Every homelab has to start somewhere!!! 🖥️⌨️🖱️🧑💻
Mine started with a little Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, a Proxmox ISO, and probably a little more confidence than I should have had. 😄
How Did It All Start?#
The funny thing is, starting a homelab wasn’t exactly a new idea for me. It had been sitting on my “one day I’ll do this” list for quite some time.
My interest really grew after stumbling across communities like r/homelab, r/homeassistant and r/MiniPCs on Reddit. The projects people were building — from Home Assistant automation and self-hosted services — were right up my alley. I’ve always enjoyed meddling with technology, so having my own little playground to experiment, break things and learn sounded like a lot of fun.
Then came the question of what hardware to start with?. With hardware prices being what they were, I spent weeks researching tiny and mini PCs, comparing specs, upgrade options and what others were using. After plenty of “Should I buy this one or wait?” moments, I finally settled on the Lenovo ThinkCentre M730q.
And that’s where the journey begins. Of course, I couldn’t just make things easy for myself. 😅
For curious homelabbers, here are the tiny specs behind a bigger dream — and hopefully, a long journey ahead. 💪💪
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| PC/Model | Lenovo ThinkCenter M730q |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 - 10th Gen |
| Cores/Threads | 8C / 16T |
| RAM | 32GB DDR4 (2x 16GB @ 3200) |
| Storage | 500GB NVMe SSD |
Notes: My tiny has little more space for a SATA SSD/HDD for growth. But right now, this spec is an absolute killer for starters!
What Came Next?#
As I was in excitement, I jumped straight into the installation thinking, “How difficult can this be?” Well… it was difficult enough to spend hours troubleshooting things that, in hindsight, were actually pretty basic.
What did I miss? Well, for starters: I missed some of the key fundamentals:
- Reviewing the Tiny hardware - Not a showstopper, but knowing your hardware and its compatibility with what you plan to install can save you a ton of time.
- Why am I saying this? Well, I had a bit of a rough time figuring out why my NIC (network interface card) wasn’t being picked up during installation. It turned out to be a driver/hardware compatibility issue that I hadn’t accounted for. I eventually bought a USB-to-Ethernet Adapter just to get myself moving..
- Flashing the right ISO - This got the best of me. I flashed the wrong ISO — ARM64 instead of Intel/AMD64. 👌
- Preparing & checking the BIOS settings - Things like making sure USB is at the top of the boot menu, disabling Fast Boot and Secure Boot where required, and checking other recommended settings can make the installation much smoother.
- Pre-planning the design - Trust me! This will help you build a better setup without having to tear everything down and rebuild it later.
Those mistakes cost me a few hours, but they also gave me an idea to journal. 🧑💻🤞
A Journal Idea Was Born#
Instead of simply documenting the final setup, why not document the journey from the beginning — including the silly mistakes, things that didn’t work, settings I had to change, and the little lessons that aren’t always mentioned in those “just follow these 10 steps” tutorials?.
Well, that’s what this series is going to be.
I’ll be building my homelab from the ground up, starting with this tiny PC and gradually exploring Proxmox, virtual machines, containers, networking, storage, services, security and everything else I inevitably manage to break along the way. 😂
If you’re thinking about starting your own homelab, hopefully my mistakes will save you a few hours. ⏱️⌛
And if nothing else, this will be a nice record for future me to look back at and wonder: “Why on earth did I do it that way?” 🤦♂️🤷♂️
And So It Begins…#
At this point, I thought I had done the hard part. Looking back now… I clearly had no idea what was waiting around the corner. 😅
To be continued… 🧑💻