Homelab Builds

Practical homelab builds for infrastructure engineers. This is where enterprise skills meet kit you can actually afford. Guides cover mini PC clusters, refurbished Dell and HPE servers, Proxmox hypervisor setups, network segmentation with VLANs, and the power and cooling tradeoffs that matter when you run 24/7 at home. Every build documented here has either sat in a production rack or a real spare bedroom. No theoretical gear lists, no affiliate filler. If you want to learn Kubernetes on a £120 refurbished OptiPlex or run a dozen self-hosted services on a Pi cluster, start here. The homelab is a professional development environment, and this is how we treat it.

Terminal showing a Minecraft server starting on Ubuntu 24.04 with Java 21

How to Set Up a Minecraft Server on Ubuntu 24.04

Why a Minecraft Server Is the Best First Server Project I have been running servers professionally for over twenty years. Linux, Windows, bare metal, virtualised, containerised, on-prem, cloud. And if someone asked me what the single best learning project is for someone who wants to understand server administration, I would tell them to set up

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Grafana dashboard displaying CPU, memory, and network metrics for a homelab server cluster

How to Set Up Grafana and Prometheus for Homelab Monitoring

How to Set Up Grafana and Prometheus for Homelab Monitoring I need to be honest with you before we start. Grafana and Prometheus will teach you more about your infrastructure than any other tool you deploy. They will also consume an alarming number of hours as you chase the perfect dashboard layout, tweak colour schemes,

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Terminal showing Tailscale connected to a mesh VPN network with multiple devices listed

How to Install Tailscale on Linux (Zero-Config VPN)

How to Install Tailscale on Linux (Zero-Config VPN for Your Homelab) I have spent more hours than I care to admit configuring WireGuard tunnels by hand, generating key pairs, managing peer configs across devices, and debugging firewall rules when something stops working after a kernel update. Then I installed Tailscale, and it took two minutes.

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Nginx Proxy Manager web dashboard showing multiple proxy hosts with SSL certificates

How to Install Nginx Proxy Manager with Docker (2026 Guide)

Every Homelab Needs a Front Door If you are running more than one web-facing service in your homelab, you have probably hit the same wall everyone does. Nextcloud is on port 8080, Vaultwarden is on port 8081, Uptime Kuma is on port 3001, and you are typing IP addresses and port numbers into your browser

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Network patch panel with ethernet cables connected, representing home network infrastructure for dynamic DNS

How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux)

How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Before I set up proper internal DNS, DuckDNS was the glue holding my remote access together. I had a Raspberry Pi running a handful of services at home, a residential IP address that changed every few days, and no interest in paying

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Server room with blinking status lights on network equipment, representing infrastructure monitoring

How to Install Uptime Kuma to Monitor Your Homelab (2026 Guide)

How to Install Uptime Kuma to Monitor Your Homelab (2026 Guide) I monitor 30+ services across my homelab with Uptime Kuma. It has saved me from silent failures more times than I can count, and it takes about five minutes to deploy. Here is how to set it up properly. From the homelab: Uptime Kuma

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