The Network Journey — How a Spare Mini PC Turned Into a Whole Homelab

Every homelab has an origin story, and most of them start the same way: with a piece of hardware you already owned, a problem that should have been simple, and a level of confidence that — in hindsight — was not earned.

Mine started with a spare mini PC, a single Ethernet port, and the firm belief that I was about to save money. Reader, I did not save money.

This series is the honest, slightly-bruised account of how a “I’ll just repurpose this old box” project snowballed into a Proxmox-hosted Omada network with VLANs, ad-blocking DNS, and bedtime schedules for the kids. It’s part war story, part build log, and part cautionary tale about buying hardware before reading the spec sheet.

If you’re at the start of your own homelab journey, my hope is simple: that you make more interesting mistakes than I did, because you won’t need to repeat mine.

The series

1. One NIC and a Dream — Building a router out of a spare mini PC with OPNsense, and hitting the wall everyone hits: you need two network ports, and I had one.

2. The Cheap Dongle That Cost Me a Weekend — How a bargain USB Ethernet adapter taught me what “false economy” actually means, in real time, at 11pm.

3. Buying the Whole Ecosystem to Solve One Problem — Why I gave up on the lone-wolf router and bought into TP-Link Omada, what it promised, and what I thought it promised.

Parts 4 and 5 are still in editorial review. They will appear here when they are ready to publish.

Who this is for

Beginners who want the story and the technical why. I’ll explain the jargon as it comes up (NIC, VLAN, SSID — all friends by the end), but I won’t dumb down the config. If you already know your trunk ports from your access ports, skim the grey boxes and enjoy watching me suffer.

New parts drop on a schedule — bookmark the page or check back. The code and full step-by-step configs for each build will follow as standalone guides.