Hacker News Reader

I don't know where it comes from, but the distinction's basically 'when a home server becomes home servers', or at least becomes a hobby, as opposed to just setting up and forgetting a Pi-hole once or something.

View on HN

Originally, a "home lab" is specifically for learning and testing, primarily for professional reasons: i.e. someone going for a Cisco networking certification might get a stack of old Cisco routers and build test environments with them, someone learning windows networks might setup a windows domain on multiple PCs, ...

It's kind of morphed and people fold their home "production" environments into the term too.

It's in the above link:

Homelab [hom-læb](n): a laboratory of (usually slightly outdated) awesome in the domicile

Well, sure, but IME 'production' at home is essentially the same as lab tinkering. How many home labbers have even one home environment besides 'production'?

I meant "production" in the sense of "things you run to use, not just to learn". I.e. on /r/homelab you get many people with "I have a bunch of Ubiquiti gear, a NAS and a server running Plex", which isn't that "experimental", even if they did learn something while setting it up. Whereas the mentioned pile of Cisco routers might never see traffic that's not part of testing something. And of course the two can mix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com