Building a Homelab
last edited Fri, 25 Apr 2025 07:20:41 GMT
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There are a variety of reasons for setting up and maintaining a home labaoratory, and nearly all are beneficial for gaining experience outside of a professional or academic environment. Before setting up a homelab, it's important to assess the underlying goal you have in mind. What will the purpose of your homelab be?
- attack simulation
- security research
- test beds for software development
- network analysis
Performance Specifications direct link to this section
- Host OS 1GB RAM + 1 core
- VM 2GB RAM + 1 core
Hardware direct link to this section
Aim to use whatever you have to save on spending. You can rent a cloud-based environment but having a dedicated lab in your physical reach is an invaluable experience. Dedicated hardware isn't mandatory, a spare desktop or even a laptop with 4GB of RAM is an option for a locally-hosted lab.
- routers
- switches
- old computers and SBCs
- monitors
- storage
- RAM
Software direct link to this section
- server optimized Linux distributions
- Alpine
- Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, etc.)
- Windows Server
Network Mapping direct link to this section
- use a diagramming tool to organize your desired network setup
- create visual representations of your ISP, modem, firewall, switche(s), access point(s), wi-fi, server(s), desktop/laptop(s), sandboxes
- you can can include granular details
- isolate traffic from the rest of the netork
- allow machine to be updated
- different software can be utilized to manipulate network traffic
- VMware Workstation 'Host only' and 'LAN segment'
Routing direct link to this section
- reserve your local IP address in your router's DHCP settings
- homeserver should always have this static address