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Before moving to the next part, I thought it was relevant to have a background on what network architecture was backing all of this. I was never the person to take what an ISP would sell as a useless excuse of a modem/router, but I was still using a stock TP-Link router with reasonably good wireless and gigabit networking support. What I now have are two ISPs, both providing FTTH (fiber to the home). The first one provides 300Mbps symmetrical, and the second one reaches 200Mbps. Each has its ONT (Optical network terminal) and provides a gigabit port or two bundled with unusable WiFi. There is nothing I can do about this, but it is good enough for the job. ...

We have reached the more fascinating parts now, where I spent (still spending) the most time and the one that adds the most value to me. All of these applications are running on docker, set up by docker-compose. There are some obvious choices here that may not be obvious to many of you reading this, such as using Træfik instead of the more predominantly used NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) . There are two parts to this. One, I am familiar with those more so than the alternatives, two, I might have had the same running before I migrated some of these from my PC. ...

Now that I had an ESXi up and running successfully, it was time to decide on the VMs that will run. The clear-cut choices were one Ubuntu server and one Windows server. The former would be running docker and all the containers, whereas the latter would provide LDAP (with Active Directory) and DNS services. Pretty good with those two, I started looking for something that can serve as a NAS. ...

As you might have seen in my previous post, I now have an Intel NUC to set up as an all-in-one server. It should handle all the docker containers I previously had running on my PC and serve as a NAS. Other than that, I had plans for having an LDAP server and DNS server as a backend for Pi-hole. My initial thoughts were to use an Ubuntu server for everything that I mentioned above. But I wanted anything running on Ubuntu to be in the form of a container since otherwise managing configurations becomes a pain. I still had an option with the DNS server with powerdns and many web UIs for the same, but the LDAP server was a different thing. I could not find any good containerized LDAP server + web UI for it. ...

My journey into building a home lab started with a simple raspberry pi running a couple of services like pi-hole and samba. The next jump came when I build myself a “gaming” PC with enough horses to pull a dozen docker containers without affecting the overall system in any way. It was overkill, of course, with a six-core twelve-thread beast of a processor, 32 GB RAM, and an RTX 3060Ti running full time only to serve my nextcloud and jellyfin applications. ...