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I 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
by m0xte 6y ago
I 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.
- vmurthy 6y ago>For a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management. Bang on here. I am a PM at a startup who doesn't really "setup" servers at work but I did enjoy researching how to turn my Lenovo SFF PC (used , bought off Ebay) into a nice little home server (ESXi running multiple VMs) for things like storing media , Adguard VPN etc. Still work-in-progress but loving the experience so far :)
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoYeah, home labbing is about the journey but eventually the journey ends once you've learned how to use some of the technology you wanted.
- comprev 6y agoMy home lab helped boost my career enormously. 5 old HP servers running Windows 2000 network introduced me to AD, Exchange, MS-SQL, etc. hooked up via Cisco hardware. (100% pirated I will admit) The cost of purchasing (eBay) and running the servers paid for itself in 6 months on my first "IT" salary. I sold on the whole lot to another guy trying to boost his skills too. It was fun and served its purpose.
- breakfastduck 6y agoNever heard a single story about setting up a home lab that isn’t wholesome! Got to be one of the least offensive hobbies going.
- xxpor 6y agoI have a mini-itx case with 8 5400 rpm drives, and some basic xeon (E12xx, forgetting the exact model), and I'm shocked at how well modern power saving techniques work. When it's just sitting there being a file server it consumes less than 100 watts, and even when I'm pulling from it at over a gigabit it goes up to maybe 110. It also has 120 mm fans, but I barely notice when they kick on. The loudest part of the whole thing are the heads on the HDDs kicking back and forth!
- mrslave 6y agoMini-ITX case recommendation that holds 8 3.5" drives please?
- walterbell 6y agoInWin MS08, https://www.ipc.in-win.com/soho-smb-iw-ms08 https://www.ipc.in-win.com/soho-smb-iw-ms08 Norco ITX-S8, http://www.norcotek.com/product/itx-s8/ http://www.norcotek.com/product/itx-s8/ Silverstone GD07 plus 3-bay hotswap cages for dual-bay 5.25 = 11 drives total with audio device aesthetic, https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=330&area=en https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=330&area=en
- DHowett 6y agoI’m very happy with my U-NAS enclosure (NSC-400; 4 hotswap bays), and they do have 8-bay enclosures. https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_id=17640 https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_...
- poglet 6y agoMy recommendation would be the Fractal Design Node 804.
- mrslave 6y agoPeople actually put a mini-ITX in a micro-ATX case?!?!?! faints
- zouhair 6y agoYour conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you. People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.
- znpy 6y agoMaybe a bit too direct, but I 100% agree with this comment.
- msh 6y agoWell, I guess if you are serious about a home lab you need both your normal network and a seperate homelab. I like tinkering with my homelab but I need not to depend on it for my work or internet access.
- rfoo 6y agoWhat if your true Internet access depends on it? Providing un-GFWed Internet access for all my devices is so much easier with the networking gears which happens to be in my homelab setup.
- m0xte 6y agoMy conclusion is that my home lab was a learning exercise that comes to an end and that having physical hardware was actually detrimental to it. I still have a home lab. It's just virtualized.
- zouhair 6y agoWhatever works for you, just don't generalize it.