Is It Still Called a Homelab if It's Portable?

Any electronics or computing enthusiast who has tinkered with hardware for any length of time has likely accumulated plenty of gear. Some of this equipment will be for use at home, like all of the components and racks that make up a homelab, while other hardware, such as travel routers and handheld tools like the Flipper Zero, are appropriate for use in the field.

There is a big difference between the capabilities of the hardware in these groups, however. So if you want to do some more serious experimentation, you’ve got to get to your gear at home. But Michael Klements didn’t want to make any compromises while on the road, so he built a portable homelab. It has plenty of power for even very demanding projects, yet it is small enough to lug around in a backpack.

Klements’ latest design shrinks his earlier 10-inch Lab Rax homelab down to a very compact 5-inch format. The entire chassis is 3D printed and scaled to roughly half the size of the original, reducing the overall volume to about one-eighth. Despite the drastic reduction in size, the rack still houses a reasonably powerful computing stack. The physical build is designed with durability in mind, using M3 brass heat-set inserts embedded into the printed parts instead of traditional nuts. These inserts provide strong mounting points for the rack units as well as the posts and handles that hold the structure together as it is moved about.

Inside the rack is a complete networking and server stack built largely around Raspberry Pi hardware. At the network edge sits a router based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 running OpenWRT, handling tasks such as firewall rules, DHCP, and DNS. A compact five-port TP-Link gigabit switch — removed from its plastic enclosure to save space — provides the network backbone.

Two Raspberry Pi 5 boards power the rest of the stack. One serves as a NAS system using an NVMe SSD for fast storage, complete with a small front-panel OLED display and active cooling. The other operates as a container host running Docker to support various services.

To keep everything running smoothly, the homelab includes a full monitoring setup using Netdata alongside Prometheus and Grafana dashboards for long-term performance tracking.

For anyone who needs some real computing power away from home, Klements’ tiny rack proves that portability and performance no longer have to be mutually exclusive. Be sure to check out the video for more details about how you can create your own portable homelab.