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.
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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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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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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The UK, US, Australia, EU and Canada all publish cybersecurity frameworks with the same five controls. If you run a homelab, you already practise all five – not because you studied a framework, but because things break if you don’t.
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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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Published on 25 February 2026 | Homelab / Self-Hosting | 12 min read Right, so you’ve got Docker running on a spare PC or a Raspberry Pi. Maybe you followed a YouTube tutorial, maybe you just winged it. Either way – now what? I’ve been running a homelab for a few years now, and honestly,
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