Home Lab
This project is a self-designed home lab centered on self hosted accessible cloud storage, data integrity, and experimentation where I deepened my understanding of server architecture, virtualization, and scalable infrastructure. It reflects long-term ownership of a continuously evolving technical system rather than a one-off build.
Project Type
Personal Project
Date
Aug. 2024 - Jan. 2026
Progress
Completed
At the core of this home lab is a primary Synology-based server located in Pennsylvania, configured with two 7 TB drives in RAID 1 to provide 7 TB of fault-tolerant, remotely accessible storage. Functionally, this system operates as a personal cloud, enabling secure file access from any location while maintaining direct control over hardware, data, and configuration. Rather than pursuing a fully custom-built solution, I intentionally selected a commercial platform for the primary server to prioritize reliability, mature firmware support, and predictable performance characteristics. The result is a robust baseline infrastructure that supports both personal use and continued technical experimentation.
To meet formal data reliability standards, I designed and implemented a geographically separated backup system in Virginia to satisfy the 3-2-1 data redundancy rule: three copies of data, across two media types, with one copy stored offsite. This secondary server operates as a TrueNAS instance hosted within a Linux virtual machine, allowing controlled experimentation with storage management, virtualization, and networking without jeopardizing primary data integrity. The Linux host also runs Docker containers, including OpenWebUI secured behind Cloudflare, which I use to test and evaluate local large language models such as LLaMA 3 and Mistral. Built largely from repurposed hardware, this system demonstrates deliberate resource reuse while still delivering substantial computational capability. Rather than serving solely as a passive backup, the machine is architected as a multipurpose platform for infrastructure testing, software deployment, and applied systems learning.
