Building a Security-Focused Homelab: Lessons from Week One

Starting my homelab journey has been more rewarding than I expected. After researching budget options, I settled on a Dell OptiPlex 7070 with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel i5 8500T. It’s not the most powerful machine on the market, but it’s proven more than adequate for my needs.

The Setup

I installed Proxmox as my hypervisor and spun up several virtual machines to create a functional security testing environment: