I wanted to share the evolution of my homelab over the last 4 years. From a meager setup in my apartment to a full fledged setup at my house. This is the story.

My first setup:

In 2022 I had multiple routers, all flashed with some version of DD-WRT, different subnets, I couldn’t find a picture of the computers I was using. I had a Lenovo K450e with a dual NIC card and an old HP Pavillion 15″ laptop. I ran various flavors of linux in virtual box. I was working as a junior system admin at a small company and around this time I learned about pfSense. I had known about another linux based firewall/router called smoothwall and of course IP tables, but I prefered the ease of a router with a pre-baked interface. Not pictured are the Linksys Velop gen 1 mesh routers that ran the rest of the house.

Shortly after this I purchased my first house. Along with all the issues of buying an older fix-er-upper I was in school and working. My homelab took a back seat. I set up my first pfSense box along with a TrueNAS home NAS. PfSense was run on a homebuilt PC, Intel i5 4400 with 8gb ram. TrueNAS was setup on my repurposed Lenovo K450e with an i5 4690, 32gb ram, and 2 mirrored Segate Ironwolf 4tb drives. I had a virtual machine running on the TrueNAS box and I started playing around with Zabbix and Uptime Kuma. I never had time to really dive in a get those two services up and running. For the infrastructure I ran a Dell Power Connect 2724 Gigabit switch, APC 1500va UPS, Tripp-Lite PDU, a Lorex Wireless Surveillance system, and a custom rack I bought off Craigslist. WIFI consisted of the Linksys Velop Mesh brought over from the apartment. We had a lot of power outages the first year at the house and the Dell switch just couldn’t handle it and died. I put a “temporary” TP-Link 5 port Gigabit switch I had in my work bag as an on-site backup for testing. That switch ended up being in service for 3 years.

The new house had an office, so I set up a test bed with what little time I had. Intel i5, 32gb Ram, Nvidia GPU as my main school computer. Ran Adobe suite just fine. A Dell T3500 workstation with an Intel Xeon processor and some amount of ram became my virtualization test bed. I had XCP-NG loaded on this box at the time. There were 3 Watchguard Fireboxes a work colleague lent me to try and flash pfSense onto, however these were either first or second generation units with only 32bit CPUs. Modern versions of pfSense being 64bit could not be installed. They sat there for awhile after a few weeks of digging through the internet to find a workaround, but the hardware was just too old. All those boxes ended up as e-waste. This setup lasted until mid 2024.

As time went on and the Wifi setup just couldn’t keep up with work/school from home, gaming, and streaming. The Linksys velop routers that did fine in a 1000sq ft apartment struggled in the 1400 sq ft house. Coupled with solid metal ducting, copper piping, a unique floorplan, and stucco exterior walls meant that wifi signals attenuated significantly. I tried for months and months to get a stable mesh, coupling the 3 Linksys nodes with a variety of Netgear wifi-repeaters and repurposing the DD-WRT routers to function as repeaters all through the house. I achieved some success with this method, but administering all the mismatched gear and contending with constant power outages due to our location became too much. In the end there were bottlenecks and slowdowns and a constant dead area in the house that made me decide to go pro. It was time for enterprise grade access points and a streamlined network closet. Time for research!

This version took some time to get together. I slowly researched and perused ebay. I gathered all the things together and put this together over the course of a couple of weeks. The first upgrade was the cable modem. We originally had a Netgear CM500. It ran hot and was always in need of a reboot. After a few power outages it became more unstable and needed almost daily restarts to get any kind of connection. I found a Netgear CM1200 at a thrift store and got our service switched over to that unit. The CM1200 ran hot as well and became somewhat unstable in the closet due to reduced airflow and my need for it to be horizontal. I believe these were designed to radiate heat upward like a smoke stack and not lay sideways. An AC infinity USB fan underneath the modem solved the heat related instability issues. The switch was upgraded from the unmanaged TP Link 5 port to a managed TP-Link TL-SG105E which had VLAN, QoS, and Link-Aggregation (not really). Another APC1500VA UPS rounded out the additions. I picked up an old Dell Optiplex 5080 with an i7 from a local computer store for $40 to run pfSense on and save space. I didn’t have the budget at the time to go to an embedded unit or a 1/2u server. These are stout units even for their age. I swapped the i7 to the i5 cpu used in the initial pfSense box to save on electricity. The computer had 8gb ram and an SSD swap. For more space savings I picked up a Rackspace 2u chassis on Prime Day to move the TrueNAS server into. I setup NUT on both the pfSense and TrueNAS computers for graceful shutdown due to our constant power outages. Wifi was provided by 2 Ruckus r610s powered by Trend-Net PoE injectors. The Ruckus APs are running Unleashed firmware. I ran the Cat 5e throught the attic to the living room and hall where the APs were located.

I had a few wifi lights I had received as a Christmas present years ago. A work acquaintance had showed me his home automation setup using Home Assistant earlier that year. I chose to setup a Home Assistant instance on the TrueNAS server. It was a bit of a challenge since TrueNAS core didn’t allow for Virtual Machine import at the time and there was limited use case of this setup. I couldn’t find a reasonably priced Rasberry Pi kit at the time and I didn’t want a whole other computer just to run HA OS, so lots of digging turned up someone on the HA forums that had figured out how to install HA OS via command line. I believe this is the guide. Since TrueNAS core is deprecated it’s a moot point, but good for posterity to know.

The above setup was in service with no issues until November of 2025. I received an older Synology ds3018xs NAS in trade and found a used TrendNet TC-P16C6 patch panel at a used parts store. As an early Christmas present to myself I picked up a Sophos XG 125 with rack ears on eBay for $75 shipped. I transferred all the data from TrueNAS to the Synology, flashed the XG 125 with pfSense and did some cable maintenance. Home Assistant was migrated to the easily downloaded HA OS vm. I purchased a number of LightingInside wifi Tuya compatible LED lights as well. I setup multiple SSIDs on the APs and setup VLANs. An issue arose with the way the TP-Link TL-SG105E handled VLAN tagging in concert with the Ruckus APs. I was only able to get 2 VLANs to work reliably. I suspected my firewall rules were to blame, but all research and troubleshooting left me with no answers. This left my IoT network unsegmented. This is when I found out about Tuya devices phoning home. That is for another post.

The current iteration of the homelab replaces the TP-Link switch with a Cisco C2900XR-24PD-i. It features 24 Gigabit ports, 190w PoE budget, and 2 SFP+ ports. I chose this model specifically for CCNA prep as well as having the 2 SFP+ ports. I have a detached garage that will need an uplink eventually so the 10gb availability was a must. Picked it up on eBay for just over $100 shipped. After installing the switch and configuring the VLANs, I no longer was limited to 2 tagged VLANs. My network is now segmented with a management VLAN, Guest VLAN, and IoT VLAN. Some reviews of the Cisco XR series reported it as loud during operation, however right now with no PoE it is whisper quiet.