I'm a systems admin for a renewable energy company, and do most of my work in the cloud or with on-prem VMWare systems. I'm starting a consulting business and need to have infrastructure at home to test and evaluate solutions before breaking client's production networks.
I've run the BBS at home since 1991, mostly on bare metal hardware - first an old 286 running DOS, a 486 running OS/2, several Pentiums running Windows.
Lately, I've been using Proxmox as my homelab of choice. My homelab (
https://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab.jpg) is running on an old Thinkpad that was being sold as parts-only. The screen had horrible keyboard marks and the keyboard is missing keys, but it's been running solidly for close to ten years. I picked up a Synology NAS used for $119 and populated it with old drives I had laying around from an older system that had a RAID array.
The BBS, an Active Directory test environment, a PiHole DNS server and ad-blocker, and a couple of desktop environments run just fine on the same hardware that just ran the BBS a few years ago.
My only concern is age -- my environment is way past any expected lifetimes. I could scrounge a spare laptop with little worry but the NAS is a little harder to think about - a new NAS and drives would cost more than I'd like.
If that happened, I'd probably just stick the USB drive onto my Proxmox host and share it via NFS/CIFS.
That reminds me, I should take the Thinkpad down, blow out the fans and replace the thermal grease - doing what I can to keep things running...
