What roles do you need to support?

- [Narrator] When you set up a home lab you have the opportunity to decide what role each piece of it will play. Infrastructure services like Mail, DNS, NTP, various directory services like Active Directory, or LDAP, firewalls, and others, are common within home labs, depending on the size and what the intention or purpose of the lab is. It's also common to use a home lab to explore how to configure and administer user-facing services. Those would be things like Nextcloud for personal cloud storage and other services, or irregular file sharing server, or various personal media services, or smart home control, or other things like that. These roles and foundational skills, like the basics of system administration, or networking, are each very deep topics to explore, and we won't be going over the details of each of them here. Be sure to check out our other courses that focus on these specifically, if you're interested. You might choose to set up one server that provides many services, or individual servers each providing just one service, or some combination of these strategies. If you're setting up a lab to act as a Windows Domain, you'll need systems to handle the Domain Controller and DNS, and likely a Backup Domain Controller too. You may also need additional machines acting as other servers and as client systems. If you just need to work with Windows clients, you may not need to install Windows Server. A Linux lab might have a similar setup, with a directory server, a web server, and so on. Or you might configure a simple lab, with two machines sharing a private network connection. Labs are a great place to experiment with different Linux distributions and to explore software you're not used to administering, like Nginx, if you're familiar with Apache, for example. One common role for isolated home labs is security research or penetration testing. In such a lab, you might have various systems with intentional vulnerabilities like Metasploitable Linux, or accidental vulnerabilities like unpatched operating systems, or software that's hostile and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near your personal computer or home network. Because of the risk associated with this kind of work, it's important to be able to completely and safely erase systems when you're done with them. Home labs can also be used to practice with storage management, either using a real storage array, or using virtual disks as we'll see in just a little bit. Home labs are a good place to learn about clustering and high availability, and to configure firewalls without the risk of opening your home network to bad actors on the internet. And they're a great place to experiment with software-defined networking, with orchestration and deployment, with network booting and DHCP, or CICD workflows, or disaster recovery scenarios on a small to moderate scale. Home labs tend to fall into two general categories: Sandbox systems, where you can build arbitrary infrastructure, and practical systems intended to mirror a production system that's in use somewhere else. Because we don't want to experiment with things on real production systems, it can be useful to set up an identical copy of infrastructure to try out operations, upgrades, and other activities. Sandbox systems where you build arbitrary infrastructure are great for practicing concepts. And practical systems are usually best for practicing workflows that will be applied to production systems. But there's no hard and fast rule about that. You should design and build the infrastructure you need. You can always change it later, and that's part of the fun. In some cases, you may need to follow a specific set of guidelines to set up a lab. If you're studying for a certification program, you'll find that some of them require or assume a specific configuration of hardware and software. This is especially common for vendor-defined networking, architecture, and storage exams. If that's the case for you, you may need to purchase specific makes or models of network hardware or computer hardware and set them up in a predefined way. Often these configurations mirror what you'll be expected to use when you take an exam, down to the software versions, network addresses and topology files and user accounts. There are even companies that sell certification kits complete with hardware racks, targeted to particular exams or groups of exams. While a home lab gives us a great opportunity to experiment with file storage services, like self-hosted cloud services, your lab shouldn't be the home to irreplaceable data. If you do choose to use your lab to host important data like photos, videos, documents, and so on, that data should be reliably backed up in a safe way. Generally speaking, a home lab should be thought of as disposable, at least in terms of the data stored on it. A home lab isn't something that you design once and stick with forever. You can experiment with it, change it around and repurpose it whenever you like. As you select roles for systems and resources in your lab, keep in mind the many courses we offer here on LinkedIn Learning. They cover Linux and Windows administration, and services like DNS, Mail, web hosting, deployment and orchestration, networking, and more.