Series · COMPLETE
Homelab From Zero
From an empty desk to a small rack that earns its power draw — hypervisor, network, storage, and the mistakes in order.
08 / 08parts published
- 01What a Homelab Actually IsNot a datacenter in your closet. A place where breaking things is cheap — which changes what you should buy and what you should skip.
- 02Picking Homelab Hardware Without Wasting MoneyThe used-enterprise trap, the mini-PC sweet spot, and why your first server should cost less than your monitor.
- 03Proxmox in One EveningInstall the hypervisor first, even for one machine — snapshots make every later experiment reversible, which is the whole point of a lab.
- 04Tailscale: Reach Your Lab From AnywhereFlat, private networking to every lab machine with zero opened ports — and why port forwarding was never the answer.
- 05Homelab Storage You Can Afford to LoseThe lab rule inverted: decide what is disposable first, protect the tiny remainder properly, and skip the NAS you were about to buy.
- 06Running Small Local Models on My HomelabQ6_K quantization, GGUF, and what 24GB of VRAM actually buys you in real throughput rather than benchmark numbers.
- 07Pi-hole: Ad-Blocking for the Whole HouseOne DNS server, every device on the network, zero browser extensions — and why this is the workload that actually convinces skeptics.
- 08The Lab, Eight Parts LaterWhat actually got built, what it cost, and the two incidents that proved the 'allowed to break' rule from part one was the right one.