Adventures in Home Labing! Part 1: Where is all began...

Hello all, this will be the start of a series I'm dubbing "Adventures in Home Labbing". It will be focused on my home lab journey, from my humble pc/gaming/NAS, to my current, proper (with enterprise grade) servers and hardware... We all start some where, and my journey was no different. So come along for the ride! :)  

So, after college (perhaps a little whilst still attending), I started my journal in network management. I started to get interested in web hosting, and web design in general. Thus, I started to play with my old computer, a dinky old Dell Optiplex something-or-other... Running a Pentium 4 with HT (Yeah, baby, virtual threads), with 4GB's of RAM and a 250GB HDD... I started running Ubuntu 9.10 or perhaps it was 10.04, I honestly don't remember... But I do remember that I really enjoyed the whole process of setting everything up and opening my web browser and entering my website for the time... that was a thrill... Fast forward a few years and bam! My first official, "proper" home lab was born...

Fast forward a few years and you'll see my first "Production" home lab in the making (Image above for scale. lol). It was the first time I had servers to work with (albeit still desktop hardware, but running as servers). It was about at this time I started getting into virtualisation and hypervisors and such. So I landed on Proxmox, with Pfsense as my firewall/router. A couple of VM's running services, Zentyal for Active Directory, Samba, and DNS tasks, with... Crap I honestly don't remember what else at this time. A Minecraft server I suppose, but really don't remember much else. This was just my transistion period to the hobby of home labbing... It's start was subtle, but it got it's hooks in me...