A playground for geeks to safely play with IT stuff.
"…most of us work in IT or a related field, and playing with production equipment is a big no-no.
So we build ourselves a "production" environment at home, that becomes our lab."
—Reddit
Anyone wishing to learn about servers, network design, system administration and whatnot for work, is unlikely to be unleashed to play freely in a commercial production environment, the risks are too high. Enter the homelab, a smaller-scale version of the types of things that hang out in the commercial space.
Some home labs are populated with surplus kit from employers, or sniped off eBay, others are repurposing older personal computers (and increasingly, single board computers like the Raspberry Pi and their ilk). Others (like me) are buying up cheap surplus small form factor desktops and mini-towers, jamming in a few hard drives, installing Promxox or similar, to set up network storage and personal cloud software, home automation and media servers.
Here we safely learn, play and develop skills and knowledge. For some, it's the means to an end, if they want to get a job in systems administration or architecture; for others like me, it's the end in itself.
I have data-hoarding friends who collect data as a crow does costume jewelry. Books, media, manuals, old software, all is grist to the datahoarder's mill. Making the collection available means having server space in line with the CIA triad, and the homelab becomes a necessity. Hackers all, we create servers out of odds and ends, sometimes trawling surlpus stores and thrift shops for tech stuff that will, one day, be useful. Know this kind of hacker by the boxes full of old power supplies, tangles of cables, and strange PCIe cards scattered across desks, beds and dining tables.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
BQ25 300