Raspberry Pis, mini PCs, Proxmox, VLANs, UPS units and racks: building and watching a network at home.
Raspberry Pi, N100 mini PC or a used office desktop: pick your first always-on box by RAM, storage, idle watts, noise, network ports and software support.
Continue reading A home lab server: choosing the first box (Pi, mini PC or a used workstation) ›
The green dot says the AP is on. It does not say why the back bedroom drops calls at nine. A checklist from the cable up to the client.
Continue reading Monitoring Wi-Fi access points: what the controller page does not tell you ›
Count the powered ports, budget by class at the switch port, insist on SNMP if you graph things and keep it fanless. A home lab PoE switch, worked through.
Continue reading Choosing a PoE switch for a home lab: ports, power budget and SNMP ›
Measure the load, check it against both the watt and VA ratings, read runtime off the maker's chart, and know when pure sine matters. A worked example included.
Continue reading How to size a UPS for a home lab: VA, watts and runtime ›
A UGREEN NAS gives a home lab more CPU, RAM and M.2 slots. A Synology NAS gives it DSM, SNMP and mature backups. How to choose, and how to watch either one.
Continue reading UGREEN NAS vs Synology for a home lab: more hardware or better software ›
VLANs, mirroring, LACP and SNMP: what a managed switch adds to a home lab, why many budget models cannot be polled, and how to pick ports, PoE and cooling.
Continue reading How to choose a managed switch for a home lab ›
Network UPS Tools from the USB cable to a tested shutdown: drivers, upsd, upsmon, what upsc tells you, and which box should go down last.
Continue reading UPS monitoring with NUT: clean shutdowns for a home rack ›
A five-VLAN plan for a house: what goes where, which switch ports carry tags, the firewall rules between networks and how to keep casting working.
Continue reading VLANs at home: separating IoT, guests and servers ›
A Raspberry Pi, a USB SSD and two days: the home-lab monitoring box I would build again, from SNMP on the router to power and cooling.
Continue reading Monitoring a home lab from a Raspberry Pi: a weekend build ›
