I started with a basic as shit NAS and was happy with it.
Then i wanted Hardware Acceleration for my Plex Server because i wanted to stream high resolution content when i was out of the house.
I then rebuilt my old Gaming Rig into a server.
After i realized that i now have much more power to use i started to host a bunch of services; AdGuard, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Overseerr, Homarr, Lidarr, SabNZBs, Kavita, Kaizoku, HomeBox, HomeAssistant, Nextcloud, FoundryVTT, PaperlessNGX, Audiobookshelf, Romm and Whisper for my HomeAssistant.
That’s stuff i would’ve never even had the chance to host on something simple like a little NAS.
Oh and most homelabs are NOT racks with 2 cores… in my case, old gaming PC with Ryzen 5 2600X, 16Gigs of Ram and GTX1660 Super
Same, my game desktop was so powerful (i9 with 24 cores and 64 RAM DDR5) I converted it to Proxmox, pfSense with a Wi-Fi adapter that creates an access point, I have much more control of my local network and services I host, it’s fun and the power usage isn’t that much.
Any reason you chose pfSense over opnSense ? I heard opnSense was better or something.
I really want to go down that rabbithole aswell and get myself some real network appliance with 10gig ethernet and take control over my network. I currently have a Fritz!Box by AVM that i bought myself so not via my ISP so it’s already fairly controlled and configured by only me… but it has it’s limitations; I can’t setup PXE boot for example.