I am not a professional red teamer or security researcher, but my background is in systems engineering and DevOps, so I spend a lot of time working with Linux, networking, firewalls, virtualization, and infrastructure security. I already knew the obvious security rules.

I spent nearly six years running a dual-socket decade-old Xeon server as my primary NAS. Recently, I moved to an off-the-shelf Ugreen NAS and started comparing the two. The thing is, they really can't be compared, and I realized I've spent way more money on that old Lenovo than I originally thought.

If you've been on the fence with whether to buy a NAS (network-attached storage) or not—let me show you a different way. ORICO's latest 9948RC3 PRO DAS (direct-attached storage) system offers great transfer speeds, RAID, and more, all without a pesky network connection or custom operating system to deal with, and I actually really enjoyed using it.

When was the last time you thought about the devices that run your home network? You might have some devices that are officially too old to be using in 2025.

Buying used enterprise storage is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you look at the price and becomes more complicated once you actually put the hardware into a machine. Enterprise HDDs that originally cost a small fortune can appear on the used market for surprisingly little money. For a homelab, where storage capacity is always useful and budgets are rarely unlimited, it is difficult to ignore those prices.

So, you're wanting to get started with Ubiquiti's UniFi networking gear, huh? I love my UniFi setup, but I definitely made some mistakes. Here are the four biggest mistakes I see people make all the time in the UniFi community, and how you can avoid them.

Wi-Fi 7 routers and network cards are finally becoming affordable and commonplace, but if you're a homelabber or someone who just enjoys any sort of self-hosting, you probably haven't had a pressing reason to upgrade to this latest standard.

As we march toward fall, it's time to start thinking about tidying up the homelab and making it a bit safer and more secure. Today's projects include two programs that help keep an eye on your homelab for you, and one that makes your information way more accessible.

What's the easiest and cheapest way to build your own budget homelab? Arguably, a used Windows 10 PC is a safe bet (most of the time). But the reality is that mini PCs are slowly taking over this segment, and it's true that they have a lot of attributes that make them easy to recommend for that type of job.

If you have a multi-gig NAS, one of the most obvious (and yet, somehow, still easy to miss) network bottlenecks is plugging it into a gigabit network. So, naturally, you look at your router, hunt down the 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps Ethernet port, and go for the fastest option available on your hardware. Makes sense.

Do you have a Raspberry Pi that isn't being used to its fullest? Well, this weekend, I have three projects for you to check out from homelab infrastructure to automatically feeding your pets when you're on vacation.

In my search for a media center front-end, Home Assistant server, media server, and do-everything-else computer, I briefly considered buying a Raspberry Pi. Then I caught wind of the used Mac mini market, and it was clear which direction made more sense.

If you're not happy with your internet connection around the house, your ISP and Wi-Fi router are probably the first things you'll blame. But before you pay for a faster internet plan or a new router, there's a much cheaper solution you should try first: a simple unmanaged switch. Allow me to explain.

Proxmox is remarkably forgiving when you use it the way it was designed to be used. With it, you can have a functioning homelab in an afternoon, but that ease and simplicity can also encourage a lot of mistakes.

A NAS is one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to keep your data backed up. It’s also fairly reliable, but while HDDs and SSDs can last for years, they will fail eventually. When they do, you could lose everything stored on them, so here are some cheap ways to back up your NAS before that happens.

I love my Bambu Lab printers, but I got tired of the software lock-in and decided to see how well I could recreate it with community tools. I was actually able to get remote monitoring and notifications working fairly well without a ton of work, and here's how I did it.

Plex is best known as the streaming platform that lets you host your own video content and then stream it to devices on your local network. However, Plex has so much more to it, and chances are there's at least one of these five features you weren't aware of.

I’ve been running a Plex server for a long time, which means I’ve made my fair share of amateur mistakes. Storage is probably one of the biggest things plaguing my Plex server, and I have definitely made all three of these mistakes at least once (if not multiple times).

Whether your homelab consists of an ISP-provided router and a mini PC or a whole rack that takes up the corner of your spare room, it could always benefit from a few considered upgrades.