Homelab explainers

Everything else on this site assumes you already know what a hypervisor is. These pages don’t.

A homelab is a small set of computers you run yourself, at home. It hosts the software you’d otherwise rent from someone else: photo storage, dashboards, a password manager, a media library, monitoring for your own network. People build them for three reasons that usually arrive in this order: curiosity, then cost, then control. Curiosity gets you the first machine. Cost keeps you going when you notice how many monthly subscriptions one box replaces. Control is the one that lasts. Your data stays on hardware you can hold in your hand. Nothing gets discontinued because a company changed direction. The tradeoff is real and worth saying plainly: you become the operations team. When it breaks at 2 AM, nobody else is paged. Most of what’s described in these pages exists to make that happen less often, and to make it recoverable when it does.

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Start here

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The shape of it

Four layers, each depending on the one below. Most homelab problems are a layer confusion: a networking problem being debugged as an app problem, or vice versa. Physical machines are the actual computers. The hypervisor is the software that divides each one into isolated slices. Guests are those slices, each behaving like its own computer. Applications are what you actually wanted: the photo library, the dashboard.

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Where to go next