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.

Homelab Guides 2026 | Build Enterprise Skills on Any Budget

Homelab Guides 2026 | Build Enterprise Skills on Any Budget

Build Real Infrastructure. Land Real Jobs. Every DevOps job posting asks for “production experience.” But how do you get production experience without a production job? The homelab. From the homelab: Everything in this series comes from my own infrastructure. I run a Proxmox cluster, a Pi rack, and 30+ self-hosted services. Each guide is something

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IP Addressing Explained: Public vs Private, Subnetting & Interview Questions

IP Addressing Explained: Public vs Private, Subnetting & Interview Questions

Built for people who are learning networking the real way: by breaking stuff, fixing it, and doing it again. From the field: I have seen engineers push a full /16 network for a single web service because it was the default in the Azure template they cloned. Understanding IP addressing is not optional — it

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Why Your Homelab Makes You a Better Cloud Architect

Published on 25 February 2026 | Homelab / Career | 10 min read The Question That Started This I’ve been interviewing infrastructure engineers on and off for the best part of a decade. Mostly Azure and AWS roles – cloud architects, platform engineers, DevOps leads. The kind of people who should know how the internet

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An open hard drive is displayed on a wooden surface, showcasing its internal components and metallic details.

Linux Disk Space: How to Find What’s Eating Your Storage (df, du, lsblk)

The Outage Nobody Saw Coming Disk full. Two words that have caused more production outages than most people realize. Applications crash, databases corrupt, logs stop writing—all because nobody was watching disk usage. Disk management isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential. Knowing how to check space, find what’s consuming it, and manage storage is fundamental sysadmin work.

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How to Build Your First Homelab in 2026 (The RAM Crisis Edition)

How to Build Your First Homelab in 2026 (The RAM Crisis Edition) TL;DR: Yes, RAM prices have gone mental. No, that doesn’t mean you can’t start a homelab. This guide covers how to build a career-advancing lab in 2026 using free cloud resources, budget hardware, local AI, and workflow automation—all while navigating the worst memory

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grep, sed & awk: Linux Text Processing for Sysadmins

The Power Trio of Text Processing Logs, configs, and data outputs are all text. The ability to search, filter, and transform text efficiently separates those who manually copy-paste from those who process gigabytes of logs in seconds. grep finds. sed replaces. awk structures. Together, they’re an analytical powerhouse that’s been solving problems since before most

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