http://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab.jpg
I picked up an old Thinkpad as-is, mostly working but with bum keys - most likely the victim of a liquid spill. Put my biggest SATA drive in it, scrounged another memory stick from the BBS (it's running 32-bit Windows and couldn't even see the added RAM)
I loaded Proxmox on it, loaded a couple of VMs on it, and it's running nicely. Did a little poking around and replaced the self-signed cert with a LetsEncrypt cert, using a domain name I keep around for testing. I've got a USB ethernet cable as a secondary NIC and an external DVD-R I've had laying around for years.
The router on top of it is running DD-WRT, it's sharing a USB 3.0 2TB drive as a CIFS share. With a little work, I can get it to work as an NFS server, so it'll serve the guest VMs via NFS and backup my desktop via CIFS. The router is already doing DNS, DHCP, and NAT, I'm going to play with QoS and then get onto my next project, getting OpenVPN working on the router to selected IPs. I want to be able to route to locast via whatever VPN endpoint I choose and sent the rest out the usual way.
I've been interested in setting up Docker, it might be a good excuse to set up an ad-blocking DNS server in a container.
This'll keep me busy for a while.
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