Home Lab

Shane Cooper

Having a home lab or server to handle both home server and test lab needs is both a luxury and a curse. It's a luxury as I can host just about anything I think I'm capable, which usually means a complex set of Ubuntu linux systems or windows servers to service a specific need. The curse is, I tend to set them up "in the moment" and forget the complex web of configuration, code or setup and of course like most techs flying too close to the sun, I do not document.

So, this site is NOT intended to be my "documentation" per se, but I do hope to use it to document different test procedures, technology or the like.

What is my home lab? I do NOT plan to expose any of the details, like access, IP address, acct credentials or anything that would point a bad actor towards a path inside my home network - THAT would be both crazy and counterintuative to my own career focus, cybersecutiry professional.

My home lab basically consists of the following:

  • Dell 650 server - 128gb RAM, 8CPUs and 8 drive slots for SSD drive storage.
  • ProxMox - running on bare metal
  • Lots of VMs - most for testing PKI automation, development, coding, new server technology, dockers etc...
  • PiHole - a VM
  • Plex - a VM

That's the foundation of my entire system.