Homelab

Oh…wow. That’s quite the loaded question. How much time do we have? ::checks watch::

The short answer is that almost every technical skill I’ve learned or improved (and some non-technical ones like public speaking as well) has been a result of my home lab. I just needed the right push/motivation/use case to dive into it.

The first iteration of my home lab started 20 years ago while I was in college. I started my lab because I wanted more hands on experience, and my curiosity pushed me forward from there.

So…it really depends on what skills you want to develop and where you want to start your career. IT is a very large area.

The best thing you can do is find problems you have and use your lab to design and implement a solution.

In general, I would say the following:

1. Troubleshooting- Build things in your lab just to break them. Learn how to figure out what you broke and how to solve the problem.
2. Networking - Build a network. Understand how applications and services talk to each other. Learn a little about TCP/IP and basic routing. It doesn’t need to be complex (unless you want to go for your CCIE)
3. Virtualization - Build out a small virtual environment. Use it to run a few applications or services for personal use. This is also good because you can put multiple services on the same piece of hardware.
4. Share what you’re doing - A big part of IT is communications skills. Once you start doing something interesting, share it. Blog. Find user groups for the technology you’re interested in and talk about how you use your lab to learn it. Good communication skills will get you further than good technical skills.

My active passiv pihole cluster helped me to understand clusters.

I learned how to use docker containers by setting up my minecraft server.

My homeassistant VM and OPN sense test VM helped me to understand hardware passthrough.

By setting up wireguard i learned how routing works.

I was experimenting with GPOs in a test active directory running completely in VMs. That way i learned some basic stuff about active directory.

I really recommend setting up a proxmox server or something similar for experimenting.

Setting up my own OPNsense router, setting up my own mail server (testing in homelab, then moved to DC as production), Univention Corporate Server as active directory for centralized authentication.

I learned Oracle by setting up bunches of Oracle VMs, doing horrible things to them, getting rid of the bodies, and starting over. Their sacrifices have helped me be a competent entry-level Oracle DBA. I’m learning Python on a VM configured with Eclipse and another VM with Jupyter. I’m actually a SQL Server DBA, and we don’t have much of a SQL Server test environment where I work. I test what I can in VMs in my homelab. Flashed a consumer router with OpenWRT and learned tons about networking, and confirmed why I never aspired to be a network engineer LOL. Trying to access my homelab remotely taught me a lot more about information security. Wanting to know what’s going on with my infrastructure (InfluxDB+prometheus+Grafana) has given me greater insight into SRE.

My test setup for an enterprise DAM helped me to better understand Active Directory, ADFS, SAML and mixed OS environments and the challenges.

If it is to easy you are missing a firewall

Having users. It helped me understand users are a PITA. ;).

1. Linux/server os's with command line administration

2. Hypervisor VMs and Containers

3. Setting up external access to a service via a reverse proxy and a FQDN.

4. Pihole, understanding DNS and the different effects it has on things

5. VLANs for different devices to stop things accessing the internet or putting guests on a different network.