Hello everyone,
I’ve been lurking around Level1Techs for a while and finally decided to share my story.
I’m from Cuba and I’ve been fascinated by computers for as long as I can remember. I started learning programming when I was around 12 years old, and today I’m 23.
For many people, building a homelab is mostly about budget.
Here, it’s often about whether the hardware can even be obtained in the first place.
For years I dreamed of owning a real enterprise server. Most of what I learned was done on old desktop computers, virtual machines, and whatever hardware I could find.
About two years ago I finally managed to buy a used Dell PowerEdge R730xd.
For me, that was a dream come true.
Getting it into the country was an adventure on its own. I was worried about customs issues, theft, and losing components, so I ended up having the server shipped in separate parts and reassembling everything myself after it arrived.
Fortunately, everything made it safely.
Today the server runs the latest version of TrueNAS SCALE and serves as the heart of my entire infrastructure.
Current setup:
- Dell PowerEdge R730xd
- TrueNAS SCALE
- 2 SSDs for the operating system
- 2x Hitachi 1.2TB 10K SAS drives
- MikroTik hEX S
- Small rack
- Patch panel
- 16-port switch
- Multiple VMs
- Self-hosted services
One of the biggest challenges isn’t hardware.
It’s electricity.
Over the last months we’ve experienced power outages that sometimes last up to 20 hours at a time.
When most people think about homelab challenges they think about storage performance, networking, backups, or virtualization.
I also have to think about:
- When to safely shut systems down
- How to protect storage from repeated power loss
- How to recover services after long outages
- How to keep infrastructure running when the electrical grid is unreliable
Getting replacement parts is another challenge.
If something fails, I can’t just order a replacement from Amazon and receive it tomorrow.
Every hard drive, SSD, network card, memory module, or server component requires planning, patience, and sometimes luck.
Despite all of that, building this homelab has been one of the most rewarding projects of my life.
It became my development environment, testing environment, learning environment, and honestly one of the reasons I kept learning throughout the years.
The homelab eventually led me to build other projects as well, including a network inventory and IPAM platform I recently made public.
I’d love to hear from others who are running infrastructure under unusual circumstances.
Anyone else dealing with unreliable power, difficult hardware availability, expensive imports, or other challenges that most homelab builders don’t normally face?
If people are interested, I can post photos of the rack, the R730xd, the MikroTik setup, and some screenshots of the TrueNAS environment.
P.S. This post was originally written in Spanish and translated into English with the help of ChatGPT. After some recent discussions about AI-assisted writing, I figured I’d mention it openly from the start.