[HN Gopher] More random home lab things I've recently learned
___________________________________________________________________
More random home lab things I've recently learned
Author : otter-in-a-suit
Score : 179 points
Date : 2025-10-06 13:02 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chollinger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chollinger.com)
| j1elo wrote:
| I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my
| grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's
| setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the
| needs of a small/medium company!
| tylerflick wrote:
| It's another league, but I don't get the point of mixing
| enterprise rack-mounts with Raspberry Pis.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| You'd be delighted (or terrified) to know that I just added
| an old gaming computer in a 4U case to the cluster, so I can
| play with PCI/GPU passthrough.
|
| The Dell is essentially the main machine that runs everything
| we actually use - the other hardware is either used as
| redundancy or for experiments (or both). I got the Pi from a
| work thing and this has been a fun use case. Not that I
| necessarily recommend it...
| bombcar wrote:
| Pis are a relatively quick and cheap (including power) way to
| get "another computer" that isn't a VM or otherwise
| dependent.
|
| VMs can add a lot of complexity that you don't really need or
| want to manage.
|
| And (perhaps unadmitted) lots of people bought Pis and then
| searched for use cases for them.
| fluoridation wrote:
| They're really not that cheap anymore, though. If you just
| need "another computer" you can probably find something
| more capable in the used market.
| bombcar wrote:
| They never were _terribly_ cheap, but there was a time
| when people who hadn 't seen a single-board computer
| (that small) and didn't really keep abreast of the used
| market gobbled them up.
|
| One advantage over the used market is that you can easily
| keep getting the exact same one over and over again.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >They never were terribly cheap
|
| Not really, no. Not if all you need is "a computer".
| They're more interesting if you want a cheap ARM
| computer, or a tiny computer, or a server that sips
| power. Although for that last one they're also kind of
| dubious. If you can somehow get away with running what
| you need off a phone, that's way better value.
| haunter wrote:
| Here is an actual another league if you are curious about it
| https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I second the shout out for Mealie, it's very useful. Importing
| from URLs works very well, and it gives you a centralised place
| for all your recipes, without ads or filler content and safe from
| linkrot.
| Havoc wrote:
| My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically
| expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the
| entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC
| sticks.
|
| >No space left on device.
|
| >In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That's... a
| design.
|
| Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup &
| compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in
| proxmox & reboot it. Unlike VMs you don't need to do anything
| inside the container to resize FS so this generally works as fix.
|
| >PiHole
|
| AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH
|
| >Raspberry Pi 5, ARM64 Proxmox
|
| Interesting. I'm leaning more towards k8s for integrating pis
| meaningfully
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| >AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH
|
| Technitium has all the bells and whistles along with being
| cross platform.
|
| https://technitium.com/dns/
| Aurornis wrote:
| > My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically
| expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the
| entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to
| ECC sticks.
|
| DDR4 anything is becoming very expensive right now because
| manufacturers have been switching over to DDR5.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah, built on AM4 and in hindsight spending more on mobo &
| CPU to hop on AM5 would have been the smart move. Live &
| learn.
|
| On the plus side I have a lot of non-ECC DDR4 sticks that I'm
| dumping into the expensive market rn
| everforward wrote:
| You seem knowledgeable so you may already know, but it's worth
| looking at the x86 mini PCs. Performance per watt has gotten
| pretty close on the newer low power CPUs (e.g. N150, unsure
| what AMD's line for that is), and performance per $ spent on
| hardware is way higher. I'm seeing 8GB Pi 5s with a power
| supply and no SD card for $100; you can get an N150 mini PC
| with 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD pre-installed for like $160.
| Double the RAM, double the CPU performance, and comes with an
| SSD.
|
| Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general
| compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah have a collection of minipc - they are indeed great.
| This build was more NAS focused. 9x SATA SSD and 6x
| NVME...minipcs just don't have the connectivity for that sort
| of thing
|
| >Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general
| compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.
|
| I have a bunch of rasp 4Bs that I'll use for a k8s HA control
| plane but yeah outside of that they're not idea. Especially
| with the fragility of SD card instead of nvme (unless you buy
| the silly HAT thing).
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Raspberry Pi 5s can actually support NVME drives
|
| And Raspberry Pi 4s can actually boot from NVME via a USB
| enclosure.
| dangus wrote:
| The first thing I thought when I read this article was how
| raspberry pi's just make this kind of thing more difficult
| and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap
| mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a
| plain desktop PC).
|
| And if you want GPIO pins I'd imagine that a lot of those
| applications you'd be better served with an ESP32 and that a
| raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use
| cases.
|
| The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller
| than ever these days.
| perdomon wrote:
| You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5
| years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary
| concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there
| (as long as you don't need too much compute).
| bigiain wrote:
| > And if you want GPIO pins I'd imagine that a lot of those
| applications you'd be better served with an ESP32
|
| I often us an Arduino plugged onto a spare USB port.
| There's a whole lot of GPIO pin related projects that suit
| 5V better than 3.3V, and Arduino IO pins are practically
| unbreakable compared to ESP32. I've got Arduinos that still
| work fine after accidentally connecting 12V directly to IO
| pins. I've has ESP32s (and RasPis) give up the ghost just
| from looking at the IO pins while thinking about 12V.
| master_crab wrote:
| Don't do K8s on Pis. The Pis will spend the majority of their
| horsepower running etcd, CNI of choice, other essential
| services (MetalLB, envoy, etc). You'll be left with a minimal
| percentage of resources for the pods that actually do things
| you need outside the cluster.
|
| And don't get me started on if you intend to run any storage
| solutions like Rook-Ceph on cluster.
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| Maybe I just got lucky, but a year ago or so I managed to find
| Kingston 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM's from Amazon for a price that was
| more or less identical to normal non-ECC RAM. Running a Ryzen
| system with 128gb of memory now.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| One of my favorite CyberPower perks is their RMCARDs for network
| monitoring: It's a separate module that works in basically all of
| their rackmount UPSes. You can replace the entire UPS without
| having to pay for the little mini web server again, it'll just
| pop right into the new unit.
| icyfox wrote:
| It's a neat chip but I couldn't bring myself to spend in excess
| of the price of the UPS ($439.00 for RMCARD at time of
| writing). I ended up hooking my UPS via USB to my existing home
| server via NUT and it's been working well.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It is a little hefty for a homelab-level setup, but the
| impressive bit to me is that they've kept compatibility with
| it longer than we've replaced UPSes at work (it looks like
| the RMCARD205 and 305 were introduced in 2018), so instead of
| paying for that hardware built into each unit, the RMCARD has
| been a one-time purchase we can bring from unit to unit.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| APC UPSes that support their network management card add in
| - then the cards can frequently be purchased on eBay for
| $30-$100, you have to make sure the UPS supports the card,
| but they are excellent. Model numbers like ap9631 (if i
| recall). I run about 10 of them across different locations
| and they work great , some of them for 8+ years now. (
| about a year ago when I got a new ups, Apc still offered
| the older firmware for download, however after a certain FW
| version it started going to a cloud subscription model - so
| be sure to keep the old firmware. If you're worried about
| the firm or not being updated on the non-cloud version,
| just be sure to vlan/firewall control access to them which
| you should be doing anyway)
| immibis wrote:
| I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning
| you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term
| for running a 'server lab' at home.
| tehlike wrote:
| You can run whatever. You don't need specific software
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| some people think it's not "homelabbing" unless you're doing
| things the way it's done at large scale. i think these people
| are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be
| a resume project.
|
| but proxmox and kubernetes are overkill, imo, for most homelab
| setups. setting them up is a good learning experience but not
| necessarily an appropriate architecture for maintaining a few
| mini PCs in a closet long term.
|
| you can ignore the gatekeeping.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| k8s is definitely an overkill if your goal is not learning
| k8s.
|
| proxmox is great, though. It's worth running it even if you
| treat it as nothing more than a BMC.
| baq wrote:
| I'm running an ubuntu server as a hypervisor only because
| the proxmox installer is using an older kernel than the
| actual system and wouldn't install on my box :/
| placardloop wrote:
| Homelabbing is a hobby for most people involved in it, and
| like other hobbies, some people dip their toes in it while
| others go diving in the deep end. But would you say it's
| "overkill" for a hobbyist fisher to have multiple fishing
| poles? Or for a hobbyist painter to try multiple sets of
| paintbrushes? Or a hobbyist programmer to know multiple
| programming languages?
|
| There's a lot of overlap between "I run a server to store my
| photos" and "I run a bunch of servers for fun", which has
| resulted in annoying gatekeeping (or reverse gatekeeping)
| where people tell each other they are "doing it wrong", but
| on Reddit at least it's somewhat being self-organized into
| r/selfhosted and r/homelab, respectively.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and
| consider a homelab to be a resume project.
|
| It's funny. I did this (before it really became a more
| mainstream hobby, this was early 00s), but now that I work in
| ops I barely even want to touch a computer after work.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Most "homelabs" are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin,
| with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of
| the features.
|
| It's the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the
| pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the
| occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should
| do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even
| though the stakes are low.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I don't personally have a homelab, but I think that (unlike a
| giant amp or SUV) the homelab lets you learn interesting
| skills that would be hard to learn otherwise. It seems more
| defensible to me.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I have a small setup that could be considered homelab-ish -
| a NAS, a server, Docker+Portainer running a variety of
| services including HomeAssistant, a Plex server, UPS with
| graceful shutdown, and other stuff. I agree it's
| educational, it certainly has been for me; but everything I
| run has a practical purpose.
|
| People will build a huge multinode cluster in their
| basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out
| performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and
| so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby,
| but it's shaped like someone's actual job.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| LARPing as a sysadmin has a lot of benefits. It's taught me
| Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
|
| Which are all pretty useful considering my day job is a
| software engineer.
|
| Many of these things have been directly applicable at work,
| e.g. when something weird happens in AWS, or we have a
| project using obscure Docker features.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| Run whatever you like!
|
| I personally enjoy the big machines (I've also always enjoyed
| meaninglessly large benchmark numbers on gaming hardware) and
| enterprise features, redundancy etc. (in other words, over-
| engineering).
|
| I know others really enjoy playing with K8s, which is its own
| rabbit hole.
|
| My main goal - apart from the truly useful core services - is
| to learn something new. Sometimes it's applicable to work (I am
| indeed an SWE larping as a sysadmin, as another commenter
| called out :-) ), sometimes it's not.
| walkabout wrote:
| Where'd we get this term? I hear "home lab" and I think of
| having equipment to accomplish something new, not... running
| ordinary server software in fairly ordinary ways. Like Tony
| Stark designing his suits has a "home lab". People 3D printing
| Warhammer figures or with a couple little servers running
| PiHole and Wireguard and such... not so much?
|
| I've had one or two machines running serving stuff at home for
| a couple decades [edit: oh god, closer to 2.5 decades...],
| including serving public web sites for a while, and at no point
| would I have thought the term "home lab" was a good label for
| what I was doing.
| petepete wrote:
| There's a blurred line between self-hosting and homelabbing.
|
| I'd classify myself in the former camp, with a small server
| that runs TrueNAS and serves media, runs VMs and a few apps I
| use for work - and a Unifi network for my home and security
| cameras and VPN.
|
| I'm positive there are people with very similar setups who
| call it a homelab. I don't really experiment with mine, it's
| set up and works in the background for months on end.
| jrmg wrote:
| Wait, what?
|
| Surely people have had 'homelabs' for longer than VMs and
| container have been mainstream?
| bombcar wrote:
| People might gatekeep it, but in my opinion if it is YOUR fault
| the TV won't play the show, you've a homelab; if it's the ISP
| or streaming service's fault, then you don't have a homelab.
|
| You know when you know.
| srjilarious wrote:
| I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a
| much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup
| ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu
| Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for
| last couple years.
|
| I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to
| install.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I have Proxmox running on top of a clean Debian install on my
| NUC, I wanted to allow Plex to use the hardware decoding and it
| got a bit funny trying to do that with Plex running in a VM, so
| it runs on the host and I use VMs for other stuff
| nodesocket wrote:
| I have an Intel (12th Gen i5-12450H) mini-pc and at first had
| issues getting the GPU firmware loaded and working in Debian
| 12. However upgrading to Debian 13 (trixie) and doing apt
| update and upgrade resolved the issue and was able to pass
| the onboard Intel GPU through Docker to a Jellyfin container
| just fine. I believe the issue is related to older linux
| kernels and GPU firmware compatibility. Perhaps that's your
| issue.
| ysleepy wrote:
| It's very easy to do this with LXC containers in Proxmox now,
| as passing devices to a container is now possible from the
| UI.
| phito wrote:
| Just as easy with VMs, just have to pass the device to the
| VM
| wltr wrote:
| _A Few Moments Later_
| blitzar wrote:
| There is time dialation in the homelab vortex ... what feels
| like a few hours can turn out to be years in the real world.
| wltr wrote:
| That's precisely what I meant! I'm at my sixth year, I
| guess. Maybe longer, I've lost my count.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| My best McConaughey voice: "this little server is gonna
| cost us 51 years"
| tom1337 wrote:
| If you want to go another, related rabbit hole, check out the
| DataHoarder subreddit. But don't blame me, if you're buying
| terabytes of storage over the next few months :)
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Data Hoarding is a bit more involved than just a homelab.
| Don't want your data hoard to go down or missing, whole
| you're labbing new techs and protocols.
| blitzar wrote:
| don't blame me if you're buying terabytes of USB drives and
| pulling out the hard drives
| jrmg wrote:
| _Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that 's been serving me
| well_
|
| In my book, that's a homelab, it's just a small one (an
| efficient one?...)
| lisbbb wrote:
| I've set up half a dozen different home labs over the years
| but never used anywhere near the compute or disk capacity I
| had. It was more about learning things, I guess. I laughed
| when he mentioned the number of cores he has available.
| m463 wrote:
| I used to have a large server serving a couple important
| things.
|
| I was able to put everything on a fanless zotac box with a
| 2.5" sata SSD, and it has served well for many years. (and
| QUITE a bit less electricity, even online 24/7)
| mvATM99 wrote:
| You should definitely try mealie yes. On top of a good way to
| host your own recipes, the entire thing just feels...really
| well put together?
|
| I'm not even using the features beyond the recipes yet, but i'm
| already very happy that i can migrate my recipes from google
| docs to over there
| skelpmargyar wrote:
| Proxmox is awesome! I've been running it for ~5 years and it's
| been absolutely stable and pleasant to run services on.
|
| The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me.
| Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for
| LXC and VMs has been amazing.
| strbean wrote:
| I've been looking to get offsite backups going. Where do you
| keep your backups? NAS + cloud?
|
| I also wanted to back up my big honking zpool of media, but
| it doesn't economical to store 10+ TB offsite when the data
| isn't really that critical.
| somehnguy wrote:
| My PBS server has 2 datasources - one local external drive
| & Backblaze B2. I snapshot to the local drive frequently
| throughout the day & B2 once in the evening.
|
| Yeah I don't backup any of my media zpool. It can all be
| replaced quite easily, not worth paying for the backup
| storage.
| perdomon wrote:
| I've had a ton of fun with CasaOS in the past few months. I
| don't mind managing docker-compose text files, but CasaOS comes
| with a simple UI and an "App Store" that makes the process
| really simple and doesn't overly-complicate things when you
| want to customize something about a container.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not sure I understand the need to use a Raspberry Pi here.
| They're cool and all, but wouldn't a regular old PC be simpler to
| setup, maintain, and attach hardware to? It's a hobby--and you
| can do whatever you want, but I wouldn't involve a Pi in a home
| server setup unless I specifically needed something it bought me,
| like the small form factor, low power usage, GPIO pins and so on.
| fartfeatures wrote:
| I always need lower power consumption. I'm in the UK and my
| power costs are $0.40 per kWh. Even running a raspberry pi 5
| 24/7 would cost me $25 per year
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Look for used thin clients. You can get HP t630s for ~$50 or
| less. They have a nice AMD SoC. If mostly idle, they draw
| about 2x a Pi. Loaded, they are similar.
| baq wrote:
| N100 minipcs will burn about as much power as a fully decked
| rpi5 and they're so much more hypervisor-friendly.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| I just commented on this above, but I actually got for the Pi
| for free and it's a very capable device. I wouldn't buy one for
| this use case (nor do I really recommend it, but it _does_
| work).
| srcreigh wrote:
| Can somebody explain the whole proxmox thing? I haven't used it,
| I use k3s.
|
| I don't get why people use VMs for stuff when there's docker.
|
| Thanks!
| baq wrote:
| it's so you can have a machine to run docker on, basically.
|
| especially useful if you want multiple of those, and also
| helpful if you don't want one of them anymore.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Makes backups of the KVM VM running docker easy too right
| baq wrote:
| and you can move the whole vm to a different host
| approximately trivially
| oceanplexian wrote:
| "Why would I need virtualization when I have Kubernetes"..
| sounds like a someone who has never had to update the K8s
| control plane and had everything go completely wrong. If it
| happens to you, you will be begging for an HVM with real
| snapshots.
| pletnes wrote:
| Not all things run as containers.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| VMs can though =D
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is
| important, VMs are just better.
|
| Outside of that:
|
| Docker & k8s are great for sharing resources, VMs allow you to
| explicitly _not_ share resources.
|
| VMs can be simpler to backup, restore, migrate.
|
| Some software only runs in VMs.
|
| Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network
| interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with Docker.
|
| For my setup, I have a handful of VMs and dozens of containers.
| I have a proxmox cluster with the VMs, and some of the VMs are
| Talos nodes, which is my K8s cluster, which has my containers.
| Separately I have a zimaboard with the pfsense & reverse proxy
| for my cluster, and another machine with pfsense as my home
| router.
|
| My primary networking is done on dedicated boxes for isolation
| (not performance).
|
| My VMs run: plex, home assistant, my backup orchestrator, and a
| few windows test hosts. This is because:
|
| - The windows test hosts don't containerise well; I'd rather
| containerise them. - plex has a dedicated network port and
| storage device, which is simpler to set up this way. - Home
| Assistant uses a specific USB port & device, which is simpler
| to set up this way. - I don't want plex, home assistant, or the
| backup orchestrator to be affected by issues relating to my
| other services / k8s. These are the services where small
| transient or temporary issues would impact the whole household.
|
| Also note, I don't use the proxmox container support (I use
| talos) for two reasons. 1 - I prefer k8s to manage services. 2
| - the isolation boundary is better.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is
| important, VMs are just better.
|
| Better how? What isolation are we talking about, home-lab?
| Multi-tenant environments for every family member?
|
| > Some software only runs in VMs.
|
| Like OS kernels and software not compiled for host OS?
|
| > Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network
| interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with
| Docker.
|
| Insane take because we're talking about binding something
| from /dev/ to a namespace, which is much easier and faster
| than any VM pass-through even if your CPU has features for
| that pass-through.
|
| > plex has a dedicated network port and storage device, which
| is simpler to set up this way.
|
| Same, but my plex is just a systemd unit and my *arrs are in
| nspawn container also on its own port (only because I want to
| be able to access them without authentication on the overlay
| network).
|
| > I don't want plex, home assistant, or the backup
| orchestrator to be affected by issues relating to my other
| services / k8s.
|
| Hosting Plex in k8s is objectively wrong, so you're right
| there. I don't see how adding proxmox into the place instead
| of those services being systemd units. If they run on the
| same node - you're not getting any fault tolerance, just
| adding another thing that can go wrong (proxmox)
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| Proxmox is essentially a clustered hypervisor (a KVM wrapper,
| really). It has some overlap with K8s (via containers), but is
| simpler for what I do and has some very nice features, namely
| around backups, redundancy/HA, hardware passthrough, and the
| fact that it has a usable GUI.
|
| I also use K8s at work, so this is a nice contrast to use
| something else for my home lab experiments. And tbh, I often
| find that if I want something done (or something breaks),
| muscle-memory-Linux-things come back to me a lot quicker than
| some obscure K8s incantation, but I suppose that's just my
| personal bias.
|
| Several of my VMs (which are very different than containers,
| obviously - even though I believe VMs on K8s _can_ be a
| thing...) run (multiple) docker containers.
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| personally : proxmox /VM is great if You'd like to separate
| physical HW. In my case - virtualized TrueNAS means I can give
| it a whole SATA controller and keep this as an isolated storage
| machine.
|
| Whatever uses that storage usually runs in a Docker inside an
| LXC container.
|
| If I need something more isolated (think public facing
| cloudflare) - that's a separate docker in another network
| routed through another OPNSense VM.
|
| Desktop - VM where I passed down a whole GPU and a USB hub.
|
| Best part - it all runs on a fairly low power HW (<20W idle NAS
| plus whatever the harddrives take - generally ~5W / HDD).
| varun_ch wrote:
| Maybe my use case is abnormal, but I allocate the majority of
| my resources to a primary VM where I run everything, including
| containers, etc. but by running Proxmox now I can backup my
| entire server and even transfer it across the network. If I
| ever have some software to try out, I can do it in a new VM
| rather than on my main host. I can also 'reboot' my 'server'
| without actually rebooting the real computer, which meant less
| fan noises and interruption back when I used an actual rack
| mounted server at home.
| messe wrote:
| Not everything I put in a VM runs on Linux.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| For my home archive NAS boxes, Proxmox is just a Debian distro
| with selective (mostly virtualization) things more up to date,
| and has ZFS and a web UI out of the box.
|
| I disable the high availability stuff I don't use that
| otherwise just grinds away at disks because of all the syncing
| it does.
|
| It has quirks to work through, but at this point for me dealing
| with it is fairly simple, repeatable and most importantly, low
| effort/mental overhead enough for my few machines without
| having to go full orchestration, or worse, NixOS.
| ab71e5 wrote:
| You can manage containers with proxmox. The idea with proxmox
| is also to use something that you might encounter at work to
| practice with at home.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Good reminder for me to set up a UPS for my home lab before I go
| on vacation. . .
| pdpi wrote:
| > ignore current warnings - I'm using a MacBook Pro charger +
| cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU.
|
| You need to be careful with this one.
|
| The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the
| standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume
| the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to
| 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support
| a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode.
|
| Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on
| 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or
| may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it
| can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
| wpm wrote:
| 5W5A is not a custom profile. It is part of the USB-PD
| standard, but as an optional profile that can only be provided
| if you ensure the cable used is safe to handle 5 amps of
| current. It's why the official Rapsberry Pi 5 PSU has a non-
| removable cable.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| That's good to know, thank you. It's using the official charger
| in the rack, but I used the charger I've had on my desk while
| setting it up. I added a note to the article.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack
| server that has next to none single-thread performance
| (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox
| (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason?
|
| Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or
| macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest
| businesses...where it will be an overkill.
|
| Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few
| static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from
| that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.
| _dain_ wrote:
| the point of the hobby is to have something to tinker with. if
| it were too easy it wouldn't be any fun.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I know, that's why I have my own "lab". I just don't get why
| most of other labs are so cookie-cutter proxmox + home
| assistant + (unifi controller) + pihole and there is always
| RPi somewhere next to a chunky server.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Someone who successfully configures and tests a k8s cluster at
| home knows more about it than I do.
| 0x457 wrote:
| You overestimate the complexity. Even if you don't use k8s
| installer/distribution and do it from scratch - you are not
| going to learn much about operating/using k8s.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| > none single-thread performance (relatively)
|
| I find horizontal scaling with many smaller cores and lots of
| memory more impactful for virtualization workloads than heavy
| single core performance (which, fwiw, is pretty decent on these
| Xeon Golds).
|
| The biggest bottleneck is I/O performance, since I rely on SAS
| drives (since running full VMs has a lot of disk overhead),
| rather than SSDs, but I cannot justify the expense to upgrade
| to SSDs, not to mention NVME.
|
| > Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or
| macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest
| businesses...where it will be an overkill.
|
| That is a core part of the hobby. You do some things very
| enterprise-y and over-engineered (such as redundant PSUs and
| UPSs), while simultaneously using old hard drives that rely on
| your SMART monitor and pure chance to work (to pick 2 random
| examples).
|
| I also re-use old hardware that piles up around the house
| constantly, such as the Pi. I commented elsewhere that I just
| slapped an old gaming PC into a 4U case since I want to
| play/tinker with/learn from GPU passthrough. I would not do
| this for a business, but I'm happy to spend $200 for a case and
| rails and stomach an additional ~60W idle power draw to do
| such. I don't even know what exactly I'll be running on it yet.
| But I _do_ know that I know embarrassingly little about GPUs,
| X11, VNC, ... actually work and that I have an unused GTX 1080.
|
| Some of this is simply a build-vs-buy thing (where I get actual
| usage out of it and have something subjectively better than an
| off the shelf product), others is pure tinkering. Hacking, if
| you will. I know a website that usually likes stuff like that.
|
| > You're not going to learn much about k8s from that
|
| It's possible you and I learn things very differently then (and
| I mean this a lot less snarky than it sounds). I built Raft
| from scratch in Scala 3 and that told me a lot about Raft and
| Scala 3, despite being utterly pointless as a product (it's on
| my website if you care to read it). I have the same experience
| with everything home lab / Linux / networking - I always learn
| something new. And I work for a networking company...
| 0x457 wrote:
| > It's possible you and I learn things very differently then
| (and I mean this a lot less snarky than it sounds). I built
| Raft from scratch in Scala 3 and that told me a lot about
| Raft and Scala 3, despite being utterly pointless as a
| product (it's on my website if you care to read it). I have
| the same experience with everything home lab / Linux /
| networking - I always learn something new. And I work for a
| networking company...
|
| Building k8s from scratch, you're going to learn how to build
| k8s from scratch. Not how to operate and/or use k8s. Maybe
| you will learn some configuration management tool along the
| way unless your plan is to just copy-paste commands from some
| website into terminal.
|
| > find horizontal scaling with many smaller cores and lots of
| memory more impactful for virtualization workloads than heavy
| single core performance (which, fwiw, is pretty decent on
| these Xeon Golds).
|
| Yeah, if you run a VM for every thing that should be a
| systemd service, it scales well that way.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 2x Xeon Gold 6248 CPU
|
| 300 are a lot of watts. ...I didn't used to pay attention but
| power costs keep rising.
|
| I recently opted for a i7 F (65w base) over an i7 K (125w base)
| even with the 15% performance hit.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I have a couple of machines that I can spin up if I need the
| power and performance, but it was amazing to me that the always
| on services that I'm _actually_ using would run on an N95 mini
| PC.
|
| YMMV, I'm not saying it's enough for every use case. The CPU
| will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500 FPS. I don't
| have enough users to saturate that using Jellyfin.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The CPU will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500
| FPS.
|
| Did you do the original encoding yourself (to insure
| everything is optimized for your rig)?
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