I know of people whose home-lab is better equipped than the test/lab equipment many of my employers were providing me with.

From such people I would expect great questions that are on-topic for ServerFault, questions that show they did research, found and read the vendor documentation and/or tried a solution before asking the internet for help.

That they encountered the problem in their home lab would be completely irrelevant to the problem at hand.

I think we should and already do welcome such questions and answer them.

Many other home-lab questions are more from power users and enthousiasts.

Often their problems are specific to and caused by the fact that they are in their home-lab or  attempts to engineer around typical home-lab limitations:

• Their internet access will be from a consumer ISP, with limitations and restrictions such as;

  • no fixed IP-addresses
  • prohibits running servers and blocks for example
    • SMTP and ports 25 as a spam prevention measure
    • ports 80 and 443 for HTTP(S)
    • VPN protocols
  • their ISP provided modem/router is limited with regards to what the end-user can configure, monitor and/or troubleshoot

• their home-lab equipment is often not fit for purpose:

  • too light weight like the (early generation) Raspberry Pi
  • not suitable/certified for their intended purpose (attempt to run VMWare ESXi on an old laptop)
  • was "enterprise grade" back in the day, but was in reality salvaged from the recycling bin after it reached EOL many moons ago
  • their home networking is broken because they don't have internal DNS and/or reverse DNS records, they insist on using the mDNS .local TLD rather than their own registered domain

• etc. etc.

For such question I vote to close, sometimes with the close reason to migrate if they belong on SuperUser and at times I leave a helpful comment that their problem is of their own making.

I know of people whose home-lab is better equipped than the test/lab equipment many of my employers were providing me with.

From such people I would expect great questions that are on-topic for ServerFault, questions that show they did research, found and read the vendor documentation and/or tried a solution before asking the internet for help.

That they encountered the problem in their home lab would be completely irrelevant to the problem at hand.

I think we should and already do welcome such questions and answer them.

Many other home-lab questions are more from power users and enthousiasts.

Often their problems are specific to and possibly even caused by the fact that they are in their home-lab or their attempts to engineer around typical home-lab limitations:

• Their internet access will be from a consumer ISP, with limitations and restrictions such as;

  • no fixed IP-addresses
  • prohibits running servers and blocks for example
    • SMTP and ports 25 as a spam prevention measure
    • ports 80 and 443 for HTTP(S)
    • VPN protocols
  • their ISP provided modem/router is limited with regards to what the end-user can configure, monitor and/or troubleshoot

• their home-lab equipment is often not fit for purpose:

  • too light weight like the (early generation) Raspberry Pi
  • not suitable/certified for their intended purpose (attempt to run VMWare ESXi on an old laptop)
  • was "enterprise grade" back in the day, but was in reality salvaged from the recycling bin after it reached EOL many moons ago
  • their home networking is broken because they don't have internal DNS and/or reverse DNS records, they insist on using the mDNS .local TLD rather than their own registered domain

• etc. etc.

For such question I vote to close, sometimes with the close reason to migrate if they belong on SuperUser and at times I leave a helpful comment that their problem is of their own making.