Setting up your own homelab can be a great way to
teach yourself new IT skills. You don't need a powerful machine
for a homelab either. Many of the computers you find on woot.com or
ebay will
work. Many of the smaller 1l desktops (mini
micros) make great machines to start with.
Here are a few VM projects I found
useful/interesting.
Run your own DNS hosting
service. I set up PiHole
with Unbound. By default, PiHole checks other DNS services
for lookup, (ex: 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, or your own ISPs DNS).
There's nothing wrong with using these services for DNS, but
your ISP may harvest data from their DNS service to sell to
advertisers. 8.8.8.8 is Google's own DNS service, and since they
are primarily and ad company, they too are interested in
collecting DNS data.
Unbound changes your PiHole VM from a forwarding
DNS service to a recursive DNS service. This link
explains it far better than I can.
Freedom Box hosts my Tiny
Tiny RSS reader. Supports some other web apps, but at the moment
it's only used for that.
https://guacamole.apache.org/
RDP from a web browser. Stores RDP, SSH, etc connections. Allows
you to connect to multiple machines from a browser tab. Very
handy for administering your network environment when not at
home (access from a web browser tab in a KASM envrionment).
My media server. Like hosting your own private
Netflix in your house.