4 ms·

You have a home server rack. That places you comfortably in the "almost" part of "almost nobody".

snuxoll 7y ago
As somebody with one as well, it’s very true. However I don’t expect 10Gb networking is going to stay out of actual prosumer and SOHO spaces (versus /r/homelab subscribers) for much longer. While consumers are moving more to streaming and offloading their stuff to the cloud, creators are going to need more bandwidth on their internal networks. Really the killer right now is 10Gb over twisted pair is a power sucking beast; and people are (rightly) not wanting to abandon the familiarity, ubiquity and ease of installation granted by it. More PC motherboards and assembled systems are shipping with 10Gb NIC’s, we’re just waiting on switching to be affordable and fairly quiet before it can take off.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  I work at a major research institute/hospital. We still have 100 Mbps connections everywhere, with a few 1 Gbps ports available if you beg (and pay!). We still move data around by sneakernet--a briskly walking postdoc can move a Tb/minute with a hard drive in their pocket. I would love 10 Gbps connections, but I don't think they're right around the corner.
  - buran77 7y ago
    On HN the passion for tech tends to obscure the harsh realities of the "everyday person". The overwhelming majority of people don't know, need, care, or want to pay for a lot of tech that we take for granted, or as a "bare minimum" to go about our daily routine. Many others would love to have it but for whatever reasons, usually money or lack of skill, won't anytime soon. Though I do have to admire the conviction with which some of my co-techies believe what they are describing is a generally applicable situation anywhere beyond the limits of places like HN. And I am saying this as someone who has over 1000 CPU cores and over 2TB of RAM in my home lab for some years now. I'm realistic enough to accept that this isn't a reasonable expectation even from other techies, let alone for a regular consumer.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - DeathArrow 7y ago
      Just for curiosity, what kind of processors and servers do you have?
      - buran77 7y ago
        About a third are functioning (albeit not very productive) "collector's items". Anything from Intel and AMD, to PowerPC and SPARC. The productive ones are mostly Intel because I acquired them before AMD's resurgence. Also plenty of AMD, and even ARM. They run Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, ESX, or dedicated appliance OSes. All on 1, 10, or 40G network, plus WiFi. I usually buy everything second hand, the most expensive stuff usually from companies that upgraded. To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing". But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)
        snuxoll 7y ago
        > But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :) Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :) Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.
MR4D 7y ago
I'm not the OP, but my 82 year old dad has a server rack in his house. It holds mostly telecom/network gear, but also has a simple NAS of some sort that he uses for backups (not sure what it is). Also, most people with $1MM homes with integrated media systems piping through their house have a rack with telecom/network/media. A friend of mine has one in a house built 4 years ago. So yeah, clearly this is a small minority, but still a bigger population than you might expect. And for reference, only one of the houses that I mentioned was over a million dollars. The other is about half than. And neither are geeks (one is a doctor, the other a retired manager).
- buran77 7y ago
  This sounds more like a way to organize some regular equipment that many people would have in the house like a router or switch, a modem, a home NAS, etc. than what OP was describing when they said "multiple devices in my home server rack that have native 10Gb". Excluding people who work(ed) in the field, and have money and time to spare I have seen exactly 0 people who have a home lab and racks of high-end IT equipment.

As somebody with one as well, it’s very true. However I don’t expect 10Gb networking is going to stay out of actual prosumer and SOHO spaces (versus /r/homelab subscribers) for much longer. While consumers are moving more to streaming and offloading their stuff to the cloud, creators are going to need more bandwidth on their internal networks. Really the killer right now is 10Gb over twisted pair is a power sucking beast; and people are (rightly) not wanting to abandon the familiarity, ubiquity and ease of installation granted by it. More PC motherboards and assembled systems are shipping with 10Gb NIC’s, we’re just waiting on switching to be affordable and fairly quiet before it can take off.

mattkrause 7y ago
I work at a major research institute/hospital. We still have 100 Mbps connections everywhere, with a few 1 Gbps ports available if you beg (and pay!). We still move data around by sneakernet--a briskly walking postdoc can move a Tb/minute with a hard drive in their pocket. I would love 10 Gbps connections, but I don't think they're right around the corner.
- buran77 7y ago
  On HN the passion for tech tends to obscure the harsh realities of the "everyday person". The overwhelming majority of people don't know, need, care, or want to pay for a lot of tech that we take for granted, or as a "bare minimum" to go about our daily routine. Many others would love to have it but for whatever reasons, usually money or lack of skill, won't anytime soon. Though I do have to admire the conviction with which some of my co-techies believe what they are describing is a generally applicable situation anywhere beyond the limits of places like HN. And I am saying this as someone who has over 1000 CPU cores and over 2TB of RAM in my home lab for some years now. I'm realistic enough to accept that this isn't a reasonable expectation even from other techies, let alone for a regular consumer.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
    Just for curiosity, what kind of processors and servers do you have?
    - buran77 7y ago
      About a third are functioning (albeit not very productive) "collector's items". Anything from Intel and AMD, to PowerPC and SPARC. The productive ones are mostly Intel because I acquired them before AMD's resurgence. Also plenty of AMD, and even ARM. They run Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, ESX, or dedicated appliance OSes. All on 1, 10, or 40G network, plus WiFi. I usually buy everything second hand, the most expensive stuff usually from companies that upgraded. To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing". But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        > But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :) Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :) Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.

MR4D 7y ago

I'm not the OP, but my 82 year old dad has a server rack in his house. It holds mostly telecom/network gear, but also has a simple NAS of some sort that he uses for backups (not sure what it is). Also, most people with $1MM homes with integrated media systems piping through their house have a rack with telecom/network/media. A friend of mine has one in a house built 4 years ago. So yeah, clearly this is a small minority, but still a bigger population than you might expect. And for reference, only one of the houses that I mentioned was over a million dollars. The other is about half than. And neither are geeks (one is a doctor, the other a retired manager).

buran77 7y ago
This sounds more like a way to organize some regular equipment that many people would have in the house like a router or switch, a modem, a home NAS, etc. than what OP was describing when they said "multiple devices in my home server rack that have native 10Gb". Excluding people who work(ed) in the field, and have money and time to spare I have seen exactly 0 people who have a home lab and racks of high-end IT equipment.