Homelab

An Intro to Homelabs

A good homelab is a great way to improve your life, and to practice your system administrator skills. This will be an overview of some projects that you could build for your home. Each provides benefits for you and your network, and teaches some real world skills. This is not going to be an in-depth guide on each project, but will give you somewhere to start from.

Your Home Router

A great first project is upgrading your router. You are likely using either your ISP provided modem/router combo, or an off the shelf router. These are designed to get you online, and generally do a reasonable job for most people. However, they don’t often provide a lot of features that you would want in a homelab. If you own your router, there may be aftermarket firmware (like DD-WRT) that you could install to gain some additional functionality, although I’m going to recommend building your own router/firewall using pfSense.