The desire to have a minimal computing environment at home has always been strong. Early on I was a big fan of having some nice recently decommissioned rack mount servers in the basement. Eventually however all the heat, noise, and high electric bills got to me and I switched mostly to beefing up my desktop and using tools like vagrant and virtual box to scratch my lab itch.
When Windows 10 came out I decided to replace virtual box with the built-in Hyper-V functionality, and that’s when all my troubles started. I also play quite a few games on my desktop and not long after configuring my new Hyper-V setup I started getting knocked offline consistently from any online game I was playing. I can tell you that your friends won’t be happy with you running mythic+ or raiding in World of Warcraft if you are not able to stay online. I never did determine the root cause for the unstable network with Hyper-V, but the issues I was having lead me to build out fresh home lab infrastructure. Instead of my desktop which is really a gaming machine pulling double duty as a half-baked lab infrastructure I needed to build out something new.
The first question you might ask is why not just use the cloud? I actually do use public cloud resources for quite a few things, but my day job requires me to also stay up to date in low-ish level infrastructure topics. Not all of these are easy to accomplish using only something like ec2 so having some real bare metal equipment at home is useful.
Network
The first obstacle for building a capable home lab was to upgrade my network stack. My ancient Linksys wrt54g was not going to cut it trying to handle the projects I wanted to throw at it.
Requirements
- Advanced capabilities
- Capable of configuring multiple VLANs
- Capable of participating in routing protocols such as BGP and OSPF
- Support for IPv6
- Quiet
The first thought that popped into mind was hopping on eBay and buying some nice off-lease Cisco gear. While that idea was appealing at the time I was just starting a project at work to test the viability of using white box switch devices running Cumulus Linux as an alternative to Cisco. I ended up deciding against this path because the actual switch devices themselves sound like jet engines when they are running and that did not meet my requirements for QUIET.
As I was researching options a friend who does a lot of work with wireless devices for conventions turn me on to Ubiquiti Networks. After doing some research I decided to try out some of their consumer priced devices which looked like they would meet my requirements. About $150 later (not really that much more than a new “all-in-wonder” device) I picked up an EdgeRouter-X and a PoE WiFi access point. This gear is as quiet as can be, has all the advanced features I was looking for, and “just works” from a configuration point of view. While it can’t do everything the Cumulus Linux based stuff I was describing previously can it does check off all the requirements I had for my new lab.
Note: I actually did the network upgrade portion of my research when I was moving to my new house and have been running a Ubiquiti based network for almost 2 years now. It’s some of the best money I’ve ever spent, and I have been recently looking at upgrades which would allow me to add a VPN and a couple of other goodies to an already solid setup.
“Server”
When I built my most recent desktop I went with a mini-itx build and felt pretty good about it. Based on this I put together my list of requirements for the “server” portion of my lab build out.
Requirements
- Decent processing power (i5+)
- 16GB+ RAM
- FAST disks
- 2+ 1GB+ ethernet ports
- As small as possible
- Quiet
My first idea was to do something in a similar form factor to my desktop for the “server” portion of my lab build out. As I was researching how to get a mini-itx motherboard that supports 32GB of ram I started to notice a lot of noise on twitter about Intel NUC devices. After a bit of research I ended up with a Skull Canyon based NUC with 32GB of RAM and some m.2 NVME storage devices. After a quick assembly I was up and running with a basic CentOS 7 install in no time. I’ve used Red Hat Enterprise Linux pretty extensively professionally so I tend to choose CentOS for home projects unless I need some bleeding edge kernel features and then I reach for Fedora.
What’s Next?
Now that I have the basics of my home lab infrastructure in place I need to do some work on automation and configuration. I’ve been using Prometheus quite a bit lately for monitoring so I’ll likely get that setup as well. Expect some more posts in the future that explore the continuation of my setup.