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.
There is a moment in every homelab journey where you realise you have lost track of what is running. You SSH in, type docker ps, and stare at a wall of truncated container names, port mappings, and status fields that tell you technically everything and practically nothing. Which container is eating all the RAM? What
Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing Read More »
Every other project in this series runs on Docker. The reverse proxy, the monitoring, the DNS, the automation platform, the AI models — all of it. Docker is not one of the ten projects. It is project zero. The foundation that everything else sits on. I have Docker running across most of my estate right
Docker on Raspberry Pi 5: Your Foundation for Everything Else Read More »
The Commands That Actually Matter Docker has over 50 commands. You’ll use about 10 of them regularly. The rest are either for building images, managing swarm clusters, or edge cases you’ll look up once a year. This guide covers the 10 commands I run most frequently across six Docker hosts, with the flags I actually
10 Docker Commands Every Homelab Admin Should Know Read More »
Why Docker on a Raspberry Pi Makes Sense I have three Raspberry Pis running Docker in my homelab. One handles DNS and ad blocking, another runs monitoring and a dashboard, and the third runs Listmonk for newsletter management. They draw about 5 watts each, run silently, and cost less than a month of any cloud
How to Install Docker on Raspberry Pi (2026 Guide) Read More »
The Windows Minecraft Server: Start Here, Graduate Later Most people’s first server of any kind runs on Windows. That is not a criticism. If Windows is what you have, Windows is where you start. I ran my own first servers on Windows Server 2003, and the fundamentals are the same regardless of OS: install the
How to Set Up a Minecraft Server on Windows Read More »
A Minecraft Server That Costs 5 Watts One of the most common questions I see in homelab communities is whether a Raspberry Pi can run a Minecraft server. The honest answer: it depends on which Pi and how many players you expect. A Pi 4 can do it. A Pi 5 can do it properly.
How to Set Up a Minecraft Server on Raspberry Pi Read More »
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
How to Set Up a Minecraft Server on Ubuntu 24.04 Read More »
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, and add panels for metrics you will never actually look
How to Set Up Grafana and Prometheus for Homelab Monitoring Read More »
Why Proxmox Is the Homelab Standard I run Proxmox VE on a five-node cluster at home, plus a separate hosting cluster in the house. It is the foundation the rest of the lab sits on, and it has been rock solid in a way I did not expect from free software. From the homelab: I
How to Install Proxmox VE (Beginner’s Guide 2026) Read More »
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 for a static IP from my ISP. DuckDNS solved the problem in about
How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Read More »
