Homelab 101/Homelab Fundamentals
Have you ever seen the posts on TikTok or Reddit about homelabs? When you have some servers or even just networking in your house and maybe have a test lab for those devices?
Congrats! You have a homelab!
Lots of people will say, to have a homelab, you must have like 10 enterprise servers running like jets all the time. When that actually isn't true, infact that's more like r/HomeDataCenter, anyway...
You don't actually need 10 enterprise servers to run a homelab, infact any ol' computer will do! All you really need is a computer ideally newer than 2011 and has ideally more than 4GB of RAM but will still work.
There are many things you can do in a homelab, but one of my favorites is defintely a media server such as Jellyfin or Plex!
To get started with a media server, you need a computer that has ideally less than 13 years of age, it doesn't even have to be a desktop, laptops work fine! As long as it has enough storage for the media you are going to have on it.
You also need an OS, now as far as I believe, Windows works fine but if you want the best experience (in my opinion), you should use a linux distro such as Debian or Ubuntu, if you have a good enough computer (or more than one computer), you may want to look into Proxmox which is a hypervisor (computer inside a computer basically) and it can have clusters/nodes and run stuff like containers so you don't have to have everything on the same machine (technically)
Now I'm not going to get that deep into installing anything on this blog, but if you want to know how, I recommend visiting the Jellyfin docs as they have great instructions or a YouTube video on homelabbing as that may talior more to your needs, also Hardware Haven has lots of cool videos on the topic in general.
Personally when I first started my homelab, I had a HP Chromebook modded with Coreboot Firmware to run Linux and Windows on it. It ended up being a Home Assistant server for it's time (RIP Old HP Chromebook), and now I have multiple old computers in a Proxmox Cluster with 40GB of RAM total, now compared to some people it's not alot, but it's also totally fine for my needs, and that's the whole thing. You don't need 10 enterprise grade servers if you are just hosting Jellyfin and a Photo backup server. Or maybe you do....
