Additional Resources:
I’m sharing this video for those of you who couldn’t make it to my talk at MSPGeekCon 2025—or for anyone who did attend and wants to revisit the session.
This presentation, “HomeLab: The Self-Hosted Path to Leveling Up,” covers how to build a powerful and affordable private cloud using mostly free and open source tools. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your skills, test new solutions, or just tinker in your off hours, this should give you a solid starting point.
Video referenced in the talk
Take Control of Your Security: Free, Self-Hosted SIEM & Logs with Graylog, Wazuh, & Security Onion
XCP-ng playlist
UniFi Playlist
TrueNAS Playlist
Getting Up and Running with Ollama
Netbird VPN
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Chapters
00:00 MSPGeek 2025 Homelab Talk
00:30 HomeLab: The Self Hosted Path To Leveling Up
02:28 Why Build a Homelab?
04:32 Homelab Project Ideas
05:09 Home Assistant
08:32 Media Servers
09:55 Network Security Tools
11:18 Self Hosted LLM Ollama
12:28 Open Source Automation
13:53 Self Hosted VPN Netbird
14:47 Containers
17:57 Virtualization XCP-ng and Proxmox
19:45 TrueNAS Storage
21:17 Synology Strorage
22:28 Firewalls pfsense, OPNSense and UnIFi
24:55 Network Switching and WIFi
27:29 Homelab Server Choices
31:47 Some Final Thoughts on Homelabs