Mobile Lab & Homelab Workshop

Systems & Infrastructure ran the workshop in collaboration with Monash's Association of Coding, supported by Xenon Systems. Homelabs range from home automation to self-hosting storage and media servers or a free sandbox development environment, and they have become popular with students as a way to host, test and learn enterprise-grade software for free and to build practical networking and systems administration skills.

A major barrier for students is the hardware and software skills needed to start. The team's goal was a workshop that walks students through the full setup and deployment of their first environment. Thanks to Xenon lending servers, the team built a cluster that could be transported to the venue, deployed on-site, and used to provision an isolated virtual machine for each attendee, with no reliance on cloud infrastructure or manually prepared machines.

The challenge was making it reliable and reproducible: bringing up dozens of VMs consistently, providing networking between attendees and their machines, and being simple enough to redeploy without rebuilding by hand.

Participants used their own Linux VMs to learn SSH, key-based authentication, Docker, GitHub-based deployment, Dokploy and Cloudflare tunnels, taking a server from first login to a publicly accessible application. It was a practical demonstration of the team's infrastructure work at event scale.