Free I.T. Athens

We would like to welcome some of the newest volunteers and they both jumped right in and started learning how to refurbish computers

Cloud server technology :)

Ever thought about building a Home Lab using completely OPEN SOURCE solutions? We did… and it has been an awesome learning experience!

At Free I.T. Athens, we’ve been diving deep into enterprise-style infrastructure using tools anyone can explore at home. Here’s what we recently deployed:

* An OPNSense Firewall for network security
* A Proxmox VE virtualization server
* TWO additional Proxmox nodes for failover and redundancy
* A Proxmox Backup Server for automated backups
* ZFS storage configuration for reliability and performance
* Hourly VM backups (okay… maybe that part was a little overkill , we're doing hourly so see how much it can back up)

This setup may be more than most home labs need, but the experience of learning how to deploy, configure, and manage all of it has been incredibly fun and valuable.

We’re currently writing a full article explaining how we built everything step-by-step so you can explore these solutions for your own home lab projects!

Check out these amazing open-source platforms:
Proxmox VE https://www.proxmox.com
OPNsense Firewall https://opnsense.org

Keep an eye out for the upcoming post — and yes, we’ll also send it through Mailchimp!

AND… we will host a hands-on class where you can learn to set up one or both of these solutions yourself… and keep what you build.