Build your dream home lab
Hardware reviews, setup guides, and practical tips for building and running a home lab. From your first server to a full rack.
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10 Useful Raspberry Pi Projects for Your Home Lab
Practical Raspberry Pi projects that actually earn their keep in a home lab. From network-wide ad blocking to monitoring dashboards, these are the Pi projects worth your time.
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Unraid for Home Lab Use: The Complete Guide
A thorough guide to using Unraid in your homelab — the parity system, cache pools, Docker and VM support, Community Applications, and when to choose Unraid over alternatives.
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Mini PCs for Your Home Lab: A Practical Buyer's Guide
Comparing Intel NUC, Beelink, MinisForum, HP EliteDesk Mini, and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny for homelab use. CPU, RAM, power, noise, and pricing breakdowns.
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Cloudflare Tunnel: Expose Home Lab Services Without Port Forwarding
Set up Cloudflare Tunnel to securely expose your homelab services to the internet. Covers installation, access policies, custom domains, and comparison with VPN alternatives.
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Building a Quiet Home Lab: Noise Reduction Guide
Practical tips for building a home lab that won't drive you out of the room. Covers fan replacements, case selection, SFF builds, noise measurement, and the trade-offs between silence and cooling performance.
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Buying Used Dell PowerEdge Servers: What to Look For
A practical guide to buying used Dell PowerEdge servers for your home lab — which models to target, what specs to check, where to buy, and what to avoid.
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BorgBackup for Home Lab Data Protection
A hands-on guide to BorgBackup for homelab backups — repository setup, encryption, compression, deduplication, automated scheduling with borgmatic, pruning, monitoring, and restoring files.
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Home Lab Security Hardening: A Practical Guide
Harden your home lab against real threats — SSH lockdown, firewall rules, automatic updates, network segmentation, secrets management, and common mistakes to avoid.
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PCIe Cards for Your Home Lab: HBAs, NICs, and Expansion
A practical guide to PCIe cards for homelabs — HBA controllers, 10GbE NICs, NVMe expansion, SAS expanders, bifurcation, and compatibility pitfalls to avoid.
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Home Lab Monitoring with Grafana and Prometheus
Set up a complete monitoring stack for your home lab using Prometheus and Grafana. Covers installation, node exporters, building dashboards, setting up alerts, and what metrics actually matter.
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LXC Containers on Proxmox: Lightweight Alternatives to VMs
A practical guide to using LXC containers on Proxmox VE as a lighter alternative to full virtual machines. Covers when to use LXC vs VMs, setting up templates, resource management, and real-world use cases.
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Tailscale for Home Lab: Zero-Config Remote Access
How to use Tailscale to access your home lab from anywhere without port forwarding, dynamic DNS, or firewall configuration. Covers setup, subnet routing, exit nodes, ACLs, and when to choose Tailscale over WireGuard.
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Building a Media Server with Jellyfin: The Complete Guide
Set up a self-hosted media server with Jellyfin — installation, library organization, hardware transcoding, client apps, remote access, and how it compares to Plex.
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Ubuntu Server Initial Setup: Security Hardening for Home Labs
A step-by-step guide to securing a fresh Ubuntu Server installation — SSH key authentication, firewall setup, fail2ban, unattended upgrades, and essential hardening.
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SSL Certificate Management for Your Home Lab
A practical guide to managing SSL certificates in your homelab — Let's Encrypt with DNS challenges, internal CAs, wildcard certs, cert-manager, and automated renewal.
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Running Lightweight Kubernetes in Your Home Lab with k3s
A practical guide to deploying k3s in your home lab — from installation to your first workload, persistent storage, Helm charts, and ingress routing.
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Home Lab SSD Buying Guide: SATA, NVMe, and Everything In Between
How to choose the right SSD for your home lab — SATA vs NVMe, TLC vs QLC, endurance ratings, enterprise vs consumer, and the best drives for boot, cache, and VM storage.
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Keeping Your Home Lab Affordable: A Cost Optimization Guide
Practical strategies for reducing home lab costs — measuring power consumption, choosing efficient hardware, buying used gear, and knowing when to scale up.
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Automated Updates for Your Home Lab: A Complete Strategy
Set up unattended OS updates, Docker container updates, and dependency management for your homelab. Covers unattended-upgrades, dnf-automatic, Watchtower, and reboot policies.
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TrueNAS SCALE Setup: From Install to First Share
A hands-on walkthrough of installing TrueNAS SCALE, creating your first ZFS storage pool, setting up SMB and NFS shares, and deploying apps. Everything you need to go from bare metal to working NAS.
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Upgrading to 10GbE Networking: Is It Worth It for Your Home Lab?
A practical cost analysis of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for home labs — what hardware you need, what it actually costs, and when the upgrade makes sense.
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Remote Access for Your Home Lab: DDNS, Tunnels, and VPNs
A complete guide to accessing your home lab remotely — dynamic DNS, Cloudflare Tunnel, WireGuard, Tailscale, and the security trade-offs of each approach.
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Nginx Proxy Manager: The Easy Reverse Proxy for Your Home Lab
Set up Nginx Proxy Manager in Docker to route traffic, manage SSL certificates, and organize access to all your home lab services with a visual UI.
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Hyperconverged Infrastructure in Your Home Lab: Proxmox + Ceph
A practical guide to building hyperconverged infrastructure at home with Proxmox and Ceph — clustering, storage tiering, hardware requirements, and honest cost analysis.
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Self-Hosted CI/CD with Gitea Actions
Set up a complete self-hosted CI/CD pipeline using Gitea Actions — from installation to writing workflows, building Docker images, and deploying to your homelab.
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Managing Your Home Lab with Terraform and Proxmox
A practical guide to infrastructure as code for home labs — define VMs, storage, and networking in Terraform using the Proxmox provider.
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Setting Up WireGuard VPN to Access Your Home Lab Remotely
A step-by-step guide to installing WireGuard VPN on a Linux server for secure remote access to your home lab. Covers server setup, client configuration, DNS routing, and split tunneling.
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Home Lab Networking Fundamentals: Everything You Need to Know
A practical guide to networking basics for home lab beginners — IP addressing, DHCP, DNS, subnetting, NAT, ports, and choosing the right network gear.
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The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy for Your Home Lab
How to implement a real 3-2-1 backup strategy in your home lab using restic, borgbackup, and rclone. Covers local snapshots, NAS backups, offsite replication, and automating the whole thing.
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Docker vs Podman for Your Home Lab: A Practical Comparison
An honest comparison of Docker and Podman for home lab use — rootless containers, daemon vs daemonless, Compose vs pods, and when to pick each one.
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Automating Your Home Lab with Ansible
A practical introduction to using Ansible for home lab automation. Covers inventory setup, writing playbooks, using roles, and real examples for common homelab tasks like updates, Docker deployments, and system configuration.
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Self-Hosting Your Photos with Immich
How to set up Immich as a self-hosted Google Photos replacement. Covers Docker deployment, mobile backups, ML features, storage planning, and migrating from Google Photos.
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NFS vs SMB vs iSCSI: Choosing the Right Network Storage Protocol
A practical guide to network storage protocols for your home lab — NFS, SMB, and iSCSI compared, with setup examples, performance notes, and when to use each.
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Your First Home Lab Server: A Beginner's Complete Guide
Everything you need to know to buy, build, and set up your first home lab server — from choosing hardware to installing your first operating system.
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UPS Systems for Your Home Lab: A Complete Guide
Everything you need to know about uninterruptible power supplies for home labs — sizing, brands, Linux monitoring with NUT, automated shutdowns, and battery care.
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Running Home Assistant in Your Home Lab
A complete guide to running Home Assistant in your homelab — installation methods, Zigbee and Z-Wave setup, automations, dashboards, MQTT, ESPHome, and how it compares to OpenHAB.
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Essential Docker Compose Stacks for Your Home Lab
Ready-to-deploy Docker Compose configurations for the most useful home lab services — from reverse proxies to media servers, monitoring, and more.
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VLAN Segmentation: Isolating Your Home Lab Network
A practical guide to using VLANs to segment your home lab network — why VLANs matter, what hardware you need, and step-by-step setup with managed switches and pfSense/OPNsense.
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GPU Passthrough in Proxmox: The Complete Guide
Step-by-step guide to passing a GPU through to a Proxmox VM — covering IOMMU, VFIO, BIOS settings, NVIDIA and AMD specifics, and real-world use cases.
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Run Your Own DNS: Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home for Your Home Lab
A hands-on guide to running Pi-hole or AdGuard Home for network-wide ad blocking, local DNS, and privacy — with an honest comparison to help you choose.
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Proxmox vs ESXi: Which Hypervisor for Your Home Lab?
An honest comparison of Proxmox VE and VMware ESXi for home lab use — covering cost, features, setup complexity, and which one you should actually pick.
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Centralized Logging with Grafana Loki
Set up centralized logging in your homelab with Grafana Loki — architecture, installation, Promtail, Docker and systemd log collection, LogQL queries, dashboards, and alerts.
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pfSense vs OPNsense: Choosing a Firewall for Your Home Lab
A practical comparison of pfSense and OPNsense for home lab use — features, hardware requirements, UI design, and which one to pick for your setup.
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ECC RAM in Your Home Lab: Do You Actually Need It?
An honest look at ECC memory for home lab use. What ECC actually does, when it genuinely matters, when it doesn't, and whether the extra cost is justified for your setup.
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Building a Dedicated NAS for Your Home Lab
A practical guide to building a purpose-built NAS for your homelab — cases, CPUs, HBA cards, drive selection, and choosing between TrueNAS, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault.
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ZFS Storage Pool Setup: The Complete Home Lab Guide
A practical guide to setting up ZFS storage pools in your home lab — pool types, RAID-Z levels, scrubs, snapshots, and real-world configuration examples.
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Authelia: Single Sign-On and 2FA for Your Home Lab
Set up Authelia for SSO and two-factor authentication in your homelab. Covers reverse proxy integration, access policies, OIDC, and comparison with Authentik and Keycloak.
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Home Lab Power Consumption: How to Measure, Monitor, and Reduce
A practical guide to understanding, measuring, and optimizing power consumption in your home lab — from Kill-A-Watt meters to BIOS tweaks and hardware choices.