From zero to a running VM | Homelab Log

Sourced and assembled a full homelab rig from scratch: a $188 refurbished Dell OptiPlex 3060 SFF, a monitor, keyboard/mouse, and a dual-connector USB drive, all bought used or on a budget.
Wired the machine into my home network, confirmed the NIC and static IP entirely from the command line before ever touching a browser.
Installed Proxmox VE (a bare-metal hypervisor) directly onto the hardware, configured with a static IPv4 address instead of the default IPv6.
Created and installed my first virtual machine (Ubuntu Server 24.04), fully isolated from the host.
Set up SSH so I can manage that VM entirely from my laptop, no monitor or keyboard required going forward.

My HDMI cable didn’t fit the OptiPlex’s port. Turned out the “HDMI” label on the refurb listing was wrong: it was actually DisplayPort. Fell back to VGA for the one-time setup screen instead of buying the wrong adapter twice.
balenaEtcher (the tool I planned to use to flash my installer USB) threw a bug on both local file and URL flashing. Skipped it entirely and used dd via Terminal instead, which is honestly the more “real” way people do this anyway.
Learned the hard way that Proxmox’s default free-tier repo setup throws update errors until you manually disable the enterprise repos, an easy one-line fix once I knew to look for it, but not obvious from the UI alone.
Biggest lesson: almost nothing about this was plug-and-play. Every step had a small decision to make or a small thing to debug, which is exactly the muscle I’m trying to build for SOC work.

Install Docker on the Ubuntu VM and get my first containerized service running.
Buy a managed switch and start segmenting my network into VLANs.
Eventually: build out log aggregation so I can practice actually monitoring what I’ve built, not just running it.

Following along or building your own? I’d love to hear what you’re working on.