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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 hobb

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.
  - nomel 4y ago
    > 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. Nearly all of your assumption here are incorrect or flawed, except the redundant PSU (we only had one). But, I do think they're just like me: working in a non-ideal environment with constraints outside of our direct control. The non-ideal constraint that they had, in that instance, at that time, was that they could only give us a VPS with 4 threads. It wasn't possible to do what we needed with their server. Or, to put it into your language, five nines doesn't mean shit if, in practicality, it makes a reliable space heater.
  - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    > Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. The server is a big pie. If you're buying a single slice, then yes, it's very very easy for a cheap old desktop to be way faster than a cheap VPS. > 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. It's the managers that are idiots. Not everything needs to run in a datacenter. Some things really are kittens and not cattle.
  - arinlen 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. Unless you're hoping to monetize that spot on your desk, the real estate market means nothing in terms of cost. > 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.) What stops you from "using standardized tools" on a box you own? > Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have redundant PSUs. What leads you to believe that all those 9s are relevant or even not comparable with cloud alternatives? In fact, I'm not sure that the latest rounds of outages at AWS allow it to claim more than 3 9s during the past year. > Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. Actually, it is.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
- bigiain 4y ago
  I like to point out to people who haven’t worked it out for themselves, that the load balanced HA pair of EC2 instances with the multi AZ RDS that runs almost $200 a month at on demand rates, is somewhat less computing power and storage that the phone in my pocket.
genewitch 4y ago
looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/master/wireguard_NAT_type_A.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple SSL/https hosts behind that single IP, which is something you couldn't easily do a decade ago without the host with the single IP having all of the certificates and "MITM" the entire session. Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. [0] the iLO (lights out) actually reported the server's power usage in BTU. It drew the same power as a portable space heater.
- 7speter 4y ago
  > Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like and I wonder if you people who are looking to make labs using the latest ryzen or i7/i9 (really, I’m thinking of getting started by converting an old thinkcentre with a 4th gen i5, possibly undervolting the cpu, and 24gb ddr3 into a pfsense router and some sort of server) will really be missing out on some necessary enterprise feature?
  - accountofme 4y ago
    On that note ryzen does support ecc. It is not validated. So YMMV, but it works and is seen by Linux for me at least .
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    Enterprise servers make no sense at home, but they are more fun to play with than old laptops. It's a hobby. After a while you appreciate buying good tools rather than making do, like any other hobby. Old HPE servers have jumped in price though. Last year you could buy insanely powerful stuff for under $200 but it's all $400 and up for the same gear at the moment.
alsetmusic 4y ago
> running a homelab is a nonsensical I think a lot of people build a homelab to learn about technologies and get realworld experience deploying them. That was what drove mine for a couple of years. Once you’ve mastered servers and networking and so on, then it just becomes a fun hobby, I agree there. But someone who wants to get into networking and the like (and who lacks experience) is definitely going to need to practice with real or simulated networks to get good at it.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Deploying servers and networking is a lot more fun when you can just sit down to Visual Studio Code and write some HCL or Yaml… And yes I was around before the “cloud” was a thing. I first networked a Mac LC II and PowerMac 6100/60 to play with a Gopher server.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear, the amount of integration and automation makes for a very pleasant experience. > In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. I just add my old devices to my cluster and call it a day. Even ancient hardware is suitable for it, especially if you're using old laptops that are optimized for power savings. Even old Core 2 processors in laptops can idle at a low wattage, and TDP can be less than a light bulb's when maxed out.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    That depends on your thinking. My "media server" consists of a web application, backend application, multiple *arr services, transcoding automations, fibre termination, user account management shared across multiple machines and services, multiple VLANs and LUNs, etc. All these are spready across 16RU or so, but really only serve as a "media server".
  - Psychotherapist 4y ago
    I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. Yeah. I've got my search engine basically a beefy gaming PC with no graphics card and 128 Gb ram. I've not only gotten supposed HN death hugs multiple times, I've had my search engine see multiple queries per second without as much as flinching. It took Elon Musk tweeting a link to one of my blog entries before I started getting more traffic than my computer could handle and it started dropping a few connections. Modern consumer PCs are ridiculously powerful if you make good use of the hardware.
- mcovalt 4y ago
  Very cool! Running the not-well-maintained https://hndex.org https://hndex.org search engine (and other memory hungry linear algebra based services) was also my original motivation for tunneling to my home as opposed to hosting on a VPS. Are you hosted via a residential ISP? It's my hunch that peering agreements favor routes of consumer -> data center -> consumer as opposed to consumer -> consumer. That's mainly why I tunnel. Has that been your experience?
  - agencies 4y ago
    Nice! Have you considered publishing your crawl data?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Yeah it's on residential broadband. Haven't really had much trouble to be honest. Though I'm based in Sweden and we have fairly well robust networking infrastructure all around, I guess that may be a factor. I was hit by a botnet after my first big HN hug, so right now at least the search engine goes visitor->cloudflare->server, but if anything that's just added a bunch of ping. I'm also doing crawling and so on on the same network and it's really not bad for that either. Granted my crawls are fairly slow and very far from saturating any connections.
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. To be fair they're not spinning every single piece of the CPU. My desktop can play games from 2009-ish, but at idle it clocks down to like 30 watts. It could play games from 2011 if I put the GPU back in, but the GPU's idle power draw is ridiculous...
brianzelip 4y ago
Thanks for the guide. Congrats on the wedding!

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.
- nomel 4y ago
  > 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. Nearly all of your assumption here are incorrect or flawed, except the redundant PSU (we only had one). But, I do think they're just like me: working in a non-ideal environment with constraints outside of our direct control. The non-ideal constraint that they had, in that instance, at that time, was that they could only give us a VPS with 4 threads. It wasn't possible to do what we needed with their server. Or, to put it into your language, five nines doesn't mean shit if, in practicality, it makes a reliable space heater.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  > Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. The server is a big pie. If you're buying a single slice, then yes, it's very very easy for a cheap old desktop to be way faster than a cheap VPS. > 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. It's the managers that are idiots. Not everything needs to run in a datacenter. Some things really are kittens and not cattle.
- arinlen 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. Unless you're hoping to monetize that spot on your desk, the real estate market means nothing in terms of cost. > 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.) What stops you from "using standardized tools" on a box you own? > Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have redundant PSUs. What leads you to believe that all those 9s are relevant or even not comparable with cloud alternatives? In fact, I'm not sure that the latest rounds of outages at AWS allow it to claim more than 3 9s during the past year. > Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server. Actually, it is.
- Aeolun 4y ago
bigiain 4y ago
I like to point out to people who haven’t worked it out for themselves, that the load balanced HA pair of EC2 instances with the multi AZ RDS that runs almost $200 a month at on demand rates, is somewhat less computing power and storage that the phone in my pocket.

genewitch 4y ago

looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/master/wireguard_NAT_type_A.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple SSL/https hosts behind that single IP, which is something you couldn't easily do a decade ago without the host with the single IP having all of the certificates and "MITM" the entire session. Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. [0] the iLO (lights out) actually reported the server's power usage in BTU. It drew the same power as a portable space heater.

7speter 4y ago
> Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like and I wonder if you people who are looking to make labs using the latest ryzen or i7/i9 (really, I’m thinking of getting started by converting an old thinkcentre with a 4th gen i5, possibly undervolting the cpu, and 24gb ddr3 into a pfsense router and some sort of server) will really be missing out on some necessary enterprise feature?
- accountofme 4y ago
  On that note ryzen does support ecc. It is not validated. So YMMV, but it works and is seen by Linux for me at least .
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Enterprise servers make no sense at home, but they are more fun to play with than old laptops. It's a hobby. After a while you appreciate buying good tools rather than making do, like any other hobby. Old HPE servers have jumped in price though. Last year you could buy insanely powerful stuff for under $200 but it's all $400 and up for the same gear at the moment.

alsetmusic 4y ago

> running a homelab is a nonsensical I think a lot of people build a homelab to learn about technologies and get realworld experience deploying them. That was what drove mine for a couple of years. Once you’ve mastered servers and networking and so on, then it just becomes a fun hobby, I agree there. But someone who wants to get into networking and the like (and who lacks experience) is definitely going to need to practice with real or simulated networks to get good at it.

scarface74 4y ago
Deploying servers and networking is a lot more fun when you can just sit down to Visual Studio Code and write some HCL or Yaml… And yes I was around before the “cloud” was a thing. I first networked a Mac LC II and PowerMac 6100/60 to play with a Gopher server.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear, the amount of integration and automation makes for a very pleasant experience. > In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. I just add my old devices to my cluster and call it a day. Even ancient hardware is suitable for it, especially if you're using old laptops that are optimized for power savings. Even old Core 2 processors in laptops can idle at a low wattage, and TDP can be less than a light bulb's when maxed out.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."
- Handytinge 4y ago
  That depends on your thinking. My "media server" consists of a web application, backend application, multiple *arr services, transcoding automations, fibre termination, user account management shared across multiple machines and services, multiple VLANs and LUNs, etc. All these are spready across 16RU or so, but really only serve as a "media server".
- Psychotherapist 4y ago
  I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. Yeah. I've got my search engine basically a beefy gaming PC with no graphics card and 128 Gb ram. I've not only gotten supposed HN death hugs multiple times, I've had my search engine see multiple queries per second without as much as flinching. It took Elon Musk tweeting a link to one of my blog entries before I started getting more traffic than my computer could handle and it started dropping a few connections. Modern consumer PCs are ridiculously powerful if you make good use of the hardware.

mcovalt 4y ago
Very cool! Running the not-well-maintained https://hndex.org https://hndex.org search engine (and other memory hungry linear algebra based services) was also my original motivation for tunneling to my home as opposed to hosting on a VPS. Are you hosted via a residential ISP? It's my hunch that peering agreements favor routes of consumer -> data center -> consumer as opposed to consumer -> consumer. That's mainly why I tunnel. Has that been your experience?
- agencies 4y ago
  Nice! Have you considered publishing your crawl data?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Yeah it's on residential broadband. Haven't really had much trouble to be honest. Though I'm based in Sweden and we have fairly well robust networking infrastructure all around, I guess that may be a factor. I was hit by a botnet after my first big HN hug, so right now at least the search engine goes visitor->cloudflare->server, but if anything that's just added a bunch of ping. I'm also doing crawling and so on on the same network and it's really not bad for that either. Granted my crawls are fairly slow and very far from saturating any connections.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago

> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. To be fair they're not spinning every single piece of the CPU. My desktop can play games from 2009-ish, but at idle it clocks down to like 30 watts. It could play games from 2011 if I put the GPU back in, but the GPU's idle power draw is ridiculous...

brianzelip 4y ago

Thanks for the guide. Congrats on the wedding!