The (Mis)Adventures of a Systems Admin, Part 1: Home Labbing

One computer running Windows for Workgroups. Thirty years later it’s a Proxmox cluster, a pile of virtual machines, VLA

Ns that mostly behave, and enough blinking lights to qualify as a small data center. Nobody plans that — it happens one “I wonder if…” at a time. Join Romano Woodfolk for the next installment of The (Mis)Adventures of a Systems Admin, retracing the route from Windows networking and NT to Linux, VMware ES

Xi, and today’s Proxmox VE.

We’ll cover what homelabbing is, why people sink their weekends into it, and what it’s good for: virtualization, self-hosted services, networking you can break without getting fired, and home automation that keeps running when the vendor goes out of business. Expect the wins, the failures, and at least one honest *“What was I thinking?”* No experience or expensive hardware required — that ten-year-old laptop in your closet is a server waiting for an operating system that respects it.

**Speaker Bio**

Romano Woodfolk has spent more than thirt