Story time: Dreaming of my Home Lab

Do you really need a specific reason to build a home lab? The sheer enjoyment of working with professional-grade hardware and software is often reason enough. However, for me, the motivation behind building my home IT lab extends far beyond simple technical experimentation. Join my dreams building my Home Lab:

Hardware dreams

I’m eager to explore enterprise-grade networking equipment, particularly routers and switches. It’s time to expand my horizons beyond typical consumer hardware like my aging FritzBox 7530 and venture into more capable solutions. This is especially relevant as I’m currently planning to build a house, which requires careful consideration of the network infrastructure. I want to avoid the mistake of installing CAT 5 cabling throughout the house, only to later discover its limitation to gigabit speeds.

My home lab should be somewhat future proof and support recent technological achievments like wifi 7. Do I need this? Surely not right now because non of my devices supports wifi 7, but time and devices will come for sure. But I am already sick of the lacking wifi signal in my old small appartment and would love to not worry about bad wifi in my new house.

I have already made the investment to buy a TP-Link router and access point. These will be covered in detail in a blog post on its own.

Server

I am currently already using a Synology DS716 for backups and some other services, but this device is quite limited in usage because of its lacking hardware. With a whooping 8GiB of RAM and 4TB raid 1, there is not too much to explore and discover. A long time goal if mine is to have some hardware that lets me create a viable k8s cluster. This could be a few raspberry pies, or a beefy server with virutalized nodes.

Currently, my eyes long for a Minisforum MS-01, a new Synology NAS (maybe the RS2323+) and some sort of Proxmox based servers. I am not yet sure what to go for right now. I definitly want to go towards a small rack system.

Software dreams

Please, someone hit F5 and refresh some of my rusty networking basics. Its insane that one time I confidently knew what NAT, CIDR notation and all that was about.