051 - What's Actually in Our Homelabs (and Why)

The hardest part of running a home lab in 2026 is not building it up; it is being honest about what earns its place.Andy is joined by returning guest and member of the SysAdmin Weekly community, Clay Tamam, a working SysAdmin over in the Netherlands, for a real tour of what is actually sitting in their labs: the hardware, the hypervisors, the services they use every day, and the reasoning behind each choice. Andy explains why he tore a four-node Kubernetes cluster down to five VMs on a single Debian box, Clay walks through building a rack from scratch on a practical budget, and both of them dig into what current memory and hardware prices are doing to the hobby. It closes with the Graveyard: the gear and services that got powered off, and why pruning is an important part of the discipline.## Chapters00:00:00 - Welcome and a Returning Guest: Clay from the Netherlands00:07:20 - News React: A US Firm's Bid for the Dutch DigiD Infrastructure00:15:21 - News React: An AI-Assisted Hack Hits US Festival Ticketing00:18:11 - Nerd Hour: Scoping AI Agents and Building a Lab From Scratch00:24:29 - Main Topic: What Is Actually in Our Home Labs00:25:15 - The Hardware: Andy's Pared-Down Single-Box Lab00:31:25 - The Hardware: Clay's From-Scratch Rack Build00:45:52 - The Foundation: KVM vs. Proxmox00:56:33 - The Services That Earn Their Keep01:02:37 - Self-Hosting, the Plex Price Hike, and Leaving Discord01:13:57 - Learning Goals and the Graveyard01:24:19 - Local Inference and the Urge to Panic-Buy01:25:49 - Wrap-Up## Resources / Show Notes- Wired - Researcher used Claude to break Front Gate Tickets: https://www.wired.com/story/claude-helped-a-hacker-find-a-way-to-issue-tickets-to-almost-every-us-music-festival/- NL Times - Netherlands blocks the US takeover of DigiD operator Solvinity: https://nltimes.nl/2026/05/26/netherlands-blocks-us-takeover-digid-operator-solvinity-security-concerns- Security Now with Steve Gibson: https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm- Proxmox Virtual Environment and Backup Server: https://www.proxmox.com- Forgejo, the self-hosted Git forge (Gitea fork): https://forgejo.org- Tailscale, the overlay mesh VPN: https://tailscale.com- Foundry Virtual Tabletop: https://foundryvtt.com- Plex - New Lifetime Plex Pass pricing: https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/- Jellyfin, the free software media system: https://jellyfin.org- Vaultwarden, a self-hosted Bitwarden-compatible server: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden- Framework Desktop: https://frame.work/desktop- Connect with Clay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clay-tamam-00b6441b3/- AndyOnTech: https://www.andyontech.com