> I've never understood why fiddling with IT equipment in your home is considering a "home lab" since you aren't necessarily creating anything
To paraphrase the first item in the HN guidelines:
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."[0]
You can get to explore configurations and scenarios you might never be able to do at work. But it's not about work, it's about scratching an itch.
> The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices
If you know where to look you can pick up enterprisey kit cheap. It may not be the latest and greatest, but it's probably good enough to play with.
Just because you don't understand the attraction of this pastime (or any pastime) you don't get to judge or complain about folks who enjoy tinkering.
Once upon a time I built out a home lab to run a piece of software called Zebra to learn about BGP4 and CIDR. It was about scratching an itch. If energy prices in the UK weren't so utterly bonkers at the moment then I'd love to build out a new lab to mess about with some stuff. Again, to scratch a curiosity itch.
To paraphrase the first item in the HN guidelines:
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."[0]
You can get to explore configurations and scenarios you might never be able to do at work. But it's not about work, it's about scratching an itch.
> The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices
If you know where to look you can pick up enterprisey kit cheap. It may not be the latest and greatest, but it's probably good enough to play with.
Just because you don't understand the attraction of this pastime (or any pastime) you don't get to judge or complain about folks who enjoy tinkering.
Once upon a time I built out a home lab to run a piece of software called Zebra to learn about BGP4 and CIDR. It was about scratching an itch. If energy prices in the UK weren't so utterly bonkers at the moment then I'd love to build out a new lab to mess about with some stuff. Again, to scratch a curiosity itch.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html