homelab on a budget
turns out a lot of my coworkers homelab. found this out through a random conversation at work. a couple of hilariously intense examples: our boss (yes, the associate director) has an entire server rack he's trying to sell because he's upgrading, and another coworker has a server, gnss, and lidar on his crosstrek (note: it's a hobby project he's doing for fun. not work related). we got to talking about who else does this kind of thing, and it was way more people than i expected. i just didn't have a way in yet.
then the coworker who put lidar and gnss on his crosstrek handed me a cisco asa 5512-x like it was nothing. i grabbed a compatible 2.5" sata ssd for it and figured that'd be the extent of it.
from there something clicked, probably one of those 2am late night highs, and i went all in.
turns out you don't need much to start. a raspberry pi is plenty. i dug through my old box of microcontrollers, sensors, and other embedded systems junk and found my old pi 3b, a 16gb microsd card, and some leftover fiber optic cable just sitting there. jack pot!
that pi became the first real piece of the homelab, running pihole (i'm fed up with ads) and wireguard so i could vpn in from anywhere once everything else came online. pihole won't touch youtube ads though, brave handles those instead.
unrelated hypothesis: the best privacy move might not be hiding but to be so unbelievably boring that nobody bothers digging past page one. wireguard tunnel's just a bonus, really. or so i can work on projects from my personal laptop when im on business/test trips.
for compute, i pulled my old toshiba laptop out of the closet and turned it into my proxmox box / lab manager. not sure it's the wisest long-term call, but it's what i had lying around. well... now that i have all this i should probably figure out how to put the cisco asa 5512-x to use instead of letting it sit there without a rack. i'll probably improvise a rack by buying stuff from ikea. once that's sorted i'll basically have a full stack, minus a nas and a proper workstation. those are getting bought gradually, because i'm a new grad and my bank account would like a word... or who knows maybe i'll buy the server that my boss is selling.