My "HomeLab"

My homelab consists entirely of Pis for running compute, and ubiquiti network gear.

Here's an image of the my pi shelf(Can be bought here, thanks @cadawg for the recommendation). 4 Pis that are powered by a Ubiquiti switch. From the far left to the far right here's their purpose: running random scripts, pihole 2, pihole 1, smokeping.

While the list is short, that's all I need to run at home. As I said in my last post, I like running minimal stuff at home.

A look at the PIs

The Pi's aren't anything special. They are Pi 4's that range from 2G of RAM to 8G of RAM(2x 4 G, 1x 2G, 1x 8G) and 3 of them are powered by POE. The rightmost one is powered over the USB C cable. The network switch only has 4 POE ports, and initially, the 4th port was being used by the access point I was using for my network, and so I'd only gotten 3 hats. At this point, I can get a 4th POE hat if I want, but probably more work than its worth. I can also put some SSDs on the other side of the PIs(you can see it on the backside image, there's screw holes to hold the drives.

While they are low powered, they get the job done for everything I want to run(except a NAS, which we'll talk about later).

A look at the network

The network switch being used isn't anything special.

Just a simple Ubiquiti network switch with 4 POE ports, and 4 regular ports. The far right port is used for upstream(connected back to the router). The black network cables are used for the PIs, and the yellow one is connected to a AP which is sometimes powered on when I need a better connection in the basement where this is located at. The connection from the AP upstairs is usually good enough and I don't need to have that powered on.

Upstairs, I'm running a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. The grey cable goes down to the switch. The other cables go to other various devices. The cable connected under where the world symbol is at is the WAN port, and it's connected to my Xfinity Modem. Since I have 2 gbit service(down only, upstream is capped to 200 mbit), I needed to use the sfp+ port, since the RJ45 ports only support up to 1Gbit.

The Xfinity modem that the router connected to is just the XB8 modem. Nothing special there. It's required in order to have 200 megabit upload speed, and so I'm using it. I got it for no rental fee for 2 years as part of a deal(though the pricing still sucks since I had to buy the very top tier service with everything included in order to get the upload speed, no fiber available in my area yet, even though it's available to houses just a block away).

Future Plans

There's not too much more that I'm planning to my home lab and my home network. Some things I'd want to do is run some network cables to my room(there's no cables going to any of the rooms in the house) and add a NAS(@themarkymark has given me a link to a good one). I most likely won't end up running cables since this is my parent's house and I'm not smart enough to run cables inside the walls, and I don't want to leave it outside looking ugly so just the NAS it is. Until I have a place of my own, this is it.