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Story Of My Homelab

This is the story of my homelabbing journey. One of the reasons I’m writing this post is because I want to share my hobby and my experiences. I’m also writing this because I am hoping that maybe I will inspire someone to also pick up homelabbing. Thirdly, I want to show that homelabbing does not necessarily involve racks full of servers and networking gear. One can start with basically anything, be it a Raspberry Pi Zero, an old laptop or an even older gaming PC.

Homelabbing is what you make it, and there are no right or wrong paths. It’s about having fun and maybe learning a thing or two along the way.

I decided for this page to be a subpage of my blog instead of a post, as I plan to update it as new iterations of my homelab appear.

v0.1 - Somewhere in 2019

The idea of having a home server started appearing for me in 2019, when I was transitioning my career from being a Project Manager to becoming a developer. I’ve always enjoyed computers and tinkering with code (I learnt C in primary school and wrote a few text based games :3), but never before that time I considered working a software developer. Thankfully, there was a company that hired me, even though I had no experience in the field, and here I am.

The pictures show my initial projects with a Raspberry Pi Zero W. One of those was connecting a DS18B20 thermometer to it, and gathering data to a PostgreSQL database. I also experimented with making a file server with sharing over Samba. Small, basic projects, but made a good basis for the future.

v1.0 - May 2020

At that time I got more into the idea of homelabbing, and I bought a small rack case. I made a “rack mount” for my Pi Zero, and installed PiHole on it. This can be defined as the actual beginning of me “cosplaying as a sysadmin” (c) Jeff Geerling.

v1.5 - June 2020

For a short while I got into Smart Home, and I bought an IKEA Tradfri gateway, and a smart lightbulb. I did some experimenting with communicating with the gateway from the command line using SOAP. I maybe also tried Home Assistant, don’t remember it exactly.

The inside of my new rack case, below the atrocious cable management, there is the Tradfri gateway, my router, and the router/modem from my ISP.

v2.0 - April 2021

First major upgrade of my homelab. I found a very cheap motherboard with an embedded Celeron J1900 SoC CPU with four threads. I combined it with the cheapest case and power supply I could find, and an SSD that I had lying around from upgrading my PC. That gave me a lot of room to grow, and I started installing my first Docker-based services. But mostly this PC was for BOINC. Somewhere around that time I discovered BOINC and I got hooked instantly. That small PC would run 24/7 crunching Universe@Home. Good thing it was virtually silent, barring the tiny PSU fan. It was the beginning of my journey with BOINC, which I summarized recently in two blog posts:

My thoughts as I reach 100 million points in BOINC

I reached 150 million points in BOINC

I also continued tinkering with Raspberry Pis, and I created the Flora Pi. The name was meant to be a pun on the case made from a margarine box of that name, and the purpose: monitoring the temperature and humidity for my plants, my other passion at the time of the pandemic.

v2.1 - August 2021

I switched the J1900 motherboard to a different one that had a full length PCIe slot, and I added a GPU, a GeForce GT710 to crunch GPU tasks in BOINC. The GPU was obviously very slow, but it was silent and better than no GPU.

My daily PC, the J1900 BOINC machine, and the rack case with even more cables than before.

v2.1 - Aug 2021

I found a cheap mining GPU, the AMD RX470 that gave me a massive improvement in BOINC crunching speed. I also had to replace the PSU to something that could also power the GPU. The GPU run for many months before dying, something I totally expected, it was a dedicated mining GPU that was surely abused most of its life.

v3 - Aug 2023

Iteration 3. I moved to my then girlfriend’s, now wife’s flat, and space became a constraint. The J1900 box went to the cellar and I went back to homelabbing using only Pis for while. I got much more into Docker containers and started learning Kubernetes (which I am still learning and still not using). Sadly, I could not find a photo from that time. But soon, I switched to a Thinkpad X240 laptop as my home server. I bought this laptop to use in astrophotography, but the screen turned out to be unacceptable, so it was assigned to become a server.

This is the first iteration of my homelab that got a blog post: State of my homelab in August 2023

Photo of computer equipment on a small shelf

v4 - June 2024

Again things went up a notch. I decided to sell my daily desktop PC, as it was taking too much space and power, and I was ok with living with a laptop. And so, from combined parts of my old desktop, some parts of the new desktop, and new drives, I created the version 4.0 of my homelab. Again, details in a blog post: State of my homelab/NAS in June 2024

The inside of my new homelab server. The particular parts are described in the blog post.The inside of my new homelab server

v4.1 - August 2024

Bought another drive, this time a used HGST 3TB HDD, and added a GPU, an RTX2060 from that daily PC I mentioned before. I am using that GPU for BOINC, and for some local dabbling in machine learning.

The inside of my new homelab server. The particular parts are described in the blog post.The inside of my new homelab server

Future plans

If you are really, really enjoyed this story, please consider helping me expand my homelab by supporting me on these crowdfunding sites: