What's the best way to set up an extremely basic homelab in 2026?
🍵=> EMF@krans Excellent question for the #homelab @homelab community!
IMO:
- Set boundaries on what you are going to do with it, on a scale of: Personal-NAS -> family-ISP -> AV platform -> mini supercomputer system (eg: ML training).
- This will give an idea of scale: one machine or a rack of 'em?
- That determines software a bit, such as RAID array or cluster file system...
Family-ISP here: One Dell T20 tower server, soon to be replaced with a much smaller Beelink Me Pro NAS, NetBSD+services.
@phlash @krans @homelab this absolutely the start point - what do you want to achieve? Also I think there’s a question of how much reliability you need/want, which will be influenced by the first question - there’s a world of difference between a machine or two to tinker with stuff you’re interested in on and something you’re going to rely on.
@phlash @krans @homelab I’m the era of symmetric gigabit home internet connections I also question whether most people really want a *home*lab. I do have on site hardware for home automation and local data storage but the beefy server is rented from OVH because who wants the power draw and noise a proper server in their house?
@jon Initially, was thinking of setting up some extremely basic web facing service (like a couple of static HTML pages). I feel like even something like a Raspberry Pi should be overkill for that…
@krans @phlash @homelab as someone who was once responsible for several Raspberry Pis distributed around Europe, do yourself a favour and get a cheap thin terminal or mini PC off eBay instead if you want something you can hold onto, or rent a £5/month VM from somewhere.
Raspberry Pis are great if you need a Linux machine with GPIO to interface with the real world, otherwise they’re just woefully underpowered computers with flakey storage.