Home Lab

I started building out my Home Lab this spring with a couple of old desktop towers I had laying around. I had to spend some time trying out a few different flavors of Linux on a few of the boxes but eventually I ended up with a dedicated server running OpenMediaVault for fileshares and another one that I was able to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and get a few LLMs installed and an instance of OpenWebUI running locally on the network.

🧩 Features

• Prosumer grade firewall running PFSense
• Clean network cabling and only a few switches
• VLANs to segregate, work, home, guest, kids, IOT, VPN and dev networks
• 1 dedicated media server with hot-swappable SSDs
• 1 dedicated Linux server running Ubuntu for running LLMs and Docker containers for local-only services
• 1 dev laptop with WSL for development and network management

💡 Technologies used

• Complete firewall config from scratch including VPNs, VLANs, custom DNS, AcmeCerts, HAproxy for local services and more
• Ollama running locally with an OpenWebui frontend
• Docker Containers
• Python
• Bash

🎯 Objective

My home lab currently serves some functionality for my wife’s home-based business, physical hosting for a server of a colleague of mine and my own experimentation and development in all things coding, computers and self-hosted. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I highly encourage you check out a few of these links to resources that I found really helpful and inspiring when I was building it out:

• Awesome Self Hosted
• Basic Setup and Configuring pfsense Firewall Rules for Home - Lawrence Systems
• Dual Boot Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS and Windows 10 - A Step by Step Install Guide - (UEFI Tutorial)
• reddit.com/r/homelab/
• reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking
• github.com/open-webui/open-webui
• docker.com

I learned a lot along the way and developed a ton of clarity about how all this stuff works and really enjoyed it!

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