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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
- tjbiddle 6y agoWhat I'm most fascinated by is that this is a solo blog that has sponsors and plenty of affiliate links, and has over 4 million readers. Very curious what kind of revenue it's pulling in. Can't seem to find a search function to see if the topic was already covered.
- xupybd 6y agoi'd be interested if it comes close to covering the cost of the setup. It looks beautiful but I bet it comes at a price.
- tomc1985 6y agoGreat, now the time-honored nerd practice of running shit out of your closet/garage has been picked up by hucksters as "homelab"ing. If it's anything like the damage that YouTube did to computer building, next thing you know this practice is going to suddenly turn into aesthetics and bragging rights. I am SOOO SICK of watching this highly technical and aesthetically inconsiderate hobby turn into an issue of neckbeard Modern Living. A new generation of boutique providers selling storage racks at silly markups. Pretty soon you're going to have the worst kind of hipsters -- keyboard nerds -- obsessing over the material used in rack standoffs or something. Because you know that aged Persian rubber dampens vibrations +.03db better... Yay.....
- system2 6y agoRouter =/= Firewall. If you are planning to host stuff, or even just to protect your own things, you better get something like Sonicwall or similar. At my home I have a sonicwall, synology nas, 2 dell servers, power supplies. Not in a single closet though. To me, the server security is far more important than the looks. Spend the most money on firewall, rest is just for looks. Patch panel for home setup sounds excessive because I am not going to run all my cables thru my garage. Have individual switches in every room if you want. Most living spaces need only one or two ethernet cables, rest of the devices can be wifi easily.
- twicetwice 6y agoMaybe a noob question, but why do you need a dedicated firewall appliance? What is it doing for you that just closing all ports and then selectively reopening as needed (my current solution) won't do? What kinds of threats is it protection your network from?
- msh 6y agoWell I dont think you need a real firewall but a serious router is nice for the home network. A big advantage is that you can do vlans, so you can seperate your homelab from the rest of your devices. You could also do things like block outbound traffic from your home network.
- reilly3000 6y agoAlso mostly a noob, but my understanding is that most of the value comes from having a subscription to the firewall vendors threat database, and using the box’s deep packet inspection to verify gnarly stuff isn’t coming over port 80 or other common protocols. You want it in an appliance so that you can be assured of isolation from the rest of your network. You can run firewall software in a VM, but you would still want that VM’s host physically isolated or with dedicated NICs for the VM.
- tuananh 6y agoi'm temped to buy the used enterprise equipment but in the end, i ended up buying small Intel NUC machines for my homelab. power consumption of these NUCs is almost negligible while one Dell R620 with dual CPU takes 150-200W at idle.
- bithaze 6y agoSame for me. I can fit two Intel NUCs under my monitor stand - one a headless server, another the primary input on the monitor - and can accomplish a decent amount with 16 GB RAM (on an older generation NUC) and two internal drives.
- flipbrad 6y agoI looked at NUCs and settled for a used ThinkPad. Integrated keyboard, monitor, mouse and battery, and potentially even more judicious with power consumption, but oomphy enough to run image recognition on my photo collection while hosting lots of dockers. Backup to a local NAS that I only switch on during the backup window, and backup remotely to backblaze B2.
- tuananh 6y agoi bought used NUCs too. new one cost way too much :D
- abfan1127 6y agoas a hardware engineer, I got all excited it would talk about budget friendly oscilloscopes, dmms, and power supplies. Still a fun read.
- a_imho 6y agoI was expecting how to genetically modify yeast in the kitchen or something.
- neilv 6y agoOne of the reasons I still run some servers and play with networking gear at home, even when SaaSes, Linode, and EC2 are so affordable, is as an exercise in being somewhat more self-sufficient, than depending on "other people's computers" for everything. Especially since my entire industry seems determined to see how far it can push spying on its users, leveraging power over them, etc. (All evidence is: no real limit yet.) Also, it's just fun to play with gear. Currently, I want to engineer for reliability, audible noise, power consumption, and price. (Will a RasPi with its SD card and wallwart be reliable enough? What about an Atom box, with Noctua fans, and mirrored 2.5" drives? Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I make OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear pretty but closed? Remember the price doubles if I want to have cold spares. Has the novelty of the big blue Palo Alto Networks box worn off yet? Can I discreetly mount my rack console in my living room IKEA, without a deep 4-post cabinet, nor the official rails kit?) Toys get traded on /r/homelabsales, craigslist, and eBay.
- maxioatic 6y ago> Also, it's just fun to play with gear. Exactly my reason as well. RaspberryPi k8s cluster of some old Pi 3's I had lying around - why not? Hardware seems to generally last longer than you expect, and can be repurposed for, at the very least, a fun Sunday morning. > Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I make OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear pretty but closed? Just went through this too. The research and rabbit-holing down different hardware paths is so much fun. I ended up with Ubiquiti over pfSense; it is pretty, hot dang.
- koyote 6y ago> Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I make OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear pretty but closed? So I went from Tomato on an old Cisco router to buying a fitlet2, installing Proxmox on it, setting up pfSense as one of the VMs and then finally connecting a Ubiquity Unifi AP to the box. pfSense is very nice and definitely beats Tomato in terms of things you can do with it (although Tomao/OpenWrt is great for 'upgrading' an existing router). Because my network is 100% wireless the Unifi UI has a great overview of all connected devices and I get to set up separate SSIDs with their own VLAN tags which then feed into the pfSense's firewall. This means my IoT devices are on their own network and can't interact with the rest of my stuff and my one external camera has no direct internet access at all. It's all great fun setting up!
- tilolebo 6y agoI'm trying to remember the name of these really small, nearly portable homelab servers. They're quite expensive but looked like a good homelab alternative for people lacking space for a proper rack. Someone knows it?
- tilolebo 6y agoI think it was Intel NUC.
- shifto 6y agoFunny. I have a full 42U rack at home but because I am moving to another city I had to dismantle everything to get it packed. All the critical VM's and services are now running on an old NUC and a HP low-spec laptop. Made me rethink if I really need all the hardware I have or I should downsize.
- Railworks2 6y agoNUC? NAS? Kind of depends which way you wanna go. NAS is probably the term you're thinking off.
- tilolebo 6y agoNope, it was indeed NUC. I already have a DIY NAS at home, I'm now looking for an extra small machine to run more experimental stuff, playing with k8s, etc. I don't want to do that on my NAS.
- commotionfever 6y agoI am very happy with my proliant microserver gen10 plus. holds 4x 3.5" drives, is absolutely tiny, good at virtualisation, quiet-ish, upgradeable
- tilolebo 6y agoVery nice! I configured my NAS a few weeks ago, went for a fractal design core 500. Now I'm looking for a smaller, more beefy machine with less storage capacity, for some @home experiments.
- bregma 6y agoThe author of the article can afford all this stuff because he keeps a 'little woman' locked in his basement ironing his shorts. Sure, the article if full of techporn but I haven't read anything so unabashedly sexist in nature since the late 1970s. It was truly cringeworthy. Reminded me of reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950s or a pulp SciFi novel by Murray Leinster or something.
- stryan 6y agoSource? The only time the author mentions his wife in the article is that she's working full-time and would dislike some server placements.
- MivLives 6y agoKinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.
- Elv13 6y ago120mm + closed loop watercooling makes almost no noise. 140mm makes no noise (compared to background), but don't fit in the standard "U" format. 3U (ATX) can fit a full 120mm, but not a closed loop. 4U (ATX) take a lot of space, but the airflow and WC flow is easy to get right. I used to be a self employed embedded system (Linux) engineer and had to compile whole OS images all day long on air-gapped, on premise, systems, so I ran my own "semi-pro home lab" for a few years. Another trick is to have 5v, 12v and 48v DC lines with silent PSU like Corsair RM series directly feeding some servers so they didn't have to use an internal PSU, that leaves only the CPU and GPU as "hot" components (and the NAS, but that's another story and a solved problem). https://imgur.com/a/cGYxIPW https://imgur.com/a/cGYxIPW
- Cieplak 6y agoAny rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoMostly skimmed over here, but a key point is that you should be trying to build a cheap version of what you'd use at work. The closer you are to your work environment, the more you can applicably "try things" at home, and bring them to work with you. And since most of us are pretty busy, it's nice to not have to learn a whole new skill set just for maintaining our home networks.
- fomine3 6y agoI love homelabbing but the ongoing problem for homelabbing to training skill is that more jobs need to use cloud services, rather than on-premises.
- dragonwriter 6y agoSo, why not run open-source cloud software (OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.) in your homelab?
- fomine3 6y agoThat's OK for learning general things and the software but jobs tend to use AWS.
- dragonwriter 6y agoSure, so, you'll want to use some AWS (much of which can be within free tier), some of your homelab with CloudStack, etc., and some Terraform (etc.), and learn heterogenous hybrid cloud. Using a homelab for learning isn't somehow mutually exclusive with having your own AWS account for learning.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoIf given an option between a job maintaining cloud services and a job maintaining on-premises technologies, I'd take the latter every time. You spend less time fighting support ticket queues and more time doing things.
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- heisenzombie 6y agoI currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
- boring_twenties 6y agoBuy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.
- j_walter 6y agoI did this also. An HP G8 DL380p with 12LFF spots was had for <$250 with plenty of RAM. Add Xpenology and it was like having a Synology NAS for about 1/5 the price. Currently I'm running 8x8TB in RAID6...something that would have required a ~$1200 machine from Synology (at least when I was looking to upgrade).
- heisenzombie 6y agoI would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?
- fomine3 6y agoIf you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount. If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case. If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
- j45 6y agoAvoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 6y agoPLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running. Please don't let this happen to you. EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals.
- icedchai 6y agoI recommending setting up "restic" to S3 or one of its many clones: https://restic.net/ https://restic.net/
- j45 6y agoIt's only a backup if you have more than 1 copy of it. Storing it in one cloud doesn't count. Losing data sucks, but seems to be a right of passage.
- glynnforrest 6y agoThat's terrible. There's nothing worse than losing data. I'm working on this exact problem at the moment: a dashboard to keep track of your backups to check they never fail. https://backupshq.com https://backupshq.com * Get notified when backups fail or take too long via email, slack, webhook, etc. * Run your backup scripts and tools with an open source agent, which takes cares of reporting backup results to the dashboard. * Alternatively, write your own integration with our API to report backup results and send logs yourself. I'm hoping to launch privately soon, I'd love to hear what you think. We haven't made any pricing decisions yet, but definitely want to give free credit to homelabbers!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dclusin 6y agoCommit and push to GitHub more frequently for me. Don’t wait until the pr is perfect before committing.
- lmilcin 6y ago
- Animats 6y agoFor people who are really into system administration.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI had been wondering if retrocomputing were the informatics equivalent of model railroading, but homelabbing might be an even better fit.
- q3k 6y agoIs that a bad thing? You seem to be implying it's a bad thing.
- j45 6y agoThe work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.
- fermienrico 6y agoHow can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection? Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.
- j45 6y agoDynamic DNS has existed for the better part of 20+ years. Residential ISPs also often provide static DHCP leases that are quasi static IPs. Some ISPs also sell an addon for a static IP to the service.
- TOGoS 6y agoIf you mean being able to access your server from elsewhere... I have a dynamic DNS thingamabob going (a script on a raspberry pi that pings my website a few times per day) and have had no problems. Haven't even noticed my home servers becoming unavailable due to IP address changes for a few years, probably because my ISP (Charter a.k.a. Spectrum) doesn't change my address very often. I use NearlyFreeSpeech for hosting the website and they also handle DNS and have an API for it, so it's all very nice and simple.
- harha 6y agoAny recommendations on home networking? I couldn't figure out what the established approach would be to having access to the infrastructure over a consumer internet connection and without exposing the rest of the network. All resources I've seen so far don't give enough background to seem reliable.
- twicetwice 6y agoI can't replace/reconfigure the router I'm behind right now, so I set up a Wireguard VPN. A $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet is the "hub", which then has point-to-point connections through Wireguard to each of my devices. They all get their own IP addresses through the network—I used the 10.101.101.0/24 subnet for memorability—and since I manually allocate IP addresses, I can actually remember which one is which! Then they can talk to each other through the VPN, and if anything wants to be accessible from the public internet, Nginx on the DO droplet reverse proxies to it. My favorite advantage is that my phone/laptop always have access to my devices at home, even when roaming. Plus, in theory, I could relocate any device to another network with no downtime except the time it takes to physically move it and plug it back in—I haven't tested this yet. The one downside I've encountered so far is that I often have devices sending traffic from home network -> droplet -> home network, since they "don't know" that they're actually on the same local network, and exclusively communicate through the VPN. My ping to DO's datacenter is low enough that this hasn't really bothered me, though.
- ThatPlayer 6y agoNot as popular as Wireguard, but Tinc VPN is a mesh VPN where each client is also a node. I've got it running on my actual router (pfsense), so my phone will then attempt to connect to the router node when I'm on my home network so any connections will stay in my home network. And then for everything external I can have it go through a VPS (or multiple) like you.
- j45 6y agoA traditional router can be enough to start with depending on what you're after. If you want a local VPN without too much fuss, Ubiquiti gear is popular, including the EdgeRouter X gear for off the shelf configuration. A lot of this stuff is pretty neat these days, set it up once, forget it as long as it's supported and updated from the vendor.
- m0xte 6y agoI had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains. So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it! My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.
- Schwan 6y agoI had a debian root server for years; Did i do anything specific relevant on it which would have required it? Nope. But boy did i learn things. If not us as Software Engineers / Tech people, should have something like a home lab? I have setup a k8s cluster at home; Do i need it? Nope for sure not; Is it nice? Is it running smoothly? Did i learn things? Is it interesting to use and fun? Does it help that it does run 24/7? yes, yes yes and yes. When i have my own house, i do plan to centralize everything in it in one rack somewhere nice, optic fiber in every relevant room, vlan, backup server/nas etc. Alone something like this does require quite a lot of hardware. And i think its very nice to have vlan capabilities to seperate that one iot device from the rest of my network.
- bregma 6y ago> expensive to feed ... take up a lot of room ... family ... become needy balls and chains. So you go rid of the lab instead of the obvious solution?
- breakfastduck 6y agoFor a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management. So I think your final line is more personal preference than a lesson most people with home labs need to realise.
- gog 6y agoAnybody knows if those kinds of power strips mentioned in the article are available for the Europian market (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFZ98YO/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFZ98YO/)? I've been searching for something like that a few months ago but couldn't find anything that has schuko sockets on the other side.
- j45 6y agoYou can search for PDUs (Power distribution units) in North America to get you pointed in the right direction. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pdu https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pdu
- Havoc 6y ago>Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. This is the exact opposite of my thinking. I want my experiments to happen on a remote server I don't care about...not on my home network that I really don't want to compromise/open up by accidentally misconfiguring something. VPS are cheap - I'm paying like 7 bucks for a 16 gig / 4vcore. (Admittedly a once off deal). 7 bucks to have the blast radius of my networking noobness somewhere else seems like a bargain.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoThere's been a lot of failure over here. I'd break my home server almost daily while tinkering. Now that it's been rock solid for about a year I kind of wish it would break and give me a problem to solve.
- ashitlerferad 6y agoHahaha I know that feeling!
- whalesalad 6y agoThe goal is to have a staging area where you can encounter failures before they happen in the real environment. A lot of times you cannot simulate the exact scenario you’re preparing for without actually doing it in a real setup. This is the point of a home lab.
- kube-system 6y agoFor me, part of homelabbing is learning the entire stack from physical layer up. I learn a lot of stuff running on my own physical hardware that I would have never learned when using someone else’s hardware with many nines of uptime. I have a reference point for how my software runs on real enterprise hardware. I know what unexpected things my software does when various hardware/VM/network issues arise, and I’ve learned ways around them and how to write better software that takes these edge cases into consideration. Are you really full stack if you didn’t reflash the firmware on your RAID controller? When I say I’m full stack, I really mean it. :) That said, I do keep separate VLANs for my “test” and “prod” environments here at home to keep frustrations at a minimum.
- t0astbread 6y agoMaybe a bit off-topic but what do people actually use for monitoring/intrusion detection on small-scale to hobby projects that are internet-connected? I feel like the "established" monitoring frameworks require too much maintenance work and care to really be effective but the operating systems generally used for this kinda work have a way too large surface area to just leave running on their own. (Hello Unikernels?)
- system2 6y agoI am using Sonicwall NSA2600. Works well, has 300mbit SSL filtering, very robust rules and nat configuration. Most small/medium size companies can use the model I am using. Has a very nice web interface too. Comes with SSL VPN and Global VPN.
- brendawalsh 6y agoWhat do you pay for licensing the services?
- num 6y agoDon't forget the amazing content on: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn (SFW) And the more fringe but OCD-pleasing https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn (SFW) r/homelab has been a source of great inspiration since 2012.
- bostonvaulter2 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ is an adjacent interesting subreddit
- charwalker 6y agor/homeserver for those looking at single system or less intensive setups.
- bradly 6y agoOne note... the modem recommended is only DOCSIS 3.0, not 3.1, so it will not support gigabit networking.