[HN Gopher] Home Lab Beginners guide
___________________________________________________________________
Home Lab Beginners guide
Author : ashitlerferad
Score : 448 points
Date : 2024-03-08 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (linuxblog.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (linuxblog.io)
| toinewx wrote:
| what would be the typical use of such a lab?
|
| Why are so many different components needed?
| mobilio wrote:
| Typical use for mine case - is to test things before deploy
| somewhere else.
|
| For example - Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker,
| etc, etc. All this require knowledge and experience.
| thrownawaysz wrote:
| >Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker, etc, etc.
|
| It will be a bit general but what's the best use case here?
|
| I mean try to build a home server, self host some services
| but there are so many options.
|
| - Proxmox, run a VM for each service. And it supports LXC
| too.
|
| - A vanilla Linux server which runs a type 2 hypervisor
| (QEMU) for each service
|
| - Docker can be also done either in a single server but some
| people do it with something like Unraid (which is for NAS but
| support virtualization too). Very similarly you can install
| Docker in OpenMediaVault too.
|
| Feels like there are so many ways to achive the same thing
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Proxmox + portainer
| mobilio wrote:
| But how you can install Proxmox under VM (QEMU/KVM)?
|
| Sometime you need a hardware that you can trash it within
| day or two.
| huimang wrote:
| It comes down to what you want to do and what you're
| comfortable with.
|
| For the last 4 years, I've used a Proxmox and LXC-based
| setup. I create LXCs for specific services like nfs,
| jellyfin, and minecraft where I can fine-tune the memory
| and cpu specs or turn off the LXC when not in use. Then I
| have an LXC for all of my docker-based services.
|
| I manage the LXC provisioning with ansible, the source code
| is available on github.
| https://github.com/andrewzah/service-
| automation/tree/master/...
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| Personally I run frigate, gitea, jellyfin, file storage, and a
| bunch of other minor test environments.
|
| I find it highly convenient personally, I have a data cap so
| moving large stuff files around happens over 10gbe locally
| instead of over the internet to aws or whatever. It's also all
| mine so from a security and privacy perspective it has a lot of
| advantages.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Do you do any offsite backup?
| bovem wrote:
| Depending on your use case some of the components might not be
| required like a discrete GPU.
|
| You can start self hosting on a mini PC if you want.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It means different things to different people, but I'd say for
| most it's some mixture of the following:
|
| 1. Enjoyment of building an enthusiast system from select
| components,
|
| 2. Having a more capable and flexible system,
|
| 3. Learning how networking works by being your own network
| admin.
|
| You don't need all the components. Many will get more just
| because they want to (see point 1), but mostly you get them
| because you need to (see point 2).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The responses are kinda a mixed bag here - there are two
| totally different use cases.
|
| If you want something for practical purposes, /r/selfhosted
| actually has you covered. It's usually jellyfin for movies,
| etc. And you use a NAS or a PC, but the idea is normally that
| you setup something reliable and don't lose your data, and it
| does not require too much tinkering. Maybe once in a while run
| some docker container to test it out. what I have now.
|
| Then there are people who get many raspberri Pi's or NUCs and
| basically play 'build a datacenter at home' game. It's good for
| tinkering and you often mess it up and start from scratch. I've
| done that, it's kind of fun, cool experience, learned a lot
| about networking, installed Kubernetes, then sold the machines.
|
| Then a third group are people who build a whole data centre at
| home AND run serious applications on it. These guys need to buy
| themselves a motorbike or something.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Then a third group are people who build a whole data
| centre at home AND run serious applications on it. These guys
| need to buy themselves a motorbike or something._
|
| I don't think the insult to a generalized group of people is
| necessary.
|
| Some enthusiasts have overkill racks, 40Gbps fiber,
| enterprise-class switches and vlans, etc, etc ... because
| it's their _enjoyable hobby_. The over-the-top components and
| making it all work is all part of their fun.
|
| It's not a hobby I'd personally pursue but I do understand
| why it can attract a passionate set of people.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It's not meant to be insulting, it's a joke in good spirit
|
| I think it communicates the point that their setup requires
| a level of effort and commitment that's not for everyone
| jasode wrote:
| _> It's not meant to be insulting, it's a joke in good
| spirit_
|
| Oh ok. It's hard to tell you're joking because you've
| made condescending comments about generalized groups of
| people in the past. But I've never downvoted them and
| just moved on. I stopped to reply in this case because I
| recently saw a bunch "insane petabyte homelab tour"
| videos where the owners took a lot of pride in showing
| their setups. It sounded like the "buy a motorcycle"
| advice was dismissive of their hobby.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I use mine for:
|
| * Streaming media server with Plex
|
| * Jenkins build server
|
| * Game servers (Minecraft, Factorio, etc.)
|
| * Photo syncing with Immich
|
| * File syncing with Syncthing
|
| * Alternative frontends for Reddit and YouTube with Teddit and
| Invidious
|
| * Home automation with Home Assistant
| sgarland wrote:
| Partially to practice things you do (or want to do) at work,
| partially because it's just fun.
|
| I set up a Mellanox mesh network between my three compute nodes
| a couple of weeks ago. 56 Gbps Infiniband is pretty sweet,
| although my CPU is too slow to fully take advantage of it (I
| don't have RoCE working yet, so it's IPoIB). Still, a ~20x
| speed up for my Ceph cluster on NVMe is lovely, and makes it
| actually viable for use.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| For me, mostly for experimentation with networking. For a
| practical example: most of my complaints and gripes with IPv6
| stem from trying to actually run an IPv6 network. And realizing
| that folks proclaiming that IPv6 is ready for everyone probably
| hasn't tried to administer a non-trivial network. Or they're
| getting enterprise vendor help.
|
| Looks like the author of the story is also dabbling into
| reliability engineering as well; having hardware can be a
| little helpful for that too since there's often vendor quirks
| as well.
| tills13 wrote:
| I'll dogpile on here with my uses:
|
| - AdGuard / PiHole - Plex server (plus the whole suite of *arr
| -- I gave up Netflix during the password sharing debacle) -
| Home Assistant (I'm on a huge data-ownership crusade this year)
| - Stats tracking for my car (TeslaMate -- this is such an
| amazing piece of software cannot recommend it enough if you've
| got a Tesla) - general tinkering
|
| I'm currently building a house as well and I plan on deploying
| a way more complicated networking setup (full-ubiquiti) so I
| can get rid of all my internet-connected security devices (cams
| and doorbell for example).
|
| Honestly... I used to build PCs (I still do when I need one)
| and now this fills that gap for me. I spend way too much money
| on it and it makes me happy 'cause I'm having fun. I get to
| tinker and break things in the privacy of my home. I get to
| learn about Linux administration (this is honestly the least
| fun part) and networking.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > what would be the typical use of such a lab?
|
| Usually self-hosting things and making things more complicated
| for fun.
|
| > Why are so many different components needed?
|
| Learning experience. Many home lab enthusiasts are
| sysadmins(-adjacent) and use it as a learning experience.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Piling on, my homelab is currently running
|
| * calendar/contact sync (webdav)
|
| * personal crm
|
| * notes webapp
|
| * email (yes, my primary one. helps when you're running
| business internet from home rather than a random ip on a vps)
|
| * mediawiki for writing
|
| * rss reader webapp
|
| * internet file sharing (basically selfhosted dropbox)
|
| * virtual tabletop for d&d-like games
|
| * reverse proxy/dns/cert management (a let's encrypt post renew
| hook that scps the certs where they need to go)/zfs
|
| This runs on an old rackmount server under a table using
| KVM/QEMU (once you get the commands written it your notes it's
| not so bad to manage purely from the command line), a cheap
| managed switch, and x86 router. I back up important stuff
| (email on the server, then lots of stuff on my desktop) to
| BackBlaze
| quaffapint wrote:
| Unless you simply want to play with all the various bits of
| hardware, a standard PC tower will be more power efficient and
| save a lot of room. I use that with unRaid and a simple router
| and switch and it's power efficient, doesn't make much noise,
| cheaper, and takes up much less room.
| justinclift wrote:
| > a standard PC tower will be more power efficient
|
| How much does it average in power draw (watts) from the wall?
| NegativeK wrote:
| I can't speak to if it's more or less efficient, but I have
| one PC taking backups that's running at 43W idle. A different
| PC based server, which is a much more highly specced retired
| desktop, is running at 72W idle.
| justinclift wrote:
| For standard PC's (ie with ATX based power supply) the 43W
| one seems pretty decent at idle.
|
| The small form factor gear though can have much more
| efficient power supplies, so some of those reportedly idle
| as low as 6w. That's total power draw at the wall. Much
| more efficient than a standard desktop PC.
|
| ---
|
| That aside, apparently that newer 12 volt power supply
| standard being pushed by Intel is good for lower power idle
| too. Hopefully that gains traction and reduces everyone's
| power bills. :)
|
| https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/intels-atx12vo-standard-a-
| st...
| bovem wrote:
| Since last year I've been configuring and maintaining my homelab
| setup and it is just amazing.
|
| I've learned so much about containers, virtual machines and
| networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-
| ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features
| than the proprietary cloud solutions.
|
| With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can
| access my homelab from anywhere in the world.
|
| The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC
| or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save
| electricity costs.
|
| If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to
| perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend
| setting up your own homelab.
|
| [1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ [2] https://immich.app/ [3]
| https://tailscale.com/
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Defo invest in a mini pc. I got a powerful HP elitedesk that
| sips 7w on idle and runs 38 containers
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I get an electronics workbench or a woodworking workshop, but I
| still don't quite understand the purpose of this ,,home lab". You
| can just run stuff on your laptop, or a mini computer in some
| corner if it's supposed to run 24/7?
| glitchc wrote:
| Looks like it's tailored for SRE-related hobbies.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| It can be for fun or practical. Having access to ECC hardware
| is a big plus for some stuff so the server racks aren't all for
| show. It just depends on your goals.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, it's the same kind of thing as running something 24/7 in
| a mini computer in some corner, but scaled up.
|
| It's fairly common for people that like to muck around with
| this stuff (or learn it for whatever purpose). Think of it like
| a hobby I guess. :)
| zild3d wrote:
| yeah was expecting/hoping for an electronics/hardware "lab"
| setup
| buybackoff wrote:
| The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and
| scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with
| 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very
| efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load.
| For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision
| Tower (can haz ECC) _SFF_ from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very
| good, quite small yet proper desktops /servers with proper quiet
| fans, could fit 10G Mellanox 3 cards (also from eBay for $40),
| and you could stack one on top of another horizontally. Don't go
| older than OptiPlexes with 12th gen CPUs, electricity and space
| they take could become a constraint. The used ones with i5-12500
| are already very cheap. With LGA1700 one could put i9-14900
| (non-K) there if needed.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just
| an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with
| an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that
| exist yet?
| buybackoff wrote:
| For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one
| PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4,
| 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago.
|
| It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I
| already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with
| them. No games of course.
|
| I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1
| native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters there (2 slots),
| it works well with ZFS mirror.
| Andrex wrote:
| OptiPlex seemed to be the best option when I was browsing
| around.
| jhickok wrote:
| I think you could DIY that, but I found getting a few little
| PCs can be stuffed in a drawers with some holes drilled in
| the back. Haven't complained about suffocation yet! I bought
| some Bee-Link mini PCs with pretty impressive specs. No idea
| if I am now being spied on by China.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...I 've been waiting for a small form factor with an
| integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that
| exist yet?_
|
| Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few
| containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on
| my QNAP.
|
| The TBS-h574TX (https://www.qnap.com/en-
| us/product/tbs-h574tx) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The
| HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280
| SATA SSD slots (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx),
| and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any
| NAS.
| buybackoff wrote:
| It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you
| could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into
| TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports
| natively, with all goodies such as SMART.
| znpy wrote:
| If you just need to run a few containers, you might want
| to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.
| belthesar wrote:
| Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option.
| I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container
| Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always
| eventually do, my home lab has become production, and
| being able to do software patches of the underlying
| system without service outages is really desirable. I've
| been agonizing and going back and forth between various
| potential solutions for this for a couple months now,
| with the most recent attempt being "Deploy k3s, with a
| fully separate control plane from the worker nodes, and
| run all of those atop a Proxmox cluster because being
| able to migrate VMs across nodes and also stand up
| isolated workloads to test out other solutions makes
| changing things in the future far less risky".
|
| That said, I was running the Homelab on effectively a
| single Unraid hyperconverged NAS/compute layer before
| then, and that worked wonders for quite a long time. I
| wouldn't consider Unraid my first choice now, given the
| advancements in TrueNAS SCALE in the time since I chose
| it as the solution, but the concept of NAS + Container
| Orchestrator as hyperconverged homelab today is quite
| attractive.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| These NASbooks are sooooo close to what I want!
|
| My problem is that none of them have an internal power
| supply. They all require a power adapter that's decidedly
| less easy to source than an IEC cord. I have had 3 separate
| experiences where I give someone instructions to grab a box
| and the power adapter... and they show up with the box and
| without the power adapter (or with a power adapter in a box
| of similar power adapters and no volt/amp/size rating on
| the box to disambiguate). In short, the internal power
| supply is something I actually care about.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's harder and harder to find small computers with
| internal power, because they've found that nobody counts
| the power brick in the "size" (remember the original
| Xbox?).
|
| The best bet might be to wait until they've all finalized
| on USB-C.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Yep, that's probably how it has to be. Hopefully USB4NET
| can save us from "gigabit ethernet is enough for
| everyone," too.
| natebc wrote:
| Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little
| expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally
| powered though)
|
| https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
| unregistereddev wrote:
| There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a
| few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available
| (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review
| site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links
| to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-
| nvme-pcie-adapters/
| buybackoff wrote:
| A cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it
| matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI
| 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, bit for NVMe 4.0 more is
| needed.
| cybrox wrote:
| In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the
| rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the
| next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability
| and learning, just go with whatever you like.
|
| I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are
| connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels
| bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into,
| connected to NAS and multiple Raspberry Pi's on a shelf and I
| really like the mess and have learned a lot.
|
| Just use what you have and expand as you need. Racks are cool
| once you're into the hobby enough to care about style points.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing
| about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware
| that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little
| market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you
| can get very good bargains.
|
| Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking
| stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer
| hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise
| capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed
| servers.
| mech422 wrote:
| The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power
| draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade
| server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric
| bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once.
|
| I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but
| tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and
| are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web
| configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches.
| And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each
| room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-
| of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack
| into 1 feed to the cable modem.
| blackfawn wrote:
| Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise
| equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick
| to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor
| (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author
| is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some
| things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards
| dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I
| haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64
| machines w/ real SSDs in them.
|
| I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might
| use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p
| Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy
| 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.
| nvy wrote:
| Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a
| successor to PC Engines APUs
| blackfawn wrote:
| I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly
| ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro"
| form factor, which are both practically identical in
| size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current
| versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s)
| old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones
| were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow
| current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for
| network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a
| generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard
| finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I
| just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.
| vially wrote:
| I was also looking for a successor to the PC Engines APUs
| and came across https://teklager.se/en/ that lists some
| possible alternatives that you might find interesting.
|
| Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up
| buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress
| (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have
| been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with
| OPNsense running as a VM).
| mech422 wrote:
| I love the Odroid H series [0]. cheap, quiet and only
| like 4w idle draw
|
| 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| transpute wrote:
| On paper, these look promising, no direct experience.
| Also on Amazon US/CA.
|
| $170, N100, 16GB DDR5 RAM, dual 2.5GbE,
| https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-n-box-pro-
| intel-n100-mi...
|
| $210, N100, dual 3.5" SATA, M.2 NVME, dual 2.5GbE,
| https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-r1-2bay-nas-
| intel-n100-...
|
| $250, Ryzen 5700U, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-
| cyber-amd-ryzen-7-5700u...
| mech422 wrote:
| Yeah - I skipped rPi because back when I started
| replacing stuff ARM still had some gotcha's with stuff
| that hadn't been ported. I do use the rPi's for the 3d
| printers though.
|
| I've found the TP Link stuff to be good for home
| switches. cheap, quiet, and basically fully
| featured/managed. Stuff like SNMP, VLAN/Mac Lan, port
| mirroring/monitoring, etc. Also SSH and web interfaces...
| I have 2-3 currently, 1 per room feeding back to the
| PowerConnects (NOISY) and haven't had a single issue in
| 3-5 years of use :-)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > The down side to the old enterprise servers is the
| power draw.
|
| It depends on the generation of the gear. Stuff coming
| off-lease in the last 3 - 4 years has been of a
| generation where lower power draw became a major selling
| point. In Dell land, for example, the power draw
| differences are dramatic between the Rx10, Rx20, and
| newer series. (Basically, throw Rx10 servers in the
| trash. Rx20 servers are better but still not great.)
| buybackoff wrote:
| Power draw also comes with terrible noise. They were
| designed to be in a server room, not a living/bed room.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I feel like it's a harder sell than it used to be because
| post-Ryzen there's been real increases in CPU performance.
| Modern NUCs and prebuilt also having native NVMe is a boon
| too.
|
| All depends on what you're going for though.
| internet101010 wrote:
| The caveat to this is noise. People who have never seen a
| rack server in person don't understand how loud they really
| are. PSUs, case fans, cpu fans (if applicable) all gotta
| go. You kind of have to go into it knowing you are going to
| spend an additional $100-200 replacing it all, and that's
| assuming you will not have to 3D print a custom bracket to
| house the new fans.
| bayindirh wrote:
| What homelab people who do not work with/in a data center
| daily doesn't realize is how noisy and power hungry is the
| equipment they procure.
|
| They got a managed switch, nice. It has VLANs, stacking,
| etc. nice. How many 48 port switches you can possibly stack
| in a home? You got a Sun ZFS7420. Great. That's a rack with
| two controllers with 1TB RAM each. That thing screams. An
| entry level 7320 is maybe workable, but you can't do 7420
| at home. Same for HPE/Dell/Netapp storage boxen.
|
| Doing Infiniband is home is another thing I can't
| understand. Fiber cables are extremely expensive. Copper is
| range limited and thick, plus unless you do HPC, its
| latency and speed doesn't mean much. Go fiber Ethernet.
| Much more practical.
|
| I understand the curiosity and willingness to play, but
| it's not that practical to play with these at home (noise,
| space, heat, power wise). I also buy high end consumer
| hardware. TP-Link has 4/8 port smart managed SOHO switches
| for example, they even have PoE. Power your Raspi cluster
| via PoE with less cables and get some respectable computing
| power with no noise. Neat! No?
|
| Dell's Rack servers are generally not noisy at idle, but a
| 2U server under some real load is unbearable. What's funny
| that an Intel N95 has the same power with an i7-3770K with
| better SIMD support while being 4x more efficient, and that
| thing is not slow by any means.
| geek_at wrote:
| I did just the same. Built myself a little movable 6 node
| rack out of wood.
|
| With 3d printed powerbrick holders on the sides and a switch
| with a 10g uplink so all servers can use the full 1g nic.
|
| Warms my home office in the colder months and can be put in
| the garage on the warmer months.
|
| Photo front: https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png
|
| Photo back: https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png
|
| Photo of the 3d printed power brick holders:
| https://pictshare.net/kgffy6.png
|
| [edit] Specs:
|
| - 80 Watts during normal load
|
| - 50 cores
|
| - 9TB nvme storage
|
| - 300GB RAM
|
| - 3 of them are running proxmox
|
| - 3 of them Docker swarm
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| I can't quite see which Thinkcentre's those are, but the
| M920x can fit a 10GbE PCIe NIC in it and provide it enough
| power. I have one on my desk with 2x2TB NVMe, 32GB RAM and
| a 10GbE fiber connection to it.
| idatum wrote:
| In the spirit of "your setup, should be your setup. As
| traditional or as custom as you'd like!" as mentioned in
| article, I went with a vertical mount rack. It's not enclosed
| so it has enough ventilation.
|
| The advantage with a vertical rack for me was space savings.
| Key parts of my home lab are near the low voltage panel
| (lucky to have in newer house) which does have foot traffic
| from other household members. Much less risk of someone
| bumping into the rack.
| mech422 wrote:
| When I started using SBC's for my home setup, I skipped
| rPi's. At the time, being ARM based was a bit limiting (IIRC,
| at the time some stuff still hadn't been ported to ARM). So I
| went with odroid h2/h3 [0]. X86 based, lots of memory to work
| with, and much cheaper then a nuc - and uses much less power
| then my old Dell/HP blade servers from EBay :-)
|
| 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| nextos wrote:
| Also there are great fanless cases for NUCs and RPis.
|
| Actually, Asus has taken over NUCs from Intel and they are
| releasing fanless machines, so now there is not even the need
| to mod them.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Racks are nice from an organization perspective as well, but
| agreed it's an unnecessary complication and expense and
| limits your options.
|
| I run a half dozen Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny PCs I picked up
| off eBay super cheap. Sure, I could go buy some rack mounts
| for them all... to the tune of $750. It would look really
| nice. That's about it. If I'd decided that was a
| "requirement" I never would have done any of this.
|
| For anyone considering diving in to any of this stuff, don't
| let the pursuit of "perfect" stop you before you've even
| started.
|
| My PCs are quite content sitting in a pile with some scraps
| of wood shoved between to help with airflow.
| noobermin wrote:
| This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby.
| See mechanical keyboards for example.
| CharlesW wrote:
| There's always the $70 IKEA Lack Rack:
| https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-
| Rack/
| BadHumans wrote:
| You can get into custom mechanical keyboards for under 50
| dollars. I don't think you understand what you are talking
| about.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Don't be disingenuous he's obviously not referring to
| that part of the mechanical keyboard community
| BadHumans wrote:
| I'm not being disingenuous. Calling it a "rich man's
| hobby" might dissuade people from partaking which I
| wouldn't want to happen. Yes, there is a high-end to
| mechanical keyboards where it can get really expensive
| but is cooking also a rich person's hobby because there
| are $1000 knives? If you don't want to play in that side
| of the pool you don't have to. You can get a lot of
| mileage out of $50-$100 in mechanical keyboards.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't know if I'd call myself a "hobbyist" for keyboards,
| but my mechanical keyboard that I am typing this on, and
| that I bought in 2021, cost me $35 after tax. Obviously not
| the cheapest keyboard in the world, but also within the
| reach of nearly any employed person in a rich country like
| the US or UK.
|
| I posted this in a sibling comment, but it doesn't really
| have to be expensive regardless. I got started with the
| homelab stuff with a partially broken laptop. Considering
| that that laptop was about to go into the trash, I consider
| that (sort of) free to get started, but even if you don't
| have an old laptop lying around you can purchase a used
| "Craigslist Special" for basically nothing, generally less
| than $200, and often much much much less because you
| probably have a friend or coworker that has an old laptop
| lying around that they'd be happy if you took off their
| hands. Old laptops are kind of in this frustrating category
| of being "too good to throw away, but not good enough to
| use", so people will often hoard them inadvertently.
| Additionally, they're extremely ubiquitous; most households
| in the US have at least one laptop, and often at least one
| per person.
|
| Even rack mount servers (used) cost very little, at least
| upfront. My server with 128gb of RAM and 24 cores was $150,
| but of course the power draw is where most of the cost for
| that comes from, so for those you could argue that they're
| a rich man's hobby.
|
| ETA:
|
| For those interested, the listing I ordered from a few
| years ago on Amazon appears to have mutated into a
| different item, but this one appears to be an identical
| product. I think for the price it's actually a really
| decent keyboard. I'm able to get about 120WPM on MonkeyType
| with it, for what it's worth.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Keyboard-Ultra-Slim-
| Anti-G...
| slyall wrote:
| Whereas a "poor mans hobby" is a a 1970s muscle car and a
| home workshop...
|
| Sure you can spend thousands on racks of servers and
| UPS/generators but you can also spend less than $500.
|
| Personally I rent a unit in a quadplex and have:
| Old 42" rack - $50 from old employer 10 year old
| HP Microserver G7 for storage - $250 new repurposed
| old desktop virtual machines - Free Cheap dumb
| switch - $50
| Semaphor wrote:
| In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a
| lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving
| devices are in the selfhosted communities.
|
| There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out
| that way.
| didntcheck wrote:
| You can add "data hoarder" to the Venn diagram too!
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I am honestly kind of anti-rack at this point.
|
| "Deals" on used enterprise are IME dreadful unless you can
| get in on your own employer offloading old stuff, which
| requires you to a) even have an onprem setup at all and b) be
| friendly enough with the IT/NOC people that they give you a
| tip when it's going to happen. (For me b seems to happen
| naturally so it's really all on a).
|
| eBay is a fools game, terrible prices. Craigslist is usually
| the same sellers too. Maybe some people live behind an Amazon
| datacenter or something, I unfortunately live in a city where
| the only reason we have Amazon 2-day shipping is because
| we're a major shipping hub. And anything that does resemble a
| good deal is ancient Opterons that are literally e-waste
| these days.
|
| So anyway, sorry, my whole point here is that most people are
| actually going to be running a ton of old enterprise stuff
| that is actually rackmountable with good sliding rails.
| You're either building whiteboxes in a 4U rosewill case or
| you're putting stuff on rack-mountable shelves. The rosewill
| cases theoretically have sliding rails but they're awful,
| just awful. So you're either using shelf rails or literal
| shelves which tends to throw off efficient utilization of the
| U's available in the rack - shelf rails usually result in a
| dead U either above or below them, and shelves obviously have
| similar effects.
|
| So yeah. As someone who owns a rack (4-post open rack), if
| you asked me, I'd say just go buy one of those big heavy duty
| Lowe's shelf units and ask for extra shelf inserts so you can
| have more, but less-tall shelves. Boom, you now have
| something that'll hold anything and is way better than
| fucking around with rack nuts and shelf rails and stuff.
|
| Love homelabs in general, though.
| sophacles wrote:
| 10-15 years ago the deals were real. I picked up a lot of
| off-lease and/or used stuff on ebay really cheap. As more
| and more companies move to cloud, and as more people get
| into homelabs, prices on decent gear have gone up. I was
| starting to think the good times were over in 2018 and in
| 2020 I stopped defaulting to ebay when I saw a great lot
| getting broken up and sold cheap suddenly pull all their
| stuff and relist it at much higher prices - "the scrappers
| are on to us" is what I realized.
|
| These days I've been replacing the guts of my old servers
| with mini-itx setups for the most part. It does what I need
| and lets me shove 2 or 3 nodes into a 2u case so I can keep
| the aesthetic of "a personal rack".
| OJFord wrote:
| Or as a compromise, you can buy strips of appropriately
| spaced/sized square-punched metal angle; before I moved I
| built a shelf unit designed so that the depth of the shelf
| was correct (19" between posts plus a bit for the sheet metal
| thickness) for a rack, I had access to the side so I had a
| combination shelf & rack. People do similarly with Ikea
| tables ('lack rack'). Nice thing about the shelves was that I
| could buy a short strip (it was maybe 12U) and if I'd
| outgrown it I could've just removed a shelf and added another
| strip.
| mindslight wrote:
| From a home perspective, the best way to think about a (full
| depth four post) rack is as an extremely high density
| shelving for specific types of things. You won't make any
| gains with one or two machines, or several SBCs in small
| cases, that you couldn't have made with similar non-rack
| shelves. Having a few pieces of gear with rack ears not in a
| rack will forever call to you though. In general I'd either
| say commit to it (42U and understand you'll be paying a
| premium for shelves/gear/accessories), or regular shelving
| will suit you fine.
| thethindev wrote:
| I actually did just that and setup my homelab with my "old"
| laptop [1].
|
| [1] https://thin.computer/index.php/2024/03/08/self-hosting-
| my-s...
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Yep, agreed. When living in a high cost of living area (i.e.
| where lots of tech professionals tend to live), space is
| limited.
|
| I'm annoyed at the lack of ECC-capable sub-ITX NAS boards. I
| have a Helios4, but I've no idea what I'll migrate to when that
| dies.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| N100 boards are ddr5 compatible which has internal ecc
| mrob wrote:
| Internal ECC doesn't protect the data in transit. It also
| doesn't have error reporting, so you could be operating
| with the error correction already operating at maximum
| capacity without knowing it, leaving no error correction
| available for unusual events. It's not a substitute for
| traditional ECC.
| sitkack wrote:
| DDR5 ECC is an internal mechanism just to make DDR5
| viable due to the speed and node size. It doesn't
| increase reliability, in enables not having a reduction
| in reliability over DDR4.
| znpy wrote:
| Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers.
|
| I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in
| terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart
| plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always
| tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile)
| for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike
| over 30W.
|
| Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based lightbulbs.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Not only do NUCs sip power but they're embarrassingly fast
| for most "I want to play with servers" jobs. RAM is cheap and
| 32GB goes a _long_ ways.
| mech422 wrote:
| Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really
| expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less
| compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G),
| SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and
| just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu
| stress).
|
| 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| I got a Ryzen 7 5800H with 32gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive
| for 320EUR... I don't have the dual on board nic, but
| beside that, it's quite great cpu wise with Proxmox --
| multiple VM on it, doing transcoding, DNS, dealing with
| download and search, Home Assistant. Of course transcoding
| 4k live is costly, but that's an exception. I can use NVMe
| and SATA hd, that's nice.
|
| And I can update the ram and use ECC.
|
| Not bad all in all !
|
| Still, I got a Dell SFF with an I5 and 16gb of ram for less
| than 100EUR -- updated it with a 4 2,5gbps NIC, will be
| good for OPnsense... If I don't switch to a Melanox Connect
| 3.
| mech422 wrote:
| Very Nice :-)
|
| I don't really need that much horsepower (My stuff is
| like 90% idle - git server, etc.) but I _really_
| appreciate the lower noise and power usage compared to my
| old Xeon blades
| Andrex wrote:
| I didn't know ODROID was in this market, that's awesome!
| Definitely checking them out next time I need hardware, the
| H3 looks perfect.
| mech422 wrote:
| I sound like a shill - I have no affiliation, just a
| customer but I _LOVE_ the H series :-)
|
| plenty of power for my needs, silent, low power ... and
| CHEAP! I especially love the large RAM capacity as it
| lets me run a lot of docker/vm/etc without swapping. Most
| of my stuff is idle like 90% of the time (stuff like git
| servers, etc) so the CPU is fine for me.
|
| I've had mine for a few years now (I had the first gen..)
| and never any problems!
| Andrex wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm actually (the original?) ODROID shill!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619740
|
| :)
|
| Glad to hear they never stopped doing what they were good
| at, sounds like they've gotten even better!
| mech422 wrote:
| One of us...One of us :-)
|
| I really hope more people hear of the H2/H3 stuff...I'd
| love for Odroid to keep making/improving them! :-D
| mech422 wrote:
| Oh hey - that post was pretty cool :-)
|
| Amazing how much a kind gesture sticks with you! Glad to
| see stuff like that these days :-D
| buybackoff wrote:
| NUCs may be expensive, until you see a 40% discount on
| Amazon :) I've got mine this way. Now they are discontinued
| so one may expect to get them cheap on eBay. Anyway, I'm
| talking about the box itself and MB/CPU only.
| Vendors/people often sell a good box with bad RAM/disks at
| a very low price.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| How do they compare to SFF (like thinkcentre tiny) or other
| minipcs (e.g. Minisforum um790)? Power usage seems to be
| fairly similar (5-7W) but maybe there are less obvious perks?
| tombert wrote:
| My first homelab thing was a laptop with a broken monitor. It
| wasn't terribly hard to get Ubuntu server working on there, it
| had a gigabit ethernet port built in, and it had USB 3.0 so it
| wasn't too hard to get reasonably good hard drive speeds to use
| as a NAS.
|
| You can buy old used laptops (especially with broken monitors)
| for basically nothing (or maybe literally nothing if you
| already have one, or you have a friend of family member who has
| one they're willing to donate). If your goal is just to use it
| for Plex, it will work fine, and the power draw on laptops
| (particularly when idle) isn't that much more than a NUC.
|
| I use a proper rack mount server now largely because I thought
| they were neat, but I think for most people an old laptop is
| fine.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| That's my setup. I decided to use old laptops instead of
| proper servers because power cuts are common in the region I
| live, especially when it rains. So laptops have built in UPS
| (their batteries) which can hold power for some minutes in
| the worst cases. It sounds like a poor man's home lab, but it
| works.
| tombert wrote:
| Honestly, I think that's probably smarter than what I do
| now. My personal laptop idles around 15-20W, tends to peak
| at about 80W. If I bought a dozen laptops, the total energy
| usage would be roughly the same as my server at idle, and I
| could use Docker Swarm or something to glue everything
| together, while also having a lot more power resiliency
| because of the batteries (like you mentioned).
|
| I also think it's good to prevent ewaste. There's a lot of
| raw computing power that just ends up in landfills. It's
| almost certainly better for the environment to get as much
| use out of existing stuff as possible than it is to buy new
| stuff. I can't imagine it's good for the world for a bunch
| of old lithium batteries to lie dormant.
|
| If I can find a good deal on a dozen old laptops, I might
| honestly put this plan into action.
| mech422 wrote:
| Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper
| then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and
| X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful
| as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab
| stuff.
|
| I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades
| - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was
| HUGE!
|
| 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| gorkish wrote:
| One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an
| object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.
| mech422 wrote:
| Heh - maybe in the H4 ?? :-) Though you can prolly stick a
| 10GB nic in the PCIE slot ??
|
| Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE
| slot..I was sure it did :-(
| tombert wrote:
| How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and
| even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W.
| Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs
| throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem
| that bad to me.
|
| Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them
| running at high load all at once then of course that can get
| pretty pricey power-wise.
| mech422 wrote:
| The Dell chassis has a 2500w powersupply for 6 blades. The
| HP chassis has a 3000w PS for 8 blades..
|
| I actually ran 3-4 extra circuits to the computer room to
| run it all...
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Not the person you are replying too but huge will largely
| depend how much you pay for electricity. Electricity is
| very expensive in Europe
|
| In Sydney, Australia running your server just at idle would
| cost just over AUD $50 a month assuming it is powered by
| the grid.
|
| For about AUD $400 you could replace it with a 7 or 8
| series Intel i7 mini PCI and throw a 10Gbe NIC in it and
| that thing will cost you AUD $7 a month to run.
|
| It gets tricky though if you want ECC RAM. Most of the
| cheaper low power systems that are available will take
| UDIMMs and that becomes prohibitively expensive if you need
| a decent amount of RAM.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I'll second this. My "home lab" is several small computers
| crammed wherever they can either be totally hidden, or where
| they can justify their presence. An old Celeron NUC lives under
| my couch, and it runs Pi-Hole, Syncthing, and some diagnostic
| stuff. It's extremely useful, and the impact on my electric
| bill is negligible. A Lenovo mini PC lives behind my TV, and
| serves double duty as a Syncthing node and an HTPC. I'll
| probably make it do other stuff eventually.
|
| It's not the most sophisticated setup on earth, but it works
| great, it's dirt cheap, and it's apartment-friendly.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk_
|
| then a better name than homelab would be your "NUC/NOC-nook".
|
| with regard to TFA, I don't trust "labs" with neat wiring.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Unless something has recently changed, the SFF Precisions and
| Optiplexes used weird smaller PSUs and generally have really
| poor airflow. Generally the lower end precision mid-tower also
| flow air terribly and get hot and whiny. There's no way I would
| recommend an SFF system if you can get the MT variant, as your
| options for fixing the MT systems when the Dell PSU inevitably
| fails are much better than getting a regular ATX PSU, cutting a
| hole to feed the cords in, and bolting it to the side of the
| case, which I've done repeatedly for SFF Dell systems with
| blown PSUs.
|
| Additionally, one challenge I have with all of these is that
| none of them have anything like a BMC. If you have more than
| one system, moving peripherals around sucks, and KVM technology
| is kind of iffy these days. It seemed easier to just jam an old
| Supermicro motherboard that had IPMI enabled in a reasonable
| ATX case with a lower power Xeon variant, and call it a day.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| BMC is not a requirement these days as there are options like
| using a piKVM or AMT/vPRO on certificied Intel systems.
|
| Personally I turn IPMI off. The difference at idle can be up
| to 20w. Not to mention the outdated interfaces are a
| sercurity risk
| _peeley wrote:
| I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more
| worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a
| single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then
| expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running
| PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I
| need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc.
|
| That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and
| upgrading some of the other hardware in my lab, this
| "beginner"'s guide was really helpful.
|
| [0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0
| buybackoff wrote:
| Please, do not use Raspberry Pi for a homelab unless you are
| 100% sure your workload is OK with it. I've just sold mine
| after ~2 years it being in a box in a closet. It's just to
| weak, too useless. I value my power socket slot more that
| RPi. If ARM is important, especially MAC Mx, the lowest Mac
| Mini is not that expensive. RPi is close to zero in
| performance. It could be just some unnoticeable VM in
| Proxmox/AnotherHypervisor performance-wise.
| bayindirh wrote:
| My homelab (or infrastructure if you will) consists of 2 ARM
| SBCs distributed geographically and connected via a VPN &
| syncthing. They are fanless, powerful enough (8 cores and 8GB
| of RAM is plenty for what I do), and handle 90% of the
| automation my old desktop was doing.
|
| I don't need Proxmox, tons of containers or anything. If I do,
| I can always throw a N95 into the mix with ample RAM and
| storage.
| haunter wrote:
| >For this article's purpose, I won't recommend any specific
| servers because this will vary a ton depending on what you will
| be hosting. NAS storage, VMs, web servers, backup servers, mail
| servers, ad blockers, and all the rest. For my requirements, I
| purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off
| eBay.
|
| This is the way. HP, Lenovo, and Dell are all making identical
| small form factor PCs that are more than enough for most people
| at home. They are also very silent and power efficient.
|
| I have a Lenovo M720 Tiny and a Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro (they
| are virtually almost the same). You can change parts, there are
| ample ports available and you can pretty much run any OS you
| want.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| > For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and
| ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay.
|
| This deserves a shout out. These things are everywhere on eBay
| and they Ryzen ones rock.
| Andrex wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with the EliteDesk G3 I got off eBay a
| couple months ago. I actually use it for light work (mostly
| spreadsheets and emails) too.
|
| I think I paid less than $130 including shipping and sometimes
| it (anecdotally) has better performance than my home PC which
| is a full tower I bought new 4-5 years back.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| I love my G3. I found with a beefy i7 8 core cpu that sips 7w
| at idle. These machines are gold
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go
| down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro.
| Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're
| working and using nix means all your system state is logged in
| git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having
| to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist
| upgrade explodes. Every change you've made, package you've
| installed, and setting you've configured is in the git log.
|
| I find myself referring to my git repo frequently as a source of
| documentation on what's installed and how the systems are set up.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I wish Nix had a shallower learning curve (or that I was
| smarter). It's been on my list of wishes to play with, but that
| list is long, and getting Nix over the hump hasn't been
| something I've been able to do yet. The concept makes sense to
| me, but when I see a new package or app I want to play with, I
| can get there with docker-compose and a VM more quickly than I
| can wrap my head around doing it in Nix.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| If you get the base system up you don't have to exclusively
| use their containerization system. I have a mix of nix
| environments and k3s deployments that are saved off in
| another git repo. There are advantages to purity but
| practically speaking you can just do what's convenient.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Its just a matter of repetition. It will eventually click if
| you go back enough times (at least it did for me after like 4
| tries). The biggest thing to getting your mind adjusted to
| the syntax is to understand that nix is just 1 big JSON blob.
| All the syntax is there to facilitate merging/updating that
| ball of JSON in a deterministic way.
|
| You might try to generate your docker containers using nix as
| a first step. Not sure if it will be more approachable for
| you, but at least its 1 less new thing to adjust to.
| haswell wrote:
| I'm going through the NixOS journey right now, and it's a
| combination of easier than I thought, but also more
| frustrating than it should be.
|
| Getting a basic system going seemed about as easy as Arch (if
| you consider Arch easy). But adding flakes and home manager
| to the mix is where things have run off the rails a bit for
| me.
|
| I think a lot of the steepness of the learning curve comes
| from trying to go all in on flakes/home manager up front, and
| a lot of the online discussions and quick starts being
| oriented towards this goal. I've since scaled back my
| aspirations a bit and I'm focusing on just understand core
| NixOS with a monolithic config file until it makes more sense
| to my brain.
|
| If you haven't get, check out vimjoyer's channel on YouTube.
| His content has been the most helpful for me by far, and it
| got me a basic setup going that I'm now iterating on. What I
| do love is that I feel like I can iterate with confidence. I
| have no idea what I'm doing for the most part but I know I
| can get myself back to a working state.
|
| I _think_ it will be worth the time investment in the long
| run, but yeah, it's been a bit weird and the lack of a
| canonical approach makes it hard to break into the ecosystem.
| cloudripper wrote:
| I use nix btw.
|
| I totally agree. It (nix and nixos) is/are such a pain so
| often. But, wow... when you get things to work it is glorious.
|
| Quickly and easily syncing system/user/application
| configurations across multiple devices is incredible. The
| declarative approach means that the often laborious effort it
| takes me to get things to work pays off when I finally figure
| it out and realize I never have to do that again - and since
| it's declarative, I now have a documented functional
| configuration/example to grow and expand from.
|
| My current project is to learn Nix development environments by
| building "Linux from Scatch" from Nix. I am making progress
| slowly, but every success is cemented and replicatable.
|
| LLMs definitely help distill the sparse/scattered
| documentation, but I am finding a good amount of grit is still
| required.
|
| All in all, I am very much enjoying Nix and hope to utilize it
| more in my homelab.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I got into Guix and then failed. Now I realise it's because I
| didn't fully understand the nix philosophy underneath. Can
| you recommend any good tutorial points for an
| intermediate/experienced unix person?
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I just feel it doesn't have to be this way. We can get the
| benefits of nix without the hardness of nix. It's just
| someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet.
|
| It's annoying enough that I won't use nix personally. I've
| used it at work so I'm quite knowledgeable with it.
| Arelius wrote:
| IMO, this thing _is_ Nix, it just needs better UI and a lot
| better documentation.
|
| The problem I've realized is that for many core Nix
| developers, the source is the documentation. Which doesnt
| scale.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| Luckily the ecosystem is literally getting better by the
| hour right now. There's been a huge uptick in interest
| and lots of people are writing really good documentation
| and starter templates.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| > sparse/scattered documentation
|
| I've been hearing more and more from people switching over to
| NixOS, so hopefully the docs will get better as well
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...or having to manually put the system back together after a
| Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes.
|
| I avoid this by running Gentoo Linux on my Linux machines. I've
| heard people say good things about Arch, but I've never used
| it.
|
| Ubuntu is just bad... I say this as someone who used Ubuntu for
| a few years waaay back when (and was _really_ pleased that I
| finally could recommend a reliably, easy-to-use Linux distro to
| nontechnical folks), but swore off of it after the second or
| third in-place upgrade (in a row) that left my system
| nonfunctional in ways that _required_ the sysadmin knowledge I
| 'd gained from going through the well-documented Gentoo setup
| process (and from tinkering over the years) to repair.
|
| Friends don't let friends use Ubuntu.
| bombcar wrote:
| Agreed - I'm willing to use Ubuntu LTS on servers that are
| basically glorified LAMP machines (LCMP?) - but for home
| servers, nothing has beat Gentoo, not only for the full
| understanding of "what I have" but also having direct control
| over what I've got running, including quite a bit of
| customizability if needed.
|
| Gentoo on ZFS is kinda nice.
| kiney wrote:
| Ansible code in git solves the same problem for ANY distro
| NewJazz wrote:
| Once you stop templating yaml you will never go back.
|
| Seriously as someone who has used ansible a lot and nix a
| bit, I'd take NixOS over Ansible+Debian/Fedora any day.
| k8svet wrote:
| No, no it doesn't. It doesn't solve the same problem, at all,
| certainly not holistically like NixOS.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| For what it's worth, I personally _do_ use Arch for my homelab
| and still achieve cattle not pets because the Arch install
| media comes with cloud-init so I simply keep a cloud-config
| with the modules to build a server from scratch on a separate
| USB stick with a drive that has "cidata" on a label and plug
| that into a machine along with the install media before hitting
| the power button. I don't know if Nix would have been easier
| but cloud-init just lets you run scripts that you presumably
| already know how to write if you're the kind of person who does
| this sort of thing. No need for a DSL.
|
| Someone is going to chime in with "boo yaml" and sure, but a
| person interested in running a homelab is almost certainly a
| person who manages a bunch of servers for work too and there's
| no escaping cloud-init, Ansible, Kubernetes, or _something_
| using yaml that you 're not going to have a choice about.
| Assuming the point of a homelab is at least partly to practice
| what you do on the job without the possibility of destroying
| something owned by someone else (which is what this guy says
| his reason was), you may as well get used to the tools you're
| going to have to use anyway and not make your home setup too
| much different than the environment you manage at work.
|
| Of course, I know a lot of people on Hacker News are not like
| me and this guy and use "homelab" to mean they want to self-
| host media servers, chat, and photo sharing and what not for
| their family and friends, not have a mini data-center as a
| practice ground for the real data center they manage in their
| day job.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I want to love arch, but it is way too complicated. I _love_
| complicated things, but arch just didn't seem worth it.
|
| My home lab journey was:
|
| manual installs -> Ansible -> Docker + Docker Compose ->
| Kubernetes (I told you I loved complicated things)
|
| I kept everything source controlled. This repo documents my
| long journey: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/servers
|
| Docker and Docker Compose are nearly perfect. Here's an example
| of what that looked like for me:
| https://github.com/shepherdjerred/servers/blob/839b683d5fee2...
|
| I mostly moved to Kubernetes for the sake of learning.
| Kubernetes is very cool, but you have to put in a large amount
| of effort and learning before it becomes beneficial.
|
| Ansible is nice, but I didn't feel like it met all of my needs.
| Getting everything to be idempotent was quite hard.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I use a single to set everything up, including docker and
| docker compose. most applications are running in docker
| compose. but ansible allows me to handle all the hard drive
| mounts and other stuff that can't be run inside docker
| containers.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| That's not a bad idea!
|
| I didn't mind manually installing Docker, configuring
| fstab, etc., since it was such little work.
| icedchai wrote:
| Nearly every time I do an Ubuntu dist upgrade, there is some
| relatively easy to solve but critical problem. A couple
| examples from a few years back: default route was lost, network
| interfaces were renamed. In both cases, remote connectivity was
| obviously lost. Good thing it was in my basement...
| znpy wrote:
| I actually went the complete opposite way and I run RHEL (Red
| Hat Enterprise Linux - with the developer subcription) or
| RockyLinux at home.
|
| Because:
|
| > "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?"
|
| Such things just don't happen. That thing (RHEL/RockyLinux)
| just doesn't break. I do update software once every six (or
| more) months, reboot and it just works.
|
| I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to keep
| ansible playbooks but they were just an overkill. Does it even
| make sense to write a playbook for a system that I'll reinstall
| in three or four years ? Probably not.
|
| One of my main systems at home has been running RHEL 8 for 3-4
| years, still happily getting updates. I plan on replacing the
| whole box, with another one running RockyLinux 9.
|
| And I'm moving from RHEL to RockyLinux because I just don't
| want the yearly annoyance of having to renew the Developer
| Subscription license.
|
| That's how reliable it is: I have to look up my notes once a
| year, and it's too much.
|
| I run most of my stuff in containers anyway, and podman is just
| great.
| k8svet wrote:
| >I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to
| keep ansible playbooks but they were just an overkill. Does
| it even make sense to write a playbook for a system that I'll
| reinstall in three or four years ? Probably not.
|
| Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a
| Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for
| years?
|
| Folks applying the Ansible mindset to NixOS are missing the
| point. NixOS is *not like a runbook*. It's declarative, it's
| prescriptive, it's not some god-forsaken state machine that
| tries to paper over the horrors of modern computing. It IS
| the definition of my computers, not some glorified pile of
| scripts and conditional checks encoded in fking jinja. The
| same as it's been mostly for 8 years now.
| _peeley wrote:
| Same, I originally had a bunch of RasPi's in my lab running
| differing versions of Raspbian until I got tired of the
| configuration drift and finally Nixified all of them. Writing a
| single Nix Flake and being able to build declarative SD card
| installation images for all of them makes managing a bunch of
| different machines an absolute dream (tutorial here[0], for
| those interested).
|
| The only issue is remotely deploying Nix configs. The only
| first-party tool, nixops, is all but abandoned and unsupported.
| The community driven tools like morph and deploy-rs seem
| promising, but they vary in terms of Flakes support and how
| much activity/longevity they seem to have.
|
| [0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/nixos-install-custom-image
| zer00eyz wrote:
| The whole home lab scene is great.
|
| Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting
| processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the
| home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping
| interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the
| types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people
| far outside the industry.
|
| I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures some of the
| magic of the early internet (at least for me).
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on
| Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find
| solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best
| practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is
| interesting to you.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| The home lab community is a very leaky abstraction ;)
|
| Serve the home, and level 1 on YouTube...
|
| It intersects with proxmox community, home assistant
| community, all the NAS distros...
|
| The spread out and over lapping nature of these groups really
| adds to the early internet vibe!
| tills13 wrote:
| which lemmy instance / community do you recommend?
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| I like selfhosted@lemmy.world but there are probably plenty
| of others
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Absolutely. As a prolific Reddit user I have a a love hate
| relarelationship with the site but the home lab and self
| hosted communities have restored my faith in internet
| communities
| lolinder wrote:
| As an alternative perspective, this is my home lab:
|
| * Location: Sitting on a shelf in my basement office. Ventilation
| is okay, the WiFi is fine but not great.
|
| * Hardware: An old PC I picked up at a neighborhood swap meet. I
| added some RAM taken from another old PC and bought a hard drive
| and WiFi card.
|
| * Software: Debian stable and podman/podman-compose. All my
| useful services are just folders with compose files. I use
| podman-compose to turn them into systemd units.
|
| If the stuff in the article is the kind of thing you're into,
| that's awesome, go ham! But you absolutely do not need to _ever_
| , and you certainly do not need to do it right away. I run a
| bunch of services that my family uses daily on this thing, and we
| use less than half the 16GB RAM and never get over 5% CPU usage
| on this old, ~free PC.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Similar, my homelab is an old gaming rig shoved in a corner
| running a bunch of docker compose services via systemd.
| SystemOut wrote:
| This could almost be me. The main difference is my "server" is
| an off-lease Dell Micro PC that I maxed out the RAM on running
| ProxMox with a mix of VMs with everything stored on a Synology
| NAS all sitting in my basement office closet. I have tailscale
| setup so I can access it remotely.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I see this a lot with certain home labs. A ton of ram for
| vms. Why not just run on the metal?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Easier to mess with or reinstall OS remotely if you're not
| sitting in front of it, I'd imagine. Also can be easier to
| back up the whole system or take a snapshot of the system
| state, or nuke it and start over if you really screw it up.
|
| I've dabbled with VMs for test environments but generally
| just install on bare metal.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have about a dozen VMs running on a couple of large-ish
| servers (16 cores, 128 gigs RAM, 8 TB storage) Many of
| these are small, experimental environments (8 gigs RAM max,
| few hundred gigs storage) Running all those on metal would
| be expensive and annoying.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| My favorite home lab setup was when I had an old (originally
| XP, switched it to Ubuntu) laptop and a couple of USB drives in
| the top drawer of a scavenged file cabinet. I cut a hole in the
| back for the wires and it never generated enough heat for
| airflow to be an issue. I hosted my personal website on it,
| including a webcam of my aquarium, hooked it up to my doorbell,
| XMPP, used it for document storage... anything I needed a
| server for. I switched to an old Mac Mini for NAS after I moved
| and haven't had much time to mess with it since.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I'm older than 30 so I just call this having a home network and
| more than one computer.
|
| Why do I have a home network? Like many here, I develop network
| applications. I'm not a network technician, but being able to
| truly understand how the various components of the internet work,
| like TCP/IP, DNS etc., is _really_ useful and sets me apart from
| many developers. I also just like being in control and having the
| flexibility to do what I want with my own network.
|
| Why do I have multiple computers? Playing with different
| operating systems etc. isn't really the reason as virtualisation
| is pretty good these days. It actually comes down to locality of
| the machines. I want my hard disks to be in a cupboard as they
| are quite noisy, but I want my screens and keyboard to be on a
| desk. So I've got a NAS in a cupboard and a (quiet) PC at my
| desk, plus a (silent) media centre in my living room and other
| stuff.
|
| One thing I would say is don't be tempted by rack mounted server
| gear. Yeah, it looks cool and you can get it second hand for not
| much, but this isn't suitable for your home. Use desktop PC cases
| with big fans instead. Rack mounted network gear is pretty cool,
| though.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I built my home server with a 4RU case filled with desktop
| components. Thankfully 4RU seems tall enough to get fans large
| enough to be quite quiet. *Actual^ rack mounted equipment
| though? I highly recommend that anyone even remotely thinking
| of bringing this stuff home find some way to hear how bloody
| loud it is beforehand. I couldn't imagine living with that.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > One thing I would say is don't be tempted by rack mounted
| server gear.
|
| That depends on the server. Super Micro makes some rackmount
| servers that are shallow enough for a network cabinet/wall-
| mount rack and fairly low power. They also have a real OOB mgmt
| system, which can be really helpful.
| https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/iot/1u/sys-510...
|
| I agree that typical deep-rackmount servers are more trouble
| than they are worth for a home lab.
| simoncion wrote:
| > They also have a real OOB mgmt system, which can be really
| helpful.
|
| You can find regular-PC-case-shaped motherboards that have
| real IPMI management baked in, but you do have to be willing
| to pay more for it, as they're usually (always?) found in
| "workstation" boards.
|
| However, you do need to do a bit of research to make sure the
| advertising claims match up to reality. Some of these "IPMI"
| ports require custom Windows-only software and don't let you
| remotely control much at all.
| bombcar wrote:
| Rackmounted gear is fine depending on where it is "racked" -
| some climates can get it into a garage, basement, etc.
|
| But unless you have a real rack it's gonna be a bit of a pain,
| because it WILL end up being stacked on other pieces of gear in
| a rackish tower that requires full dismantling to get to the
| piece you want to work on.
|
| If you go off-lease rack equipment, go whole hog and get a rack
| _and rails_ too. Rails can be a bit pricey, check the listings
| for those that include them - rails often work for much longer
| than the servers so the big companies that liquidate off-lease
| equipment don 't include them; smaller sellers often do.
| MrVitaliy wrote:
| Surprised author didn't mention https://labgopher.com/ for
| finding used enterprise hardware at low cost on ebay. This
| hardware is cheap and typically out-of-service for enterprise,
| but great for home labs.
| bombcar wrote:
| The big problem with off-lease enterprise hardware is the power
| usage can quickly outrun the original costs - but that may not
| be an issue for everyone.
|
| The _nice_ thing about off-lease enterprise hardware is there
| is so much of it, and it 's enterprise. You can easily find
| replacement parts, and working on that stuff is a joy,
| everything is easily replaceable with no tools.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| For the price of an 8th gen off lease pc on ebay you can buy
| a new alder lake N minipc with 6 tdp.
| hollerith wrote:
| Some people even use an Alder-Lake-N miniPC as a "user-
| facing machine" (i.e., as the only computer in the room). I
| do, and I love it so far (after about 45 days of using it)
| because it doesn't have a fan to make noise and gradually
| become noisier as the machine ages.
|
| My guess is that if I was _used to_ a much faster machine,
| then the machine 's slowness would bother me, but it in
| fact does not bother me. (The machine has an NVMe
| interface, and I have a fast SSD in there. I have the N100
| CPU because I couldn't find the N200 or the i3-N305 for
| immediate delivery from a non-Chinese manufacturer.)
| mech422 wrote:
| THIS! My Dell and HP blade chassis/server EAT power (10+ Xeon
| blades). I actually shut them down and started moving to SBC
| based stuff like odriod H2/H3's. Basically silent and just
| sips power. All much less heat (I live in a desert, so thats
| important)!
|
| 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| bombcar wrote:
| For what it's worth, we're just starting to get to where
| enterprise stuff that cares about power usage is coming
| off-lease. Some of the newest stuff actually sips power
| relatively when not under load.
|
| My biggest (current) problem is finding something that
| supports a ton of SATA drives and still is low power
| (though at some point even the power usage of spinning rust
| can become noticeable).
|
| I live in the icy wilderness, so excess power to heat isn't
| a problem for most of the year.
| mech422 wrote:
| yeah - I don't have a need for a lot of drives, but its
| hard to come by...but the odroids have a PCIE expansion
| slot, so you might be able to add a add-on controller...
|
| Given how huge drives are now, 1 nvme and 1 sata/spinning
| rust is basically all I'd ever need (I don't do
| video/music/etc. )
|
| Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE
| slot..I was sure it did :-(
| ellieh wrote:
| Can we stop with all the "homelab in living room = divorce", "one
| less closet = unhappy wife" etc jokes?
|
| Reminds me of all the "so simple your <older female relative>
| could use it" comments on older tech product advertising.
|
| Just smells of yet more boys club humour that adds to the
| difficulty of including women in the hobby + industry. It's the
| small jokes that we're supposed to just quietly smile along with,
| as well as the big, that cause problems.
|
| Otherwise, nice post! I've had my homelab for years now and have
| been looking at expanding, definitely some things there I'll be
| looking at.
| dijit wrote:
| I agree, actually, but "wife-acceptance-factor"[0] (or; "wife
| approved") is useful terminology; I would love if there was
| some colloquially acceptable gender neutral term for that.
|
| Some have suggested some truly cumbersome terminology to
| replace it which is unfortunate because you very quickly run
| into the same problem the vegans have: If your choices are too
| unpalatable then _reasonable_ people (who don 't care or share
| your values 100%) will avoid them.
|
| You need to make the choice easier. (hence why a lot of Vegan
| focus right now is on having enjoyable alternative meals).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor
|
| EDIT: I'm not going to argue this because if you're reading my
| comment you've already decided whether you agree or not and you
| will not be productive to talk to.
|
| I will answer some common suggestions and why they're not
| reasonably sufficient and you can argue amongst yourselves
| about it. I'm not a sociologist or psychologist but I am human
| so take it with that lens.
|
| * Partner as a replacement for "wife" is unfortunately more
| syllables making it just a smidge more annoying to speak, so
| people won't; but it's the closest to what is intended and
| mentally equivalent for most people. As a bonus it even
| encompasses the unmarried! Partner is also (commonly) said
| lovingly so it doesn't create distance in the mind of the
| speaker.
|
| * Spouse is an uncommon enough word that it doesn't come to
| mind quickly enough; it also unfortunately comes across as
| unfamiliar (IE: not from a place of warm affection) and
| clinical.
|
| A good replacement term should be something endearing because
| it's important to point out that this isn't a term of derision,
| the true meaning behind the phrase is that they love their
| partner and want them to be happy. It's just a boomer-humour
| type joke to hide behind "because I dont want a divorce" or "I
| fear my wife", which is part of the supposed humour -- so it
| needs to feel familial and affectionate.
| remram wrote:
| Replace with "partner" or "spouse"? Why is that not good
| enough?
| jpsouth wrote:
| Happy spouse, happy house.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Cohappytant, coolhabitat.
| sophacles wrote:
| Why not make the replacement term: "even reasonable people
| wouldn't object"?
| dijit wrote:
| You'd be implying that your partner is unreasonable if they
| did object, which is a bit cold.
|
| "Wife-Acceptance Factor" is also a spectrum, not a boolean.
|
| What is acceptable to one partner may be unacceptable to
| another, understanding what is _more_ generally acceptable
| than another solution is useful, because it 's likely that
| you understand where your own partner is at mentally and
| how much of the home needs to be tidy and nice.
| crtasm wrote:
| Partner. Spouse. This seems easy.
|
| edit: "it's just a joke" - please re-read OP.
|
| 5 to 6 syllables is too many? Why aren't you saying WAF (PAF)
| if that's a concern :)
| dijit wrote:
| I'd probably say "would it be wife-approved?" or some other
| thing given the context of looking at a device that is
| hideous and not in-line with my girlfriends intended
| aesthetic of the home.
|
| But an additional syllable is indeed enough friction here,
| and if you think it's not then that's fine: but it is.
|
| Please understand me here, I'm not arguing or fighting with
| you: it's not something you can argue rationally, it's
| something subliminal that all humans will do and I'm trying
| to point it out. It's a form of lossy optimisation in our
| brains, we will always choose phrases that roll off the
| tongue better. This is the science of soundbites, and how
| they are weaponised in marketing for populist political
| agendas.
| crtasm wrote:
| I hear you and that makes sense for speech, but let's
| come back to the fact that this thread begins with a
| guide put online for anyone interested in the subject to
| read. Ease of saying a phrase out loud has less
| importance for written communication and there's a
| difference between speaking about one's own specific
| situation and generalising that to tips for your entire
| audience.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The article suggests "Significant Other Acceptance
| Parameters" (SOAP), which I like better anyway since it
| involves _parameters_ which seem targeted to the individual,
| rather than a broad factor targetted at the device.
|
| The device hits all my SOAPs, vs the WAF is high.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It should really be something like family acceptance factor.
| Your spouse is usually not the only person living with you
| for long periods of time you'd ideally like to accomodate as
| a permanent co-user of shared spaces.
|
| That said, this writer never says anything about the general
| idea being wife-approvable as far as I can tell, just that
| putting a homelab in the living room will lead to a divorce.
| That is already gender-neutral but at least so far also not
| true. My homelab is in my living room and I haven't divorced.
| I had to wallmount a very large media cabinet in the
| television nook and cut holes for USB fans into it, and use
| fanless mini-PCs rather than 500 decibel used servers, but
| you can't even tell it's there if I don't tell you.
|
| The article you linked even says right up top this is widely
| thought to be a sexist term but also different than what the
| guy here means. The article here is about being considerate
| of how you use limited shared space but the Wiki is about
| design elements being attractive to people who care what
| something looks like instead of just what it does.
| Stereotypically, it would have been the woman in the
| heteronormative relationships that cared but certainly that
| isn't the case in my house. My wife loves gadgets and buys
| random crap all the time and leaves them laying around
| wherever is most convenient. _I 'm_ the one that cares deeply
| about neatness and my living space actually looking like a
| living space and not like I live in a data center.
| dijit wrote:
| I started my comment with an agreement to the sentiment
| you're expressing and the sentiment expressed by the
| parent.
|
| The only thing I added was a caveat that there _is_ a
| useful term I 'd like to see a replacement for.
| SanitaryThinkin wrote:
| I think, I don't know, that the modern day general
| understanding with that statement is "your partner finds this
| annoying."
|
| I don't think it has anything to do with genders per se but is
| an old adage with any hobby.The historical implications do
| point to a bias in understanding of 'roles' but I'm more
| comfortable with the approach that instead of rephrasing old
| adages we become comfortable with the idea that our
| understanding of the specific adage has changed.
|
| I think not changing the adage and instead focusing on the
| shift of understanding can also point to how much we grow as a
| society, and we can relish in our evolution of understanding as
| it pertains to historical beliefs.
| remram wrote:
| I agree with you in principle, but in this case the author is
| describing their own situation. They do have a wife, I'm not
| sure they should be required to remove the gender of that
| actual person.
| crtasm wrote:
| It's a "guide for beginners" offering advice to people in
| general, not just a post about their specific situation.
|
| >Here's a quick list of Pros vs. Cons I've compiled to get us
| thinking about all the possible home lab locations. Choose
| wisely.
| latentcall wrote:
| Yes agree with this. On the Homelab subreddit I've seen people
| suggest it as a bad thing if someone's wife isn't okay with a
| mess of wires accompanying a rack mount server and some other
| older PC's located in a living room. They then proceed to
| question the posters "manliness" (in other words) for
| suggesting they plan on cleaning it up or moving it.
|
| Anyways to your original point I feel as if online people feel
| like marriage is a bunch of negative compromises that are
| always one sided or something. Homelabs are great but please
| don't put loud servers and PC's in the living room. :)
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...I feel as if online people feel like marriage is a bunch
| of negative compromises that are always one sided or
| something.
|
| Bitching about the negative things in life with one's buddies
| is an activity that stretches back for hundreds of years, if
| not for as long as we've had language. It's a bonding
| activity, and an essential one.
|
| The big difference between -say- the 1980s and now is that
| one's buddies often congregate in clubhouses that post their
| conversations publicly, rather than just shooting the shit
| verbally. So, folks "these days" get to see how much
| convivial bitching between buddies there actually is out
| there, rather than being blissfully unaware of it.
|
| Yes, there are certainly folks who are dreadfully serious
| about their complaints and hate their SO with a burning
| passion or whatever... but those folks are certainly in the
| minority of complainers.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's not just that the posts are public, it's also that
| some unknown portion of your "buddies" on a place like
| Reddit or HN are actually female.
|
| Slightly misogynistic jokes with a group of male friends
| who know you and know your SO (and presumably know how your
| relationship with her _actually_ is) land completely
| differently than the same jokes in an anonymous online
| forum.
| xandrius wrote:
| Then, honey, I shall put the homelab in the bedroom!
| throw5323446 wrote:
| Yeah, the one size fits all is grating, for example my wife is
| not really into computers but she likes to see what I put
| around the house and just to ask questions and understand what
| I'm doing. She didn't have anyone to really ask questions
| growing up, and online wasn't so great so now we just talk and
| seeing a new box is just an occasion for discussion.
| durandal1 wrote:
| I generally agree, I really do. However, I also feel that the
| entire article shares a very personal perspective of running a
| home lab - and that personal perspective is probably having a
| wife which sometimes gets annoyed by blinky stuff in plain
| sight. And when we remove that personal perspective, we also
| lose..personality which I desperately appreciate in a world
| where most things are hyper professional and polished to the
| point where it feels...soulless and bland.
|
| I would would have have no problem reading an article which
| makes jokes about the husband being driven to insanity by home
| server, I would have appreciated the diversity of perspective.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Yes, of course, there is a chance that's "just" the
| experience. But these remarks tend to fall into the always
| same sexist, normative stereotypes - usually the only
| occurrence of "woman" in the story. In any case, the author
| _does know_ he isn 't exactly the first one to make that
| joke... In the end his experience may be a self-fulfilling
| prophecy. Communication does not happen in a vacuum, how
| something _could be_ perceived usually is considered on some
| level - the author may not have seen it as a problem... which
| kinda is the problem.
|
| Honestly, I wouldn't want for anyone to _act_ the way pro
| forma either, or think the author has done anything wrong, or
| even misogynistic, as others have suggested.
|
| It isn't something wrong, it is unfortunate. I think these
| jokes are sad, because any author would have an imaginary
| reader in mind, someone who might find the joke funny. And I
| don't think that imaginary reader is a woman, here - and it
| shows. So, for any woman reading these "boy's club" guides
| and write-ups, they will always feel othered, always have to
| overcome these tiny, but omnipresent obstacles in the way of
| their (new & fragile) interests. (Radiolab's 'Alone enough'
| episode comes to mind[1])
|
| I just wish, people would introspect their motivations and
| intentions _behind_ those remarks some. And _especially_ when
| writing a _guide_ , maybe consider if the take is worth
| discouraging even one girl's newly found interest in
| computers and blinky chaos, because her projected role as the
| opposition has just been reproduced sufficiently to stick. I
| wish authors would be _aware_ of the problem implicitly
| alienating some readers by these reproductions, so writing
| welcoming texts to everyone would be intrinsic motivation.
|
| [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/alone-enough
| bradley13 wrote:
| Rack mount equioment is often more expensive. Also noisy.
|
| I have mostly consumer (non-rack) equipment in a small Ikea
| closet. Looks less nerdy, which also improves the WAF.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some of it is quite quiet nowadays, when not under load.
|
| I can _hear_ my racks but they 're about as quiet as the
| furnace until I do a really big compile.
|
| On reboot they go into full speed fan mode until the controller
| comes online, that sounds like a jet taking off.
| mech422 wrote:
| If you go the Ebay route, the price isn't bad... But people can
| literally hear my servers on the phone (1 adjacent wall) if I
| fire all of them up. Also, power draw was crazy - each blade
| chassis pulls 2500w-3000w !
|
| SBC based stuff is plenty powerful for most stuff now, MUCH
| cheaper then Nucs, and SILENT! (Great for my sanity)
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It is, mostly, but if you're handy with a soldering iron, you
| can easily solve that problem with a lot of equipment as long
| as you have good airflow and cooling where your rack is
| located.
| jackallis wrote:
| how/where can a complete noob learn all these skills to set
| something like this at home?
| avidiax wrote:
| The non-noobs also don't have all the skills. The main skill is
| being able to progress towards a goal even though you don't
| know how, by searching for others that have done similar things
| and adapting their instructions.
|
| Some starter goals:
|
| * Get a Raspberry Pi
|
| * Assemble the case for it, format the SD card, start the OS
|
| * Install PiHole & Tailscale
|
| * Setup Tailscale on your phone so that you can use PiHole on
| the go
|
| * Adjust your router so that most devices go through PiHole
|
| * Get a more powerful router or OpenWRT software for the router
| so that you can do hairpin NAT to reroute everything to the
| PiHole.
|
| * Attach a hard drive to your Raspberry Pi...
| bombcar wrote:
| Or just use whatever old piece of hardware you have laying
| around, cheap is decent, but free is gold.
| michael_michael wrote:
| I started a few months ago. Reddit's /r/homelab has lots of
| great resources, and you can get some good deals through
| /r/homelabsales, though the best deals usually go quickly.
|
| Like with learning a programming language, having a specific
| goal helps a lot.
|
| Reading other people's posts about their hardware, how they use
| it, and what problems they solved with their homelab can be a
| source of inspiration that sets you on the right path.
|
| Like others on this thread have said, while it's tempting to
| immediately dive into racks, patch cables and network diagrams,
| you can achieve A LOT with something simple like a small NAS or
| a NUC. Even a spare laptop that you can repurpose might be more
| than sufficient.
|
| Unless you're trying to simulate managing enterprise hardware
| (and I mean physically managing it), the greatest value lies in
| learning the software side of thing, IMHO.
| irusensei wrote:
| I have two 4GB rockpro64 with the NAS case on my closet. Each
| with an SSD raid. There are no fans in this setup and the SBCs
| don't take much space. No heat either. More than happy with
| these, good uptime too. Tow-boot gives me an UEFI environment so
| I can use some normal distros so I use the latest Fedora server.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Whats your raid setup with the ssds? I see 4tb ssd have marched
| down to $200. Would be nice to never hear spinning rust again.
| irusensei wrote:
| BTRFS raid1 for now. I'll try to push for raid10 maybe by the
| end of the year since SSDs draw very little power.
|
| Device is finicky with sata adapters. I'm using some Marvell
| controllers at the moment.
| hajrice wrote:
| Lovely guide
| jmakov wrote:
| So running 24/7 and having no ECC is not a probl at all?
| bombcar wrote:
| Not ... really?
|
| https://www.klennet.com/notes/2022-11-25-zfs-and-ecc-rant.as...
| is a pretty good overview. ECC is "nice to have if you can get
| it cheap enough" but it is not a ride or die.
| eisa01 wrote:
| > Whatever method you use to prevent tampering with your
| backups (e.g., when a cryptovirus silently corrupts your
| data) should catch the RAM problem too. If it does not, you
| need to change the method rather than rely on ECC RAM.
|
| > If your backup and recovery strategy relies on ZFS using
| ECC RAM, you should rework your backup strategy. After you do
| not need ECC RAM, you can buy it as a matter of convenience
| to save time troubleshooting and/or restoring from the
| backup.
|
| What's the solution the article alludes to?
| buybackoff wrote:
| If you buy non-mini machine with UDIMM, not SO-DIMM, some
| generic ECC DDR4 is very cheap, e.g. Kingston Server. Works
| well with Dell Precision Tower.
| tivert wrote:
| > Attic
|
| > Pros: Less noise, easier cable runs.
|
| > Cons: can get hot depending on where you live, roof leaks,
| humidity/condensation, and creepy at night.
|
| Where do attics not get hot? I live in northern climate, and ours
| _regularly_ gets _hotter_ than 140F during sunny summer days.
|
| And I say hotter, because the remote temp sensor I have up there
| maxes out at 140F. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually gets up
| to 150F or more.
| zeroping wrote:
| My attic is insulated at the roof sheathing, not the ceiling.
| My attic is basically 'inside' the house, from an airflow
| perspective. It peaks around 87degF in late June. Not ideal,
| but workable.
| tills13 wrote:
| Conditioned attics are the new rage. Once it's conditioned, you
| can move other mechanical devices up there like HVAC etc to
| reduce the amount of ducting your home needs (especially if
| it's single-story).
|
| It's nice because that loose, shredded insulation is garbage
| and so easy to mess up (walking on it can change it from R40 to
| R20, for example). With a conditioned attic you use standard
| batting in between the roof members -- impossible to mess up.
| duped wrote:
| Sounds like a nightmare for your energy bills. At least with
| interior ductwork the losses go to heating/cooling your home
| instead of your attic, which even with insulation is going to
| act like a giant heatsink that you get nothing out of.
| tills13 wrote:
| I don't think so -- you _are_ paying to condition that part
| of your house, sure, but it becomes just another part of
| the overall envelope and acts like a buffer between the
| weather and the actually livable parts of your home.
| Anecdotally, in my home in the summer months, when
| unconditioned the attic is 50 degrees on a summer day it
| literally radiates heat down through the ceiling on the
| floor below into the rooms there. The attic acts like a
| heat battery -- long after the sun goes down the attic is
| radiating heat into the upper floors of my house. Not sure
| why it retains heat so well it's got louvres and vents ...
| duped wrote:
| When you have ductwork in the attic your heating/cooling
| efficiency is hurt by the amount of heat lost through the
| roof and out into the environment. When the ductwork is
| all in interior walls, there's no efficiency lost because
| those losses go into the rooms the system was trying to
| heat/cool already.
|
| Where I live, we have extreme ranges of temperature (both
| hot and cold) and almost all ductwork is on the interior
| for this reason. You'd be spending a fortune in the
| winter heating an attic when it's getting lost to -17C
| air temps outside...
|
| It sounds like your attic needs more insulation.
| runjake wrote:
| If you're old and grumpy[1] and don't want a homelab but
| paradoxically want homelab functionality, I can't recommend the
| Firewalla[2] enough. And heck, it would fit right into a homelab
| situation, as well.
|
| It allows you to go deep into settings and configure anything to
| your heart's content. But, if you want to ignore it for a year
| and not mess with it, it will run as smoothly as an Eero or a
| similar consumer product like that.
|
| I have a Purple model[3]. I initially balked at the price, but it
| performs well, and there hasn't been a single day in the past
| couple years where I've regretted it or looked at something else.
|
| It supports just about any router feature. Has robust and easy to
| configure device/family profiles. The quality of the Firewalla
| software and the mobile app is excellent.
|
| ---
|
| 1. I manage a quite large WAN during the day. I don't want to do
| it at night, too.
|
| 2. https://firewalla.com/
|
| 3. https://firewalla.com/products/firewalla-purple
| kmos17 wrote:
| I've seen it mentionned on hn before and was intrigued as a
| replacement/simpler solution to a home pfsense setup. It seems
| there are issues with it though:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firewalla/comments/18wvlqa/steer_cl...
|
| The software is open source apparently?
| https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla Anyone running this on
| their own hardware? Or in a VM homelab :) ?
| FredPret wrote:
| It'd be so cool if we could have permanent routable IPv6
| addresses for every machine. Home Labs would become 1000x more
| useful, and I bet Digital Ocean and similar would see an exodus
| of small site hosters like me
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for
| home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for
| 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever)
| system. It's a huge pain.
|
| Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on
| a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one
| big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high
| availability, etc. But now I'm starting to split off services
| into their own containers and it's just so tidy!
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| How exactly does running a VM in proxmox give you high
| availability?
| astockwell wrote:
| Some defense against the class(es) of availability problems
| that occur from OS + upwards. No defense against the
| class(es) that occur below that (metal).
| karolist wrote:
| It doesn't on its own but it simplifies things hard to roll
| by hand that does, like observation nodes, consensus
| algorithms, Ceph storage, live migrations etc.
| wutwutwat wrote:
| Proxmox comes with baked in support for live vm migration[0],
| high availability[1] and clustering support[2] if you run
| multiple host nodes. I'm assuming that's what OP is referring
| to
|
| 0: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-
| guide.html#qm_mig... & https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-
| admin-guide.html#_guest...
|
| 1: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-
| guide.html#_how_i...
|
| 2: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-
| guide.html#chapte...
| unpopularopp wrote:
| >Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs
| on a single hardware device
|
| I just wish there was something like Unraid's Docker support
| but in a FOSS distro.
|
| Proxmox with LXC is just not the same. Unraid is good, love the
| UI and easyness too but the proprietary paid Linux is just
| something I don't like.
| xxpor wrote:
| FWIW https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ has a docker LXC
| container. A bit meta but works fine for my use cases. But I
| agree with your general point.
| haltcatchfire wrote:
| Especially now with the rumors of Unraid moving from pay-once
| to an annual subscription model.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Proxmox is ultimately just debian linux. You can install
| portainer on the host. Or create a VM running portainer.
| cmehdy wrote:
| Proxmox is incredibly helpful especially for homelab beginners
| familiar with Linux. You can easily create and destroy various
| things as you learn. Only thing that's not so easy to use is
| storage in general : it's very difficult to truly understand
| the consequences of various choices and therefore it's kinda
| difficult to properly set up the backbone of a NAS unless
| you're fairly comfortable with zfs, lvm, lvm-thin, re-
| partitioning things, etc..
| radiowave wrote:
| Another handy feature of it is snapshots, very useful before
| trying out some modification.
| aaronax wrote:
| And a huge win that it makes it so easy to have distributed
| storage. Ceph is built-in and works well. Being able to add
| disks as needed is bliss (no RAID planning up front). And the
| rebuild situation is better than any RAID. Performance is
| adequate for homelab even on a 1gbps network. I have about 10
| SSDs mixed 1TB and 2TB across 5 hosts (old Optiplex units).
| didntcheck wrote:
| That sounds interesting, I'm only tangentially familiar with
| Ceph so forgive these stupid questions: So you have the Ceph
| "array" running on the Proxmox nodes, and then are your VHDs
| like objects on Ceph? Do you also use Ceph for direct data
| storage or are all your files and data within VM's VHDs?
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Combining that with Proxmox Backup Server is awesome.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Obviously you could have just run containers on that Ubuntu
| system. And nothing stopping you backing it up either. But you
| might as well start with a hypervisor on a new server, though.
| It gives you more flexibility to add other distros and non-
| Linux stuff into the mix too (I run an OPNsense router, for
| example).
|
| I use xcp-ng rather than Proxmox.
| caconym_ wrote:
| +1, Proxmox is awesome. I set up a cluster with two machines I
| wasn't using (one almost 10 years old, one fairly modern with a
| 5950X) and now I don't have to worry about that single Debian
| box with all my services on it shitting the bed and leaving me
| with nothing. VMs are useful on their own, but the tools
| Proxmox gives you for migrating them between machines and doing
| centralized backup/restore are incredibly freeing. It all works
| really well, too.
|
| Most recently I set up a Windows VM with PCIe GPU passthrough
| for streaming (Moonlight/Sunshine) games to the various less-
| capable machines in my house, and it works so well that my
| actual gaming PC is sitting in the corner gathering dust.
|
| My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid license. I
| would love to give back to them for what I'm getting, but >
| $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts to hobbyist
| usage. I appreciate the free tier (which is not at all
| obnoxious about the fact that you aren't paying), but I wish
| there could be a middle ground.
| znpy wrote:
| > My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid
| license. I would love to give back to them for what I'm
| getting, but > $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts
| to hobbyist usage.
|
| I don't use proxmox anymore at home (1) but as an user I
| would have loved to pay, say, $5/month and just get access to
| the updates repository (the stable ones) or maybe something
| similar. $100/year/cpu was just too much for me as an
| hobbyist.
|
| [1]: not because I don't like it, for life reasons I had to
| downsize that hobby a bit and I don't need proxmox anymore.
| caconym_ wrote:
| My thoughts exactly.
|
| Anyone from Proxmox reading? Could it be that you're
| leaving money on the table here?
| didntcheck wrote:
| As someone still in monolithic home server tech debt I've been
| meaning to migrate too. The part I always wonder about is
| storage - said server is a NAS, serving files over SMB and
| media over Plex. From what I hear some people mount and export
| their data array [1] directly on Proxmox and only virtualize
| things above the storage layer, like Plex, while others PCI-
| passthrough an HBA [2] to a NAS VM. I suppose one advantage of
| doing the former is that you might be able to directly bind
| mount it into an LXC container rather than using loopback
| SMB/NFS/9p, right?
|
| I also hear some people just go with TrueNAS or Unraid as their
| bare-metal base and use it for both storage and as a
| hypervisor, which makes sense. I might have to try the Linux
| version of TrueNAS now that it's had some time to mature
|
| I also rely on my Intel processor's built-in Quicksync for HW
| transcoding. Is there any trouble getting that to run through a
| VM, except presumably sacrificing the local Proxmox TTY?
|
| [1] As in the one with the files on, not VHDs. I default to
| keeping those separate in the first place, but it's also
| necessary since I can't afford to put all data on SSDs nor
| tolerate OS roots on HDDs. Otherwise a single master ZFS array
| with datasets for files and zvols or just NFS for VM roots
| would probably be ideal
|
| [2] Which I hear is considered more reliable than individual
| SATA passthrough, but has the caveat of being more coarse-
| grained. I.e. you wouldn't be able to have any non-array disks
| attached to it due to the VM having exclusive control of all
| its ports
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| What's the main value vs using something like K3?
|
| I've mostly just been defaulting to k3 since I use k8s at work
| so lots of my knowledge maps over.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| If someone made a UPC in the form factor of a laptop battery, we
| could be off to the races. I thought a laptop battery would be
| good for this, but they do bad things if you leave them plugged
| in all the time.
|
| No reason to go crazy with your home server if it is only you
| using it. You can get away with a crappy laptop that your
| roommate is done with.
| jrm4 wrote:
| At the risk of yucking others' yum; I wish there was more of an
| effort to get people to do this sort of thing _without buying new
| equipment_ (including perhaps the reduction of of the idea that
| you need /want a "rack")
|
| There are just SO MANY perfectly good computers that are bound to
| be e-waste that would be good for this.
| ashtonian5 wrote:
| Most people don't buy "new" hardware. Power efficiency has
| changed drastically to a point anything before ~2016 is not
| worth plugging into the wall, and sata to NVME drastically
| improve responsiveness which didn't become the base standard
| until 2018ish. Most people use an old desktop or buy old server
| equipment on ebay.
| mech422 wrote:
| Yeah - Old EBay server equipment can be had for like
| $200/node and will burn at least that much in electricity
| every year :-/ Also, the noise is hellacious!
|
| Old laptops / desktops can be better - especially since you
| can get newer/more power efficient units without all the
| noise. But I started moving to even smaller SBC based stuff
| (0)
|
| 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'm trying to come up with the best 3/2/1 solution for me. Two
| forms of storage seems bizzare, are people really backing up to
| tapes? What does that workflow even look like? What about your
| offsite? Backblaze b2 seems expensive compared to backing up on a
| big external drive off site at my desk at work.
| madphilosopher wrote:
| I rotate two 8 TB USB hard drives between home and my locker at
| work, every month or two. Full-disk encrypted, of course. This
| covers my entire system and media files.
|
| For /etc and my source code repositories, I use restic and
| cloud storage, because this data is small (< 1 GB). (Also, I'm
| on rural internet, which is metered and slow. So I can't use
| cloud backup for the big stuff.)
|
| The whole system is not quite 3/2/1, but it's close enough for
| me.
| apexalpha wrote:
| This looks really cool, but the title has to be a joke right?
| This is not 'beginner'.
|
| I have a beginner setup: a single NUC and a cheap NAS with NFS.
|
| I have yet to come across something that this setup cannot
| handle.
| ashtonian5 wrote:
| I have a lab, and I had a lot of configuration state that was
| annoying to maintain and fragile. I switched to vmug because it
| has a semi decent terraform provider and I now put most things in
| TF.
|
| TF to bootstrap vms + rke cluster. TF to deploy helm charts.
| Still some per app config/backups to mange but I just copy
| container volumes to all the machines in the cluster with the csi
| plugin and then back everything up to zfs nas via truenas on NFS.
|
| Runs primarily on 3 dell rx30 series, and then my desktop and
| htpc are also in vsphere running gpu centric things when I'm not
| gaming with them.
|
| Vmug is pretty perfect for this -> $180/yr = 16 or 36 physcial
| sockets.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| The notion of a homelab is really, more of a suggestion. I have,
| what you might call, a "homeprod."
|
| "Be aware, the video server and sync server will be offline
| between the hours of 8PM and 10PM on Friday, March 8th for
| hardware upgrades. Expected downtime should not be more than 20
| minutes but please plan around this disruption to essential
| services. Other services should not be affected during this
| work."
|
| Like someone else mentioned in this thread: It was really best
| described as a "home network with more than one computer." But
| you can't really put that on your C.V. under "experience."
|
| "Improved SLA uptime on client's network to five nines. Upgraded
| storage controllers in a live environment without disruption to
| established services. Deployed k8s cluster into a production
| environment serving thousands of hours of compressed video files
| with real-time format transcoding."
|
| I will freely admit, my home network probably needs to be pared
| down a bit. The problem is the salvaged hardware and good deals
| at the liquidation auctions accumulates faster than I can cart it
| off to the street corner. There's also far too many laptops
| floating around the house doing nothing useful that could be
| donated away. A lot of the homelab is salvage or bought at (in-
| person) liquidation auctions. There's some new stuff, but I
| rarely need the latest and greatest for my setup. In my home
| network diagram I try to document everything that touches the
| network so I can stay on top of the security patches, and what
| has access to the outside world and in what way.
|
| https://justinlloyd.li/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/home-netwo...
| tonymet wrote:
| I'll go against the grain and recommend running your lab on
| Windows 11 Pro and Hyper V (often included with reclaimed PCs).
| Hyper-V is a very capable hypervisor and Windows hardware
| compatibility is excellent. Remote mgmt can be done over RDP, SSH
| or WMI
|
| Nearly everyone has a spare PC lying around collecting dust, and
| within an hour it can be running a dozen VMs . Reclaimed HP &
| Dells are cheap and include a Windows Pro license. otherwise they
| can be had for $20
|
| I recommend Alpine for the guest OS. It's fast to set up,
| natively supports Hyper-V hosts and compact (about 1/10th the
| size of a debian guest).
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualizat...
|
| https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Hyper-V_guest_services
| buybackoff wrote:
| You could use this built-in OEM license from a Windows VM in
| Proxmox. Just search for that on Proxmox forum.
|
| Hyper-V is very limited in hardware support, you won't be able
| to pass-through stuff. And you always pay for VM layer, while
| in Proxmox you could use containers which give almost the host
| performance.
| tonymet wrote:
| that's changed in recent years. you now have access to
| hardware and the gpu for inference, for example.
| buybackoff wrote:
| Maybe in the Server version. I haven't seen anything useful
| in Windows Pro. I could not setup SR-IOV even with
| Powershell after wasting a lot of time on searching for
| help.
| haunter wrote:
| Hyper V Server 2019 (not the same as Hyper V inside Win
| 10/11) is free and has GPU pass through
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| server/virtualizat...
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-
| hyper-v-...
| haunter wrote:
| Not sure why are you downvoted, Hyper V is perfectly fine
|
| Hyper V Server 2019 is also free you don't have to pay for
| anything https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-
| hyper-v-...
|
| And you can install a full GUI too
| https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7...
| tonymet wrote:
| that's an interesting option. does it boot into cmd.exe by
| default?
| haunter wrote:
| Yes that only but you can install a GUI + a web interface
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| This is how I have my setup running, a moderately-outdated, but
| still beefy (E5-2699v4, 512GB ram, etc), Dell Precision tower,
| which originally started as a design machine with a handful of
| Autodesk and EDA tools. I wanted to try out proxmox, but I was
| too lazy to want to move all of those installed things off onto
| another host, reinstall, then move it back into a Windows VM. I
| suppose I could still run proxmox in a HyperV instance and then
| VMs within there, but it feels like too many layers of
| indirection.
|
| HyperV is perfect for what I want to do, run a dozen or two
| sandbox and experimental VMs. I can pass through hardware,
| assign raw volumes, partition out network interfaces for
| routers and other shenanigans and it's stable too. And with
| RDP, I just use the mac version of the remote desktop client to
| use it interactively, which also works surprisingly well even
| over tailscale on another continent!
| tonymet wrote:
| sounds like an awesome setup. this is what I tell my friends.
| Just run Hyper-V. They can easily be checkpointed and moved
| to another hypervisor.
|
| Use what you got!
| daemin wrote:
| How do you handle the fact that Windows 11 is a desktop OS and
| it tends to want to do whatever it feels like restarting for
| updates and such. I would imagine it's a bit of a pain to have
| the system reboot at random, killing your VMs etc.
| arh68 wrote:
| Windows 10 hardly restarts a lot. There's no pain.
|
| If I reboot windows, my Debian VM comes right back up, with
| all the docker-compose services running (a la `restart:
| always`). Like nothing ever happened.
|
| So I just don't think this is a problem. But that's just my
| experience...
| tonymet wrote:
| I manage this by scheduling restarts. Maybe 2-3x / month.
|
| fwiw my linux machines get periodic kernel & firmware updates
| that also need restarting
| arh68 wrote:
| I absolutely agree. Windows Pro + Hyper-V + Linux = super good.
| And I'm a Mac guy, if anything.
|
| Remote Desktop is really good, too. I use it all the time from
| my MacBook (though I mostly SSH, naturally). WinSCP + midnight
| commander are all the extras I need.
|
| If you have enough memory/CPU on your workstation/gaming
| machine, Just 1 PC works great.
| treflop wrote:
| I run a more mundane setup using the most possible boring choices
| (lol) and it's been reliable. I occasionally restart random
| things and pull network cables to fuck with it to make sure that
| it can recover.
|
| * Hardware: A regular but small (SFF) computer + Synology NAS
|
| * Software: Ubuntu distro + Docker containers bare
|
| * Configuration: Git-versioned Dockerfiles and docker-
| compose.ymls
|
| * Storage: The NAS with Synology Hybrid RAID
|
| * Backup: TBD... haven't figured out a cheap and automatic way to
| backup 20 TB of data off-site
|
| I run cameras, a media server shared with friends, a shared place
| to dump project files, a DNS server (just in case the Internet
| goes down so that everything local still works) and supporting
| services.
| lloeki wrote:
| > Location
|
| For a few years I put mine inside an IKEA FRIHETEN sofa (the kind
| that just pulls+). Pros: - easy access
| - completely invisible save for 1 power wire + 1 fiber (WAN) + 1
| eth (LAN)++ - structure allows easy cable routing out
| (worst case you punch a hole on the thin low-end) - easy
| layout/cable routing inside - noise reduction for free
| - doubles as warming in winter a seated butt is never cold
| - spouse enjoys zero blinkenlights - spouse didn't even
| notice I bought a UPS + a disk bay Cons: - a
| bit uncomfortable to manipulate things inside -
| vibrations (as in, spinning rust may not like it) when
| sitting/seated/opening/closing - heat (was surprisingly
| OK, not worse than a closet) - accidental spillage risks
| (but mostly OK as design makes it flow around, not inside the
| container, worst case: put some raisers under hardware) -
| accidental wire pull e.g when unsuspecting spouse is moving
| furniture around for housecleaning (give'em some slack)
|
| + https://www.ikea.com/us/en/images/products/friheten-sleeper-...
|
| ++ that I conveniently routed to a corner in the back then hidden
| in the wall to the nearest plugs, so really invisible in
| practice.
| neilv wrote:
| I had a similar thought about the IKEA KIVIK sofa (non-sleeper
| variants), which has wide boxy armrests that are open to the
| underside, and could fit towers of little SFF PCs, or maybe
| rackmount gear sideways. There's also space underneath the
| seat, where rackmount gear could fit.
|
| One of the reasons I didn't do this was I didn't want a fire
| with sofa fuel right above/around it. I wasn't concerned about
| the servers, but a bit about the UPS. Sheet metal lining of the
| area, with good venting if the UPS battery type could leak
| gases, I'd feel a bit better about, but too much work. So the
| gear ended up away from upholstery, in rack/shelving, where I
| could keep an eye on it.
| neilv wrote:
| If your homelab gear is in a non-tech-nerd living space, also
| think about noise, lights/displays, and otherwise being discreet.
|
| As an apartment-dweller, for a long time I had it in a closet.
| Once I moved it to living room, my solutions included:
|
| * For discreet, IKEA CORRAS cabinet that matched my other
| furniture. I had rackmount posts in it before, but got rid of
| them because they protruded.
|
| * For noise, going with gear that's either fanless, or can be
| cooled with a small number of Noctua fans. (I also replace the
| fans in 1U PSUs with Noctuas, which requires a little soldering
| and cursing.) I tend to end up with Atom servers that can run
| fanless in a non-datacenter except for the PSU.
|
| * Also for noise, since my only non-silent server right now is
| the 3090 GPU server, I make that one spin up on demand. In this
| case, I have a command I can run from my laptop to Wake-on-LAN.
| But you could also use IPMI, kludge something with a PDU or IoT
| power outlet, find a way to spin down the 3090 and fans in
| software, make Kubernetes automate it, etc.
|
| * For lights, covering too-bright indicator LEDs with white
| labelmaker tape works well, and looks better than you'd think.
| Black labelmaker tape for lights you don't need to see.
|
| * For console, I like the discreet slide-out rack consoles,
| especially the vintage IBM ones with the TrackPoint keyboards. If
| I was going to have a monitoring display in my living room, I'd
| at least put the keyboard in a slide-out drawer.
|
| * I also get rid of gear I don't need, or I'd need more than
| twice the rack space I currently have, and it would be harder to
| pass as possibly audiophile gear in the living room.
|
| * For an apartment, if you don't want to play with the router
| right now (just servers), consider a plastic OpenWRT router. It
| can replace a few rack units of gear (router, switch, patch
| panel), and maybe you don't even need external WiFi APs and
| cabling to them.
| hedgehog0 wrote:
| I'm a math grad student and want to play with LLMs as well, so
| I have been thinking about getting a 3060 or 3090, due to
| budget. However, I'm using a MacBook Pro from 2011, thus not
| very convenient for these kinds of things.
|
| What do you think the lowest budget or spending that I should
| have, given my "requirement"? Or would you say that vast.ai or
| similar websites would suffice?
| neilv wrote:
| You might try to find forums where people are doing the kind
| of LLM work you want to do, and see what they're recommending
| for how to do that work.
|
| Personally, for my changing needs, my GPU server is already
| on its 4th GPU, after I kept finding I needed more VRAM for
| various purposes. The RTX 3090 seems to be a sweet spot right
| now, and my next upgrade right now would probably be a 2nd
| 3090 with NVLink, or some affordable older
| datacenter/workstation GPU with even more VRAM. Other than
| the GPU, you just need an ordinary PC with an unusually big
| PSU, maybe a big HDD/SSD (for data), and maybe a lot of RAM
| (for some model loading that can't just stream it).
| https://www.neilvandyke.org/machine-learning/
| nodesocket wrote:
| I'll add a #protip about UPS. Instead of getting Cyberpower or
| APC, I recently picked up a EcoFlow River 2 Pro[1] (portable
| power station). It has 768Wh capacity and 800W output and pass
| through charging. Crucially, it switches fast enough to not cause
| any outage to any of my gear (Ubiquiti, HP Proliant, Raspberry
| Pi, Synology). As a bonus, you also get the ability to do solar
| charging and USB power outlets.
|
| [1] https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-
| power-s...
| gorkish wrote:
| IMO one of the biggest frustration I currently have with homelab-
| scale gear (and edge compute in general) is how everything has
| massively regressed to only offering 2.5gbit connectivity at
| best.
|
| Try to find one of these hundreds of small form factor products
| that has anything faster than a 2.5Gbit nic and despair! What
| good are these machines if you cant even get data in and out of
| them?!
|
| The list of hardware with 2x10GBe or better connectivity is
| amazingly short: - Minisforum MS-01 - GoWin
| RS86S*, GW-BS-1U-* - Quotom Q20331G\*
|
| From major manufacturers, only the following: -
| Mac Mini (1x10gbaseT option, ARM, ) - HPE Z2 Mini\*
| (1x10GbaseT option)
|
| Please someone, anyone, build a SFF box with the following specs:
| Minimum of 2 NVMe Minimum of 2 additional storage devices
| (SATA or more NVMe) Minimum of 2 10GbE Dedicated or
| shared IMPI/OOBM Minimum of 8 Core x86 CPU Minimum of
| 64GB RAM
|
| Make sure the nics have enough PCIe lanes to hit their throughput
| limits, give the rest to storage. Stop with the proliferation of
| USB and thunderbolt and 5 display outputs on these things, please
| already!
| Borealid wrote:
| I understand that more is better in some sense, but why the
| emphasis on having two (2) 10GbE instead of one for a single
| device that isn't a router?
|
| What's the second link for? Just more bandwidth, or is there
| some crucial use case I'm missing?
| gorkish wrote:
| In my experience, a second nic is important to build anything
| with resilience; it's not just for routing. I see it as the
| most important hardware to "double up" on. If you are
| building a small cluster, for instance, you generally want to
| have one interface for the backend interconnect and one
| interface for client traffic. Or maybe you want to be able to
| upgrade or change your networking without taking traffic
| offline -- you'll need two physical connections for that,
| too.
|
| Of course you can still build routers and everything with a
| single interface (which is why I noted the single port
| hardware in the first place), but if you are going to design
| something specific to the mini-server market, the cost
| difference between a single port and dual port controller is
| negligible enough that there's no reason not to include 2 or
| even 4 ports. The GoWin machines simply toss in an OCP nic
| slot and call it a day. That would be a fantastic solution to
| see adopted by other vendors.
| jmbwell wrote:
| If a home lab is for tinkering, it's something to play with
| first of all, but it also helps facilitate re-patching things
| or moving things around, which in many cases you can do one
| port/cable at a time without interrupting services.
|
| I once moved a server from one room to another by moving its
| redundant power cables one at a time to a UPS on a cart, then
| swapping its short network cables for longer ones one a time,
| wheeling the thing to the other room, then "reversing" the
| procedure in the new location. Zero downtime!
|
| Zero point really, but fun in the way I reckon a home lab is
| meant to be.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Stop with the proliferation of USB and thunderbolt..._
|
| If you don't need it built-in, external adapters are a good way
| to get to 10GbE and even 25GbE.
|
| https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qna-t310g1s
|
| https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/ethernet-netw...
| gorkish wrote:
| By "good" I assume you mean "possible" because there is
| nothing really good about a connectivity solution that is
| both technically inferior and vastly more expensive than it
| ought to be.
|
| I'm not opposed to Thunderbolt though; let me know when
| someone ships a 8+ port thunderbolt interdomain/multi-root
| PCIe switch. That would be a good solution.
| skazazes wrote:
| You should check out the Xeon D offerings from Supermicro. They
| make some M-ITX motherboards with embedded Xeon D chips that
| sport dual 10GB Ethernet. Used one in a freenas system at one
| point for years
|
| Looks like the X10SDV-TLN4F[1] has everything you mentioned
| besides a second m.2 slot. Although its 8 cores they are a few
| generations old and low power (45w TDP on x86). For true
| compute its not exactly fast but for something like a high
| performance file server in 1U connected to a disk shelf, they
| are really nice.
|
| [1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/x10sdv-
| tl...
| gorkish wrote:
| I actually do run a production edge cluster with these exact
| boards; they are just too old. The price/performance is so
| far off the mark WRT modern hardware they are simply not
| worth using anymore. I have started hitting CPU instruction
| set issues with current software due to the ancient
| microarchitectures in these lowend parts.
|
| On one hand they are able to still sell them because nobody
| is competing, but what is the reason for the lack of
| competition?
|
| I have a theory about Broadcom buying and blocking up the low
| end PCIe switch market to purposely hold back this segment,
| but I'm not sure how significant that is.
| jmbwell wrote:
| I use one of these. For a system that's honestly mostly idle,
| it's plenty for proxmox with Plex and pihole and whatever
| else, and it's good on power and heat and noise.
|
| I made the mistake of getting Seagate 10TB rock tumblers, but
| they're the only source of real noise. WD would probably have
| been quieter.
|
| I have this and my switches and a ham radio base station all
| racked up on top of the cabinets in my laundry/utility room,
| out of the way but not hidden away, so I can still notice if
| the fans are too loud or the wrong lights are blinking or not
| blinking or there's weird smells etc.
| jprd wrote:
| I have an obscene amount of retired Chromeboxen that I have
| flashed with Mr.Chromebox[0] EFI and running as either K8s,
| Proxmox or independent Linux/Windows nodes at any given time.
|
| These are mostly 1st-gen i7-4600U Haswell's, upgraded to 16GB RAM
| and 128G+ SSDs. I ripped them out of their cases, added heatsinks
| to the new SSDs, and then "racked" them by wedging the front-
| bottom mainboard corner (if plugs are oriented to the rear and
| the heaviest plug, AC, at the rear-bottom for balance) into a
| slotted piece of super-strong and right-angled cardboard that
| came from inside some re-inforced shipping box (I think it was an
| X-mas tree).
|
| I assembled all of this juuuuuuust before COVID while learning
| K8s and craving the physical plan aspect, as I had just
| transitioned to a remote SaaS role from one that involved
| multiple physical DCs and travel.
|
| My "go small lab" initiative turned into some sort of Tribble
| fable.
|
| [0] https://mrchromebox.tech/
| blauditore wrote:
| I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is:
| Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common
| production servers?
|
| Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e.
| what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're
| developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications
| (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is
| not too critical for most applications and devs.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of building stuff like this, and
| will always be able to find an excuse to do it anyway. :)
| optimal-choices wrote:
| It's a hobby. It doesn't need to have a point. It's kind of
| like playing games - it doesn't need to have a point, but it's
| enjoyable, and you get a community out of it.
| jll29 wrote:
| It's a server, so the goal is to have it run something you care
| about (whatever that may be) 24/7, not because you cannot live
| without it, but to get experience with administrating a server.
|
| In contrast, your dev machine may need to be rebooted any time,
| or switched off if you leave for the weekend.
|
| A second defining characteristic of a homelab is that part of
| the rationale for owning it is in order to tinker with it, to
| try out new software packages, to play with tools & concepts
| (VMs, containers, admin and remote admin tools, KVMs).
|
| Ultimately, you may define a homelab as a "physical server
| setup for learning and for running personal services". Homelab
| operators may also take pride of the independence from large IT
| or cloud providers attained by operating their lab.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Yeah, what exactly is Lego? Painting? Playing music? Model
| railroad? Ham radio?
|
| It's a place to learn while playing pretend. LARPing enterprise
| IT if you like. Why wonder what the point is?
| Havoc wrote:
| >what exactly a home lab
|
| Its murky because there is a bit of backstory. There used to be
| a homeserver subreddit. The people running commercial heavy
| rack servers got fed up with the peasants and created homelab
| sub. Then overall quality & vibe in homeserver sub dipped so
| everyone migrated over to homelab. So now you've got everything
| under the sun that is at home and switched on 24/7 being called
| a "homelab". Leading understandably to people being confused
| about the term
|
| >What is the point of a home lab
|
| People do it for different reasons - "own your own data",
| learning (IaC/docker/kubernetes/networking). It's also quite
| empowering for experimentation. Most of these setups are
| running hypervisors. So creating a VM is a 20 second affair.
| That sort of blank slate is useful to me for dev work. Local
| gitlab server, local CI runners, local kubernetes cluster,
| postgres server. It's all there, free, fast, accessible and
| ignoring initial layout effectively free.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| "safely fail" what's wrong with just taking my laptop and do my
| experiments there? Why is a "lab" needed?
| nullify88 wrote:
| Alternatively, If you don't fancy patching your own cables you
| can get female to female RJ45 keystone jacks which use plugged /
| crimped cables. The longer cable run is plugged in behind the
| patch panel, and a shorter cable in front to keep your cabinet or
| rack clean.
| ardaoweo wrote:
| Tiny PC's make excellent low-power servers for lots of purposes,
| but personally in the end I just decided to build my own desktop
| PC from cheapish previous gen parts to have more flexibility. Now
| I have an AM4 consumer board based system with 8 core Ryzen 7,
| more ECC ram than I will ever need, 4 enterprise grade SSD's with
| ZFS, intel NIC, and RTX 3060 for some AI experimentation. Thanks
| to efficient PSU choice the whole thing idles at just 30W running
| Linux, about 10 of which is due to the dedicated GPU. I should be
| even able to game on it through GPU passthrough to Proxmox VM,
| though I haven't tried it yet.
|
| For networking I can recommend Fujitsu Futro S920 thin clients,
| especially for EU users. They are dirt cheap here, and with
| aftermarket riser & intel NIC they are great routers with
| opnsense/pfsense. Apart from that, I have a couple of raspberry
| pi's running dedicated tasks, and space heaters (e-waste tier
| enterprise desktops) running BOINC during coldest months.
| isopede wrote:
| I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over
| time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys:
|
| - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever
| to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router
| configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various
| docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped
| out my network early on but failed to keep it up to date over
| time. Is there a good tool to draw, document, and keep up-to-date
| diagrams of my infra?
|
| - Backup and upgrading is also a persistent problem for me. I
| will often set up a container, come back to it 6 months later,
| and have no idea what I did. I have dozens of containers
| scattered across different machines (NUCs, NAS, desktops,
| servers, etc). Every container service feels like it has its own
| convention for where the bind mounts need to go, what user it
| should be run as, what permissions etc it needs. I can't keep
| track of it all in my head, especially after the fact. I just
| want to be able to hit backup, restore, and upgrade on some
| centralized interface. It makes me miss the old cattle days with
| VM clone/snapshot. I still have a few VMs running on a proxmox
| machine that is sort of close, but nothing like that for the
| entire home lab.
|
| I really want to get to a point, or at least move towards a
| solution where I could in theory, torch my house and do a full
| disaster recovery restore of my entire setup.
|
| There has to be something simpler than going full kubernetes to
| manage a home setup. What do you guys use?
| rlabrecque wrote:
| I think the core problem you have is a lack of consistency. I'd
| try to trim down the number of different types of
| device/deployment methods/etc you have. It's too hard to scale
| wide as a single person or two, but you can go very deep in one
| stack and both know it very well and also get into a spot where
| it's kind of like either everything works or nothing works if
| it's all exactly the same, which means ultimately everything
| will have to work well.
| steveh777 wrote:
| I just use Ansible to "orchestrate" the containers. I only run
| one of each, configured to restart on fail, so I don't need
| anything smarter than that.
| tegiddrone wrote:
| I've been trying to re-bootstrap my own homelab and I'm sort of
| gridlocked because I know I will forget or yes "cant keep it
| all in my head"... so I've been spending a lot of time
| documenting things and trying to make it simple, vanilla, and
| community supported when possible. As a result I have no
| homelab or "homeprod" as some others have coined here :)
|
| I also found a friend who I am convincing of the same issues
| and so we may try mirroring our homelab documentation/process
| so that the "bus factor" isn't 1.
| sandreas wrote:
| I think the complexity of your infrastructure is not helpful -
| so I would start in reducing it.
|
| I personally use one single server (Fujitsu D3417-B, Xeon
| 1225v5, 64GB ECC and WD SN850x 2TB NVMe) with Proxmox and an
| OpenWRT Router (Banana Pi BPI-R3). The Proxmox draws ~12W and
| the OpenWRT around 4.5W in Idle and with NodeJS I can run
| MeshCommander on OpenWRT for remote administration.
|
| Since I use ZFS (with native encryption), I can do a full
| backup on an external drive via: # create
| backup pool on external drive zpool create -f rpoolbak
| /dev/sdb # create snapshot on proxmox NVMe zfs
| snapshot -r "rpool@backup-2024-01-19" # recursively
| send the snapshot to the external drive (initial backup)
| # pv only is there to monitor the transfer speed zfs send
| -R --raw rpool@backup-2024-01-19 | pv | zfs recv -Fdu rpoolbak
|
| An incremental backup can be done by providing the -I option
| and two snapshots instead of one to mark the starting point and
| the stop of the incremental backup: # create
| new snapshot zfs snapshot -r "rpool@backup-2024-01-20"
| # only send everything between 2024-01-19 and 2024-01-20
| zfs send -RI --raw rpool@backup-2024-01-19
| rpool@backup-2024-01-20 | pv | zfs recv -Fdu rpoolbak
|
| That is easy, fast and pretty reliable. If you use this `zfs-
| auto-snapshot` you can rewind the filesystem in 15 minute
| steps.
|
| This is also pretty helpful on rewinding virtual machines[1].
| Recently my NVMe (a Samsung 980 Pro) died and restoring the
| backup via zfs (the backup shell command in reverse order from
| rpoolbak to rpool) took about 2 Hours for 700GB and I was back
| online with my server. I was pretty happy with the results,
| although I know that ZFS is kind of "experimental" in some
| cases, especially encryption.
|
| 1: https://pilabor.com/series/proxmox/restore-virtual-
| machine-v...
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Maybe something like Nix/NixOS can help you?
| bazmattaz wrote:
| I'm quite a homelab novice and I'm always tinkering so I have
| the same problem as you.
|
| So I spent time creating a robust backup solution. Every week I
| backup all the docker volumes for each container to an external
| NAS drive.
|
| Then I also run a script which backs up my entire docker
| compose file for every single container in one gigantic compose
| file.
|
| The benefit of this is that I can make tweaks to containers and
| not have to manually record every tweak I made. I know that on
| Sunday at midnight it all gets backed up
| drojas wrote:
| Oh I wish companies like Framework or System76 launched a
| reproducible manufacturing process where you code your hardware
| similarly to how Nix/Guix manages builds. Disaster recovery
| would be much easier. Perhaps Super Micro Computer can do this
| already but they target data centers. One can only dream.
| buybackoff wrote:
| I think people mix "homelab" and "homeprod". Here there are
| some other comments mentioning homeprod. To me what you
| describe sounds more like a homeprod setup. But I like the
| "lab" part. When one could just relax and experiment with lots
| of stuff.
|
| I do have an ECC instance for data, to be backed up to a remote
| S3. I could torch it. It still remains a lab. I could just buy
| a new hardware and restore. But it's only about the valuable
| data (isolated to a couple of containers), not "restore of my
| entire setup".
| eemil wrote:
| > For my home lab, I won't be needing CAT8 or CAT7 anytime soon
|
| Has anyone _ever_ needed CAT7 (or better)? CAT6 works for 10 GBit
| at a short distance, but in my experience (in corporate IT) I 've
| literally never seen a 10 GBit Ethernet port! SFPs are the shit,
| direct attach SFPs are cheap as chips and fiber ones aren't even
| that expensive anymore. And of course fiber will handily beat
| twisted pair in signal integrity at any distance.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Shameless plug, but if you're looking for awesome software to run
| in your home lab, I've got just the thing:
|
| https://awsmfoss.com
|
| The quality of software out there these days is insane -- there
| are projects that cover so many crucial functions (tracking
| expenses, playing music, managing data, etc), that it's becoming
| really hard to track them all.
|
| I've been working on converting the site to a directory and it's
| not quite there yet -- but some people do like the massive wall
| of projects.
| Andrex wrote:
| This article has such a focus on hardware, when that's like... 1%
| of my homelab decision making.
|
| Was hoping this article would delve into hosting your own email,
| websites and services and the steps to expose them to the public
| internet (as well as all the requisite security considerations
| needed for such things).
|
| A homelab is just a normal PC unless you're doing homelab stuff.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| This is always my area of interest, and I rarely see it
| covered. Maybe all the people who do it just understand it so
| well that's it just an after thought for them?
|
| I've tried on numerous occasions to host my own services at
| home and use dynamic DNS to map to an IP, but when things don't
| work, it's hard to know if it's the hardware (consumer modems,
| routers, etc.), dirty ISPs who want to force you into a
| business tier to open up anything, some combination of the two,
| or something else altogether. Are the problems so one-off and
| specific that they all require bespoke problem-solving?
|
| I would love it if anyone could share foolproof resources on
| the subject.
| treflop wrote:
| I think it is because most of those things are just regular
| sysadmin things and homelab more refers to setting up
| hardware or software that you wouldn't normally find at work.
|
| As for your actual problem, a lot of ports are blocked by
| ISPs because a LOT of computer worms have used them to spread
| malware in the past. However you usually can test to see if
| the port is open as well as try alternative uncommon ports
| like 47364 to see if they work.
|
| Some ISPs, although I believe mostly mobile ones, also use
| something called CGNAT where your Internet IP is actually an
| internal network IP within a part of the ISP, and you can
| usually test for this by checking if your IP is in a private
| range.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Did you try r/self hosted on Reddit. Thats where you'll get
| support for something like that
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's completely unclear to me from the post or comments here what
| a homelab is actually for
| leoqa wrote:
| I have two gaming computers that I'd like to vent up into my
| attic. Anyone tried this?
|
| I considered moving them to the garage and then running USB-over-
| fiber to access them but have a ton of flight sim gear I need
| powered as well.
| Dig1t wrote:
| >That said, be careful with the power consumption! You don't want
| to end up with... mortgage of $1,100, a power bill of $1,200, the
| feeling when walking into your home lab... NOT priceless.
|
| This is the biggest thing for me, I would love to have a big
| fancy lab setup at home, but when you start adding up the power
| consumption and put a monthly dollar amount to it, then it
| becomes less exciting. Especially if you live somewhere like
| California where home electricity bills are incredibly high
| nowadays, it is extra painful.
|
| There are some low-power setups that are great, but it seems like
| once you start using rack-mounted equipment, the machines get
| more power-hungry.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| I recently bought an old Mac Pro 2013 (trashcan) with 12 cores/24
| threads and 128 GB ECC RAM for my upgraded "always-on" machine -
| total cost $500. Installed Ubuntu 22.04, works out of the box
| (23.10 had some issues). Unfortunately it's hard/impossible to
| completely suspend/disable the two internal AMD Radeon GPUs to
| lower power consumption. I got it down to ~99W consumption when
| idle, when using "vgaswitcheroo" to suspend one of the GPUs (and
| it set the other one to D3hot state). My Intel NUC consumes
| almost nothing when idle (my UPS reports 0 W output while its
| running, even with 4 NVMe disks attached via a Thunderbolt
| enclosure). I don't want a 100W heat generator running 24x7,
| especially when I'm away from home, so will need to stick with
| the NUC...
| buybackoff wrote:
| GPUs are bad with power. My RTX 3060 still consumes around 20W
| doing nothing, no display or real load whatsoever. More than
| the rest combined when idle. So I made that machine on-demand
| (it's mostly off). It's also noisy for it's relatively powerful
| overall. Yes, NUCs are great for 24/7 and light/spiky loads.
| andix wrote:
| My "home lab" is a raspberry pi 4 and a few more devices thrown
| into a drawer. Not pretty (especially the gordian cable knot),
| but it works.
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