Testing new waters with a home lab setup

[modi123]

Preface: I'm in a spot upgrading my daily driver PC and it occurred to me that it also maybe a time to look into this 'home lab' thing. I'm a developer by trade, and the extent of my networking knowledge is pretty basic - can I wire up a home router, get things on it, etc.

My current set up is pretty much everything on my mainbox.. MSSQL instance, XAMPP, various VMs with Virtualbox, external storage for backups, etc. Residential cable modem and some home router.

The thought is - at the 30,000ft view - to pick up a tiny pc off Woot (or fleabay) to run Proxmox on. From there spin up an ubuntu server with MSSQL and XAMPP for a starter. Those would only need to be accessible to my main windows box.

From what I gather then the gold plating would be a tailscale or headscale instance to connect a future purchased NAS system for external (off network) access for me and the family and serve as replacement for my current backup drives.

The Woot mini pic is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75Q G2 Tiny PC, AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD. I figure RAM and SSD are a skosh weak, but I can work with it to get my feet wet.

In the general, hand waving motion, does this make sense or do I have things grossly incorrect?

 

[pioruns]

If you want to run this thing 24/7/365, and it's not just cats pics and grandma videos, consider ECC RAM. You can get that for Ryzen platform, DDR4/5 UDIMM (unbuffered) ECC RAM.

 

[modi123]

Good call. Looks like that mini pc from Woot uses DDR4 SODIMM.

While I may not need the machine working 24/7/365 for just mssql and xampp if phase 2 with an externally accessible NAS device I can see that uptime changing.