u/Zestyclose_Knee_5147

I'm an IT Support Specialist (Tier 1-2 mostly) and I started this homelab a few months ago to study for Network+ and get hands-on with
Active Directory before applying for engineering-track roles. I had no spare enterprise gear sitting around — just two MacBooks and a willingness to mess things up.

Current setup (photos in the gallery):

- MacBook #1 runs Windows 11 and Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS in VMware Fusion side-by-side. Lets me practice Windows client stuff and Linux CLI in the same session without rebooting anything.

- MacBook #2 runs Windows Server 2022 Standard (eval) with AD DS, DNS, IIS, File and Storage Services, and Print Services. This is the heart of the lab — homelab.local is my domain.

- Dell OptiPlex Micro ($189 used) runs Windows 11 24/7 as a dedicated RDP target. The point of this box is to have something always-on I can remote into from any device on the LAN, break, and rebuild without affecting the MacBooks.

The Ubuntu server is joined to the AD domain via SSSD/Kerberos, which was genuinely the hardest thing I've done in this lab so far. Spent a full Saturday on a Kerberos clock-skew error that turned out to be a timezone mismatch between the DC and the Linux box. Frustrating in the moment, but it taught me more about how Kerberos actually works than any video could.

What I use it for, in order of how often:

1. Studying Network+ (subnetting, DNS, DHCP scopes, routing concepts)
2. Active Directory practice — creating OUs, GPOs, scoping policies
3. Practicing the Microsoft RDP client and remote management workflows
4. Writing study material for the things I'm learning

Things I'd do differently if starting over:
- Would put the AD DC on the Apple Silicon Mac for better performance
- Would set up the static IP scheme on day one instead of fighting VMware Fusion's default NAT
- Would document every config change as I made it instead of trying to retrace my steps later

Future plans: a managed switch for VLAN practice, maybe pfSense in a VM, and a second domain controller for redundancy once I understand that side of AD better.

I write up the stuff I'm learning at itstudyhub.org/home-lab.html if anyone wants the longer-form version with more context.

Happy to answer questions about budget Mac-based labs or the Linux/AD integration stuff if it helps anyone else working through this.

Field Stub: Visit Log is live on the App Store. Solo dev, third app under my LLC, and the one I'm most proud of so far.

The backstory: I do IT support full-time and pick up break/fix work on the side. Every weekend gig ended the same way — I'd get home, stare at a phone full of unlabeled photos, try to remember which switch port I actually swapped, and reconstruct the visit from memory before invoicing. Half the time I'd forget mileage entirely. The "system" was Notes plus Photos plus hope.

I checked what was out there. Everything was either a $50/month PSA platform built for ten-person MSPs, or a generic field-service app oriented around plumbers and HVAC scheduling. Nothing for a guy who just needs to log a visit and walk away with a clean PDF.

So I built it. Start a visit, it timestamps and grabs location. As you work you drop in notes, photos, voice memos, and parts. End the visit and it spits out a PDF you can hand to the client or attach to an invoice. That's the whole loop.

A few things I went out of my way to get right:

• Local-first. No accounts, no cloud sync, no telemetry. SwiftData on-device. Your visit data lives on your phone, full stop.
• On-device transcription. Voice memos get transcribed using Apple's Speech framework. Audio never touches a server. This was important to me because half the visits I log are inside client offices where I'd never want audio uploaded anywhere.
• Works fully offline. Half my gigs are in basements and server closets with no signal. Had to work there or it was useless.
• One-time pricing. $39 unlock for unlimited clients. Free tier is 5 clients. I hate subscriptions for tools like this — you're not getting ongoing server costs from me, so I'm not charging like I am.

Stack: SwiftUI, SwiftData, Speech, CoreLocation, UIGraphicsPDFRenderer for the export. iOS 18+. Built with Claude Code in the terminal which honestly changed how fast I could iterate on the SwiftData model.

Hardest parts:

• The launch screen + dark mode adaptive color setup. Apple's UILaunchScreen color resolution has an undocumented gotcha where you need all four High Contrast variants in your colorset or it falls back to whichever entry is first in the catalog regardless of system appearance. Took an embarrassing amount of debugging.
• PDF export layout that actually looks professional when a client opens it. Iterated on this maybe a dozen times.
• Resisting the urge to add "just one more feature." Shipping the small thing was harder than building the big version of it.

Open to feedback, especially from anyone who does any kind of mobile field work — IT, electrical, low-voltage, whatever. The export format and visit fields are where I'm most unsure.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/field-stub-visit-log/id6767348984

Field Stub: Visit Log is live on the App Store. Solo dev, third app under my LLC, and the one I'm most proud of so far.

The backstory: I do IT support full-time and pick up break/fix work on the side. Every weekend gig ended the same way — I'd get home, stare at a phone full of unlabeled photos, try to remember which switch port I actually swapped, and reconstruct the visit from memory before invoicing. Half the time I'd forget mileage entirely. The "system" was Notes plus Photos plus hope.

I checked what was out there. Everything was either a $50/month PSA platform built for ten-person MSPs, or a generic field-service app oriented around plumbers and HVAC scheduling. Nothing for a guy who just needs to log a visit and walk away with a clean PDF.

So I built it. Start a visit, it timestamps and grabs location. As you work you drop in notes, photos, voice memos, and parts. End the visit and it spits out a PDF you can hand to the client or attach to an invoice. That's the whole loop.

A few things I went out of my way to get right:

• Local-first. No accounts, no cloud sync, no telemetry. SwiftData on-device. Your visit data lives on your phone, full stop.
• On-device transcription. Voice memos get transcribed using Apple's Speech framework. Audio never touches a server. This was important to me because half the visits I log are inside client offices where I'd never want audio uploaded anywhere.
• Works fully offline. Half my gigs are in basements and server closets with no signal. Had to work there or it was useless.
• One-time pricing. $39 unlock for unlimited clients. Free tier is 5 clients. I hate subscriptions for tools like this — you're not getting ongoing server costs from me, so I'm not charging like I am.

Stack: SwiftUI, SwiftData, Speech, CoreLocation, UIGraphicsPDFRenderer for the export. iOS 18+. Built with Claude Code in the terminal which honestly changed how fast I could iterate on the SwiftData model.

Hardest parts:

• The launch screen + dark mode adaptive color setup. Apple's UILaunchScreen color resolution has an undocumented gotcha where you need all four High Contrast variants in your colorset or it falls back to whichever entry is first in the catalog regardless of system appearance. Took an embarrassing amount of debugging.
• PDF export layout that actually looks professional when a client opens it. Iterated on this maybe a dozen times.
• Resisting the urge to add "just one more feature." Shipping the small thing was harder than building the big version of it.

Open to feedback, especially from anyone who does any kind of mobile field work — IT, electrical, low-voltage, whatever. The export format and visit fields are where I'm most unsure.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/field-stub-visit-log/id6767348984

Threw this together with a friend who's a cash-pay PT. He'd been complaining for months that there's no decent way to track the doctors and coaches who refer patients to him. Sales CRMs like HubSpot are wildly overkill. EMRs are clinical, not relationship-focused. He'd been doing it in a Google Sheet that he hated.

So I built Referra. iOS only, SwiftUI + SwiftData + CloudKit.

What it does:
- Tracks referral sources (physicians, coaches, ATs, chiros, etc.) and the referrals they actually send
- One-tap interaction logging (called, emailed, texted, visited) so you don't lose track of who you've talked to
- Reminders to nurture relationships before they go cold — color-coded by type so you can scan and prioritize
- Analytics: who's your top referrer, what categories drive most of your business, who you haven't talked to in 90+ days

The thing I'm most proud of is the "going cold" detection. It surfaces referrers you used to talk to but haven't reached out to recently. My PT friend said this alone justified the app to him because he kept losing relationships to inattention.

Privacy-first — explicitly NOT a medical record system. No PHI. Everything stays in your own iCloud, no analytics, no third-party services. The line we settled on was "track relationships, not patients."

Free tier (25 contacts, all features), then $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr or $79.99 lifetime if you don't want recurring.

Honest things I learned shipping this:
- Apple rejected v1.0 the first time for missing a Terms of Use link in the description. Resubmission with a screen recording took ~24 hours to re-review.
- StoreKit subscription compliance is fiddly. You need pricing/duration/terms visible on the paywall AND linked in metadata. Lost a day to that.
- The hardest design problem was making it not feel like another bloated CRM. Most of the work was figuring out what to leave out.

Already shipped v1.1 with a few fixes from the first wave of feedback (grouped contacts, search, drill-down on the analytics chart).

Would love feedback if you try it, especially anyone in healthcare-adjacent fields.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/referra-referral-tracker/id6763003248

Happy to answer anything about the build, the niche, the privacy approach, etc.

Hey r/AppHunt, posted here last week about Digital Legacy Vault. Back already with my third app — apparently I just keep building these.

NetScanPro is an iOS app that shows you everything on your home Wi-Fi. Phones, laptops, printers, smart TVs, the random smart plug you forgot about. Tap any device to see open ports and what they actually mean in plain English, including security notes for risky ones (SMB, RDP, IP cameras).

Built it because I got annoyed with Fing — gutted free tier, subscription Pro tier, phones home with your network data. I wanted something that just runs locally without sending anything to a server.

What makes it different:

• One-time $6.99 for Pro, no subscriptions ever
• Everything stays on your phone — no accounts, no analytics, no tracking
• Just shipped v1.1 with broader device coverage (Chromecast, AirPlay receivers, IP cameras, network printers)

Free tier: 3 network scans a day plus unlimited device discovery. Enough to actually use without paying.

Same one-person operation as last week's post — IT support by day, building iOS apps in my spare time. Open to feedback, especially if you have weird home network setups (multiple subnets, mesh networks, IoT clusters) where the app might struggle.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/netscanpro/id6762677151

Hey everyone, sharing my own app — full disclosure, I built it.

Digital Legacy Vault is a one-time $0.99 iOS app that stores the information your family would need in an emergency or after you die: emergency contacts, final wishes (funeral preferences, medical directives), current medications, and the physical location of your important documents (will, insurance, etc).

The pitch is privacy: it's 100% offline. No accounts, no cloud sync, no internet required. Your data is stored locally with iOS file encryption and locked behind Face ID. The app literally has no network code in it.

You can export everything as a printable PDF that includes a personal letter to your executor, document ID, and a confidentiality footer.

The intended use is fill it out, print it, store it with your will.

Why I built it: I looked at the major estate planning apps (Everplans, Trustworthy, Cake) and they're all $75-120/year subscription with cloud storage. I wanted something simple, one-time pay, and offline for what is genuinely sensitive information.

Requires iOS 17+. iPhone only.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/digital-legacy-vault/id6762098328

Happy to answer any questions.

Just got my second iOS app approved on the App Store. Sharing the build here because this sub helped me a ton when I was working on my first one.

**What it does:** Stores passwords, account details, medical info, and final wishes that your family can access if something happens to you. Everything is encrypted on-device behind Face ID — no accounts, no cloud sync, no servers.

**Stack:**

- SwiftUI + MVVM

- SwiftData for persistence

- LAPolicy biometric auth

- Complete File Protection for at-rest encryption

- UIGraphicsPDFRenderer for password-protected PDF export

**Why I built it:** I work in IT support and kept seeing how unprepared most people are for the digital side of an emergency. Existing solutions were either bloated subscription services or password managers retrofitted for the use case. Wanted something single-purpose, private by default, and cheap.

**Pricing:** $0.99 one-time. No subscription, no IAP.

**What I learned:** App Store review was faster than I expected (3 days). The hardest part was the UX of the "handoff" flow — how do you make sharing access feel safe when the whole point is restricting it? Ended up with the password-protected PDF export as the bridge.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/digital-legacy-vault/id6762098328

Happy to answer questions about the build, App Store submission process, or shipping solo as a non-full-time developer.