i don't know if i really like that definition. Going by the definition of a laboratory, it doesn't really make much sense. I mean sure they're a sterile environment, but it's incredibly unlikely that a lab is wiped clean and built from scratch, unless you get millions of dollars, and a lot of free time, i guess.

A lab is merely a place to do work with regard to studying, learning, or improving something.

People often refer to their "homelab" as an entire server rack, you want me to believe that people are willing to wheel out their entire server rack and discard the entire fucking thing? I doubt it. A homelab is just a collection of gear, (usually commercial networking gear) intended for providing an environment for you to mess around with things and learn about stuff.

In some capacity a homelab has to be semi permanent, if not for anything other than actually testing reliability and functionality of services and hardware, for the actual services themselves, because a part of the lab, is the service itself.

I still use the label 'homelab' for everything in my house, including the production services. It's just a convenient term and not something I've seen anyone split hairs about until now.

if nothing on it is permanent. You can have a home lab where the things you’re testing are self hosted apps. But if the server in question is meant to be permanent, like if you’re backing up the data on it, or you’ve got it on a UPS you make sure it stays available, or you would be upset if somebody came by and accidentally unplugged it during the day, it’s not a home lab.

A home lab is an unimportant, transient environment me