Evan Gargiulo

Sourcing Used Parts

I realize I talk a lot in this blog about getting things used to save money since this is an expensive endeavor at times. I also realize someone new to the space would have no idea how to do that. In this post, I want to give people an idea

Getting Started

Christian Lempa from The Digital Life just released a great video covering many topics from this blog and I wanted readers to be aware of it. In the video, he covers hardware, software, and networking, and his advice is spot-on for new people in the homelab space. If you are

Remote Control

While it is true that many of us spend almost an eternity at our desks, occasionally we do leave the house for short periods of time. During those times, Murphy’s Law can sometimes strike, and we need to make changes to our set-ups. Unfortunately, most home lab software is

Updated Setup

I have posted before about the rack setup I deploy. I have recently made a change to incorporate Proxmox into the rack and want to give you all an update. New Machines, Old Tricks I just did a post on Proxmox and why I am running it instead of Ubuntu

Proxmox

Most people have heard of this type-1 hypervisor, Proxmox. In case you haven’t, its basically a GUI wrapper for Debian which manages containers and VMs. I have always avoided Proxmox because I don’t like VMs (I think they are dated to the point where they are useless in

Who needs 10 gigabit?

at some point in your home lab career, you will see posts of people doing things like fiber in their home, or upgrading their infrastructure to do much faster LAN speeds than whatever comes on their motherboard. it may seem crazy that anyone would need that kind of speed in

Breaking the Rules

I am an unabashedly big fan of Jeff over at Craft Computing. His last video is so good I want to share it here because my summary isn’t going to do it justice. Basically it goes like this: there are a ton of “rules” as what qualifies for a

Small First Server

I just did a post on what I am using now, but I thought it also would be a good idea to talk about what I would use if I had to start from nothing today. it doesnt do a lot of good to make a post on what I

What I Use

despite many posts on this site talking about what you could build, some people want to know what I have. this is what i am working with right now, some of which I would change. I will note that below. Top Server PiecePartLinkCaseI cant find it anymoremine is either an

Building Your Own

I realize so much of my advice is geared towards building an home server, without actually telling you how to do that. problem solved. the best way to learn to do this is to watch youtube videos on it. so here one is: this above videos is wayyyy more comprehensive

YouTube Channels

what blog wouldnt be complete without a list of good youtube channels? i should also preface this by saying so much of the content you read about here originated, at times, from videos on these channels. so thank you to the content creators whose work i plagiarize for the betterment

Remote Monitoring

when running home servers, very early on you may find that things go wrong for unknown reasons. the way you find out something went wrong is when you try to access your server/service. thats the worst time to find out this information because thats exactly when you need to

Webmin + Portainer: Basic tools of the trade

when setting up a basic server like ubuntu on an older machine, these two pieces of software are almost life-saving in their simplicity and power. anytime i set up a headless type-1 hypervisor like ubuntu server, debian server, or fedora server, these are literally the first two things i install.

General Parts Advice

for those who have decided to DIY, the sheer volume of parts at your disposal can be overwhelming. looking at new parts alone, amazon can inundate you with options, and for those considering used parts (which you should be), ebay is apparently endless. these are some things to consider when

I ran out of SATA ports!

This is bound to happen to the best of us. we all think, “I went with the 6-port full size ATX motherboard and I’ll never use all of those!” Next thing you know, somehow, you can easily justify why all of those drives are necessary and there is no

Why VPNs?

a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a great way to achieve server access from outside your home, but in a more private way. my last post was about server access through cloudflare tunnels, which is awesome, but sometimes your use case may not call for that. for example, a CF

Accessing Your Server Outside Your Home

its easy enough to get things going and access your services from inside your house, on your own LAN, using basic private IP ranges like 192.168.X.X or 10.X.X.X. once your OS is up and running and you begin installing some apps, usually the first

Buy or Build?

while servers may seem scary, they are really just purpose built desktops with slightly different hardware. as such, the case for building entry level home servers is much stronger than buying enterprise hardware for your first foray into the server world. i always advocate for first time users to build,

Operating Systems

“what OS should i choose?” seems to be one of the top frequently asked questions. rightly so – this decision will shape how you interact with your server and what direction your home server journey takes. Hypervisors to get the terminology correct, what we are talking about is either a type-1

Take me to your leader

i knew over a year ago i wanted a server. i was doing things with my computer that were way harder than they should have been because i was going about it in the wrong way. i was good with computers, but mainly Windows, and i already knew linux was

Hard Drive Size Guide

the short answer to “how big should my hard drives be?” is “as big as you can afford.” while the longer answer is, “it depends,” the shorter answer really does stand the test of time well. File Systems the file system you use actually impacts what size drives you should

RAID Arrays

In the server world, we use RAID. RAID stands for “redundant array of independent disks” and is a fancy way of saying “I have a bunch of hard drives connected together.” The purpose for RAID is to safely store data. A long time ago, we used to use hardware RAID.

Let's Talk About Storage

storage is arguably the most important decision you will make regarding a server. the base function of many servers is as a networked attached storage (NAS) device, which is a fancy way of saying: a place to keep all your stuff. think of it as a digital storage unit for

What size motherboard?

there is a constant pull for the desire to built this small, silent networked attached storage (NAS) or server that absolutely disappears in a closet or under a desk. while those are amazing, for people who have never had a server before or know they are eternal tinkerers, i would

Tower or Rackmount?

to deploy a home server environment, before we consider even the basics of the hardware we are going to buy, we must first ask ourselves the question, “where am i going to put it?” this is what separates us from the animals. having done homelab environments with both rackmount equipment