Browsing Reddit's r/homelab is inspiring. The forum is filled with impressive setups.
When I was browsing, I was inspired, but also overwhelmed on where to start.
Rather than jumping into a complicated set up, I've opted to start with something rather simple.
My Simple Homelab Setup
My current setup is an old Dell Optiplex 390 from 2011. It has quad-code Intel® Core™ i3 clocked at 3.10 GHz with 8 GB of memory. I bought the machine at a going out of business sale of a local print shop.
It's sitting on the bottom shelf of my TV, connected to it via HDMI.
It's running Debian 12 with a KDE desktop environment to help navigate around the server when I am at home. I installed tailscale, a zero configuration VPN, and Cockpit, an intuitive web interface, to securely get terminal access to my humble machine when I am away from home.
As I was putting my homelab together, I rememebered a blogpost title by Jeff Atwood: "The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer" [1]. It follows then, that a homelab can be just another computer.
[1] The post available at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/