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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

249 points by ashitlerferad 5y ago

hpyhpyjyjy 4y ago
Reminds me of the best homelab setup I've ever seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cgi5gq/homelab_with_a_view/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cgi5gq/homelab_wit...
- neilv 4y ago
  Excellent taste in Linux distros, pedestal rackmount cabinets, and space heaters. But everyone please be careful not to do much keyboarding work without your keyboard and monitor straight in front (as well as observing other usual ergonomics advice).
bagrow 4y ago
Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers? Seems too narrow to me.
- hnaccount141 4y ago
  I don't think anyone would object to wider usage, it's just that the sysadmin community is the only group to have adopted the term so far.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    It's an interesting use of the word lab when rack, server, stack, etc. would have been more accurate.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  It's likely easier, safer and more socially acceptable to set up this kind of home lab than the kind of maker spaces you are talking about. A lot of people go to (shared/public) maker spaces precisely because their home is not suitable for that kind of physical experimenting. You probably need space, money and expertise to do home experiments of that sort and then it's probably generally wise to keep it on the down low in most cases so you don't freak out the neighbors or otherwise draw problems to yourself.
- qqqwerty 4y ago
  Agreed. I always click the link expecting some kind of electronics or bio lab, and am instead greeted by a server and some networking equipment. I am not really interested in reading about this kind of stuff[1]. I have a few raspberry pi's that serve as my "home lab" and that is all I really need right now. But I suspect the term took off because it gets a bunch of people like me to click. [1] Not that I don't think it should exist, its just not high on my list of interests right now.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  I often wish, that this kind of thing would be called something more like homedatacenter
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Hoarderdatacenter? I heard you say Hoarderdatacenter.
    - wellthisisgreat 4y ago
      Hoardatacenter
  - rnd0 4y ago
    /r/homeserver ?
- morganherlocker 4y ago
  My personal homelab (a stack of old laptops connected to a network switch) is mostly built around various experimental antenna arrays used for rtl-sdr hobbies (aircraft and maritime telemetry collection mostly) + home automation over a zwave mesh network. The home automation ecosystem also has a lot overlap with automated gardening/growing, since automated sensing and irrigation are a great use case for tools like home assistant.
- myself248 4y ago
  Agreed. My home lab does include some services and networking to support them, but also some nutso wifi and other radio data hardware, electronics, 3d printing, large format 2d printing, mechanical fabrication, precision metrology...
- rnd0 4y ago
  >Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? I wasn't before I read this thread! I mean, my "home lab" are old computers from 2008 to 2016 and half of what I "do" involves simply testing what weird installations (eg netbsd) I can get up and running. It's for tinkering -playing; the "lab" part coming from experimentation: "What happens when I do this...?" I agree when it comes to the definition being to narrow. Then again, I mostly engage with it on /r/homelab and the HN attitude seems to be much more restrictive...too restrictive for my tastes, personally.
- itomato 4y ago
  I agree. “Home Data Center Lab” is not always implied.
cillian64 4y ago
I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS. Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors. My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg
- neilv 4y ago
  Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you can pick up old data center gear cheap. Including some exotic stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until the novelty wore off). For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro. For people that really only want something small, I've seen people 3D print out of plastic, build out of wood, IKEA desk organizers and furniture...
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    This is what I did. My wife had an IKEA Besta media center cabinet and it's already mounted beneath our television. I just re-purposed it and put in a homemade NAS, router, switch, and some fanless mini-PCs as my server cluster. The downside is no ventilation, but I got out the jigsaw and cut holes in the cabinet and stuck USB fans with magnetic dust filters in them. Has worked fine for two years now. Upside is everything is small and quiet and I didn't need additional furniture to put servers in. You have to get Windows off the mini-PCs, but since Arch started bundling cloud-init with their installer media, I just put my configuration scripts on a USB stick with the cidata label on the disk, plug that in with the installer, hit the power button, and system installation up to configuring ssh so I can get in from my laptop happens unattended without me needing to hook up to a keyboard and monitor.
  - heelix 4y ago
    Back when my Bride and I were living in a one bedroom apartment, she looked at my jumble of computers around my desk and asked "why not just get one big box?". I was browsing/shopping at Lockheed's outlet store, and stumbled across a glorious Sun 180 server with a 19", 8' tall rack. Only $25! Who could resist! We picked it up and my Bride was horrified to discover the refrigerator sized machine next to my desk. It is still used today - though it is holding a bunch of servers in the basement rather than front and center in my office.
mcovalt 4y ago
This is fun. I'm more of a minimalist with my homelab setup. It's a laptop and an old NAS. I love it either way: running a homelab is a nonsensical and fun hobby in any case. I feel like we live in a world in which it's either racks or cheap VPSs. In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. I've handled 10's of thousands of unique visitors per minute and more than a couple front page of Reddit + Hacker News herds on this little laptop through a residential ISP. Here's my setup (pic down at the bottom): https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/ https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Mines an old laptop and a new NAS.
- nomel 4y ago
  > Consumer hardware is insane. With less technical management, I've had repeated, and bewildered, conversations trying to get them to understand that our one "computer" sitting on my desk is many many times faster than the "server" our IT team provides. "But it's a server!".
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it takes up 4-6x more space than it needs to in what is likely the most expensive commercial real estate the company owns/leases. Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it can't be remotely lights-out managed and its hardware monitored using standardized tools (or at all.) Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have redundant PSUs. Many times faster doesn't mean shit if failed drives can't be hotswapped. Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. Etc. If you want better hardware from IT, tell management to give them more money. IT is almost always viewed as a cost center and given a shoestring budget yet asked to do, and be responsible for, he world. You know how you're experienced from all your years as a programmer? Imagine IT people are the same, instead of assuming they're all idiots who are too stupid to go out and buy desktop computers instead of servers like your genius self.
neilv 4y ago
For the UPS, I always err on the side of ones that are PFC-compatible, pure sine wave, line interactive. Partly because some of the gear I rack has PFC PSUs, but also because I don't want to be flirting with edge cases in other gear. I've owned 3 such rackmount UPSes, but it doesn't seem to be the default.
- sgt 4y ago
  Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I had a UPS fail last week, but I have two of them and my servers have dual PSUs plugged into each one. I don’t really need the uptime, but I’m mostly glad I was able to finally justify my unnecessarily high power bill to myself. :)
    - namecheapTA 4y ago
      How does a UPS cause a high power bill? Doesn't it just charge up the batteries once and basically maintain after that?
      - kube-system 4y ago
        The high power bill is due to using enterprise rack mount hardware with dual PSUs, instead of consumer hardware.
        geerlingguy 4y ago
        "Idle" is often measured in the hundreds of watts on enterprise/DC gear. Newer stuff is sometimes a little better about ramping down at idle, but heck, some server fans will use more power than either of my desktop computers at idle.
      - deleted 4y ago
henvic 4y ago
wow! Pretty good :)
abriosi 4y ago
I'm very pleased using PVE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment for my homelab
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  FYI LXD can do both LXC containers and KVM VMs so it can replace Proxmox in a lot of cases. LXD is packaged in Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, and probably some other distros.
Ourgon 4y ago
I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains: * HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed switch, €47) * HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB SAS drives (€450) * NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5” SAS array, currently populated with 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), €400) * the mentioned airflow divider * 8 drying frames It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as replacements for failed drives. The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which now sits just above the air flow divider): https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K In the not-too-distant future I’ll replace the 15K SAS drives with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot. After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment. This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown in through the filter(s). I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the DS4243) although I’m only using half of these. I recently had to replace a power supply in the DL380 (€20) and two drives in the DS4243 (€20/piece), for the rest everything has been working fine for close to 4 years now. On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably ‘no’, depending on the size of the library. Instead of using ‘enterprise class’ equipment you could try to build a system tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and performance. You’ll probably end up spending about the same amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a substantially lower performing system but you’d be rewarded by the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the barn, etc. As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it is there.
ketzo 4y ago
A little off-topic, but I love the style of this writer. The humor is a little goofy in the best way; the structure is detailed, but still conversational. It just feels very… personable. Like — computers are so goddamn neat. We should all remember to have fun with this stuff sometimes.
gigel82 4y ago
It's time to update this kind of guides with at least 2.5GbE networking. I suspect most FTTH ISPs will start defaulting to 2 or even 5 Gbps soon (mine already offers theses speeds in PNW, but at premium costs). There's very few consumer options at 2.5 / 5 GbE; you can usually pick up cheaper 10 GbE gear (but on older standards, non-multi-gig compatible).
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  The areas this sort of thing is available is way too scarce to matter. I'm in a major metropolitan highly competitive area, and 1.2Gbps non-symmetrical coax is the fastest option. Most PCs where I work run through 100 Mbps switches. Your experience is very far from the average.
  - sp332 4y ago
    Verizon FIOS and Comcast/Xfinity already offer 2+ Gbps, plus AT&T and Frontier.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      Maybe in your area, but it's extremely far from typical.
      - bityard 4y ago
        Heh, yep. Where I live, Comcast is the only choice and they know it. I pay $60/mo to get 25Mb down. And pushing bits upstream is so slow that I have to schedule any "big" uploads to start around bedtime.
  - gigel82 4y ago
    I commiserate, up until last year I was in Comcast monopoly land as well, paid top dollar for the "1.2Gbps" plus $30 to remove the 1Tb data cap. Luckily we got Ziply FiOS installed and I'm in heaven; I'm paying $60 ($80 after a year) for 1Gbps symmetric. They also have a 2-Gig ($120/mo) and 5-Gig ($300/mo); I'm waiting for those to drop in price and I'll definitely jump on-board (most of my home network is on 2.5GbE with a few 1Gb segments).
candiddevmike 4y ago
Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be more efficient/faster GHz than a bunch of old servers and more than capable for running three node clusters.
- sgt 4y ago
  At what cost though?
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    $500-800 for the CPU and RAM ish? I just built a 16 core Ryzen with 32GB of RAM and a bunch of HDDs for about that a year ago.
    - MrFoof 4y ago
      Pretty much spot on, though the ceiling is a lot lower, at least in the US. -- ----- A 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X is now $395 everywhere in the US, though a patient soul can get one on new eBay for $370-375 before sales tax (but including shipping), best $350 used. DDR4-3200 CL16 from top brands isr $3.50-$3.65/GB new, or under $250 for 64GB. Again, a patient soul can save more still and get it closer to $200. Want 32GB? Cut those prices in half. So ~$530-650 new with sales tax and shipping, with a floor of maybe $455-575. For a tremendously capable processor and 32-64GB of memory.
    - sgt 4y ago
      I guess that's pretty cheap. I've also wondered about a Mac Mini running a bunch of Linux VM's. I've to this date never seen a piece of hardware as reliable as the Mac Mini, based on my own and anecdotal evidence.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- moondev 4y ago
  I went the "prosumer" route too. Threadripper maxed with 256G memory. It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru. This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.
powersnail 4y ago
As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?
- mbreese 4y ago
  There isn’t anything that isn’t doable on a sufficiently sized desktop. IMHO a rack is more helpful when you start doing larger cable runs or networking gear that isn’t available as a VM. With a well sized desktop (or pedestal server more likely), you can recreate most homelab setups virtually. You might use less power if you have separate low power devices as opposed to a single (large) server though, so that’s one consideration. Another those is what it is you hope to accomplish. If you want to test gear or hardware that you can’t virtualize, then a rack can be handy. But even things like pulling out hard drives from a running server can be simulated with a VM in some way. But it’s easier to brag about having a rack than a really elaborate VM configuration. Otherwise, as I missing something?
- Macha 4y ago
  My primary home server _is_ my old desktop with some extra drives in there. It can be useful to have a bit more stability for something that you want to be generally up and change less than your workstation setup, and that drives the need for the extra setup. Then I've got a pi for some low load services that I'd rather not be on the same host as anything internet accessible in case of a security vulnerability (things are containerised, but container escape exploits still feel like they come up relatively frequently). The only thing I feel I'm missing over over a real server would be an IPMI so I can boot it remotely in the event of a power loss. There are solutions to use a rPi for that which I plan to look into... some day.
- Elv13 4y ago
  A PC is ideal as long as there is only one. Once you start adding machines, it is time to move to a rack. Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. Racks have rails like drawers, so the units are easy to service. Thats not the case with a heap of ATX towers. Also, your "collection" remains self contained and doesn't grow. Past some scale, you start to also make use of other rack mountable accessories like UPSes, PDUs, patch panels and switches. In the past, you had to move pretty early because older consumer machines like Pentium4 could only do so much, so you needed many of them even for a basic setup like a LAMP server or render/compile cluster.
akaktsn 4y ago
I like this post because I feel like I don't see a ton of I.T applicable posts on the site. Thanks!
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
runjake 4y ago
I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses. My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were. Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in. It’s not that I don’t like learning and experimenting, it’s just that I get to do that all day at work and I need some work/life balance. But, I still love seeing these posts and commenters chiming in with their own configurations.
- eminence32 4y ago
  I like your observation. I think the flip side applies in some cases too: the people who don't get to run fancy network gear at part of $dayjob get some enjoyment running them for fun at home.
  - runjake 4y ago
    And indeed that’s how I got started, temporarily borrowing hardware from my workplace and cobbling it together in my cramped apartment: beige Cisco routers, switches and hubs, sun3 and sun4 hardware, a microVAX II, etc etc. I luckily had a mentor that let me bend the rules and bring stuff home. If you are a mentor you should also bend the rules for noobs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nullwarp 4y ago
  I never spent much time with networking so a lot of it was a bit of a mystery to me so I spent the COVID time building out really awesome but overly built network. I learned a ton and can now actually understand what's going on under the hood! Since then though I definitely have simplified it a lot because it was a lot to manage but it was an excellent learning experience. This is my long winded way of saying, network engineers don't get enough praise - that shit is actually really damn difficult to get right at scale!
jackallis 4y ago
this is not for complete noob, fyi.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  I disagree. It’s been years since I messed with “physical” networking stuff, but it wasn’t complicated. Complex, yes, but not complicated. If you’re a “complete noob” and want to level up this skill, then learning what all the equipment listed does, why you’d want it, and how to configure it is an excellent way to go about it.
loudthing 4y ago
I've never understood why fiddling with IT equipment in your home is considering a "home lab" since you aren't necessarily creating anything (like a laboratory would do), you are just integrating together other people's industrial components to serve non business purposes. The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices with your own money, whether or not it is used equipment.
- noitpmeder 4y ago
  You sound worked up. Most people who seriously invest like fiddling around and creating their own networking structure. It's a feature that they don't have to worry about "serving business needs"! I'm not sure what the difference is between this and any other moderately expensive hobby.
  - loudthing 4y ago
    It's the phrase "homelab", I suppose. Why not call it "Home IT" or "Home Data Center" or "Home Network Infrastructure". Calling it a home laboratory sounds like enthusiasts are trying to escape some preconceived notions about the topic. I digress...
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      You can actually do some crazy things with a homelab. I have a store-and-forward network joining roadwarrior machines to machines on my home network organized in a hub-spoke-ish model. It lets me access media from my home network even when I'm on some super oversubscribed AP (at 256 KB/s) at some crappy hotel with awful firewall rules (like only letting TCP traffic on 80 and 443 out) without opening any security holes on the network itself. I was able to experiment and deploy the network using the machines in my homelab. As far as the name, I think it comes from the term "networking lab" that netops actually use to trial out network topologies before deploying them in the field. It's a home networking lab, that's all.
    - dvtrn 4y ago
      I actually refer to mine as my “residential command and control center”, or “RCC”. :)
scandinavian 4y ago
I'm not a network guy, so apologies for the stupid question, but what is the patch panel for in this setup? It doesn't really look like it has a purpose from my view.
- zrail 4y ago
  It looks nice but it's not necessary. Typically in a setup like this, where you have network equipment with ports on the front and other stuff with ports on the back, you'll want either a patch panel or a 1U brush-style passthrough to make the cable runs nicer.
- xuki 4y ago
  Patch panel is where your cable run terminates. Since that part is more expensive to fix, you don't want to touch it. The only moving part is a small cable from your switch to patch panel.
- rhinoceraptor 4y ago
  For network devices around the house, for example PoE cameras, wifi access points, or wall plate jacks. The patch panel is a clean way to terminate those cables in the rack.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> As you know, trying out new things on production equipment never ends well. That is not my experience. Most of the time it works just fine if researched well in advance. The problem is just the impact for the few times it does not go well. That's why you have test environments. And test groups in production for the first rollout. My home lab is more to try out the benefits of different options, especially as I work for a huge multinational. Admin rights are split among different teams and sometimes the others don't understand what I need. It's really helpful to have full access to my own lab so I can show them what I need from them and why it works best a certain way. Without access that's hard to figure out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
Am I the only one who just slaps a few vms together on an umanaged switch? I don't need to tag anything and the two vlans I have are for the wifi and the house. One vm runs openwrt, another openmediacault, and then I have arch for my dev projects. Psu hanging out sure but all that is just on a fold out table under the stairs and it's been rock solid for 3 years. Don't get me wrong it's nice to do this stuff and I'm not knocking people for spending so much time on it but when you spend your day at work logging into systems and fixing broken junk the last thing I want to do is come home to a dead network or vm issue to solve.
Daegalus 4y ago
See, I have no interest in running large server hardware at home. I did it different. At first i Had a stack of 2-3 old laptops running stuff. Now I just use 4 raspberry pi 4s, with 8gb. It lives in a cubby in my office desk. Low energy, low maintenance and works really well. Got rid of the laptops. My network is the TPLink Omada stuff, sittign on some shelves in our family room. Everythign is wifi and I run a 2nd ap on the opposite side of the house using MoCA 2.5 to connect them over the coax in the 2 rooms to improve performance.
- tikkabhuna 4y ago
  I’m still looking for Raspberry Pis. I have some on back order. Due for delivery in December and I get an email once a month pushing that back.
  - Daegalus 4y ago
    Ya, I am currently on the hunt for CM4s for a weird restoration project. But haven't found any yet. I was lucky for the 4 that I have. I use https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com to monitor stock.
cagataygurturk 4y ago
I have 3-node vSphere cluster with 36 cores, 300 GB of RAM, bunch of different disk options (magnetic, SSD, NVMe) It is all powered by Ubiquiti networking gear. VMware VUG is providing free and legal VMware licenses. I get to run VSAN, on top of it I deploy Kubernetes and I can decide if my pod wants to use poor performance VSAN disks (like EBS on AWS) or faster local NVMe‘s. These are just couple of things I can make at home. Everything started as an experiment and it started to look like a replica of what we can have in a datacenter, but without a SLA. First of all, all these stuff is extremely fun for me. Secondly, I won‘t go into details but as a cloud consultant, this thing I started as a hobby became one of the big boosters of my career. I never expected such an effect but I am extremely impressed by this.
poulpy123 4y ago
I'm disappointed, I've read it hoping to find how to set up a scientific laboratory at home but it's just how to install some servers
aluminum96 4y ago
I initially thought this was a tech blog by Hayden James, the musician. [1] I was like "wow, what a multi-talented guy!" Alas, it's not the same person. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_James
mynameisnoone 4y ago
rejor121 4y ago
This is really cool. I’ve been wanting to build my own lab, but I’m a bit worried about power consumption. If I do build something, then it would probably be something I power up and down as required. That said, are there “Cloud” versions of this? Can I get my feet wet that way?
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > I’ve been wanting to build my own lab, but I’m a bit worried about power consumption. I’ve been concerned about this too. Initially I wasn’t worried, but in some arguments some people have warned me that even a single rack can incur significant monthly bill increases. I have a lot of retro hard too which I imagine is less power efficient.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  You can have a homelab with just one or a few raspberry pi’s. Power consumption would be negligible.
  - torgian 4y ago
    Thanks. I'll take a look!
philjohn 4y ago
With rising energy costs I recently coalesced onto a pared down homelab. 2U server with 6 4TB drives (ZRaid 2 leaving 16TB of usable space) running on an Asrock Rack WSI 246 mini itx board, a Core i3 9100T (35w, can be configured as a 25w part) and 32GB of ECC DDR 4. It idles around 20w and going full pelt with all disks running at around 40-50w. This is running UrBackup for the computers in the house to backup to, SeaFile for the phones, a Minecraft server for the kids, Plex, Wireguard (for remote access) and InfluxDB for collecting metrics. Whilst playing with ex enterprise kit would be fun, the noise, and the power consumption, just isn't worth it to me.
whazor 4y ago
My comments: - network switches: if you want enterprise features, low price, higher stability.. and you are willing to deal with painful configuration: check out Mikrotik - mentioned servers consume quite some electricity, check out this Dutch server thread on how to have efficient server for inspiration: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2096876 https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2096876 (use Google translate) note that the Framework main boards also look quite nice as server - also check out k8s at home template: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s it uses GitOps to setup services which has proven very valuable to me by messing with configurations. I also build a search for helm chart releases: https://whazor.github.io/k8s-at-home-search/ https://whazor.github.io/k8s-at-home-search/ - if going cluster mode: having a NAS for storage is more stable than using kubernetes storage solutions All in all, I learned a lot about servers and networking by doing this as a hobby.
itomato 4y ago
These are always a hoot to read. Attitudes toward dust ingress in particular delight me. Look inside any old Dolch data acquisition unit or tire alignment computer from the 1980s and find minimal reason to be horrified. To think a home environment would necessitate anything special is excessive. Pizza restaurants,OTOH.
- voxadam 4y ago
  If you think restaurants are bad, and they are, you should try machine shops. I used to maintain CNC milling machines; one was in a shop that milled EDM sinkers[1] out of solid blocks of graphite. Graphite dust is a fracking nightmare. I quickly lost count of how many servo amplifiers and PLCs I had to replace. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining
sponaugle 4y ago
Great to see a write up about someones experiences building a homelab. I love the homelabs, and I recently built a new house and made some dedicated space for mine. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDataCenter/comments/ktz6yo/my_small_homedatacenter_6_months_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDataCenter/comments/ktz6yo/my_s... I added 20KW of solar as well to offset to power usage. It is interesting to see what other people have built, why they made the choices they did, and what they are using it for.

249 points by ashitlerferad 5y ago

Reminds me of the best homelab setup I've ever seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cgi5gq/homelab_with_a_view/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cgi5gq/homelab_wit...

neilv 4y ago
Excellent taste in Linux distros, pedestal rackmount cabinets, and space heaters. But everyone please be careful not to do much keyboarding work without your keyboard and monitor straight in front (as well as observing other usual ergonomics advice).

bagrow 4y ago

Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers? Seems too narrow to me.

hnaccount141 4y ago
I don't think anyone would object to wider usage, it's just that the sysadmin community is the only group to have adopted the term so far.
- bmitc 4y ago
  It's an interesting use of the word lab when rack, server, stack, etc. would have been more accurate.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
It's likely easier, safer and more socially acceptable to set up this kind of home lab than the kind of maker spaces you are talking about. A lot of people go to (shared/public) maker spaces precisely because their home is not suitable for that kind of physical experimenting. You probably need space, money and expertise to do home experiments of that sort and then it's probably generally wise to keep it on the down low in most cases so you don't freak out the neighbors or otherwise draw problems to yourself.
qqqwerty 4y ago
Agreed. I always click the link expecting some kind of electronics or bio lab, and am instead greeted by a server and some networking equipment. I am not really interested in reading about this kind of stuff[1]. I have a few raspberry pi's that serve as my "home lab" and that is all I really need right now. But I suspect the term took off because it gets a bunch of people like me to click. [1] Not that I don't think it should exist, its just not high on my list of interests right now.
noizejoy 4y ago
I often wish, that this kind of thing would be called something more like homedatacenter
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Hoarderdatacenter? I heard you say Hoarderdatacenter.
  - wellthisisgreat 4y ago
    Hoardatacenter
- rnd0 4y ago
  /r/homeserver ?
morganherlocker 4y ago
My personal homelab (a stack of old laptops connected to a network switch) is mostly built around various experimental antenna arrays used for rtl-sdr hobbies (aircraft and maritime telemetry collection mostly) + home automation over a zwave mesh network. The home automation ecosystem also has a lot overlap with automated gardening/growing, since automated sensing and irrigation are a great use case for tools like home assistant.
myself248 4y ago
Agreed. My home lab does include some services and networking to support them, but also some nutso wifi and other radio data hardware, electronics, 3d printing, large format 2d printing, mechanical fabrication, precision metrology...
rnd0 4y ago
>Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? I wasn't before I read this thread! I mean, my "home lab" are old computers from 2008 to 2016 and half of what I "do" involves simply testing what weird installations (eg netbsd) I can get up and running. It's for tinkering -playing; the "lab" part coming from experimentation: "What happens when I do this...?" I agree when it comes to the definition being to narrow. Then again, I mostly engage with it on /r/homelab and the HN attitude seems to be much more restrictive...too restrictive for my tastes, personally.
itomato 4y ago
I agree. “Home Data Center Lab” is not always implied.

cillian64 4y ago

I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS. Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors. My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg

neilv 4y ago
Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you can pick up old data center gear cheap. Including some exotic stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until the novelty wore off). For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro. For people that really only want something small, I've seen people 3D print out of plastic, build out of wood, IKEA desk organizers and furniture...
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  This is what I did. My wife had an IKEA Besta media center cabinet and it's already mounted beneath our television. I just re-purposed it and put in a homemade NAS, router, switch, and some fanless mini-PCs as my server cluster. The downside is no ventilation, but I got out the jigsaw and cut holes in the cabinet and stuck USB fans with magnetic dust filters in them. Has worked fine for two years now. Upside is everything is small and quiet and I didn't need additional furniture to put servers in. You have to get Windows off the mini-PCs, but since Arch started bundling cloud-init with their installer media, I just put my configuration scripts on a USB stick with the cidata label on the disk, plug that in with the installer, hit the power button, and system installation up to configuring ssh so I can get in from my laptop happens unattended without me needing to hook up to a keyboard and monitor.
- heelix 4y ago
  Back when my Bride and I were living in a one bedroom apartment, she looked at my jumble of computers around my desk and asked "why not just get one big box?". I was browsing/shopping at Lockheed's outlet store, and stumbled across a glorious Sun 180 server with a 19", 8' tall rack. Only $25! Who could resist! We picked it up and my Bride was horrified to discover the refrigerator sized machine next to my desk. It is still used today - though it is holding a bunch of servers in the basement rather than front and center in my office.

mcovalt 4y ago

This is fun. I'm more of a minimalist with my homelab setup. It's a laptop and an old NAS. I love it either way: running a homelab is a nonsensical and fun hobby in any case. I feel like we live in a world in which it's either racks or cheap VPSs. In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. I've handled 10's of thousands of unique visitors per minute and more than a couple front page of Reddit + Hacker News herds on this little laptop through a residential ISP. Here's my setup (pic down at the bottom): https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/ https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Mines an old laptop and a new NAS.
nomel 4y ago
> Consumer hardware is insane. With less technical management, I've had repeated, and bewildered, conversations trying to get them to understand that our one "computer" sitting on my desk is many many times faster than the "server" our IT team provides. "But it's a server!".
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it takes up 4-6x more space than it needs to in what is likely the most expensive commercial real estate the company owns/leases. Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it can't be remotely lights-out managed and its hardware monitored using standardized tools (or at all.) Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have redundant PSUs. Many times faster doesn't mean shit if failed drives can't be hotswapped. Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. Etc. If you want better hardware from IT, tell management to give them more money. IT is almost always viewed as a cost center and given a shoestring budget yet asked to do, and be responsible for, he world. You know how you're experienced from all your years as a programmer? Imagine IT people are the same, instead of assuming they're all idiots who are too stupid to go out and buy desktop computers instead of servers like your genius self.

neilv 4y ago

For the UPS, I always err on the side of ones that are PFC-compatible, pure sine wave, line interactive. Partly because some of the gear I rack has PFC PSUs, but also because I don't want to be flirting with edge cases in other gear. I've owned 3 such rackmount UPSes, but it doesn't seem to be the default.

sgt 4y ago
Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I had a UPS fail last week, but I have two of them and my servers have dual PSUs plugged into each one. I don’t really need the uptime, but I’m mostly glad I was able to finally justify my unnecessarily high power bill to myself. :)
  - namecheapTA 4y ago
    How does a UPS cause a high power bill? Doesn't it just charge up the batteries once and basically maintain after that?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      The high power bill is due to using enterprise rack mount hardware with dual PSUs, instead of consumer hardware.
      - geerlingguy 4y ago
        "Idle" is often measured in the hundreds of watts on enterprise/DC gear. Newer stuff is sometimes a little better about ramping down at idle, but heck, some server fans will use more power than either of my desktop computers at idle.
    - deleted 4y ago

henvic 4y ago

wow! Pretty good :)

abriosi 4y ago

I'm very pleased using PVE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment for my homelab

CameronNemo 4y ago
FYI LXD can do both LXC containers and KVM VMs so it can replace Proxmox in a lot of cases. LXD is packaged in Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, and probably some other distros.

Ourgon 4y ago

I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains: * HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed switch, €47) * HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB SAS drives (€450) * NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5” SAS array, currently populated with 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), €400) * the mentioned airflow divider * 8 drying frames It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as replacements for failed drives. The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which now sits just above the air flow divider): https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K In the not-too-distant future I’ll replace the 15K SAS drives with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot. After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment. This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown in through the filter(s). I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the DS4243) although I’m only using half of these. I recently had to replace a power supply in the DL380 (€20) and two drives in the DS4243 (€20/piece), for the rest everything has been working fine for close to 4 years now. On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably ‘no’, depending on the size of the library. Instead of using ‘enterprise class’ equipment you could try to build a system tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and performance. You’ll probably end up spending about the same amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a substantially lower performing system but you’d be rewarded by the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the barn, etc. As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it is there.

ketzo 4y ago

A little off-topic, but I love the style of this writer. The humor is a little goofy in the best way; the structure is detailed, but still conversational. It just feels very… personable. Like — computers are so goddamn neat. We should all remember to have fun with this stuff sometimes.

gigel82 4y ago

It's time to update this kind of guides with at least 2.5GbE networking. I suspect most FTTH ISPs will start defaulting to 2 or even 5 Gbps soon (mine already offers theses speeds in PNW, but at premium costs). There's very few consumer options at 2.5 / 5 GbE; you can usually pick up cheaper 10 GbE gear (but on older standards, non-multi-gig compatible).

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
The areas this sort of thing is available is way too scarce to matter. I'm in a major metropolitan highly competitive area, and 1.2Gbps non-symmetrical coax is the fastest option. Most PCs where I work run through 100 Mbps switches. Your experience is very far from the average.
- sp332 4y ago
  Verizon FIOS and Comcast/Xfinity already offer 2+ Gbps, plus AT&T and Frontier.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Maybe in your area, but it's extremely far from typical.
    - bityard 4y ago
      Heh, yep. Where I live, Comcast is the only choice and they know it. I pay $60/mo to get 25Mb down. And pushing bits upstream is so slow that I have to schedule any "big" uploads to start around bedtime.
- gigel82 4y ago
  I commiserate, up until last year I was in Comcast monopoly land as well, paid top dollar for the "1.2Gbps" plus $30 to remove the 1Tb data cap. Luckily we got Ziply FiOS installed and I'm in heaven; I'm paying $60 ($80 after a year) for 1Gbps symmetric. They also have a 2-Gig ($120/mo) and 5-Gig ($300/mo); I'm waiting for those to drop in price and I'll definitely jump on-board (most of my home network is on 2.5GbE with a few 1Gb segments).

candiddevmike 4y ago

Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be more efficient/faster GHz than a bunch of old servers and more than capable for running three node clusters.

sgt 4y ago
At what cost though?
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  $500-800 for the CPU and RAM ish? I just built a 16 core Ryzen with 32GB of RAM and a bunch of HDDs for about that a year ago.
  - MrFoof 4y ago
    Pretty much spot on, though the ceiling is a lot lower, at least in the US. -- ----- A 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X is now $395 everywhere in the US, though a patient soul can get one on new eBay for $370-375 before sales tax (but including shipping), best $350 used. DDR4-3200 CL16 from top brands isr $3.50-$3.65/GB new, or under $250 for 64GB. Again, a patient soul can save more still and get it closer to $200. Want 32GB? Cut those prices in half. So ~$530-650 new with sales tax and shipping, with a floor of maybe $455-575. For a tremendously capable processor and 32-64GB of memory.
  - sgt 4y ago
    I guess that's pretty cheap. I've also wondered about a Mac Mini running a bunch of Linux VM's. I've to this date never seen a piece of hardware as reliable as the Mac Mini, based on my own and anecdotal evidence.
- deleted 4y ago
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moondev 4y ago
I went the "prosumer" route too. Threadripper maxed with 256G memory. It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru. This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.

powersnail 4y ago

As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?

mbreese 4y ago
There isn’t anything that isn’t doable on a sufficiently sized desktop. IMHO a rack is more helpful when you start doing larger cable runs or networking gear that isn’t available as a VM. With a well sized desktop (or pedestal server more likely), you can recreate most homelab setups virtually. You might use less power if you have separate low power devices as opposed to a single (large) server though, so that’s one consideration. Another those is what it is you hope to accomplish. If you want to test gear or hardware that you can’t virtualize, then a rack can be handy. But even things like pulling out hard drives from a running server can be simulated with a VM in some way. But it’s easier to brag about having a rack than a really elaborate VM configuration. Otherwise, as I missing something?
Macha 4y ago
My primary home server _is_ my old desktop with some extra drives in there. It can be useful to have a bit more stability for something that you want to be generally up and change less than your workstation setup, and that drives the need for the extra setup. Then I've got a pi for some low load services that I'd rather not be on the same host as anything internet accessible in case of a security vulnerability (things are containerised, but container escape exploits still feel like they come up relatively frequently). The only thing I feel I'm missing over over a real server would be an IPMI so I can boot it remotely in the event of a power loss. There are solutions to use a rPi for that which I plan to look into... some day.
Elv13 4y ago
A PC is ideal as long as there is only one. Once you start adding machines, it is time to move to a rack. Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. Racks have rails like drawers, so the units are easy to service. Thats not the case with a heap of ATX towers. Also, your "collection" remains self contained and doesn't grow. Past some scale, you start to also make use of other rack mountable accessories like UPSes, PDUs, patch panels and switches. In the past, you had to move pretty early because older consumer machines like Pentium4 could only do so much, so you needed many of them even for a basic setup like a LAMP server or render/compile cluster.

akaktsn 4y ago

I like this post because I feel like I don't see a ton of I.T applicable posts on the site. Thanks!

Linda703 4y ago

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runjake 4y ago

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses. My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were. Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in. It’s not that I don’t like learning and experimenting, it’s just that I get to do that all day at work and I need some work/life balance. But, I still love seeing these posts and commenters chiming in with their own configurations.

eminence32 4y ago
I like your observation. I think the flip side applies in some cases too: the people who don't get to run fancy network gear at part of $dayjob get some enjoyment running them for fun at home.
- runjake 4y ago
  And indeed that’s how I got started, temporarily borrowing hardware from my workplace and cobbling it together in my cramped apartment: beige Cisco routers, switches and hubs, sun3 and sun4 hardware, a microVAX II, etc etc. I luckily had a mentor that let me bend the rules and bring stuff home. If you are a mentor you should also bend the rules for noobs.
deleted 4y ago
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nullwarp 4y ago
I never spent much time with networking so a lot of it was a bit of a mystery to me so I spent the COVID time building out really awesome but overly built network. I learned a ton and can now actually understand what's going on under the hood! Since then though I definitely have simplified it a lot because it was a lot to manage but it was an excellent learning experience. This is my long winded way of saying, network engineers don't get enough praise - that shit is actually really damn difficult to get right at scale!

jackallis 4y ago

this is not for complete noob, fyi.

Ancapistani 4y ago
I disagree. It’s been years since I messed with “physical” networking stuff, but it wasn’t complicated. Complex, yes, but not complicated. If you’re a “complete noob” and want to level up this skill, then learning what all the equipment listed does, why you’d want it, and how to configure it is an excellent way to go about it.

loudthing 4y ago

I've never understood why fiddling with IT equipment in your home is considering a "home lab" since you aren't necessarily creating anything (like a laboratory would do), you are just integrating together other people's industrial components to serve non business purposes. The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices with your own money, whether or not it is used equipment.

noitpmeder 4y ago
You sound worked up. Most people who seriously invest like fiddling around and creating their own networking structure. It's a feature that they don't have to worry about "serving business needs"! I'm not sure what the difference is between this and any other moderately expensive hobby.
- loudthing 4y ago
  It's the phrase "homelab", I suppose. Why not call it "Home IT" or "Home Data Center" or "Home Network Infrastructure". Calling it a home laboratory sounds like enthusiasts are trying to escape some preconceived notions about the topic. I digress...
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    You can actually do some crazy things with a homelab. I have a store-and-forward network joining roadwarrior machines to machines on my home network organized in a hub-spoke-ish model. It lets me access media from my home network even when I'm on some super oversubscribed AP (at 256 KB/s) at some crappy hotel with awful firewall rules (like only letting TCP traffic on 80 and 443 out) without opening any security holes on the network itself. I was able to experiment and deploy the network using the machines in my homelab. As far as the name, I think it comes from the term "networking lab" that netops actually use to trial out network topologies before deploying them in the field. It's a home networking lab, that's all.
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    I actually refer to mine as my “residential command and control center”, or “RCC”. :)

scandinavian 4y ago

I'm not a network guy, so apologies for the stupid question, but what is the patch panel for in this setup? It doesn't really look like it has a purpose from my view.

zrail 4y ago
It looks nice but it's not necessary. Typically in a setup like this, where you have network equipment with ports on the front and other stuff with ports on the back, you'll want either a patch panel or a 1U brush-style passthrough to make the cable runs nicer.
xuki 4y ago
Patch panel is where your cable run terminates. Since that part is more expensive to fix, you don't want to touch it. The only moving part is a small cable from your switch to patch panel.
rhinoceraptor 4y ago
For network devices around the house, for example PoE cameras, wifi access points, or wall plate jacks. The patch panel is a clean way to terminate those cables in the rack.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

> As you know, trying out new things on production equipment never ends well. That is not my experience. Most of the time it works just fine if researched well in advance. The problem is just the impact for the few times it does not go well. That's why you have test environments. And test groups in production for the first rollout. My home lab is more to try out the benefits of different options, especially as I work for a huge multinational. Admin rights are split among different teams and sometimes the others don't understand what I need. It's really helpful to have full access to my own lab so I can show them what I need from them and why it works best a certain way. Without access that's hard to figure out.

deleted 4y ago

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cosmiccatnap 4y ago

Am I the only one who just slaps a few vms together on an umanaged switch? I don't need to tag anything and the two vlans I have are for the wifi and the house. One vm runs openwrt, another openmediacault, and then I have arch for my dev projects. Psu hanging out sure but all that is just on a fold out table under the stairs and it's been rock solid for 3 years. Don't get me wrong it's nice to do this stuff and I'm not knocking people for spending so much time on it but when you spend your day at work logging into systems and fixing broken junk the last thing I want to do is come home to a dead network or vm issue to solve.

Daegalus 4y ago

See, I have no interest in running large server hardware at home. I did it different. At first i Had a stack of 2-3 old laptops running stuff. Now I just use 4 raspberry pi 4s, with 8gb. It lives in a cubby in my office desk. Low energy, low maintenance and works really well. Got rid of the laptops. My network is the TPLink Omada stuff, sittign on some shelves in our family room. Everythign is wifi and I run a 2nd ap on the opposite side of the house using MoCA 2.5 to connect them over the coax in the 2 rooms to improve performance.

tikkabhuna 4y ago
I’m still looking for Raspberry Pis. I have some on back order. Due for delivery in December and I get an email once a month pushing that back.
- Daegalus 4y ago
  Ya, I am currently on the hunt for CM4s for a weird restoration project. But haven't found any yet. I was lucky for the 4 that I have. I use https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com to monitor stock.

cagataygurturk 4y ago

I have 3-node vSphere cluster with 36 cores, 300 GB of RAM, bunch of different disk options (magnetic, SSD, NVMe) It is all powered by Ubiquiti networking gear. VMware VUG is providing free and legal VMware licenses. I get to run VSAN, on top of it I deploy Kubernetes and I can decide if my pod wants to use poor performance VSAN disks (like EBS on AWS) or faster local NVMe‘s. These are just couple of things I can make at home. Everything started as an experiment and it started to look like a replica of what we can have in a datacenter, but without a SLA. First of all, all these stuff is extremely fun for me. Secondly, I won‘t go into details but as a cloud consultant, this thing I started as a hobby became one of the big boosters of my career. I never expected such an effect but I am extremely impressed by this.

poulpy123 4y ago

I'm disappointed, I've read it hoping to find how to set up a scientific laboratory at home but it's just how to install some servers

aluminum96 4y ago

I initially thought this was a tech blog by Hayden James, the musician. [1] I was like "wow, what a multi-talented guy!" Alas, it's not the same person. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_James

mynameisnoone 4y ago

rejor121 4y ago

This is really cool. I’ve been wanting to build my own lab, but I’m a bit worried about power consumption. If I do build something, then it would probably be something I power up and down as required. That said, are there “Cloud” versions of this? Can I get my feet wet that way?

the_only_law 4y ago
> I’ve been wanting to build my own lab, but I’m a bit worried about power consumption. I’ve been concerned about this too. Initially I wasn’t worried, but in some arguments some people have warned me that even a single rack can incur significant monthly bill increases. I have a lot of retro hard too which I imagine is less power efficient.
Aeolun 4y ago
You can have a homelab with just one or a few raspberry pi’s. Power consumption would be negligible.
- torgian 4y ago
  Thanks. I'll take a look!

philjohn 4y ago

With rising energy costs I recently coalesced onto a pared down homelab. 2U server with 6 4TB drives (ZRaid 2 leaving 16TB of usable space) running on an Asrock Rack WSI 246 mini itx board, a Core i3 9100T (35w, can be configured as a 25w part) and 32GB of ECC DDR 4. It idles around 20w and going full pelt with all disks running at around 40-50w. This is running UrBackup for the computers in the house to backup to, SeaFile for the phones, a Minecraft server for the kids, Plex, Wireguard (for remote access) and InfluxDB for collecting metrics. Whilst playing with ex enterprise kit would be fun, the noise, and the power consumption, just isn't worth it to me.

whazor 4y ago

My comments: - network switches: if you want enterprise features, low price, higher stability.. and you are willing to deal with painful configuration: check out Mikrotik - mentioned servers consume quite some electricity, check out this Dutch server thread on how to have efficient server for inspiration: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2096876 https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2096876 (use Google translate) note that the Framework main boards also look quite nice as server - also check out k8s at home template: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s it uses GitOps to setup services which has proven very valuable to me by messing with configurations. I also build a search for helm chart releases: https://whazor.github.io/k8s-at-home-search/ https://whazor.github.io/k8s-at-home-search/ - if going cluster mode: having a NAS for storage is more stable than using kubernetes storage solutions All in all, I learned a lot about servers and networking by doing this as a hobby.

itomato 4y ago

These are always a hoot to read. Attitudes toward dust ingress in particular delight me. Look inside any old Dolch data acquisition unit or tire alignment computer from the 1980s and find minimal reason to be horrified. To think a home environment would necessitate anything special is excessive. Pizza restaurants,OTOH.

voxadam 4y ago
If you think restaurants are bad, and they are, you should try machine shops. I used to maintain CNC milling machines; one was in a shop that milled EDM sinkers[1] out of solid blocks of graphite. Graphite dust is a fracking nightmare. I quickly lost count of how many servo amplifiers and PLCs I had to replace. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining

sponaugle 4y ago

Great to see a write up about someones experiences building a homelab. I love the homelabs, and I recently built a new house and made some dedicated space for mine. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDataCenter/comments/ktz6yo/my_small_homedatacenter_6_months_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDataCenter/comments/ktz6yo/my_s... I added 20KW of solar as well to offset to power usage. It is interesting to see what other people have built, why they made the choices they did, and what they are using it for.