A small living-room homelab for testing backups and breakage
This small homelab is built for testing s, changing settings, trying different designs, and safely breaking things. The setup has three PVE nodes on small-form-factor PCs or mini PCs, one TrueNAS machine, Mikrotik gear, a cheap managed 2.5Gb switch from AliExpress, a managed 1Gb TP-Link switch, and a simple switch for the PVE cluster link. All of the hardware sits in a self-built cabinet with cooling, placed under the TV in the living room.
The main goal is not to run many public or home services, but to give a backup engineer a private place to test backup products, setups, s, and new versions. Using work equipment would mean asking for resources, waiting for network changes, and dealing with missing . In this home setup, anything can be changed freely, and even breaking the whole cluster is acceptable.
Most of the hardware is used or cheap, but it meets the need. It is also quiet and does not take much room, which was an important requirement.
Key points
- The homelab uses three small PC or mini PC PVE nodes.
- It also includes TrueNAS, Mikrotik gear, a 2.5Gb , a 1Gb , and a simple cluster-link switch.
- The hardware is kept in a cooled DIY cabinet under a living-room TV.
- The main use is testing s, s, s, and new versions.
- Used and cheap hardware is enough because the setup is quiet, compact, and fits the job.