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.
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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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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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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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
How to Install Nginx Proxy Manager with Docker (2026 Guide) Read More »
Why Proxmox Is the Homelab Standard I run a three-node Proxmox cluster in my homelab. Between those three machines, I have around 15 virtual machines and a handful of LXC containers running everything from Nextcloud and Gitea to n8n and Ollama. Proxmox is the foundation that makes all of it possible, and it has been
How to Install Proxmox VE (Beginner’s Guide 2026) Read More »
Why WireGuard Changed Everything I ran OpenVPN for years. It worked, most of the time, but the configuration was a maze of certificates, TLS keys, and config files that took an afternoon to set up and broke in ways that were never obvious. When I switched to WireGuard, the entire server config was 15 lines.
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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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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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Best Refurbished Mini PCs for Your Homelab in 2026 TL;DR: Refurbished Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP ProDesk Mini, and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny units are the best value for homelab hardware in 2026. Look for 7th-gen Intel or newer, DDR4 RAM, and budget £100-250 for a solid setup. These beat new hardware on price and run Proxmox
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K3s: Real Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi Let me be honest upfront: running Kubernetes on a single Raspberry Pi is over-engineered. For running a few containers, Docker Compose is simpler, lighter, and more appropriate. If your goal is purely practical — get services running with minimum fuss — you don’t need Kubernetes. That’s not the
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