this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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PC Master Race
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In terms of learning tech, I'm not looking to learn in the traditional "home lab" sense. I work in cyber, and the vms I'd be running are likely different from a regular home lab. I'd be learning how to make a windows domain and how to attack/defend/configure. Realising now I should have said that in the post.
I do like the idea of having a server rack but I don't have any storage space for that so it's a future idea at the moment. Hence upgrading the tower to effectively be a server but also gaming.
You don't have to get a rackmount server or even purpose built server at all. My lab at the moment consists of a stack of old HP desktops that I stuffed a bunch of memory and drives in. Regardless my recommendation would be to get a separate box to run things on as it makes things easier to deal with in the long run I find.
Main things you'll want from the box is memory and storage. CPU is not as important in a single user environment.
Home lab racks are tiny these days but I hear ya.
I have a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 as a server at home. It is small enough to fit on my printer stand, it has two 4Tb HDDs for data in raid 1 and one 256Gb SSH for the OS and VMs to run from. It has 32GB of RAM and works really well. I have a few VMs for managing media, one for my personal jabber server (Open fire), another for calendar and contact sync, and Syncthing. I also have another 16GB of RAM unallocated so far which makes me itch for another VM to spin up, but so far I haven't had something come to mind service wise. Because it is all off my main system I can do updates, change my HDD, take my machine with me, and I always know my server is OK. The same goes in reverse, I won't bork my main system when doing server stuff. It is very handy and I find it useful to segregate things, but your situation obviously could demand a different approach. That said, I would recommend it instead of upgrading just because of the stability and segregation of risk.
Hey I really appreciate you taking the time. That's super well reasoned and I see the benefit of the approach. I'll have a think!
I'm still getting used to people shortening "cybersecurity" to "cyber."
It just seems like you're saying you work a sex chat line for a living. No disrespect if you do, but I assume that's not what you meant.
Lol what part about that said sex worker/chat line? Well, you got me: For only $99.90 per hour I'll talk to you about zero trust best practice that'll get you rock hard. You'll be begging me for a vulnerable endpoint to appear in my network sooooo bad. And I might even let you phish one of my users but I'll make you my bitch first.
I'm really not sure of that's what sex chat lines are like but I think it'd do something for half of lemmy...
"Cyber" is short for cybersex.
That's like people calling Tech "the industry" I suppose.