I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)
I would agree with this. While I run Plex and/or miniflux or as he put an OTS Nas, I also use it to provision Luns, or test things that I may consider for work.
Here are a few of the deployments that originated in my home lab but ended up in a prod environment at work
1. Replacing hardware load balancers with haproxy. (This started with a few options, including Nginx, and some others. But haproxy and it’s web management, csv monitoring gave me the best capability to integrate at work)
2. Vpn appliances for covid. I was able to whip up 2-4 scalable VPN appliances based on openvpn in “1/2 a day” at work because I was able to flesh out most of that at home.
3. Vulnerability scanners
4. HIDS security tools. In the end we went with a OTS vendor but options like ossec, wazuh etc were ruled out in a lab.
5. Ansible (over some of the other options)
6. Squid for reporting on the HIDS mentioned above.
There’s probably more. I know there is. And point blank a lot of this stuff had mock ups done at home because I have full control and am not subject to auditors etc when evaluating them. Whereas I do thst at work and I have to do more work writing up justification or change requests etc. it’s just easier at home.
All that said I try to keep the house as flat and plain Jane as I can.
