The Newbie's Guide to the Ultimate Home IT Lab Experience

scottalanmiller

Anyone new to IT is going to need to overcome some big barriers to getting started. Nothing breaks down barriers like doing stuff on your own, soup to nuts, covering all of the bases. The concepts we want to address in a home lab are:

Education: Actually learning how things work.
Industry Survey: Learning what we enjoy doing.
Resume: Gaining experience that we can show to potential employers.
Certification: Preparing for the paper to show the above.

Assuming that we are talking to a newbie starting from "scratch" with effectively zero experience and looking to build up as much of a broad, unfocused career foundation as possible, I am putting together a bit of an ultimate task list to start small and grow to an amazing lab experience. Starting assumption: that you have a Windows desktop and/or laptop that is not a pro device.

Support desktop users at home like a business. Become the desktop tech at home.
Use a desktop tool for basic documentation. Such as Microsoft OneNote, EverNote, Google Docs, or LibreOffice Writer. Document everything that you do.
Blog Everything That You Do Record your progress publicly and solicit feedback. Have constant conversations about how things are done ideally, realistically and practically. Compare what you are doing to the real world.
Implement a ticketing system for home support. Start simple, like the hosted Spiceworks system. Get used to putting in a ticket for everything that you do, keep it updated, close it when you are done. Make ticketing second nature.
Implement a business class firewall. Something like Ubiquiti, ProSafe, SonicWall, Cisco ASA, Juniper, Palo Alto, WatchGuard or similar. Nothing consumer, nothing with built in wireless. Pure firewall / router.
Implement a business class wireless access point. Again, similar vendors as above. Nothing consumer. Nothing with routing built in.
Implement a business class swich. Don't use your router for any switching functions. Get a used (or new if you want) L2 switch with at lest "smart" management capabilities. Twenty four port minimum, more if ambitious. Get a rack mount unit even if you are not ready to rack things yet.
Build out a wiring plant. Not everyone can do this practically, especially if you live in an apartment. But if you can or to whatever degree you can, wire your home for GigE Ethernet or better. Do your own cabling, terminate it all to a central wiring location. Label everything. Make it pretty. Do it so nicely that you want to show it off to friends who are willing to crawl around in your attic. Run wires places that don't need them. Run bundles, not singles. Use a nice label maker. Use J hooks and conduit. Go all out. Put in some time and effort. Take pictures. Brag.
Put in a patch panel. All of those wires you just ran, terminate them in the "wiring closet" into an attractive, organized patch panel. Test every line. Use Excel or LibreOffice Calc or Google Sheets to make a spreadsheet that tells where every line goes and what number is which. Make it pretty. Put it on the wall by the panel.
Put in a small rack. Quarter rack is fine. Floor standing is great. Wall mount will work for the moment. Wall mount for networking and floor standing later for other stuff is really great.
Wire it all up. Use the switch to connect everything to the patch panel. "Light up" the entire house. Take the spreadsheet from above and fill in data from the switch too.
Wire everything that you can. If you have a smart TV, desktop, DVR, Xbox, Playstation, Fire TV, NVidia Shield whatever - use copper Ethernet to wire them up if possible. Use your new wiring plant to improve performance while reducing WiFi congestion. Simplify and improve the real world.
Mount the AP. Get the access point mounted in an ideal location in your home wired into your new cabling system. If you can justify it, consider more than one AP.
Build a PC. If you have never built your own desktop, consider doing it. Few businesses will ever have you building desktops, or even opening them up, but understanding all of the parts and considerations that go into building one, even for home entertainment use, is important.
Get a starter NAS. A small, two bay commercial storage device like a Netgear ReadyNAS or a Synology is a perfect place to begin experimenting with server and storage technology in a useful way. Put on a shelf in your rack or near the switching closet. Get two hard drives, probably Western Digital Red drives. Put them in RAID 1. Set up an SMB share that can be used for everyone in your house to share files with each other.
Add Media Services. Set up your new NAS to serve media like music and movies to your network via DLNA. Add some media to it, enjoy your new system. Make use of it.
Install a Type 2 Hypervisor. Install a product like VirtualBox to your desktop. Download a free trial version of the current Windows Server operating system. Install it into a VM on your desktop. Do this a few times choosing different options like GUI and nano, to see the process and get used to both Type 2 virtualization and to installing Windows Server. Do nothing with the server yet, just learn the hypervisor basics and installation basics.
Install an alternative desktop onto your hypervisor. Download something very different from your normal Windows environment such as Linux Mint, OpenSuse or Fedora. These are free. Install onto your Type 2 hypervisor and spend some time trying to use it as a desktop. Try more than one if you want. Experiment. Get to know some alternatives. Connect this desktop to your NAS SMB share too and see how you can share files through the NAS.
Install a Live Linux distro to a USB stick. Make a live USB stick of a Linux distro and boot your desktop or laptop to native Linux and see how that compares to the virtual version. Connect to the NAS SMB share again. Notice how a live (non-installed) desktop can be useful because of shared storage.
If money is abundant, add more desktops, laptops and Macs. This is far outside the reach of most, but if you have the resources to do so, consider adding more machines to your home network. Having a Mac is especially valuable in learning about desktops, interoperability and desktop support tasks.

More to come, this is a work in progress. Eventually I want this to be a mammoth list meant to take years to do, but doable by most high school students or older looking to get their hands dirty and their feet wet in everything possible from the basics to the really hard stuff.

Deleted74295

I'd make one addition to this guide.

Learn how to do purchasing, learn how to choose between product A or B, be able to identify the value difference between the products and make a recommendation based on the value differences.

In a home lab, it's your money but when you are spending someone else's money, they are going to want to know why one box will only cost them £30 and another will cost £200.

ryanblahnik

I appreciate this type of stuff @scottalanmiller, and I've been continuing to gradually work my way through some of your archives on StorageCraft, Datamation and your SMB IT Journal along with keeping an eye out here when I can.

ryanblahnik

I've heard you mention that as you started out, you were on top of a sense of the best books and resources for all these different topics that evolved as new editions and entries came out, and that this eventually became harder to maintain.

I wasn't sure whether you were referring to a lot of learning starting to move toward Googling and boards, or any change in what's available in books, or maybe if your experience just got to a point where that wasn't as necessary.

A board thread might not be the best format for organizing this, but I'd be really interested in some comprehensive recommended reading too, maybe split into areas. As much as the lab is better for learning in a lot of ways, sometimes I wonder if I miss a lot at times that way too.

There are a lot of great threads here that go back and break different things down really well. I'm just really bent on making sure I have the basics of basics down, so everything can continue to build from there with hopefully fewer rude lessons down the road. Recently I've been soaking up parts of different things from languages to admin stuff to networking fundamentals to beginner security.

I believe the work will pay off, and if there are some consensus books that have been valuable and pretty bulletproof, I'd like to chew on a couple to start with. I think it'd be good to start to feel like I'm getting a lot deeper within a thing or two compared to more superficial across more different areas.

Thank you, and everyone here too, for all your contributions. I believe I was searching a little while back for reading on RAID and file systems, when I first came across something you'd written.

scottalanmiller

@ryanblahnik said:

I've heard you mention that as you started out, you were on top of a sense of the best books and resources for all these different topics that evolved as new editions and entries came out, and that this eventually became harder to maintain.

I used to hang out at Borders (anyone remember them) a few times a week with @andyw. We knew every publisher and author. We spent so much time looking at the books and owned such a staggeringly large library that it made it easy.

scottalanmiller

@ryanblahnik said:

I wasn't sure whether you were referring to a lot of learning starting to move toward Googling and boards, or any change in what's available in books, or maybe if your experience just got to a point where that wasn't as necessary.

Oh no, I think that learning has gotten harder. Google is good for fixing things, it is not good for learning. There are many fewer IT books today and the lack of physical book stores has made learning about and sampling IT books much harder.