ANYTHING there are no ‘must(s)’ not including security.
Security Tips to Get Started
- Don’t pirate software.
- Always have your Admin Account seperate from your daily driver account.
- Use time based multi-factor on critical accounts like e-mail.
- Use a password manager and have unique passwords for everything.
- Use passphrases when able. Example: 1DeerCloudSubmarine91* XKCD Password Generator.
( you can see [here](NSA Home Network Security Recommendations) for some other baseline recommendations)
your homelab is a playground to try new things. you may eventually find yourself with enough equipment to call it a home datacentre, but you do NOT need to start there.
your homelab could be a Lenovo T450 with 4 CPU Cores 8gb Ram and 128GB of Storage. theres lots of old hardware that may not be capable of running a modern desktop experience (think Windows 11 Bloat)
but can be perfectly capable little machines for any number of tasks.
Show Lenovo M700 tiny i5-7500t 24gb ram 256gb ssd
| A laptop capable of building a small lab of 2-3 Virtual Machines. Something like an i7, 16 Gigs or RAM and 500 Gigs storage. | |
| Best | The sky is the limit. Something capable of cracking passwords decently (read a mid tier GPU), i9, 32 Gigs, and 1 TB storage. |
show old fuck off tower that is my DVD Ripping Machine.
Avoid Directly Exposing Ports, Ideally Use a VPN. if you must, implementing a DMZ (De-militarized Zone) Reverse Proxy, Cloudflare Tunnel, etc. Use VPN Wireguard/OpenVPN or Pangolin (Newt Tunnel)