Inside the Home Lab

Certs get you the interview. A lab gives you something real to talk about once you are in the room. When a hiring manager asks how you would troubleshoot DNS, “I broke my own DNS on a Saturday and here is how I found it” beats a textbook answer every time.

This post is the map for the Home Lab section of the site: what is running in my lab right now, what it has already taught me, and the how-to guides coming next.

What is running right now

The network

• A UniFi Cloud Gateway Max as the router and firewall.
• The ISP gateway set to IP passthrough, so the UniFi gear does the routing and there is no double NAT.
• Separate VLANs for work devices and IoT devices, so the smart plugs and cameras cannot see the machines that matter.

The Raspberry Pis

• Pi-hole on a Pi 3B+ for network-wide DNS filtering. It is down right now after an SD card failure, and the rebuild is getting written up as its own guide.
• ADS-B receiver on a Pi 4B, running dump1090-fa to decode the position broadcasts from aircraft overhead.

Home Assistant

• The hub that ties it together: UniFi, Pi-hole, smart bulbs, Apple TV, and security cameras, plus HACS for community add-ons.
• A small Python MQTT bridge, running as a systemd service, that pushes the ADS-B receiver stats into Home Assistant so they show up on the dashboard.
• An old Amazon Fire tablet on the wall running Fully Kiosk Browser as the dashboard screen.

The RF bench

An RTL-SDR, HackRF, Flipper Zero, and Ubertooth One. This is the radio side of the lab: listening to what is in the air, from aircraft to Bluetooth.

What it has already taught me

None of this ran perfectly the first time, and that is the point. A few lessons so far:

• SD cards die. The Pi-hole went down because its SD card corrupted the filesystem. Now I know what a failing ext4 volume looks like and how to run fsck from a live USB. Back up your configs.
• Getting locked out is recoverable. I lost the password to a Pi and got back in by mounting the SD card in Windows through WSL2 and usbipd-win, then editing the account files directly. That is the same skill as recovering a locked server.
• Not every device plays nice locally. A wireless video doorbell turned out to have no local API, so Home Assistant could not talk to it. Check local control support before you buy smart gear.

Every one of those is a story I can tell in an interview, and each one maps to a real job task: backups, account recovery, and vendor evaluation.

The how-to series

Each build below gets its own written guide. Same format every time:

1. What it is and why it is worth building
2. Parts list with rough costs
3. The build, step by step
4. What broke and how I fixed it
5. What it teaches for an IT career, and how to put it on a resume

Here is the lineup:

• UniFi network with VLANs. Getting off the ISP router, killing double NAT, and splitting the network into segments. This is the foundation for everything else.
• Pi-hole. Network-wide ad blocking and your first real DNS server, written as a rebuild after the SD card failure. Cheap, fast, and it teaches you how DNS actually works.
• Home Assistant. One dashboard for the whole house, local control, and automations.
• ADS-B flight tracker. A Pi and an SDR dongle that track aircraft overhead, plus feeding the data into Home Assistant.
• Drone tracker. Tracking what is flying lower than the airliners.
• Pwnagotchi. A pocket-sized Pi project with an e-ink face that learns from the Wi-Fi around it. A fun way into wireless security.

Ground rules for the RF and wireless guides: receive-only, your own networks, your own devices. Listening to public broadcasts like ADS-B is legal in the US. Capturing or attacking networks you do not own or have written permission to test is not. Every guide will spell out where that line is.

Where to start

If you are building your first lab, start with the network and Pi-hole. Both are cheap, both run 24/7, and both teach the networking fundamentals that show up on Network+ and in every help desk ticket queue. If you have not picked a cert path yet, the IT cert roadmap lays it out, and page 2 of the free PDF covers a $0 and a ~$300 starter lab.

First guide up: building a segmented UniFi network.