Budget Student Homelab
My Homelab as a poor Uni student. Moved out of the drawer and onto a shelf now.
Details are:
Router/Firewall: Unifi Dream Machine, inherited from parents when they moved (going to see this a lot)
Switch: Unifi USW-Lite-16-POE, one of the few parts I bought, could get away with a 8 port but a bit of future proofing here.
NAS: Mac mini (inherited) with a 4 bay DAS with 2*8TB hard drives and a 2TB hard drive. Used for storage and timemachine backup of laptop. Will later be used as a offsite backup of parents similar setup and they will have mine.
Server: Generic server with i7 6700 (inherited from Fathers business, previous CI server). Running proxmox with 4vms. vm1 Webserver, hosting a couple websites I've made. vm2 linux sandbox, just a linux machine with a bit of automation and I can play around with. vm3 pihole, will get to soon. vm4 Uni server, hosting a server for a Uni class for the two semesters until we finish.
DNS: 3x pihole servers, first is a raspi4 i needed for uni ages ago and this is a good use for it now, second is the vm, and third is an original raspi I inherited. the first and second piholes are synced with gravity sync and the third clones the first with gravity sync. I know having 3 is overkill for a home-lab but my partner is not very tech savy but when she saw what it does she told me not to turn them off, now stuck in a situation where we have to have them but they can never go down.
Access Points: I have most of my SSIDs coming from an Unifi Ap Lite on my window, this allows me to access my home network from the courtyard of my apartment complex but a few SSIDs are transmitted from the UDM, mainly cameras (just so I can see what my cats up to) and DMZ or IOT network
I also share my internet connection with my neighor, don't know whether this is allowed in my complex or not but we haven't been caught yet, and he has a none managed switch and ap in his apartment, on a seperate Vlan obviously. This was just cheaper as a 100Mb connection is $90 per month while a 50Mb is $75 so we split the 100Mb (slow Australian internet speeds).
Have VDSL2 connection hence the modem in bridge mode and a UPS for bit of power backup, set to turn off mac mini which is highest power draw due to hard drives. Its writing about a 1TB of data atm which is why power usage is so high, generally around 70w.
I'm splicing my own cables to neaten cable management just haven't gotten to them all yet.
Any suggestions for improvements are more than welcome, I'm still new to this.
