Skip to main content
1 of 2
HBruijn
  • 82.5k
  • 25
  • 41

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.

HBruijn
  • 82.5k
  • 25
  • 41