My Home Lab Addiction

I started building my home lab four years ago with an HP 210 Desktop PC. It was over 5 years old at the time and was barely running Windows anymore, so I converted it to TrueNAS Scale and began the journey down the rabbit hole of home labbing.

Since then I have spent more money than I would like to admit and definitely enough that some people would look at me like I am crazy. I don't have a world class home lab though. About have of my lab was purchased used and the other half I made payment in order to afford it. There were some pieces that I made an impulsive decision to buy which is why I have begun to refer to my home lab as an addiction.

The money doesn't really compare to the amount of time that I have invested in it though. I have spent countless days building, troubleshooting, and breaking so many different platforms. There are so many applications that seemed easy to deploy when reading the documentation, but then turned out to be anything but easy. In the first year, I took down my network so many times that my kids still blame me during an outage.

I would not trade it for anything though. Even if I never get my dream job, it will have been worth every frustration and penny. I had kids at a young age, 19, and for so long I was only focused on them. I got a job that paid the bills, but it was not a career and I was never truly happy there. There was only so much that I could learn and then it was just the same thing day after day. That is how I know that information technology and cyber security is where I belong. The amount of knowledge there is to gain is a bottom-less pit. I could keep learning for several lifetimes and it would never get stale.

I have been trying to get a job in cyber security for a few years now and some days I wonder if I ever will. That was my only goal at first, but as I invest more time and money into it, I realized that doesn't matter as much as the knowledge I gain. I don't need a hiring manager to validate my knowledge. I just need to continue to show up day after day to learn and grow.

I haven't posted any pictures of my lab before because it is not perfect yet. I don't have a fancy server rack or even a server rack. My cable management looks like I just cram cables everywhere, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that I build, learn, teardown, and start the process over again.