[HN Gopher] Overengineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud prov...
___________________________________________________________________
Overengineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
Author : JNRowe
Score : 176 points
Date : 2025-08-04 23:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ergaster.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ergaster.org)
| treve wrote:
| If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good
| price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070.
| They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough
| for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The
| 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a
| parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.
| senectus1 wrote:
| curious to know what you would use this for?
| denkmoon wrote:
| local dns, static site hosting, local apt cache, various
| other network services (unifi controller if you've got those
| APs for example), remote/headless dev machine (maybe not for
| kernel or bigcorp java development), or whatever else you
| want. mail if you want. Anything :)
|
| Those little thin clients aren't gonna be fast doing "big"
| things, but serving up a few dns packets or whatever to your
| local network is easy work and pretty useful.
| treve wrote:
| I use it for media hosting. Backups (connected USB disks),
| home assistant, syncthing
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Even these low-power CPU's are surprisingly capable. As an
| example of more fancy thing, one could slap in some external
| storage, install Jellyfin, and run their own local streaming
| service off such a machine. The CPU is modern enough for
| efficient hardware transcoding of a stream.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| What if power consumption is taken into account? Are there any
| devices in that category that are ok to leave on 24/7 ?
| ninjin wrote:
| Quick search online tells me ~5W for the Dell Wyse 5070,
| which does not sound unrealistic as I have similar boxes that
| draw ~10W. So, 32 to 62kWh per year and then we have ~USD 6.5
| to 13 per year assuming 20 cents per kWh which another online
| search told me was reasonably realistic for the US.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Yea, I own Wyse 5070 extended, and measured around 5W from
| the wall when nothing attached to the PCIE slot.
| fho wrote:
| Tangent, but it's always crazy to hear what other countries
| pay per kWh compared to the 0.4EUR/kWh in Germany.
| MrDresden wrote:
| And in Iceland the average is around 0.07EUR/kWh.
| bombela wrote:
| Bay area, California: $0.61 base, $0.80 from 16:00 to
| 21:00.
| jurip wrote:
| Yeah, and Germany is expensive compared to the Nordics.
| 6.35 c/kWh right now in Finland, 2.54 c/kWh average over
| the last 30 days.
|
| (clarification: that's euro cent, so 0.0635EUR etc)
| novok wrote:
| Don't worry, there are some places in the USA that are
| even worse than that, like san diego, san francisco and
| hawaii
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I have a somewhat bigger machine that hosts my homelab, an HP
| 800 G2 SFF. It takes "normal" components, so can ben
| modified. The only custom thing is the PSU, but the standard
| one is good enough for my needs. Bonus points for not
| requiring an external power adaptor.
|
| It has an i5-6500, 32 GB RAM (16 + 2x8 DIMMs), 2 SATA SSDs
| and a 2x10Gb Connect-X3. It runs 24/7 hosting OpnSense and
| HomeAssistant on top of KVM (Arch Linux Hardened - didn't do
| anything specific to lower the power draw). Sometimes other
| stuff, but not right now.
|
| I haven't measured it with this specific nic, but before it
| had a 4x1Gb i350. With all ports up, all VMs running but not
| doing much, some power meter I got off Amazon said it pulled
| a little over 14W. The peak was around 40 when booting up.
|
| Electricity costs 0.22 EUR/kWh here. The machine itself cost
| me 0 (they were going to throw it out at work), 35 for the
| nic and maybe 50 for the RAM. It would take multiple years to
| break even by buying one of these small machines. My plan is
| to wait out until they start having 10 Gb nics and this
| machine won't be able to keep up anymore.
| yamapikarya wrote:
| i bought dell wyse 5070 for building talos cluster using
| proxmox. pretty great and you can upgrade ram to 32gb
| dardeaup wrote:
| The published technical specs indicate that the maximum RAM
| is 16gb (2x 8gb).
|
| https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/pl-
| pl/products/thin-c...
|
| Have you tried it with 32gb? If so, was this 2x 16gb or 1x
| 32gb?
| Maxious wrote:
| I had to do a bios upgrade using Windows but a single 32gb
| Corsair "DDR4 SODIMM for 11th Generation Intel Core
| Processors" worked
| zrail wrote:
| I have run 2x 16GB in my 5070s with the stock bios.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| For a bit more money, Optiplex Micro / Lenovo Tiny / HP Mini
| series with at least 8th gen i5 are a good option too. Can be
| found from Ebay for about 70 - 120 USD, much more powerful than
| Wyse 5070 while still quite power efficient (about 10W idle, as
| opposed to 5W of Wyse). Usually they come with one NVME, one
| SATA 2.5" slot, some premium models even with PCIE.
| ninjin wrote:
| All good options, just noting that based on some searches I
| made they all seem to lack serial ports compared to the Wyse
| if that is something you care about (I personally do). There
| could be variants out there though with serial ports and if
| would be happy to hear about them and even more happy if
| there are fanless variants/alternatives for those of us with
| very limited space at home and a need to avoid noise.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't know about fanless, especially with an i5 as
| opposed to n-something.
|
| But not all those minis are the same. G4 (intel 8th gen)
| and G5 (intel 9th gen) HPs are horrendous. The fan makes an
| extremely aggravating noise, and I haven't found a way to
| fix it. Bonus points for both the fan and heatsink having
| custom mounts, so even if you wanted to have an ugly but
| quiet machine by slapping a standard cooler, you couldn't.
|
| G6 versions (intel 10th gen) seem to have fixed this, and
| they're mostly inaudible on a desk, unless you're compiling
| something for half an hour.
| vitaflo wrote:
| My Lenovo m910q Tiny has serial ports. Two of them in fact.
| Cost me $50 on eBay.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I would say raspberry pi 5. cheap, small and widely used so
| much of the stuff is already done many times
| cenamus wrote:
| Is it better than a n100 setup from China? When you factor in
| the storage, power supply, case, (fan), and so on?
| addandsubtract wrote:
| No. The main pain point with RPi's is that they're SD card
| based - which are slow and prone to failure. Configuring an
| SSD to be used as the main storage has also been a pain in
| the past (not sure if that's changed recently).
|
| With an n100, you get a better, more upgradable system for
| around the same price and same power usage. On top, you
| will also have an x64 system that isn't limited to some ARM
| quirks. I made the switch n100's over a year ago and have
| had no issues with them so far.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Looking at Raspberry Pi prices inside EU, I can get 8 core
| laptops for a cheaper price, with display, dGPU et al.
|
| No idea what happened, but Raspberry Pis are super expensive
| for the last couple years, which is why I decided to just go
| with used Intel NUCs instead. They cost around 80-150EUR and
| they use more electricity but they are a quite good bang for
| the buck, and some variants also have 3x HDMI or Gbit/s
| ethernet or m2 slots you can use to have a SATA RAID in them.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Same.. switched over during the pandemic when full on
| N95/100 systems were cheaper than just the RPi board by
| itself. More compute/ram, faster storage, included case and
| power, fewer headaches.
| wraptile wrote:
| Another tip: second hand gaming PCs! They can be incredibly
| cheap and powerful due to upgrade cycles just make sure to put
| a raid 1 on it as second hand gamer gear might be less
| reliable.
| novok wrote:
| the power usage is usually horrible, which is why most don't
| want it
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Another cheap option are Fujitsu Futro's. They're meant to be
| thin server clients meant to operate larger server racks (I
| guess?). Anyway, they come with 4-8GB RAM, an SSD (most people
| upgrade them), and even have a PCI-e slot (depending on the
| model) to use with a 2.5 or 10 Gbit ethernet card, for example.
| Around $50 on ebay.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| I built mine around an N150 board off of aliexpress. 6 SATA
| slots, 4x2.5G ethernet, 2x m.2 slots. Find a cheap second-hand
| case, a bit of RAM and you're ready to go. It's got hardware
| transcoding, handles 4K without breaking a sweat. And it
| consumes 6W!
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm more inclined to go with N305/N355 myself for the extra
| compute (more images/containers). But they're a pretty decent
| option. I setup a "forbidden router" at a friend's using one.
| Been working great for his home use... proxmox, opnsense for
| routing, wireguard, pihole, docker-vm running his AP control
| software, and a trunas scale VM serving a USB hard drive for
| home backups.
|
| At home, I'm using a 5900H based mini-pc I bought a few years
| ago and a synology nas.
| czhu12 wrote:
| This was exactly a use case I had in mind when building
| https://canine.sh -- also uses k3s as a provider, and provides a
| Heroku-like devex.
|
| How to actually reliably expose a homelab to the broader internet
| is a little tricky, cloudflare tunnels mostly does the trick but
| can only expose one port at a time, so the set up is somewhat
| annoying
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've got basically raw internet coming in to my OPNSense
| device, although I had to request certain ports to be removed
| from the ISP's by-default-blocked policy, since I host a mail
| server - but the ISP is fine with this, they have a form for
| it, super easy.
|
| Some family members are behind CGNAT, and I'm not sure if their
| ISP has the option to move out from behind that, but since they
| don't self-host it's probably slightly more secure from outside
| probes. We're still able to privately share communications via
| my VPN hub to which they connect, which allows me to remotely
| troubleshoot minor issues.
|
| I haven't looked into cloudflare tunnels, but haven't felt the
| need.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| What do you mean by "one port at a time"?
|
| I run cloudflared on one machine, and it proxies one subdomain
| to one port, and another to a unix socket (could have been a
| second port, no pb).
| timc3 wrote:
| The encryption is interesting but I wouldn't call this over
| engineered at all, in fact it's rather basic compared to a lot of
| homelabs I see people building particularly where people are
| doing K8s or similar over multiple machines.
|
| Also Proxmox was called out as the only choice when that is very
| much not the case. It is a good choice for sure, but there are
| others.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > _But my server could be shut down because of a power outage or
| another reason. I might be at work or even on holidays when it
| happens, and even wireguard can't solve this._
|
| A 'power outage' incident doesn't seem to have been mitigated. My
| homelab has had evolving mitigations: I cut a hole in the side of
| a small UPS so I could connect it to a larger (car) battery for
| longer uptime, which got replaced by a dedicated
| inverter/charger/transfer-switch attached to a big-ass AGM
| caravan battery (which on a couple of occasions powered through
| two-to-three hour power outages), and has now been replaced with
| these recent LiFePo4 battery power station thingies.
|
| Of course, it's only a homelab, there's nothing critically
| important that I'm hosting, but that's not the dang point, I want
| to beat most of "the things", and I don't like having to check
| that everything has rebooted properly after a minor power
| fluctuation (I have a few things that mount remote file stores
| and these mounts usually fail upon boot due to the speed at which
| certain devices boot up - and I've decided not to solve that
| yet).
| qwertox wrote:
| > I cut a hole in the side of a small UPS so I could connect it
| to a larger (car) battery for longer uptime
|
| Can you share more about this? I have a APC Back UPS PRO USV
| 1500VA (BR1500G-GR) and it would be nice to know if this is
| possible with that one as well.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| That UPS eventually died, and I'm not sure if it was because
| it was hooked up to a larger battery than it was designed
| for, but it's still only 12 volts so I don't think the
| electronics would notice. What they may notice is extended
| run-time in the event of a power failure.
|
| It was a crude mod. Take the cover off and remove the
| existing little security alarm battery, use tin snips to cut
| a hole in the side of the metal UPS cover (this was
| challenging, it was relatively thick metal, I'd recommend
| using an angle grinder in an appropriately safe environment
| far away from the internals of the UPS), and feed the battery
| cables out through the hole. I probably got some additional
| cables with appropriately sized terminations to effectively
| extend the short existing ones (since they were only designed
| to be used within the device). And then connect it up to a
| car battery.
|
| Cover any exposed metal on the connectors with that shrink
| rubber tubing or electrical tape. Be very careful with
| exposed metal around it anywhere, especially touching the RED
| POSITIVE pole of the battery. Get a battery box - I got one
| for the big-ass AGM battery.
|
| Test it out on a laptop that's had it's battery removed or
| disconnected that, just in case, you don't care too much
| about losing.
|
| Get a battery charger that can revive a flat battery, and do
| a full refresh/renew charge on the car battery once a year or
| after it's had to push through a power outage that may have
| used more than a few percent of its capacity.
|
| Personally, I think it's safer a less hassle to go for a
| LiFePo4 (LFP) Power Station style device that has UPS
| capabilities. LFP batteries have 3,000-ish cycle lifetimes,
| which could be nearly ten years with daily use.
| throaway920181 wrote:
| This really doesn't seem like something one would want to
| mess around with if they don't know what they're doing (fire
| hazards and all...)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| My commercial UPS already scares me at the fire potential.
| No way I would take on the risk of some DIY on something
| that could burn down the place or electrocute me.
| sirmoveon wrote:
| No, don't do it. I understand his thought process because
| they are both 12v batteries with more capacity, but car
| batteries are made for high burst of energy which a car
| engine ignition requires, whereas UPS batteries are made for
| slow drains. Also, these UPS are made for charging battery
| cells in a certain way, if you start to stack a bank of
| batteries of the same model in parallel hoping for more
| capacity, even then its a problem for the UPS's charger, they
| won't charge evenly and eventually becoming a problem.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Marine deep cycle batteries might work better, but at some
| point I'm pretty sure lithium would be price competitive.
| bluGill wrote:
| It isn't quite that bad. the batteries are close enough
| that it will work.
|
| the real worry is these are already a fire hazzard and so
| something goes wrong insurance will blame the mod even if
| not at fault
| chatmasta wrote:
| I like to keep my hardware competence sufficiently low so
| that I'm never cursed with the false confidence to even
| _consider_ "drilling a hole in a UPS," nevermind wiring it
| to a car battery in my closet...
| nancyminusone wrote:
| You seem like the kind of guy who _doesn 't_ enjoy a nice
| sulfuric acid spill on the floor, haha
| chatmasta wrote:
| I will mess with all kinds of hardware, especially mini
| PCs and routers.. I once had a few hundred iPhones in my
| closet... but I draw the line at anything that uses
| batteries or electricity in a non-standard way. If the
| wire can't carry data, I'm not touching it.
|
| Maybe it's because when I was a kid, I fancied myself an
| experimenter, and I had a wire ripped off a lamp, and
| touched the two ends together...
| cyberax wrote:
| It's a bit trickier than you think. And can be dangerous.
|
| The discharging circuitry is fine, but the _charger_ might
| overheat because a larger battery can draw more current while
| charging for longer periods. I discovered that when I tried
| to attach a "lead-acid compatible" LFP battery to an UPS.
|
| These days, it's just easier to buy a dedicated rack-
| mountable LFP battery originally meant for solar
| installations, an inverter/charger controller, and a
| rectifier. The rectifier output will serve as a "solar panel"
| input for the battery. You get a double-conversion UPS with
| days-long holdover time for a fraction of a lead-acid UPS.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| There's not much to it, you just take the small 12V sealed
| lead-acid cell out from the bottom of the UPS, extend the two
| leads, and connect a larger capacity lead-acid battery of the
| same voltage.
|
| If you don't recognize the terms "sealed", "lead-acid",
| "battery", "capacity", or "voltage" then you shouldn't do
| this.
|
| About the only advantage of it is that it's cheap (free if
| you find a UPS in the trash with an already dead battery),
| but those cheap UPSs make really crap quality power, and for
| some of them the only reason they don't overheat is because
| their stock battery is so small. It's a bit like how you can
| cook a whole turkey in the microwave, but you probably don't
| want to.
| preisschild wrote:
| I just use a small UPS to make sure all data is written to the
| drives properly before the battery runs out.
|
| Do you have power outages often? Even if I have one, my
| services can come up automatically without doing anything, when
| the power is restored.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Same. I have two small UPS. The first I connect to my
| computers and it lasts about 15 minutes. Enough for me to
| save/checkpoint whatever in a restorable way. The second I
| connect to the wifi router. This lasts for a while longer and
| it's pretty useful. In those 15 minutes local network still
| works. And if the power comes back in a minute or two (which
| happens more often than outages that last hours where I am),
| then I don't have to wait for the wifi routers painfully slow
| boot time.
|
| Speaking of... does anyone know how to speed up wifi router
| boot time? Stupid thing takes 5 minutes almost.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I would be happy with smaller/lighter UPS that will only
| provide 10 seconds of juice. I only purchased the thing
| because the lights in my apartment would flicker a couple of
| times a week.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I have a few things that mount remote file stores and these
| mounts usually fail upon boot due to the speed at which certain
| devices boot up - and I've decided not to solve that yet
|
| If your OS is using systemd, you can fix that pretty easily by
| adding an After=network-online.target (so the ExecStart doesn't
| even try to check if there is no networking yet) and an
| ExecCondition shell script [1] to actually check if nfs / smb
| on the target host is alive as an override to the fs mounts.
|
| Add a bunch of BindsTo overrides to the mounts and the services
| that need the data, and you have yourself a way to stop the
| services automatically when the filesystem goes away.
|
| I've long been in the systemd hater camp, but honestly, not
| having to wrangle with once-a-minute cronjobs to check for
| issues is actually worth it.
|
| [1] https://forum.manjaro.org/t/for-those-who-use-systemd-
| servic...
| jmholla wrote:
| Here's a deeper article on ordering things around network
| startup: https://systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/
|
| It doesn't conflict with anything you've said, just a very
| handy document.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| You can also use _netdev in the mount options, then systemd
| mount generator will generate the dependency on network
| automatically.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Even then, that doesn't resolve the power outage primarily
| because the local nodes that your Modem transmits to will also
| be down in the area from same said power outage, most only have
| backup power for 10-30m, if even that many say there is no
| backup power for those which is why they disclaim that in their
| service agreement with regards to emergency phone calling over
| voip (for services that include unified communications).
|
| So even if your local node could transmit, none of the others
| could, and they can't buffer either.
|
| To mitigate power outage, you would need both power, and a
| cellular connection, and that connection would only be good for
| 2-3 hours (Cell tower backups), and those would require a
| Cradlepoint.
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| Author here, indeed I didn't install a UPS. I've tried to keep
| my setup fairly minimal, and I'm consciously accepting that if
| there's a power outage my services will be down. I self-host
| exclusively for myself, not for others.
|
| What I don't want though is a power outage putting my server
| offline while I'm on holidays, and not be able to access my
| services at all.
|
| My ISP-provided router supports Wireguard, so I can use that to
| connect to my KVM and send the Wake on LAN packages.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you look through the BIOS options on
| your computer? Mine is much less capable than yours (it is a
| used mini-pc) but it has options to boot itself up upon
| resuming power.
| behringer wrote:
| I use UPS for my internet and then remote access such as
| intel AMT will get you back into your systems if you've
| specced your hardware to have such features.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| You REALLY should not expose AMT to the internet.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| For anyone thinking of doing this, please please don't. A car
| battery is probably never a sealed deep cycle battery, and the
| UPS's charging circuitry is not intended to charge a battery of
| this size (this is assuming you're using a lead based battery,
| and not something even more crazy and dangerous like Li-Po or
| LiFePO4). God forbid you have a cell fail on a car battery and
| that charger starts cooking the battery. I've had actual car
| lead acid batteries explode because of poor choices someone
| else made trying to do something like this, and man when they
| go, they're dangerous and scary. You really need to pick
| hardware that's all properly specced and sized for the
| job...there's a reason Eaton and APC charge what they do.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| To each their own. I'd personally sleep far more soundly with
| even a car battery UPS under my bed than with one of those
| consumer ready lithium ion portable power station batteries
| they sell on Amazon.
|
| But if you can't explain the difference between voltage and
| current, or know what "short circuit" means, then this isn't
| something to poke at.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I've spend a decent amount on EcoFlow units (Delta 2) that I
| use as online UPS for my servers and networking. They work
| great and I also recently installed dual 220watt EcoFlow solar
| panels on my roof that pump in solar during the day. Works
| nicely though the ROI admittedly is not there at all, just a
| cool thing.
| tietjens wrote:
| This is such a great post. I have a small collection of posts for
| inspiration in creating my homelab and this is getting added to
| it. Current have a Pi 4 with PiHole and a Beelink. Going to add
| one or two more machines.
| MaKey wrote:
| Your VPS provider likely uses servers with ECC RAM, this home
| server doesn't. For most people it doesn't seem to matter but for
| me it does - a home server where I store my data needs to have
| ECC RAM.
| ninjin wrote:
| Seconded, but hard to find for small boxes. I have seen _in-
| band_ ECC on Asus Nucs, but that is as good as it gets from
| what I can tell.
| MaKey wrote:
| There is the new Minisforum N5 Pro, which supports DDR5 ECC
| RAM. I'm keeping an eye on it.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| totally agree. That's why my homelab storage server(s) are 2nd
| hand enterprise machines. They come with ECC.
| dardeaup wrote:
| True! Unfortunately, an enterprise machine is more likely to
| have considerable power draw and quite possibly be much
| louder. I have a 2013 Apple Mac Pro (trashcan) that uses ECC.
| They're also cheap, small, and quiet.
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with it. Why do you want or need ECC RAM
| for your homelab?
| MaKey wrote:
| ECC RAM protects against bit flips (a bit changing to the
| wrong state). These can be caused by electric or magnetic
| interference. A pixel of a picture suddenly having the wrong
| color because of a bit flip is not that bad but some day an
| important file might end up corrupted because of one. I want
| to sleep well at night not having to worry about silent data
| corruption so ECC RAM it is. See here for more information:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory
| arjie wrote:
| I have a setup that is perhaps not as robust, but where my
| primary aim was that I should be able to incrementally
| encapsulate the parts.
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/One_Quick_Way_To_Host_A_WebA...
|
| As an example, I use cloudflare tunnel to point to an nginx that
| reverse proxies all the services, but I could just as well point
| DNS to that nginx and it would still work. I had to rebuild the
| entire thing on my home server when I found that the cheap VPS I
| was using was super over-provisioned ($2/mo for 2 Ryzen 7950
| cores? Of course it was) and I had this thing at home anyway, and
| this served me well for that use-case.
|
| When I rebuilt it, I was able to get it running pretty quickly
| and each piece could be incrementally done: i.e. I could run
| without cloudflare tunnel and then add it to the mix, I could run
| without R2 and then switch file storage to R2 because I used FUSE
| s3fs to mount R2, so on and so forth.
| cyprien_g wrote:
| Building a homelab is an awesome way to learn a lot of things.
|
| I also used to over-engineer my homelab, but I recently took a
| more simplistic approach (https://www.cyprien.io/posts/homelab/),
| even though it's probably still over-engineered for most people.
|
| I realized that I already do too much of this in my day job, so I
| don't want to do it at home anymore.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| While i get the whole homelab thing is exiting and a great
| learning experience, it's simply not worth the time and effort
| for the majority of people.
|
| You will end up paying much more for your services, along with
| spending a ton of time maintaining it (and if you don't, you will
| probably find yourself on the end of a 0-day hack sometime).
|
| In Northern/Western Europe, where power costs around EUR0.3/kWh
| on average, just the power consumption of a simple 4 bay NAS will
| cost you almost as much as buying Google Drive / OneDrive /
| iCloud / Dropbox / Jottacloud / Whatever.
|
| A simple Synology 4 bay NAS like a DS923+ with 4 x 4TB Seagate
| Ironwolf drives will use between 150 kWh and 300 kWh per year
| (100% idle vs 100% active, so somewhere in between), which will
| cost you between EUR45 and EUR90 per year, and that's power
| alone. Factoring in the cost of the hardware will probably double
| that (over a 5 year period).
|
| It's cheaper (and easier) to use public cloud, and then use
| something like Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt
| data before uploading it. That way you get the best of both
| worlds, privacy without any of the sysadm tasks.
|
| Edit: I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that
| time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is
| finite, you can always make more money.
|
| Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things
| you love with people that matter to you. Eventually those people
| won't be there anymore, and the memories you make with those
| people will matter far more to you in 20 years, than the
| EUR20/month you paid for cloud services.
| guappa wrote:
| a NAS has like 10000x more storage than google drive and is
| also way faster locally.
| brazzy wrote:
| The premium plan from Google has 2 TB and costs about the
| same annually as the electricity for the NAS that the GP
| comment suggested for comparison (at 100% usage). So at the
| same ONGOING cost (not even counting initial investment), the
| NAS has 8 times more storage. 16 times if you assume it will
| be mostly idle. Except if you want high availability with
| RAID, then you're back to 8 times. And haven't yet thought
| about backups.
|
| All this assuming that you even _need_ that much storage,
| which most people definitely do not.
| guappa wrote:
| Google cloud has deleted user's data by mistake in the
| past.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I'm willing to bet that far more data has been lost to
| people serving their own data, than Google has lost data.
|
| In any case, you should always make backups regardless of
| where your data is stored. At home, your biggest threat
| is loss of data, probably through hardware malfunction,
| house fires or similar.
|
| In the cloud your biggest threat is not loss of data but
| loss of access to data. Different scenarios but identical
| outcomes.
|
| Backup solves both scenarios, RAID doesn't solve any of
| them, but sadly, many people think "oh but I've got RAID6
| so surely I cannot lose data".
| tracker1 wrote:
| Having experienced batches of faulty HDDs in a home NAS,
| you can definitely lose data with RAID6/ZFS-2 even.
|
| Of course, syncing a NAS between yourself and a friend or
| family member's home may be the better solution over
| cloud options.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| How much space do you realistically need high availability,
| redundant storage for ?
|
| For my personal use case, that involves photos and documents,
| all things i cannot easily recreate (photos less so). Those
| are what matters to me, and storing them in the cloud means i
| not only get redundancy in a single data center, but also
| geographical redundancy as many cloud providers will use
| erasure coding to make your data available across multiple
| data centers.
|
| Everything else will be just fine on a single drive, even a
| USB drive, as everything that originated on the internet can
| most likely be found there again. This is especially true for
| media (purchased, or naval aquisition). Media is probably the
| most replicated data on the planet, possibly only behind the
| bible and IKEA catalog.
|
| So, back to the important data, i can easily fit an entire
| family of 4 into a single 2TB data plan. That costs me
| somewhere around EUR85 - EUR100 per year, for 4 people, and
| it works no matter what i do. I no longer need to drag a
| laptop with me on vacation, and i can basically just say
| "fuck it" and go on vacation for 2 weeks.
| guappa wrote:
| I just need you to make comparisons that are fair.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I thought they were.
|
| If you need to commute to work daily, and you're
| concerned about the cost, you don't really care if you're
| comparing a city car vs a sports car vs the bus, despite
| on goes at 80km/h, and another can do 230km/h, if all
| you're interested in is the price.
|
| Obviously as your storage needs increase, so will cloud
| costs, but unless you're a professional photographer, I'm
| guessing 2TB will be more than enough for most people.
|
| Again, not talking about people trying to run their own
| media server on pirated content, and saving money that
| way. In my book that's comparable to saving money by
| robbing a bank. You're not saving anything, you're
| breaking the law, and 9 out of 10 times, it's cheaper to
| steal someone else's bike than it is taking a taxi home.
|
| I'm talking actual storage for data you actually own, and
| possibly even data you have created yourself. Anything
| that came from the internet can be found on the internet
| again, purchased or naval acquisition.
| geodel wrote:
| Sorry, you make some good arguments but then mix them up
| with clueless assertions.
|
| 2 TB ought to good for everyone is hilarious. There is so
| many people I know who would fill 512 GB phone in 1-2
| year with photos and videos.
|
| Maybe you do not have use case or situation where larger
| storage is needed. But it is strange to assume everyone
| in same bucket.
| itintheory wrote:
| > everything that originated on the internet can most
| likely be found there again
|
| I would that this were true. I guess it depends on what you
| mean by "the internet", but there's a reason the Internet
| Archive exists. Sure, you don't need to back up your recent
| Firefox installer or your Debian ISO but lots of important
| and valuable data can't be found on the internet anymore.
| There are very valid reasons that groups like Archiveteam
| [1] do what they do, not to mention recent headlines like
| individuals losing access to their entire cloud storage
| [2].
|
| [1] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page [2]
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/aws_wipes_ten_years/
| Hamcha wrote:
| Have you seen the prices for Google Drive et al? The NAS setup
| you describe (which I wouldn't consider worth the money for
| that little space) is what, 12GB with 1 parity drive?
|
| Google One for 10TB is 274,99EUR/mo (at least in my country) so
| you'd make the entire nas price and subscription cost within a
| few months, let alone years.
|
| There just aren't compelling public cloud for large sizes (My
| NAS is 30TB capacity and I'm using 18 right now) and even if
| you go the more complex loops with like S3 and whatnot you
| still get billed more than it's worth. Public cloud is meant
| for public files, there's a lot of costs you're paying for
| stuff you don't need like being fast to access from everywhere.
| thomascountz wrote:
| OP has admittedly over-engineered their setup. Depending on
| your goals (cost, speed, space, autonomy), there are less-
| rigorous solutions for the layperson.
|
| I, for one, don't want to have Google, etc. as a dependency[1],
| so I will pay some energy cost to do that.
|
| 1: see:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| Unit327 wrote:
| Encrypted data on the servers is only useful if your server is
| just dumb storage. I want the server to actually do something,
| e.g. serving media, running home assistant etc.
| Pooge wrote:
| But on a homelab you can host any service you want and
| start/stop it whenever you need to. Sure cloud storage might
| cost less in the short-term, but if you need more storage or
| more services, a selfhosted option is far cheaper.
|
| VPS are very expensive for what you get. If you have the
| capital, doing it yourself saves you money very quickly. It's
| not rare to pay $50 for a semi-decent VPS, but for $2000 you
| would get an absolute beast that would last 10 years at the
| very least.
|
| With Docker, maintenance is basically zero and unused services
| are stopped or restarted with 1 command.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| How many services do you need ? And how much CPU power do
| those services need ?
|
| I've also self hosted for decades, but it turns out i don't
| really need that much, at least not public.
|
| I basically just need mail, calendar, file storage and DNS
| adblocking. I can get mail/calendar/file storage with pretty
| much any cloud provider (and no, there is no privacy when it
| comes to mail, there is always another participant in the
| conversation), and for EUR18/year i can get something like
| NextDNS, Control D, or similar.
|
| For reference, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 will use around 50 kWh
| per year, which (again in europe) will translate to
| EUR15/year. For just EUR3 more per year i get redundancy and
| support.
|
| I still run a bunch of stuff at home, but nothing is opened
| to the public internet. Everything runs behind a Wireguard
| VPN, and i have zero redundant storage. My home storage is
| used for backing up cloud storage, as well as storing media
| and client backups. And yes, i also have another cloud where
| i backup to.
|
| My total cloud bill is around EUR20-EUR25/month, with 8TB of
| storage, ad blocking DNS, mail/calendar/office apps and even
| a small VPS.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I did not do the price calculations (in France, and I
| prefer not to know :) but I host many things except for
| mail and calendar (mail is tricky to host). Of these 29
| services, I use maybe 4 daily and 15 monthly. They are well
| protected, easy to maintain, and serve family and friends.
|
| Not to mention that I love them.
| cyprien_g wrote:
| The maintenance time is a bit overestimated if you keep it
| simple.
|
| On my homelab, I update everything every quarter and it takes
| about 1 hour, so 4 hours a year is pretty reasonable. Docker
| helps a lot with this.
|
| And I've almost never run into trouble in years, so I have very
| few unexpected maintenance tasks.
|
| EDIT: I am referring to a homelab that is only accessible for
| private purposes through a VPN.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| As a bare minimum, you should update your server and docker
| images daily, or at least whenever there's an update (which
| you won't know unless you check).
|
| If you only access your homelab over VPN or similar, then by
| all means, update whenever you feel like it, but if you
| expose your services to the internet, you want to be damned
| sure there are no vulnerabilities in them.
|
| The internet of today is not like it was 20 years ago. Today
| you're constantly being hammerede by bots that scan every
| single IPv4 address for open ports, and when they find
| something they record it in a database, along with
| information on what's running on that port (provided that
| information is available).
|
| When (not if) a vulnerability for a given service is
| discovered, an attacker doesn't need to "hunt & peck" for
| vulnerable hosts, they already have that information in a
| database, and all they need to do is start shooting at their
| list of hosts.
|
| You can use something like shodan.io to see what a would be
| attacker might see (can check your own IP with
| "ip:xxx.xxx.xxx.xx".
|
| Try entering something like Synology, Proxmox, Truenas,
| Unraid, Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, or any of the other popular
| home services.
| cyprien_g wrote:
| Sorry, I should have mentioned that my services are only
| accessible through a VPN. Otherwise, I completely agree
| with you.
| Pooge wrote:
| > which you won't know unless you check
|
| RSS feeds FTW
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's pretty easy to soft expose yourself too now with
| things like cloudflare tunnels without a lot of the
| security risks. You can put all access behind an secret/API
| key or OAuth login easily.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I definitely need to get my security hygiene up to snuff,
| but let me ask you, since using a reverse proxy (caddy in
| my case) refuses connections without a domain, would the
| scans reveal anything about my host if they don't know the
| URL of my jellyfin instance?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > As a bare minimum, you should update your server and
| docker images daily, or at least whenever there's an update
| (which you won't know unless you check).
|
| I got this setup automatically with Renovate: https://githu
| b.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/blob/main/src/cdk8...
| rootsudo wrote:
| It's great to learn on, and if you happen to have a place with
| free electricity then even more fun :)
|
| It's also an excuse for me to stay in most summer days.
| onre wrote:
| As a Northern European (Finland) I can tell you that the
| electricity cost here for last year was closer to 0,1 EUR per
| kWh including the transfer fee and taxes. Additionally, more
| than 40 % of houses here have electric heating. The heating
| season starts in early autumn and ends in late spring, lasting
| 8 to 9 months depending on the year. As the electricity used by
| the device is turned into heat, during the heating season
| running it costs nothing.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Yeah, northern scandinavia has plenty of renewable energy.
|
| As for electric heating, that is true in 1:1 heating
| scenarios, but i assume you guys are also using heat pumps
| these days, and while you still get heat "for free", it will
| not be anywhere as efficient as your heat pump.
|
| Yes, it's probably peanuts in the grand scheme of things, i
| know our air to water heat pump in Denmark uses around
| 4500-5500 kWh per year, so adding another 100 kWh probably
| won't mean much.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Google Premium storage, is $100/yr (paid annually) for 2TB of
| storage.
|
| Even at the high end estimate the homelab is giving you several
| times the storage for the same cost.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| do you need more space than 2TB ? (excluding things you've
| downloaded from the internet)
|
| Very few people i know has use for that much storage. Yes,
| you can download the entire netflix catalog, and that will of
| course require more storage, and no, you probably shouldn't
| put it in the cloud (or even back it up, or use redundant
| storage for it).
|
| Setting up your own homelab to be your own netflix, but using
| pirated content, is not really a use case i would consider.
| I'm aware people are doing it, and i still think it's stupid.
| They're saving money by "stealing" (or at least breaking
| laws), which is hardly a lifehack.
| Xss3 wrote:
| I know many people that would fill that space with home
| videos from phones and digital cameras. Millennials with
| kids especially.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| You can fit A LOT of photos and videos in 2TB.
|
| My wife is a professional photographer, and while we do
| archive most of her RAW files somewhere else, pretty much
| everything HEIC, JPEG or any other compressed format
| lives in our main cloud.
|
| We have 2.2TB in total for "direct storage", and we're
| currently using around 1.5TB, and that's including myself
| and our kids.
|
| My personal photo library has just short of 90,000
| photos, and about 5,000 videos. My wife's library is
| roughly twice that. I have no idea how many photos the
| kids have, but they each take up around 200GB for photos.
|
| And then we have backups, which actually take up about
| 1TB per person, mostly because that's the space I've
| allocated for each, so history just grows until it's
| filled. Photos ideally won't change much. We backup
| originals along with XMP metadata for edits, so the
| photos stays the same, and changes are described in
| easily compressed text files. Backups of course also have
| deduplication enabled.
| Xss3 wrote:
| My mother, now in her 70s, has about 4tb worth of photos
| and videos, and we haven't even started digitizing stuff.
|
| My friend, in her mid 20s, uses nearly 3tb of apple cloud
| space with photos and videos, mostly of her kids and dog.
|
| I dont even film much but im using about a terabyte.
| close04 wrote:
| You are moving the goalposts and supporting your generic
| point only under very narrow _assumed_ conditions.
|
| There's always a "right tool for the job". Sometimes it's
| the cloud. Sometimes it isn't. The article is for people
| who found the cloud isn't a good fit and need something
| at home.
|
| A lot of people have large collections of music or
| movies. Or want to keep full control over some data no
| matter the cost. Or need it to work without internet.
| There are many solid reasons to avoid the cloud and use
| your own solution.
|
| You are arguing that your original assertion isn't wrong,
| people's stated needs must be wrong. Because you have
| different needs so others must be doing it wrong. And
| this undermines everything else you say.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Five comments up you're talking about 4x4TB NAS setups.
| Which is it?
| sophacles wrote:
| > do you need more space than 2TB ?
|
| Yes.
|
| > (excluding things you've downloaded from the internet)
|
| Why on earth would I do that? My storage includes things I
| downloaded from the internet that are not there
| anymore/hard to find/now paywalled. If you were thinking
| the only thing to download from the internet is pirated
| media - I haven't included that in my >2TB assessment.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| >Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing
| things you love with people that matter to you
|
| Who are you to tell people how to spend their time? Let people
| have hobbies ffs
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| A server will never love you back.
| redserk wrote:
| Neither will the majority of hobbies for self-enrichment.
|
| It isn't unreasonable to want some alone time.
| guappa wrote:
| Well I'm ugly so... at least it doesn't actively hate me
| either.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, also neither it wants to move out because you pushed
| start button too many times or stay sullen over weekend
| because dinner plan on Friday got canceled.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Neither will a lizard. People still have them.
| ezconnect wrote:
| It's purpose in life is to serve not to love.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Sure, run a homelab as a hobby. Everybody has hobbies.
|
| Once your user count goes beyond 1, you suddenly have a SLA
| as people are dependent on your services. Like it or not, you
| are now the primary support staff of your local cloud
| business.
|
| The more users you get, the more time you will need to spend
| to fix problems.
|
| At which point does it go from a hobby to a 2nd job ?
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| You're still arguing from the point of view of someone who
| doesn't want to do it or isn't interested in doing it. Your
| GP said you 'get' homelabs but it's increasingly clear you
| do not - and that's ok. People run homelabs because they
| enjoy learning and tinkering. If they don't enjoy it, or
| they can't risk having the odd problem, they have other
| options they can explore. It's not really any more
| complicated than that. Believe it or not, people are
| capable of evaluating the tradeoffs and making a sensible
| decision about what to host themselves.
| mannyv wrote:
| Once you know how to build and maintain infrastructure you
| realize that while it's nice to know how to do it, it's not
| cost-effective.
|
| The thing is, it's worth it to learn. Do you know the basics of
| how to set up a completely redundant environment? There's no
| conceptual difference between setting one up at home by using
| consumer equipment and setting it up in a data center. You can
| get pretty capable equipment (Mikrotik) for less. The
| enterprise stuff has more configuration options, but it's
| doubtful that you'll use most of them.
|
| Set up backup WANs, redundant routing, DNS, power, etc is fun.
| Setting up redundant load balancers, backend services,
| databases, etc is also fun. It's not hard to do, it's just hard
| to get it all right. There are probably a zillion configuration
| parameters you can mess with, and only a few sets actually
| work. Unfortunately, the sets that work in your home won't be
| the ones that will work in production, but you could possibly
| run load tests etc to simulate a real environment (though
| simulating multiple clients from multiple endpoints is harder
| than you think).
|
| And of course, getting production equipment is hard. Nobody has
| 2 F5s lying around. And you really need at least 4 F5s, because
| you have redundant locations. That's a lot of cashola. And in
| most environments you wouldn't want some random person messing
| around with the production (or test) F5s. It's the same with
| NAS, VM servers, docker registries, etc.
|
| I suspect getting the whole end-to-end setup isn't something
| people experience anymore, because small companies have (or at
| least should have) moved to the cloud by now.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Not everything that seems "interesting" is worth it to learn
| from an economic perspective. Could it be worthwhile for
| someone studying for the A+ Computer Technician test? Maybe.
| Could it be worth it for someone looking to impress their
| boss Harry? Possibly, if Harry also controls your pay and has
| a penchant for overpaying for locally run infrastructure and
| a distrust of the cloud. Possibly. These kinds of investments
| are based evaluated at the individual level --- not everyone
| will benefit. Some may find themselves no more competitive in
| the job market as your average IT clown, but as always,
| results will vary.
| bkettle wrote:
| Learning things because they are interesting is reason
| enough in itself for many people, regardless of any
| economic benefit.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| The others' points are valid. Google Drive is rather expensive,
| Hetzner is cheaper and works well enough.
|
| However, it also depends on how you use that data. In my case,
| I'm a Sunday photographer, so I tend to wrangle multiple GB of
| data at a time. I usually edit my photos locally, but I
| sometimes will want to revisit older stuff. I can download it,
| but it's a PITA and s_l_o_w. Google drive file stream is
| terrible for this, you never know if the files are uplaoded or
| not. Onedrive isn't any better. I haven't tried dropbox.
|
| Hetzner has some storage box which exposes SMB but doesn't seem
| to enforce encryption nor IP filtering, so I'm not very
| comfortable with that.
|
| Also, my internet connection pretends I have 5 Gb down, 0.5 up.
| The down part is usually as expected (my machine only has a 1
| Gb nic), but upload is sometimes very slow. Running a local NAS
| is much faster. It's ZFS, so backups are trivial to send to
| encrypted offsite storage.
|
| It also doesn't need to run 24/7, which helps with power usage
| (0.22 EUR/kWh here).
|
| > I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that
| time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is
| finite, you can always make more money.
|
| Indeed. Waiting around for files to transfer gets old quick. I
| have better things to do with my time. My NAS needs a whopping
| five minutes of my time every now and again when a new kernel
| comes out.
| m463 wrote:
| lol.
|
| don't spend your time cooking food, pay for others to prepare
| it for you.
|
| don't spend your time maintainig a house, rent and let someone
| else do the maintenance.
|
| just lease a car and get a new one automatically every 3 years.
|
| honestly, everyone has their own setpoint for things. and there
| are degrees of solutions for every point you make.
|
| I think most people _would_ benefit from being just a little
| bit self-sovereign.
|
| Personally, "majority of people" could use one low power
| fanless server with 1tb for the few things most people need
| continuously online.
|
| And separately a server you turn on occasionally with lots of
| storage, like maybe
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TV1XPDD
|
| I'm reminded of jwz's backups info www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
|
| _" RAID is a goddamn waste of your time and money"_
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Seems like a lot of adults yearn for having a mommy and daddy
| take care of everything for them
| m463 wrote:
| Alternately, most computer vendors actively interfere with
| your independence and force you into the cloud in various
| ways with your computers and phones.
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| Author here, I completely agree. In fact, I even wrote about
| it: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-
| se...
|
| My homelab is my hobby. I maintain it for my pleasure and to
| learn new skills. We have an infra nerds club with a few
| colleagues and we're having a lot of fun comparing our
| approaches!
| motorest wrote:
| > Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing
| things you love with people that matter to you.
|
| To some, spending time hunched over servers is doing things
| they love.
|
| I mean, each and every thing you said about maintaining a home
| lab you can also say about maintaining cloud infrastructure.
|
| There was a time when having hobbies was normal. It seems
| nowadays some people mistake hobbies for work after hours?
| Where is that hacker mindset?
| alnwlsn wrote:
| The price and effort is practically irrelevant. My homelab is
| _mine_ , local, and answers only to myself and a wall outlet.
| Also, where I live, the internet is simply not dependable
| enough to consider otherwise.
| crinkly wrote:
| Yeah good luck with that one.
|
| I ran a home lab for a number of years. This was a fairly
| extensive set up - 4 rack mount servers, UPS, ethernet switch etc
| with LTO backups. Did streaming, email and file storage for the
| whole family as well as my own experiments.
|
| One morning I woke up to a dead node. The DMZ service node. I
| found this out because my wife had no internet. It was running
| the NAT and email too. Some swapping of power supplies later and
| I found the whole thing was a complete brick. Board gone. It's
| 07:45 and my wife can't check her schedule and I'm still trying
| to get 3 kids out of the door.
|
| At that point I realised I'd fucked up by running a home lab. I
| didn't have the time or redundancy to have anyone rely on me.
|
| I dug the ISP's provided WiFi router out, plugged it in and
| configured it quickly and got her laptop and phone working on it.
| Her email was down but she could check calendar etc (on icloud).
| By the end of the day I'd moved all the family email off to
| fastmail and fixed everything to talk to the ISP router properly.
| I spent the next year cleaning up the shit that was on those
| servers and found out that between us we only had about 300 gig
| of data worth keeping which was distributed out to individual
| macbooks and everyone is responsible for backing their own stuff
| up (time machine makes this easy). Eventually email was moved to
| icloud as well when domains came along.
|
| I burned 7TB of crap, sold all the kit and never ran a home lab
| again. Then I realised I didn't have to pay for the energy, the
| hardware or expend the time running it. There are no total
| outages and no problems if there's a power failure. The backups
| are simple, cheap and reliable. I don't even have a NAS now - I
| just bought everyone some Samsung T7 shield disks.
|
| I have a huge weight off my shoulders and more free time and
| money. I didn't learn anything I wouldn't have learned at work
| anyway.
| plqbfbv wrote:
| I can relate to this. I still run my own x86 box as a router to
| have the AP controller, but I'm strongly considering dropping
| this.
|
| I need to update it and patch it, hoping nothing goes wrong in
| the process. If something breaks I'm the only one that can
| repair it, and I really don't want to hear my wife screaming at
| me at 7am when I wake up.
|
| Eventually I came to your same conclusion, but I still run a
| hybrid setup that allows me to keep the router (for now), and a
| NAS for backup (3-2-1) and some local services. I run a
| dedicated server from Hetzner for "always on" services, so that
| the hardware, power redundancy and operational toil are
| offloaded. I gave up long ago on email: any hosting service
| will be way better than me doing it - I know I _can_ do it, but
| is it worth my sanity? Nope.
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| Author here, thanks for the warning! I'm all too familiar with
| this kind of situation! This homelab is for fun and learning.
|
| I wrote about why I don't (want to) self-host services for
| others: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-
| host-se...
| tehlike wrote:
| I moved my side project to my garage so I don't have to pay
| hetzner 600+$ and counting every month
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've got a single server and a /28 IP block on OVH for public
| facing stuff. Mostly because it's cheaper than the bump from my
| "home" internet to "business" to be able to use common server
| ports (blocked on the home service).
|
| Works well enough for what I need.
| tehlike wrote:
| I use cloudflare tunnel to do most of this, and i am fine
| with the implications (like CF mitm'ing my website traffic).
| lazyweb wrote:
| I did the exact opposite. And by that I mean physically moved
| my homelab into their colo earlier this year. Runs like a
| charm, costs about 500EUR per month total.
|
| Sounds like a lot, but I was almost paying the same before -
| 220EUR for power at home, 110EUR for a dedicated Hetzner
| server, 95EUR for a secondary internet connection (as not to
| interfere with the main uplink used for home office by my
| partner and me).
|
| Not having to deal with the extra heat, noise and used up space
| at home anymore has been worth it as well.
| tehlike wrote:
| My storage needs were increasing by the day. Electricity is
| now a small monthly cost. I have more cores and ram than
| ever, and can easily expand it. Main machine now runs with
| 1TB ram and 15TB SSD and other has more than 384G ram. I
| currently use 3TB ssd storage, and get way more performnce
| than Hetzner's VMs with ceph ssd disks. I do need redundancy,
| but it's not something hetzner was giving me anyway, and if
| my anectode is not a mess up, i actually got database
| corruption on hetzner that never happened on my own local
| setup.
|
| I'd have colo'ed or used dedicated as it's definitely better
| than their VMs, but they don't have that in their US
| datacenters.
|
| I am pretty happy with my current setup, I have significantly
| less down time (few mins a month) than when I was on hetzner
| - but this is mostly due to my need for more ram at times.
|
| I also used this as an excuse to get 56G mellanox fiber
| switch and get poe cameras etc in a full homelab manner, so
| it's been fun, on top of being cheaper. Noise is not a
| concern, I got a sound-proof server rack that's pretty nice.
| It takes up space, but i have kids, so my garage is near full
| at times anyways :)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I love infrastructure. I run my own services at home too, and
| have for many years. But to be honest, the older I get the less
| fun it is to deal with issues that come up from time to time.
|
| At some point you'll need to upgrade hardware and software, you
| get to do the exercise over again. There will always be lessons
| learned and its get better each time. Its still work.
| philip1209 wrote:
| This is cool - I have a similar home lab on a Mac Mini [1].
|
| The encryption question is interesting. I don't have disk
| encryption turned on, because I want the computer to recover from
| power failure. If power turns off then on, the server would be
| offline until I decrypt it.
|
| How does your "Wake on LAN" work with the encryption?
|
| [1] https://github.com/contraptionco/toolbox
| doubled112 wrote:
| They mention it in the article, in a big yellow note box.
|
| You could use an IP KVM, or you could install Dropbear SSH
| server into the initramfs.
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| Author here, indeed I bought a JetKVM. A colleague had one
| and recommended it warmly! I'm Very happy with it so far, but
| my usage has been rather basic.
|
| I've heard that it might be difficult to get one in the US
| though.
|
| https://jetkvm.com/
| doubled112 wrote:
| I've looked into similar solutions since the mini PC I'm
| using as a home server doesn't support WoL, but never
| pulled the trigger.
|
| I keep putting it off since it is on a UPS and power
| outages aren't that frequent. Accessibility isn't too bad
| since it's under the TV stand.
| st3fan wrote:
| "I used the full disk with LLM, and set up disk encryption"
|
| I know we're in the AI hype cycle but I bet you meant LVM there
| >:-)
| thibaultamartin wrote:
| Oh lord of the rings, that's embarrassing. Thanks for reporting
| the typo!
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I really don't get why people like the Minisforum stuff over
| alternatives. I've unfortunately been given one, and honestly I'm
| really unimpressed between crap firmware, no real expandability
| and just all of the other compromises that come with buying
| Aliexpress hardware. For the same money you can either pick up a
| used entry model Dell/HP/Lenovo server (and if they're E3/W/other
| entry level Xeon, they're usually not terrible on power) or get a
| good ATX chassis and power it with some off lease Supermicro
| hardware. Then you don't need to compromise on things like OOB
| management, hot swap bays, a real SAS card, real 10G nics, ECC
| ram, etc. etc. Maybe people are just afraid of doing a little bit
| of putting hardware together? I've seen and have systems that use
| the above gear that have been going for well over a decade now,
| with basically no hiccups, and even the old Sandy Bridge era E3
| stuff both punches above probably even RPi5 and N100 and doesn't
| draw more than 30-40W when you don't have spinning disks in
| there. I'm sure if you avoid AMD and go find a newer T variant
| Intel chip, you can both have your cake and eat it.
| daymanstep wrote:
| ECC capable hardware tend to be very power hungry.
| p12tic wrote:
| That's just an artifact of Intel disabling ECC on consumer
| processors.
|
| There's no reason for ECC to have significantly higher power
| consumption. It's just an additional memory chip per stick
| and a tiny bit of additional logic on CPU side to calculate
| ECC.
|
| If power consumption is the target, ECC is not a problem. I
| know firsthand that even old Xeon D servers can hit 25W full
| system idle. On AMD side 4850G has 8 cores and can hit sub
| 25W full system idle as well.
| Derelicte wrote:
| N100 is faster and more efficienct than any Ivy bridge E3. At
| idle the Xeon draws roughly 20W more, which works out to
| $30USD/year at the national average electricity prices. That
| gap widens as the load increases.
|
| I can totally see why someone who doesnt need expandability
| would choose the cheap mini PC.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| When I first got into homelabbing as a hobby, I built a
| massively overpowered server because I was highly
| ambitious.it mostly just drew power for projects that didn't
| require all the horsepower.
|
| A decade later, I like NUCs and Pis and the like because
| they're tiny,low-power, and easy to hide. Then again, I don't
| have nearly as much time and drive for offhand projects as I
| get older, so who knows what a younger me would have decided
| with the contemporary landscape of hardware available to us
| today.
| Dr4kn wrote:
| A decently powerful Server is nice, when you need it.
| Having some modern APU for decent en- and decoding
| performance is great.
|
| There are tasks that benefit from speed, but the most
| important thing is good idle performance. I don't want the
| noise, heat or electricity costs.
|
| I'm reluctant to put a dedicated GPU into mine, because it
| would almost double the idle power consumption for
| something I would rarely use.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I just purchased a Minisforum mobo BD795i SE with a Ryzen 9
| 7945HX (16 core, 32 thread). Can't beat the price to
| performance. Building a NAS / VM server with 5x 14TB Seagate
| Exos drives, 2TB NVME, 500GB boot SSD, and 96GB of DDR5 memory.
| I was able to buy all components including a 3u hotswap 5x
| drive caddy for less than $1,200 all in. Can't really beat
| that.
| indemnity wrote:
| For appliance-like quickly replaceable little servers like my
| firewall or other one off roles, they are ok for me, but to
| run my TrueNAS system (ZFS) I gotta run something with a
| Supermicro board and ECC. Mission critical workloads that
| need 24/7 uptime (homelab general purpose always-on server)!
| nodesocket wrote:
| I am running TrueNAS on it, honestly ECC is overblown out
| of proportion. This isn't storing military state secrets.
| nullwarp wrote:
| I used to really like the minis but I had to basically e-waste
| two of them because the ethernet went bad (lightning strike i
| think) and there was really no way to replace them and the OS
| would crash from hardware issues from it.
| jackhalford wrote:
| Why install proxmox on top of debian? Proxmox distributes an iso
| that basically does the same as you with preseeding. Although
| recently had to install proxmox as an apt pkg on top of debian
| happened because the proxmox iso wouldn't install properly. That
| actually happened twice. I think I'll just install debian from
| now on...
| kayson wrote:
| After some research, it seems much easier to just back up the
| Proxmox config (and VM disk images, if they're needed) than to
| define or deploy Proxmox VMs with OpenTofu or ansible.
|
| https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Cluster_File_System_(pm...
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