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I'm skeptical of homelabs. There's people buying old rack mount servers on Ebay thinking they're getting a great deal when really they're getting a 10 year old

I'm skeptical of homelabs. There's people buying old rack mount servers on Ebay thinking they're getting a great deal when really they're getting a 10 year old machine that will obliterate their ears and provide more heating than processing power. Anything you want to experiment with can be virtualised or ran in the cloud. The only legitimate use case for a homelab I can see is to play with hardware but it sure is an expensive hobby just so you can play around with RJ45 cables and switches. Even for a NAS, you're just making yourself a system administrator of something you really don't want to go wrong. Save yourself the hassle, put it all in an S3 bucket and spend your hours on something else.

imiric 5y ago
> Even for a NAS, you're just making yourself a system administrator of something you really don't want to go wrong. It's really not as difficult to maintain as you're making it out to be, if you're comfortable with some hardware and software tinkering. Good deals can be found on ATX rack mountable cases and it's just a matter of building a PC at that point. Servers don't need to be these heavy machines with outdated hardware and loud fans. As for software, LUKS and SnapRaid have served me well for years, and I haven't had any maintenance issues so far. > Save yourself the hassle, put it all in an S3 bucket and spend your hours on something else. Right, and pay up every time I want to access my data, or deal with free egress services and slow speeds. And always be at the mercy of the provider and their ToS. No thanks.
- c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  Egress fees are cheap, even on Amazon. Cloudflare R2 is coming and there it will be completely free. Not to mention that everything's going to be safe and sound if your home burns down. Pretty sure S3 supports an equivalent for Google Storage's CMEK too, so you can encrypt your data in a way that isn't easily readable by them. They're not interested in your data anyway. You can pay Amazon, or you can pay for electricity and pay with your time to administrate a NAS. You have to pay one way or another.

imiric 5y ago

> Even for a NAS, you're just making yourself a system administrator of something you really don't want to go wrong. It's really not as difficult to maintain as you're making it out to be, if you're comfortable with some hardware and software tinkering. Good deals can be found on ATX rack mountable cases and it's just a matter of building a PC at that point. Servers don't need to be these heavy machines with outdated hardware and loud fans. As for software, LUKS and SnapRaid have served me well for years, and I haven't had any maintenance issues so far. > Save yourself the hassle, put it all in an S3 bucket and spend your hours on something else. Right, and pay up every time I want to access my data, or deal with free egress services and slow speeds. And always be at the mercy of the provider and their ToS. No thanks.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago
Egress fees are cheap, even on Amazon. Cloudflare R2 is coming and there it will be completely free. Not to mention that everything's going to be safe and sound if your home burns down. Pretty sure S3 supports an equivalent for Google Storage's CMEK too, so you can encrypt your data in a way that isn't easily readable by them. They're not interested in your data anyway. You can pay Amazon, or you can pay for electricity and pay with your time to administrate a NAS. You have to pay one way or another.