outside world, you do introduce some risks if you have not got your firewall, reverse proxy, and other basic security set up properly (but that is part of the learning too).
I just recently moved all my devices onto their own grouped VLANs. This improves their security as well as reducing lots of broadcasts across my network, but this was quite a bit more complex to do.
If you think that any form of home lab is just unnecessary, think for a moment that if you are adding no-name Wi-Fi cameras, Wi-Fi switches, audio speakers, etc to your home network, that you do want to really separate those types of devices from your actual computers and phones and the network.
See
https://www.androidpolice.com/home-lab-explainer-how-to-build as well as this one about VLANs at
https://www.xda-developers.com/reasons-you-should-you-be-using-vlans-on-your-home-network#
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selfhosting #
homelabs
