My Humble Homelab · kwiromeo

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.

Web interface access of my humble homelab via Cockpit.

Current specs of the homelab — Current specs. Nothing impressive.

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/