The Idea of a Homelab

I am not quite sure since when exactly I started thinking of about building my own homelab. Over the past few years, I have been watching videos online where people are building their own home network environment. Simply using their desired router, switches, patch panels, running different types of micro servers, using networking cables to connect their modern networking devices. This may sound way too complicated to some but if you get to understand the basics of networking, it is not all that difficult to build.

I am still in planning phase and trying to learn on this issue from various sources. What I understood so far is that, I will eventually need a rack to put all of my networking devices. This way core components of my network will reside in a single place which should be easily movable. Since I am not planning something super fancy, I don’t expect the rack to be too big and definitely not looking for traditional server rack or something similar to that size. Some of the smaller rack from DeskPi should work just fine for me.

Couple of tech you-tuber already focused on some of the racks from DeskPi. Jeff Geerling wrote an article on one of the mini rack earlier and then he shared some of his project ideas where he used other racks from the same company. As I don’t want something super big, these racks seems like something that I can actually use for my own homelab. However, the problem is these racks are still not available in Bangladesh, a country where I want to setup one of my homelab as well.

Simply judging from DeskPi website, it seems like they can ship it to Bangladesh but I will be very expensive. In fact the shipping cost will be more than the price of the product itself. I am not totally sold with that idea yet. So, I may need to think of about other alternatives or wait until it becomes available locally.

I debated with myself over the choice of my primary router and eventually made up my mind to go ahead with the Mikrotik router over OpenWrt based ones for some obvious reasons, stability, security and product quality. Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of open-source software and I own devices running on OpenWrt. Yet, I had to go with RouterOS this time around simply because I am fairly familiar with their ecosystem. This homelab will be a bit bigger than my personal homelab. It will be used on an apartment complex building. So, I would need something fairly powerful.

I am thinking of building a ten gigabit network that would primarily use optical fiber for individual connection and hopefully to upgrade it later on at some point. I still got sometime in my hand before I start purchasing the components. So, I will continue to watch out for racks that can support this project. Wish me luck.