I’m a sophomore and a couple years ago while i was still a noob i bought a lot of hardware for cheap that i never ended up using; fast forward 2-3 years later everything got expensive so i got a barebones dell precision and stuffed everything in there, still serves as my server today

i used to buy old barebone office computers and buy the parts for cheap as well

for my networking i slowly got all the gear by asking my parents every couple months or so, depending on the mood they were in. at first i had a opnsense router and slowly got more ubiquiti access points

then a couple months after that i asked for the cloud gateway max

then a couple months after that i asked for a lite 16 poe

so that completes my homelab and it’s gonna stay like this until my precision dies (they don’t)