For many in the networking and observability space, a home lab is more than just a hobby. It’s a sandbox for innovation, a fortress for data privacy, and a proving ground for new technologies.
Whether you are looking to host a private game server, secure your IoT devices, or test in a safe environment, the path to a high-functioning home lab is paved with intentional choices. ElastiFlow’s Madison Grubb, Senior SRE, and Brad Collins, Senior Sales Engineer, recently took a deep dive into their personal setups in our podcast, Signal > Noise.
Why Build a Home Lab?
While every lab starts with a spark of curiosity, the underlying goals often fall into two categories: personal utility and professional research.
Personal Utility: Madison’s original goal was data ownership, focused on offline storage, backups, and media, rather than relying on third-party providers. Today, Madison also uses his home lab for code projects and game server hosting.
Professional Research: Brad’s built out his homelab with a goal of flow visibility to take a closer look at his network traffic for research and to use as part of his demos.
The Minimum Viable Home Lab
Getting started with a home lab might not be as daunting as you think. You can build a functional lab with equipment you might already have lying around. As you might expect, a SRE and a Sales Engineer have different approaches. One thing they do agree on: a free trial of ElastiFlow for network observability.
Hardware:
Madison (SRE): A router and an old laptop with at least 256GB of disk space can serve as a solid foundation. Even better, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) with ZimaOS, CasaOS, TrueNAS, or Unraid.
Brad (Sales Engineer): As a self-procaimed “add to cart” guy, Ubiquiti Dream router 7, Unify Pro AP 7, Unify 2.5GB switch.
Software:
Madison (SRE): OpenWRT or OPNsense, Ubuntu or another linux flavor, K3s
Brad (Sales Engineer): Proxmox, Favorite flavor of Linux, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and ElastiFlow - there’s so much you can do with the basic license.
What the Traffic Reveals
The real fun begins when you start monitoring your traffic. The most compelling reason to monitor your home lab is to discover what your devices are doing behind your back.
Madison (SRE): “My doorbell, which I thought was local-only, was in fact not local-only! I was able to see it sending motion events to an S3 bucket and promptly blocked it on my router from reaching the WAN.”
Brad (Sales Engineer): “Data is power! The majority of my traffic is boring everyday stuff like social media, streaming services, etc, but I’ve found some crazy outliers. My 3D printers and lightbulbs that talk to things all over the world. These chatty devices are a prime example of why visibility is power. If you can't see the traffic, you can't secure it."
Our Home Lab Toolkit: Madison vs. Brad
As your lab grows, the hardware and software become more specialized to handle higher throughput and more complex automation. If you're looking for inspiration for your next hardware purchase, here is a breakdown of what our team is currently using:
Category | Madison’s Lab | Brad’s Lab |
Hardware | 3 Linksys e8450s | Ubiquiti Dream Router 7 |
Software | Openwrt | Proxmox |
Ready to Gain Visibility into Your Home Lab?
The overarching lesson from Madison and Brad is simple: data is power. Building a home lab is the best way to learn how data moves through a network and shifts you from a passive consumer of technology to an active auditor of your own network. Get started with a free version of ElastiFlow to see what’s happening on your network.
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