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Home Lab Beginners guide

• bradley13 3y ago
  Rack mount equioment is often more expensive. Also noisy. I have mostly consumer (non-rack) equipment in a small Ikea closet. Looks less nerdy, which also improves the WAF.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Some of it is quite quiet nowadays, when not under load. I can hear my racks but they're about as quiet as the furnace until I do a really big compile. On reboot they go into full speed fan mode until the controller comes online, that sounds like a jet taking off.
  • mech422 3y ago
    If you go the Ebay route, the price isn't bad... But people can literally hear my servers on the phone (1 adjacent wall) if I fire all of them up. Also, power draw was crazy - each blade chassis pulls 2500w-3000w ! SBC based stuff is plenty powerful for most stuff now, MUCH cheaper then Nucs, and SILENT! (Great for my sanity)
  • oceanplexian 3y ago
    It is, mostly, but if you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can easily solve that problem with a lot of equipment as long as you have good airflow and cooling where your rack is located.
• leoqa 3y ago
  I have two gaming computers that I’d like to vent up into my attic. Anyone tried this? I considered moving them to the garage and then running USB-over-fiber to access them but have a ton of flight sim gear I need powered as well.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• toinewx 3y ago
  what would be the typical use of such a lab? Why are so many different components needed?
  • mobilio 3y ago
    Typical use for mine case - is to test things before deploy somewhere else. For example - Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker, etc, etc. All this require knowledge and experience.
    • thrownawaysz 3y ago
      >Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker, etc, etc. It will be a bit general but what's the best use case here? I mean try to build a home server, self host some services but there are so many options. - Proxmox, run a VM for each service. And it supports LXC too. - A vanilla Linux server which runs a type 2 hypervisor (QEMU) for each service - Docker can be also done either in a single server but some people do it with something like Unraid (which is for NAS but support virtualization too). Very similarly you can install Docker in OpenMediaVault too. Feels like there are so many ways to achive the same thing
      • jbverschoor 3y ago
        Proxmox + portainer
      • mobilio 3y ago
        But how you can install Proxmox under VM (QEMU/KVM)? Sometime you need a hardware that you can trash it within day or two.
      • huimang 3y ago
        It comes down to what you want to do and what you're comfortable with. For the last 4 years, I've used a Proxmox and LXC-based setup. I create LXCs for specific services like nfs, jellyfin, and minecraft where I can fine-tune the memory and cpu specs or turn off the LXC when not in use. Then I have an LXC for all of my docker-based services. I manage the LXC provisioning with ansible, the source code is available on github. https://github.com/andrewzah/service-automation/tree/master/ansible https://github.com/andrewzah/service-automation/tree/master/...
• quaffapint 3y ago
  Unless you simply want to play with all the various bits of hardware, a standard PC tower will be more power efficient and save a lot of room. I use that with unRaid and a simple router and switch and it's power efficient, doesn't make much noise, cheaper, and takes up much less room.
  • justinclift 3y ago
    > a standard PC tower will be more power efficient How much does it average in power draw (watts) from the wall?
    • NegativeK 3y ago
      I can't speak to if it's more or less efficient, but I have one PC taking backups that's running at 43W idle. A different PC based server, which is a much more highly specced retired desktop, is running at 72W idle.
      • justinclift 3y ago
        For standard PC's (ie with ATX based power supply) the 43W one seems pretty decent at idle. The small form factor gear though can have much more efficient power supplies, so some of those reportedly idle as low as 6w. That's total power draw at the wall. Much more efficient than a standard desktop PC. --- That aside, apparently that newer 12 volt power supply standard being pushed by Intel is good for lower power idle too. Hopefully that gains traction and reduces everyone's power bills. :) https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/intels-atx12vo-standard-a-study-in-increasing-computer-power-supply-efficiency/ https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/intels-atx12vo-standard-a-st...
• bovem 3y ago
  Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing. I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions. With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the world. The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save electricity costs. If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend setting up your own homelab. [1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ [2] https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/ [3] https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/
  • bazmattaz 3y ago
    Defo invest in a mini pc. I got a powerful HP elitedesk that sips 7w on idle and runs 38 containers
• MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  I get an electronics workbench or a woodworking workshop, but I still don’t quite understand the purpose of this „home lab“. You can just run stuff on your laptop, or a mini computer in some corner if it’s supposed to run 24/7?
  • glitchc 3y ago
    Looks like it's tailored for SRE-related hobbies.
  • AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
    It can be for fun or practical. Having access to ECC hardware is a big plus for some stuff so the server racks aren't all for show. It just depends on your goals.
  • justinclift 3y ago
    Yeah, it's the same kind of thing as running something 24/7 in a mini computer in some corner, but scaled up. It's fairly common for people that like to muck around with this stuff (or learn it for whatever purpose). Think of it like a hobby I guess. :)
  • zild3d 3y ago
    yeah was expecting/hoping for an electronics/hardware "lab" setup
  • petepete 3y ago
    Like with every hobby, YouTube and Reddit push people from having an interest in something to pursuing it to extreme lengths. Many people get so struck by gearlust they lose sight of what piqued their interest in the first place. I'm not immune, I don't think I'd have a Unifi setup at home if I hadn't seen the flashing lights and convinced myself I needed some.
• buybackoff 3y ago
  The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers with proper quiet fans, could fit 10G Mellanox 3 cards (also from eBay for $40), and you could stack one on top of another horizontally. Don't go older than OptiPlexes with 12th gen CPUs, electricity and space they take could become a constraint. The used ones with i5-12500 are already very cheap. With LGA1700 one could put i9-14900 (non-K) there if needed.
  • smallmancontrov 3y ago
    I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?
    • buybackoff 3y ago
      For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4, 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago. It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with them. No games of course. I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1 native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters there (2 slots), it works well with ZFS mirror.
      • Andrex 3y ago
        OptiPlex seemed to be the best option when I was browsing around.
    • jhickok 3y ago
      I think you could DIY that, but I found getting a few little PCs can be stuffed in a drawers with some holes drilled in the back. Haven't complained about suffocation yet! I bought some Bee-Link mini PCs with pretty impressive specs. No idea if I am now being spied on by China.
• haunter 3y ago
  >For this article’s purpose, I won’t recommend any specific servers because this will vary a ton depending on what you will be hosting. NAS storage, VMs, web servers, backup servers, mail servers, ad blockers, and all the rest. For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay. This is the way. HP, Lenovo, and Dell are all making identical small form factor PCs that are more than enough for most people at home. They are also very silent and power efficient. I have a Lenovo M720 Tiny and a Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro (they are virtually almost the same). You can change parts, there are ample ports available and you can pretty much run any OS you want.
  • laweijfmvo 3y ago
    > For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay. This deserves a shout out. These things are everywhere on eBay and they Ryzen ones rock.
  • Andrex 3y ago
    I've been pretty happy with the EliteDesk G3 I got off eBay a couple months ago. I actually use it for light work (mostly spreadsheets and emails) too. I think I paid less than $130 including shipping and sometimes it (anecdotally) has better performance than my home PC which is a full tower I bought new 4-5 years back.
    • bazmattaz 3y ago
      I love my G3. I found with a beefy i7 8 core cpu that sips 7w at idle. These machines are gold
• AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro. Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're working and using nix means all your system state is logged in git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes. Every change you've made, package you've installed, and setting you've configured is in the git log. I find myself referring to my git repo frequently as a source of documentation on what's installed and how the systems are set up.
  • eddieroger 3y ago
    I wish Nix had a shallower learning curve (or that I was smarter). It's been on my list of wishes to play with, but that list is long, and getting Nix over the hump hasn't been something I've been able to do yet. The concept makes sense to me, but when I see a new package or app I want to play with, I can get there with docker-compose and a VM more quickly than I can wrap my head around doing it in Nix.
    • AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
      If you get the base system up you don't have to exclusively use their containerization system. I have a mix of nix environments and k3s deployments that are saved off in another git repo. There are advantages to purity but practically speaking you can just do what's convenient.
    • JamesSwift 3y ago
      Its just a matter of repetition. It will eventually click if you go back enough times (at least it did for me after like 4 tries). The biggest thing to getting your mind adjusted to the syntax is to understand that nix is just 1 big JSON blob. All the syntax is there to facilitate merging/updating that ball of JSON in a deterministic way. You might try to generate your docker containers using nix as a first step. Not sure if it will be more approachable for you, but at least its 1 less new thing to adjust to.
    • haswell 3y ago
• zer00eyz 3y ago
  The whole home lab scene is great. Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people far outside the industry. I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures some of the magic of the early internet (at least for me).
  • AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
    The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is interesting to you.
    • zer00eyz 3y ago
      The home lab community is a very leaky abstraction ;) Serve the home, and level 1 on YouTube... It intersects with proxmox community, home assistant community, all the NAS distros... The spread out and over lapping nature of these groups really adds to the early internet vibe!
    • tills13 3y ago
      which lemmy instance / community do you recommend?
      • AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
        I like selfhosted@lemmy.world but there are probably plenty of others
    • bazmattaz 3y ago
      Absolutely. As a prolific Reddit user I have a a love hate relarelationship with the site but the home lab and self hosted communities have restored my faith in internet communities
• lolinder 3y ago
  As an alternative perspective, this is my home lab: * Location: Sitting on a shelf in my basement office. Ventilation is okay, the WiFi is fine but not great. * Hardware: An old PC I picked up at a neighborhood swap meet. I added some RAM taken from another old PC and bought a hard drive and WiFi card. * Software: Debian stable and podman/podman-compose. All my useful services are just folders with compose files. I use podman-compose to turn them into systemd units. If the stuff in the article is the kind of thing you're into, that's awesome, go ham! But you absolutely do not need to ever, and you certainly do not need to do it right away. I run a bunch of services that my family uses daily on this thing, and we use less than half the 16GB RAM and never get over 5% CPU usage on this old, ~free PC.
  • c-hendricks 3y ago
    Similar, my homelab is an old gaming rig shoved in a corner running a bunch of docker compose services via systemd.
  • SystemOut 3y ago
    This could almost be me. The main difference is my "server" is an off-lease Dell Micro PC that I maxed out the RAM on running ProxMox with a mix of VMs with everything stored on a Synology NAS all sitting in my basement office closet. I have tailscale setup so I can access it remotely.
    • kjkjadksj 3y ago
      I see this a lot with certain home labs. A ton of ram for vms. Why not just run on the metal?
      • drewzero1 3y ago
        Easier to mess with or reinstall OS remotely if you're not sitting in front of it, I'd imagine. Also can be easier to back up the whole system or take a snapshot of the system state, or nuke it and start over if you really screw it up. I've dabbled with VMs for test environments but generally just install on bare metal.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I'm older than 30 so I just call this having a home network and more than one computer. Why do I have a home network? Like many here, I develop network applications. I'm not a network technician, but being able to truly understand how the various components of the internet work, like TCP/IP, DNS etc., is really useful and sets me apart from many developers. I also just like being in control and having the flexibility to do what I want with my own network. Why do I have multiple computers? Playing with different operating systems etc. isn't really the reason as virtualisation is pretty good these days. It actually comes down to locality of the machines. I want my hard disks to be in a cupboard as they are quite noisy, but I want my screens and keyboard to be on a desk. So I've got a NAS in a cupboard and a (quiet) PC at my desk, plus a (silent) media centre in my living room and other stuff. One thing I would say is don't be tempted by rack mounted server gear. Yeah, it looks cool and you can get it second hand for not much, but this isn't suitable for your home. Use desktop PC cases with big fans instead. Rack mounted network gear is pretty cool, though.
  • cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    I built my home server with a 4RU case filled with desktop components. Thankfully 4RU seems tall enough to get fans large enough to be quite quiet. *Actual^ rack mounted equipment though? I highly recommend that anyone even remotely thinking of bringing this stuff home find some way to hear how bloody loud it is beforehand. I couldn’t imagine living with that.
  • marcus0x62 3y ago
    > One thing I would say is don't be tempted by rack mounted server gear. That depends on the server. Super Micro makes some rackmount servers that are shallow enough for a network cabinet/wall-mount rack and fairly low power. They also have a real OOB mgmt system, which can be really helpful. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/iot/1u/sys-510d-4c-fn6p https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/iot/1u/sys-510... I agree that typical deep-rackmount servers are more trouble than they are worth for a home lab.
    • simoncion 3y ago
• MrVitaliy 3y ago
  Surprised author didn't mention https://labgopher.com/ https://labgopher.com/ for finding used enterprise hardware at low cost on ebay. This hardware is cheap and typically out-of-service for enterprise, but great for home labs.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    The big problem with off-lease enterprise hardware is the power usage can quickly outrun the original costs - but that may not be an issue for everyone. The nice thing about off-lease enterprise hardware is there is so much of it, and it's enterprise. You can easily find replacement parts, and working on that stuff is a joy, everything is easily replaceable with no tools.
    • kjkjadksj 3y ago
      For the price of an 8th gen off lease pc on ebay you can buy a new alder lake N minipc with 6 tdp.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • hollerith 3y ago
        Some people even use an Alder-Lake-N miniPC as a "user-facing machine" (i.e., as the only computer in the room). I do, and I love it so far (after about 45 days of using it) because it doesn't have a fan to make noise and gradually become noisier as the machine ages. My guess is that if I was used to a much faster machine, then the machine's slowness would bother me, but it in fact does not bother me. (The machine has an NVMe interface, and I have a fast SSD in there. I have the N100 CPU because I couldn't find the N200 or the i3-N305 for immediate delivery from a non-Chinese manufacturer.)
    • mech422 3y ago
      THIS! My Dell and HP blade chassis/server EAT power (10+ Xeon blades). I actually shut them down and started moving to SBC based stuff like odriod H2/H3's. Basically silent and just sips power. All much less heat (I live in a desert, so thats important)! 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
• ellieh 3y ago
  Can we stop with all the "homelab in living room = divorce", "one less closet = unhappy wife" etc jokes? Reminds me of all the "so simple your <older female relative> could use it" comments on older tech product advertising. Just smells of yet more boys club humour that adds to the difficulty of including women in the hobby + industry. It's the small jokes that we're supposed to just quietly smile along with, as well as the big, that cause problems. Otherwise, nice post! I've had my homelab for years now and have been looking at expanding, definitely some things there I'll be looking at.
  • dijit 3y ago
    I agree, actually, but "wife-acceptance-factor"[0] (or; "wife approved") is useful terminology; I would love if there was some colloquially acceptable gender neutral term for that. Some have suggested some truly cumbersome terminology to replace it which is unfortunate because you very quickly run into the same problem the vegans have: If your choices are too unpalatable then reasonable people (who don't care or share your values 100%) will avoid them. You need to make the choice easier. (hence why a lot of Vegan focus right now is on having enjoyable alternative meals). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor EDIT: I'm not going to argue this because if you're reading my comment you've already decided whether you agree or not and you will not be productive to talk to. I will answer some common suggestions and why they're not reasonably sufficient and you can argue amongst yourselves about it. I'm not a sociologist or psychologist but I am human so take it with that lens. * Partner as a replacement for "wife" is unfortunately more syllables making it just a smidge more annoying to speak, so people won't; but it's the closest to what is intended and mentally equivalent for most people. As a bonus it even encompasses the unmarried! Partner is also (commonly) said lovingly so it doesn't create distance in the mind of the speaker. * Spouse is an uncommon enough word that it doesn't come to mind quickly enough; it also unfortunately comes across as unfamiliar (IE: not from a place of warm affection) and clinical. A good replacement term should be something endearing because it's important to point out that this isn't a term of derision, the true meaning behind the phrase is that they love their partner and want them to be happy. It's just a boomer-humour type joke to hide behind "because I dont want a divorce" or "I fear my wife", which is part of the supposed humour -- so it needs to feel familial and affectionate.
• jackallis 3y ago
  how/where can a complete noob learn all these skills to set something like this at home?
  • avidiax 3y ago
    The non-noobs also don't have all the skills. The main skill is being able to progress towards a goal even though you don't know how, by searching for others that have done similar things and adapting their instructions. Some starter goals: * Get a Raspberry Pi * Assemble the case for it, format the SD card, start the OS * Install PiHole & Tailscale * Setup Tailscale on your phone so that you can use PiHole on the go * Adjust your router so that most devices go through PiHole * Get a more powerful router or OpenWRT software for the router so that you can do hairpin NAT to reroute everything to the PiHole. * Attach a hard drive to your Raspberry Pi...
    • bombcar 3y ago
      Or just use whatever old piece of hardware you have laying around, cheap is decent, but free is gold.
  • michael_michael 3y ago
    I started a few months ago. Reddit's /r/homelab has lots of great resources, and you can get some good deals through /r/homelabsales, though the best deals usually go quickly. Like with learning a programming language, having a specific goal helps a lot. Reading other people's posts about their hardware, how they use it, and what problems they solved with their homelab can be a source of inspiration that sets you on the right path. Like others on this thread have said, while it's tempting to immediately dive into racks, patch cables and network diagrams, you can achieve A LOT with something simple like a small NAS or a NUC. Even a spare laptop that you can repurpose might be more than sufficient. Unless you're trying to simulate managing enterprise hardware (and I mean physically managing it), the greatest value lies in learning the software side of thing, IMHO.
  • meonkeys 3y ago
    First: try running just about anything from https://awesome-selfhosted.net https://awesome-selfhosted.net . Pick something useful to you. I chose Nextcloud and Jellyfin when I started in 2020. Before then I was running a few random things like Syncthing and Samba mostly just for myself. In 2020 I decided to try and apply a more thoughtful, disciplined process. Good security, reliable backups, useful for my whole family, etc. Shameless self-promotion: https://selfhostbook.com https://selfhostbook.com . My book covers justification for self-hosting, fundamental skills, and homelab (or perhaps "homeprod") setup with Ubuntu, Ansible, Docker, and Traefik. I wrote it for folks with some light sysadmin/programming skills. It's a good general starting starting point for self-hosting.
• irusensei 3y ago
  I have two 4GB rockpro64 with the NAS case on my closet. Each with an SSD raid. There are no fans in this setup and the SBCs don’t take much space. No heat either. More than happy with these, good uptime too. Tow-boot gives me an UEFI environment so I can use some normal distros so I use the latest Fedora server.
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Whats your raid setup with the ssds? I see 4tb ssd have marched down to $200. Would be nice to never hear spinning rust again.
    • irusensei 3y ago
      BTRFS raid1 for now. I’ll try to push for raid10 maybe by the end of the year since SSDs draw very little power. Device is finicky with sata adapters. I’m using some Marvell controllers at the moment.
• hajrice 3y ago
  Lovely guide
• jmakov 3y ago
  So running 24/7 and having no ECC is not a probl at all?
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Not ... really? https://www.klennet.com/notes/2022-11-25-zfs-and-ecc-rant.aspx https://www.klennet.com/notes/2022-11-25-zfs-and-ecc-rant.as... is a pretty good overview. ECC is "nice to have if you can get it cheap enough" but it is not a ride or die.
    • eisa01 3y ago
      > Whatever method you use to prevent tampering with your backups (e.g., when a cryptovirus silently corrupts your data) should catch the RAM problem too. If it does not, you need to change the method rather than rely on ECC RAM. > If your backup and recovery strategy relies on ZFS using ECC RAM, you should rework your backup strategy. After you do not need ECC RAM, you can buy it as a matter of convenience to save time troubleshooting and/or restoring from the backup. What's the solution the article alludes to?
  • buybackoff 3y ago
    If you buy non-mini machine with UDIMM, not SO-DIMM, some generic ECC DDR4 is very cheap, e.g. Kingston Server. Works well with Dell Precision Tower.
• tivert 3y ago
  > Attic > Pros: Less noise, easier cable runs. > Cons: can get hot depending on where you live, roof leaks, humidity/condensation, and creepy at night. Where do attics not get hot? I live in northern climate, and ours regularly gets hotter than 140F during sunny summer days. And I say hotter, because the remote temp sensor I have up there maxes out at 140F. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually gets up to 150F or more.
  • zeroping 3y ago
    My attic is insulated at the roof sheathing, not the ceiling. My attic is basically 'inside' the house, from an airflow perspective. It peaks around 87°F in late June. Not ideal, but workable.
  • tills13 3y ago
    Conditioned attics are the new rage. Once it's conditioned, you can move other mechanical devices up there like HVAC etc to reduce the amount of ducting your home needs (especially if it's single-story). It's nice because that loose, shredded insulation is garbage and so easy to mess up (walking on it can change it from R40 to R20, for example). With a conditioned attic you use standard batting in between the roof members -- impossible to mess up.
    • duped 3y ago
      Sounds like a nightmare for your energy bills. At least with interior ductwork the losses go to heating/cooling your home instead of your attic, which even with insulation is going to act like a giant heatsink that you get nothing out of.
      • tills13 3y ago
        I don't think so -- you _are_ paying to condition that part of your house, sure, but it becomes just another part of the overall envelope and acts like a buffer between the weather and the actually livable parts of your home. Anecdotally, in my home in the summer months, when unconditioned the attic is 50 degrees on a summer day it literally radiates heat down through the ceiling on the floor below into the rooms there. The attic acts like a heat battery -- long after the sun goes down the attic is radiating heat into the upper floors of my house. Not sure why it retains heat so well it's got louvres and vents ...
• runjake 3y ago
  If you're old and grumpy[1] and don't want a homelab but paradoxically want homelab functionality, I can't recommend the Firewalla[2] enough. And heck, it would fit right into a homelab situation, as well. It allows you to go deep into settings and configure anything to your heart's content. But, if you want to ignore it for a year and not mess with it, it will run as smoothly as an Eero or a similar consumer product like that. I have a Purple model[3]. I initially balked at the price, but it performs well, and there hasn't been a single day in the past couple years where I've regretted it or looked at something else. It supports just about any router feature. Has robust and easy to configure device/family profiles. The quality of the Firewalla software and the mobile app is excellent. --- 1. I manage a quite large WAN during the day. I don't want to do it at night, too. 2. https://firewalla.com/ https://firewalla.com/ 3. https://firewalla.com/products/firewalla-purple https://firewalla.com/products/firewalla-purple
  • kmos17 3y ago
    I've seen it mentionned on hn before and was intrigued as a replacement/simpler solution to a home pfsense setup. It seems there are issues with it though: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewalla/comments/18wvlqa/steer_clear_of_firewalla_purple/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firewalla/comments/18wvlqa/steer_cl... The software is open source apparently? https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla Anyone running this on their own hardware? Or in a VM homelab :) ?
• FredPret 3y ago
  It'd be so cool if we could have permanent routable IPv6 addresses for every machine. Home Labs would become 1000x more useful, and I bet Digital Ocean and similar would see an exodus of small site hosters like me
• NelsonMinar 3y ago
  A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever) system. It's a huge pain. Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high availability, etc. But now I'm starting to split off services into their own containers and it's just so tidy!
  • 2024throwaway 3y ago
    How exactly does running a VM in proxmox give you high availability?
    • karolist 3y ago
      It doesn't on its own but it simplifies things hard to roll by hand that does, like observation nodes, consensus algorithms, Ceph storage, live migrations etc.
    • astockwell 3y ago
      Some defense against the class(es) of availability problems that occur from OS + upwards. No defense against the class(es) that occur below that (metal).
    • wutwutwat 3y ago
      Proxmox comes with baked in support for live vm migration[0], high availability[1] and clustering support[2] if you run multiple host nodes. I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to 0: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_migration https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_mig... & https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_guest_migration https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_guest... 1: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_how_it_works_2 https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_how_i... 2: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_pvecm https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapte...
  • 3y ago
• GabeIsko 3y ago
  If someone made a UPC in the form factor of a laptop battery, we could be off to the races. I thought a laptop battery would be good for this, but they do bad things if you leave them plugged in all the time. No reason to go crazy with your home server if it is only you using it. You can get away with a crappy laptop that your roommate is done with.
  • PKop 3y ago
    So what should you do, remove the battery on these laptop servers?
    • GabeIsko 3y ago
      Yeah, especially after a few years. Perhaps there is a way to get it to charge and discharge reccurringly, but that would probably take some extra hardware.
• antivir 3y ago
  [dead]
• jrm4 3y ago
  At the risk of yucking others' yum; I wish there was more of an effort to get people to do this sort of thing without buying new equipment (including perhaps the reduction of of the idea that you need/want a "rack") There are just SO MANY perfectly good computers that are bound to be e-waste that would be good for this.
  • ashtonian5 3y ago
    Most people don't buy "new" hardware. Power efficiency has changed drastically to a point anything before ~2016 is not worth plugging into the wall, and sata to NVME drastically improve responsiveness which didn't become the base standard until 2018ish. Most people use an old desktop or buy old server equipment on ebay.
    • mech422 3y ago
      Yeah - Old EBay server equipment can be had for like $200/node and will burn at least that much in electricity every year :-/ Also, the noise is hellacious! Old laptops / desktops can be better - especially since you can get newer/more power efficient units without all the noise. But I started moving to even smaller SBC based stuff (0) 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
• kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I’m trying to come up with the best 3/2/1 solution for me. Two forms of storage seems bizzare, are people really backing up to tapes? What does that workflow even look like? What about your offsite? Backblaze b2 seems expensive compared to backing up on a big external drive off site at my desk at work.
  • madphilosopher 3y ago
    I rotate two 8 TB USB hard drives between home and my locker at work, every month or two. Full-disk encrypted, of course. This covers my entire system and media files. For /etc and my source code repositories, I use restic and cloud storage, because this data is small (< 1 GB). (Also, I'm on rural internet, which is metered and slow. So I can't use cloud backup for the big stuff.) The whole system is not quite 3/2/1, but it's close enough for me.
• apexalpha 3y ago
  This looks really cool, but the title has to be a joke right? This is not 'beginner'. I have a beginner setup: a single NUC and a cheap NAS with NFS. I have yet to come across something that this setup cannot handle.
  • lotsoweiners 3y ago
    My setup is even more beginner. I have an old Elitedesk running Windows with some external hard drives for extra media storage.
• ashtonian5 3y ago
  I have a lab, and I had a lot of configuration state that was annoying to maintain and fragile. I switched to vmug because it has a semi decent terraform provider and I now put most things in TF. TF to bootstrap vms + rke cluster. TF to deploy helm charts. Still some per app config/backups to mange but I just copy container volumes to all the machines in the cluster with the csi plugin and then back everything up to zfs nas via truenas on NFS. Runs primarily on 3 dell rx30 series, and then my desktop and htpc are also in vsphere running gpu centric things when I'm not gaming with them. Vmug is pretty perfect for this -> $180/yr = 16 or 36 physcial sockets.
• justinlloyd 3y ago
  The notion of a homelab is really, more of a suggestion. I have, what you might call, a "homeprod." "Be aware, the video server and sync server will be offline between the hours of 8PM and 10PM on Friday, March 8th for hardware upgrades. Expected downtime should not be more than 20 minutes but please plan around this disruption to essential services. Other services should not be affected during this work." Like someone else mentioned in this thread: It was really best described as a "home network with more than one computer." But you can't really put that on your C.V. under "experience." "Improved SLA uptime on client's network to five nines. Upgraded storage controllers in a live environment without disruption to established services. Deployed k8s cluster into a production environment serving thousands of hours of compressed video files with real-time format transcoding." I will freely admit, my home network probably needs to be pared down a bit. The problem is the salvaged hardware and good deals at the liquidation auctions accumulates faster than I can cart it off to the street corner. There's also far too many laptops floating around the house doing nothing useful that could be donated away. A lot of the homelab is salvage or bought at (in-person) liquidation auctions. There's some new stuff, but I rarely need the latest and greatest for my setup. In my home network diagram I try to document everything that touches the network so I can stay on top of the security patches, and what has access to the outside world and in what way. https://justinlloyd.li/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/home-network-2023-11-13-v3.drawio.png https://justinlloyd.li/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/home-netwo...
• tonymet 3y ago
  I'll go against the grain and recommend running your lab on Windows 11 Pro and Hyper V (often included with reclaimed PCs). Hyper-V is a very capable hypervisor and Windows hardware compatibility is excellent. Remote mgmt can be done over RDP, SSH or WMI Nearly everyone has a spare PC lying around collecting dust, and within an hour it can be running a dozen VMs . Reclaimed HP & Dells are cheap and include a Windows Pro license. otherwise they can be had for $20 I recommend Alpine for the guest OS. It's fast to set up, natively supports Hyper-V hosts and compact (about 1/10th the size of a debian guest). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/best-practices-for-running-linux-on-hyper-v https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualizat... https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Hyper-V_guest_services https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Hyper-V_guest_services
  • buybackoff 3y ago
    You could use this built-in OEM license from a Windows VM in Proxmox. Just search for that on Proxmox forum. Hyper-V is very limited in hardware support, you won't be able to pass-through stuff. And you always pay for VM layer, while in Proxmox you could use containers which give almost the host performance.
    • tonymet 3y ago
      that's changed in recent years. you now have access to hardware and the gpu for inference, for example.
      • buybackoff 3y ago
        Maybe in the Server version. I haven't seen anything useful in Windows Pro. I could not setup SR-IOV even with Powershell after wasting a lot of time on searching for help.
    • haunter 3y ago
      Hyper V Server 2019 (not the same as Hyper V inside Win 10/11) is free and has GPU pass through https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/deploy/deploying-graphics-devices-using-dda https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualizat... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...
• treflop 3y ago
  I run a more mundane setup using the most possible boring choices (lol) and it's been reliable. I occasionally restart random things and pull network cables to fuck with it to make sure that it can recover. * Hardware: A regular but small (SFF) computer + Synology NAS * Software: Ubuntu distro + Docker containers bare * Configuration: Git-versioned Dockerfiles and docker-compose.ymls * Storage: The NAS with Synology Hybrid RAID * Backup: TBD... haven't figured out a cheap and automatic way to backup 20 TB of data off-site I run cameras, a media server shared with friends, a shared place to dump project files, a DNS server (just in case the Internet goes down so that everything local still works) and supporting services.
• lloeki 3y ago
  > Location For a few years I put mine inside an IKEA FRIHETEN sofa (the kind that just pulls†). Pros: - easy access - completely invisible save for 1 power wire + 1 fiber (WAN) + 1 eth (LAN)†† - structure allows easy cable routing out (worst case you punch a hole on the thin low-end) - easy layout/cable routing inside - noise reduction for free - doubles as warming in winter a seated butt is never cold - spouse enjoys zero blinkenlights - spouse didn't even notice I bought a UPS + a disk bay Cons: - a bit uncomfortable to manipulate things inside - vibrations (as in, spinning rust may not like it) when sitting/seated/opening/closing - heat (was surprisingly OK, not worse than a closet) - accidental spillage risks (but mostly OK as design makes it flow around, not inside the container, worst case: put some raisers under hardware) - accidental wire pull e.g when unsuspecting spouse is moving furniture around for housecleaning (give'em some slack) † https://www.ikea.com/us/en/images/products/friheten-sleeper-sofa-skiftebo-dark-gray__0829146_pe644659_s5.jpg?f=xxl https://www.ikea.com/us/en/images/products/friheten-sleeper-... †† that I conveniently routed to a corner in the back then hidden in the wall to the nearest plugs, so really invisible in practice.
  • neilv 3y ago
    I had a similar thought about the IKEA KIVIK sofa (non-sleeper variants), which has wide boxy armrests that are open to the underside, and could fit towers of little SFF PCs, or maybe rackmount gear sideways. There's also space underneath the seat, where rackmount gear could fit. One of the reasons I didn't do this was I didn't want a fire with sofa fuel right above/around it. I wasn't concerned about the servers, but a bit about the UPS. Sheet metal lining of the area, with good venting if the UPS battery type could leak gases, I'd feel a bit better about, but too much work. So the gear ended up away from upholstery, in rack/shelving, where I could keep an eye on it.
  • jcul 3y ago
    This is amazing. Do you have an actual photo with your servers inside or anything? I would be really worried about ventilation and heat / fire risk. Reminds me of the lack rack. https://archive.is/Uf2k3 https://archive.is/Uf2k3
• neilv 3y ago
  If your homelab gear is in a non-tech-nerd living space, also think about noise, lights/displays, and otherwise being discreet. As an apartment-dweller, for a long time I had it in a closet. Once I moved it to living room, my solutions included: * For discreet, IKEA CORRAS cabinet that matched my other furniture. I had rackmount posts in it before, but got rid of them because they protruded. * For noise, going with gear that's either fanless, or can be cooled with a small number of Noctua fans. (I also replace the fans in 1U PSUs with Noctuas, which requires a little soldering and cursing.) I tend to end up with Atom servers that can run fanless in a non-datacenter except for the PSU. * Also for noise, since my only non-silent server right now is the 3090 GPU server, I make that one spin up on demand. In this case, I have a command I can run from my laptop to Wake-on-LAN. But you could also use IPMI, kludge something with a PDU or IoT power outlet, find a way to spin down the 3090 and fans in software, make Kubernetes automate it, etc. * For lights, covering too-bright indicator LEDs with white labelmaker tape works well, and looks better than you'd think. Black labelmaker tape for lights you don't need to see. * For console, I like the discreet slide-out rack consoles, especially the vintage IBM ones with the TrackPoint keyboards. If I was going to have a monitoring display in my living room, I'd at least put the keyboard in a slide-out drawer. * I also get rid of gear I don't need, or I'd need more than twice the rack space I currently have, and it would be harder to pass as possibly audiophile gear in the living room. * For an apartment, if you don't want to play with the router right now (just servers), consider a plastic OpenWRT router. It can replace a few rack units of gear (router, switch, patch panel), and maybe you don't even need external WiFi APs and cabling to them.
  • hedgehog0 3y ago
    I’m a math grad student and want to play with LLMs as well, so I have been thinking about getting a 3060 or 3090, due to budget. However, I’m using a MacBook Pro from 2011, thus not very convenient for these kinds of things. What do you think the lowest budget or spending that I should have, given my “requirement”? Or would you say that vast.ai or similar websites would suffice?
    • neilv 3y ago
      You might try to find forums where people are doing the kind of LLM work you want to do, and see what they're recommending for how to do that work. Personally, for my changing needs, my GPU server is already on its 4th GPU, after I kept finding I needed more VRAM for various purposes. The RTX 3090 seems to be a sweet spot right now, and my next upgrade right now would probably be a 2nd 3090 with NVLink, or some affordable older datacenter/workstation GPU with even more VRAM. Other than the GPU, you just need an ordinary PC with an unusually big PSU, maybe a big HDD/SSD (for data), and maybe a lot of RAM (for some model loading that can't just stream it). https://www.neilvandyke.org/machine-learning/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/machine-learning/
• nodesocket 3y ago
  I'll add a #protip about UPS. Instead of getting Cyberpower or APC, I recently picked up a EcoFlow River 2 Pro[1] (portable power station). It has 768Wh capacity and 800W output and pass through charging. Crucially, it switches fast enough to not cause any outage to any of my gear (Ubiquiti, HP Proliant, Raspberry Pi, Synology). As a bonus, you also get the ability to do solar charging and USB power outlets. [1] https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-station?variant=40563653378121 https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
• gorkish 3y ago
  IMO one of the biggest frustration I currently have with homelab-scale gear (and edge compute in general) is how everything has massively regressed to only offering 2.5gbit connectivity at best. Try to find one of these hundreds of small form factor products that has anything faster than a 2.5Gbit nic and despair! What good are these machines if you cant even get data in and out of them?! The list of hardware with 2x10GBe or better connectivity is amazingly short: - Minisforum MS-01 - GoWin RS86S*, GW-BS-1U-* - Quotom Q20331G\* From major manufacturers, only the following: - Mac Mini (1x10gbaseT option, ARM, ) - HPE Z2 Mini\* (1x10GbaseT option) Please someone, anyone, build a SFF box with the following specs: Minimum of 2 NVMe Minimum of 2 additional storage devices (SATA or more NVMe) Minimum of 2 10GbE Dedicated or shared IMPI/OOBM Minimum of 8 Core x86 CPU Minimum of 64GB RAM Make sure the nics have enough PCIe lanes to hit their throughput limits, give the rest to storage. Stop with the proliferation of USB and thunderbolt and 5 display outputs on these things, please already!
  • Borealid 3y ago
    I understand that more is better in some sense, but why the emphasis on having two (2) 10GbE instead of one for a single device that isn't a router? What's the second link for? Just more bandwidth, or is there some crucial use case I'm missing?
    • gorkish 3y ago
      In my experience, a second nic is important to build anything with resilience; it's not just for routing. I see it as the most important hardware to "double up" on. If you are building a small cluster, for instance, you generally want to have one interface for the backend interconnect and one interface for client traffic. Or maybe you want to be able to upgrade or change your networking without taking traffic offline -- you'll need two physical connections for that, too. Of course you can still build routers and everything with a single interface (which is why I noted the single port hardware in the first place), but if you are going to design something specific to the mini-server market, the cost difference between a single port and dual port controller is negligible enough that there's no reason not to include 2 or even 4 ports. The GoWin machines simply toss in an OCP nic slot and call it a day. That would be a fantastic solution to see adopted by other vendors.
• jprd 3y ago
  I have an obscene amount of retired Chromeboxen that I have flashed with Mr.Chromebox[0] EFI and running as either K8s, Proxmox or independent Linux/Windows nodes at any given time. These are mostly 1st-gen i7-4600U Haswell's, upgraded to 16GB RAM and 128G+ SSDs. I ripped them out of their cases, added heatsinks to the new SSDs, and then "racked" them by wedging the front-bottom mainboard corner (if plugs are oriented to the rear and the heaviest plug, AC, at the rear-bottom for balance) into a slotted piece of super-strong and right-angled cardboard that came from inside some re-inforced shipping box (I think it was an X-mas tree). I assembled all of this juuuuuuust before COVID while learning K8s and craving the physical plan aspect, as I had just transitioned to a remote SaaS role from one that involved multiple physical DCs and travel. My "go small lab" initiative turned into some sort of Tribble fable. [0] https://mrchromebox.tech/ https://mrchromebox.tech/
• blauditore 3y ago
  I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is: Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common production servers? Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e. what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is not too critical for most applications and devs. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of building stuff like this, and will always be able to find an excuse to do it anyway. :)
  • optimal-choices 3y ago
    It's a hobby. It doesn't need to have a point. It's kind of like playing games - it doesn't need to have a point, but it's enjoyable, and you get a community out of it.
  • jll29 3y ago
    It's a server, so the goal is to have it run something you care about (whatever that may be) 24/7, not because you cannot live without it, but to get experience with administrating a server. In contrast, your dev machine may need to be rebooted any time, or switched off if you leave for the weekend. A second defining characteristic of a homelab is that part of the rationale for owning it is in order to tinker with it, to try out new software packages, to play with tools & concepts (VMs, containers, admin and remote admin tools, KVMs). Ultimately, you may define a homelab as a "physical server setup for learning and for running personal services". Homelab operators may also take pride of the independence from large IT or cloud providers attained by operating their lab.
  • jmbwell 3y ago
    Yeah, what exactly is Lego? Painting? Playing music? Model railroad? Ham radio? It’s a place to learn while playing pretend. LARPing enterprise IT if you like. Why wonder what the point is?
  • Havoc 3y ago
    >what exactly a home lab Its murky because there is a bit of backstory. There used to be a homeserver subreddit. The people running commercial heavy rack servers got fed up with the peasants and created homelab sub. Then overall quality & vibe in homeserver sub dipped so everyone migrated over to homelab. So now you've got everything under the sun that is at home and switched on 24/7 being called a "homelab". Leading understandably to people being confused about the term >What is the point of a home lab People do it for different reasons - "own your own data", learning (IaC/docker/kubernetes/networking). It's also quite empowering for experimentation. Most of these setups are running hypervisors. So creating a VM is a 20 second affair. That sort of blank slate is useful to me for dev work. Local gitlab server, local CI runners, local kubernetes cluster, postgres server. It's all there, free, fast, accessible and ignoring initial layout effectively free.
• bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  "safely fail" what's wrong with just taking my laptop and do my experiments there? Why is a "lab" needed?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nullify88 3y ago
  Alternatively, If you don't fancy patching your own cables you can get female to female RJ45 keystone jacks which use plugged / crimped cables. The longer cable run is plugged in behind the patch panel, and a shorter cable in front to keep your cabinet or rack clean.
• ardaoweo 3y ago
  Tiny PC's make excellent low-power servers for lots of purposes, but personally in the end I just decided to build my own desktop PC from cheapish previous gen parts to have more flexibility. Now I have an AM4 consumer board based system with 8 core Ryzen 7, more ECC ram than I will ever need, 4 enterprise grade SSD's with ZFS, intel NIC, and RTX 3060 for some AI experimentation. Thanks to efficient PSU choice the whole thing idles at just 30W running Linux, about 10 of which is due to the dedicated GPU. I should be even able to game on it through GPU passthrough to Proxmox VM, though I haven't tried it yet. For networking I can recommend Fujitsu Futro S920 thin clients, especially for EU users. They are dirt cheap here, and with aftermarket riser & intel NIC they are great routers with opnsense/pfsense. Apart from that, I have a couple of raspberry pi's running dedicated tasks, and space heaters (e-waste tier enterprise desktops) running BOINC during coldest months.
• isopede 3y ago
  I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys: - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep it up to date over time. Is there a good tool to draw, document, and keep up-to-date diagrams of my infra? - Backup and upgrading is also a persistent problem for me. I will often set up a container, come back to it 6 months later, and have no idea what I did. I have dozens of containers scattered across different machines (NUCs, NAS, desktops, servers, etc). Every container service feels like it has its own convention for where the bind mounts need to go, what user it should be run as, what permissions etc it needs. I can't keep track of it all in my head, especially after the fact. I just want to be able to hit backup, restore, and upgrade on some centralized interface. It makes me miss the old cattle days with VM clone/snapshot. I still have a few VMs running on a proxmox machine that is sort of close, but nothing like that for the entire home lab. I really want to get to a point, or at least move towards a solution where I could in theory, torch my house and do a full disaster recovery restore of my entire setup. There has to be something simpler than going full kubernetes to manage a home setup. What do you guys use?
  • rlabrecque 3y ago
    I think the core problem you have is a lack of consistency. I'd try to trim down the number of different types of device/deployment methods/etc you have. It's too hard to scale wide as a single person or two, but you can go very deep in one stack and both know it very well and also get into a spot where it's kind of like either everything works or nothing works if it's all exactly the same, which means ultimately everything will have to work well.
  • steveh777 3y ago
    I just use Ansible to "orchestrate" the containers. I only run one of each, configured to restart on fail, so I don't need anything smarter than that.
  • tegiddrone 3y ago
• eemil 3y ago
  > For my home lab, I won’t be needing CAT8 or CAT7 anytime soon Has anyone ever needed CAT7 (or better)? CAT6 works for 10 GBit at a short distance, but in my experience (in corporate IT) I've literally never seen a 10 GBit Ethernet port! SFPs are the shit, direct attach SFPs are cheap as chips and fiber ones aren't even that expensive anymore. And of course fiber will handily beat twisted pair in signal integrity at any distance.
• hardwaresofton 3y ago
  Shameless plug, but if you're looking for awesome software to run in your home lab, I've got just the thing: https://awsmfoss.com https://awsmfoss.com The quality of software out there these days is insane -- there are projects that cover so many crucial functions (tracking expenses, playing music, managing data, etc), that it's becoming really hard to track them all. I've been working on converting the site to a directory and it's not quite there yet -- but some people do like the massive wall of projects.
• Andrex 3y ago
  This article has such a focus on hardware, when that's like... 1% of my homelab decision making. Was hoping this article would delve into hosting your own email, websites and services and the steps to expose them to the public internet (as well as all the requisite security considerations needed for such things). A homelab is just a normal PC unless you're doing homelab stuff.
  • Shawnecy 3y ago
    This is always my area of interest, and I rarely see it covered. Maybe all the people who do it just understand it so well that's it just an after thought for them? I've tried on numerous occasions to host my own services at home and use dynamic DNS to map to an IP, but when things don't work, it's hard to know if it's the hardware (consumer modems, routers, etc.), dirty ISPs who want to force you into a business tier to open up anything, some combination of the two, or something else altogether. Are the problems so one-off and specific that they all require bespoke problem-solving? I would love it if anyone could share foolproof resources on the subject.
    • treflop 3y ago
      I think it is because most of those things are just regular sysadmin things and homelab more refers to setting up hardware or software that you wouldn’t normally find at work. As for your actual problem, a lot of ports are blocked by ISPs because a LOT of computer worms have used them to spread malware in the past. However you usually can test to see if the port is open as well as try alternative uncommon ports like 47364 to see if they work. Some ISPs, although I believe mostly mobile ones, also use something called CGNAT where your Internet IP is actually an internal network IP within a part of the ISP, and you can usually test for this by checking if your IP is in a private range.
    • bazmattaz 3y ago
      Did you try r/self hosted on Reddit. Thats where you’ll get support for something like that
  • gassiss 3y ago
• bowsamic 3y ago
  It’s completely unclear to me from the post or comments here what a homelab is actually for
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Dig1t 3y ago
  >That said, be careful with the power consumption! You don’t want to end up with… mortgage of $1,100, a power bill of $1,200, the feeling when walking into your home lab… NOT priceless. This is the biggest thing for me, I would love to have a big fancy lab setup at home, but when you start adding up the power consumption and put a monthly dollar amount to it, then it becomes less exciting. Especially if you live somewhere like California where home electricity bills are incredibly high nowadays, it is extra painful. There are some low-power setups that are great, but it seems like once you start using rack-mounted equipment, the machines get more power-hungry.
• tanelpoder 3y ago
  I recently bought an old Mac Pro 2013 (trashcan) with 12 cores/24 threads and 128 GB ECC RAM for my upgraded "always-on" machine - total cost $500. Installed Ubuntu 22.04, works out of the box (23.10 had some issues). Unfortunately it's hard/impossible to completely suspend/disable the two internal AMD Radeon GPUs to lower power consumption. I got it down to ~99W consumption when idle, when using "vgaswitcheroo" to suspend one of the GPUs (and it set the other one to D3hot state). My Intel NUC consumes almost nothing when idle (my UPS reports 0 W output while its running, even with 4 NVMe disks attached via a Thunderbolt enclosure). I don't want a 100W heat generator running 24x7, especially when I'm away from home, so will need to stick with the NUC...
  • buybackoff 3y ago
    GPUs are bad with power. My RTX 3060 still consumes around 20W doing nothing, no display or real load whatsoever. More than the rest combined when idle. I wanted to sell the entire box, but made that machine on-demand (it's mostly off). It's also noisy for it's relatively powerful overall. Yes, NUCs are great for 24/7 and light/spiky loads.
• andix 3y ago
  My "home lab" is a raspberry pi 4 and a few more devices thrown into a drawer. Not pretty (especially the gordian cable knot), but it works.
• albertzeyer 3y ago
  It's linked there, but I found this interesting: To get some more inspiration, visit: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/ My "homelab" for now is a single Raspberry Pi (I want it silent and not take much power when idling). But from there, I can power-on my desktop, via wakeonlan.
• Jun8 3y ago
  There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SW project guides you know?
  • gomoboo 3y ago
    I’m running a scraper for Dune movie tickets on mine. Before that I didn’t really have anything to do on it besides learning about Proxmox, VMs, networking, and cloud-init. Maybe try to run something you’d usually spin up a VPS for.
  • NortySpock 3y ago
    Admittedly, it makes way more sense once you have more than one person in your household. I ended up running most things in docker on a Raspberry Pi 4. Started with - PiHole to cut down on ads and try to keep the kids from clicking malware links - added network attached storage to make it easier to share files with the family - added Jellyfin to share music with people in the house (kids gotta grow up listening to good music) - added syncthing to be able to ditch dropbox and still keep multiple computer file folders synced - ran a Minecraft server, then a Terraria server, then shut those down since we moved on to other games - turned on an ntp server since ddwrt router wasn't getting the time from the internet reliably - added librespeed and ittools for quick wifi-speed-testing and to convert docker-run commands to docker-compose commands - needed a webpage with links to start keeping track of all of this, so lighttpd it is... - smokeping and blip were fired up when the internet got flaky and I needed more data to explain to the ISP what I was seeing - Got a 3D printer, and Octoprint made it easy to start and monitor prints without having to pull a microSD card out of the socket every time. - Figured, while we're here, that I might as well explore the smart-home thing with HomeAssistant -- now we have a handful of lightbulbs and smart power switches that mean you don't have to get up to change the lights quite as often (not everything is on a smart control, just a few out-of-the-way things. Oh, yeah, handy during Christmas-time to turn the tree lights on and off without having to fumble behind the tree for the little switch.) - That, of course, lead to an MQTT broker (mosquitto), which is kind of a budget pub-sub broker - And now that I have docker logs with things I need to debug, Dozzle serves those logs in a handy webpage. Not secure, but it's not like this is enterprise server. - Then I wanted to play around with timeseries data (just to learn), so (running out of RAM at this point, so I couldn't just fire up Grafana) kept digging until I found VictoriaMetrics, which was quite happy to catch metrics (fired at it from Benthos) and visualize some 3 years of hourly Beijing weather data. (Seriously, I'm still amazed how lightweight, simple, and easy to use VictoriaMetrics is) - currently thinking of kicking the tires on the NATS message broker and see if I can get the multi-node clustering to work. No real purpose other than see what it's like and dream about silly developer projects. - also thinking of exploring SeaweedFS -- might be nice to have horizontally scalable storage, as each of my nodes are scattered around the house depending on where I can put an Ethernet drop. - after a few years going along this journey, it has the perk of having helped me get my current job, which is pretty cool. So... it's mostly a plaything, a sandbox, but a handful of things run "in production" at home and make life around the house slightly more convenient and less risky. By being choosy with the software and a bit aggressive on the container RAM limits, I've got 27 containers running on a Raspberry Pi. Hey, gotta take my bragging rights somewhere.
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  I'll toss mine out there. A single computer. Ryzen 1700 with 128GB RAM, six or seven disks totalling 20TB storage or so. SSD for VM images. Proxmox for OS, on a UPS. I have one of those SoC Intel boxes with 4x2.5Gb LAN running proxmox, running OPNsense for my router. I had to get a fan to keep it from overheating. Proxmox is a great SDN/VM host and I haven't fully explored monitoring and automating it.
• rpigab 3y ago
  Do you have easy ways to monitor power usage on any power plug over time, without needing to check out a display on the plug or to install some shady chinese Android app? I have a nice used Dell Poweredge T320 with a single Xeon E5-2428L that's been running on only an SSD (and then a raid 1 of 3.5" HDDs) for over 8 years, but electricity prices are rising and I wish I could measure it precisely, idle and under load.
  • jasomill 3y ago
    While no broken out per plug, APC UPS network management cards provide total power output data (current, voltage, frequency, power) via SNMP, which you can log using a wide variety of tools. And even without external tools, historical power usage logs are available via the APC Web UI. While I don't currently log anything externally, I use an xbar[1] script[2] to display UPS output current in my Mac menu bar. [1] https://xbarapp.com https://xbarapp.com [2] https://jasomill.at/apc-nmc-status.5s.sh https://jasomill.at/apc-nmc-status.5s.sh
• _huayra_ 3y ago
  One bit of guidance I've been trying to figure out is this: how does one properly segment one's homelab to be able to firewall potentially dangerous stuff (e.g. IoT gear, hosting publicly-available websites via Cloudflare tunnels or something, all while running on the usual "virtualize all workloads" thing with Docker/Proxmox, etc)? The best I've come up with so far is segmentation via VLANs, then adding many rules to deal with inter-VLAN reachability (e.g. should it be forced to transit to the firewall and back? Can my laptop reach out to the IoT devices, even if I block connections in the reverse direction?). Beyond this, I'm not sure how to best handle similar segmentation on my few servers (all running proxmox), e.g. whether to expose VLANs to the VMs (which I kinda need to do for the pfsense firewall, maybe?). The biggest thing is how to keep these network configs in sync, e.g. when adding a new VLAN, etc. I basically have an Org file that I write all this down, but I'm guessing there's a better way. Also, if anyone wants a cheaper alternative to Ubiquiti, Mikrotik has served me well for years. I'm considering switching to Ubiquiti stuff though, as they seem to have a solution to synchronize state between multiple switches that is much better (vs. manually using Winbox on each individual router).
• mtmk 3y ago
  > ...or in a cardboard box When I saw the picture of the server mounted in a cardboard box, my first thought was about fire hazards. It turns out that might not be as big an issue as I initially thought, since paper won't spontaneously catch fire until reaching ~200C [1], and the operating temperatures of computers generally shouldn't exceed 100C. However, I'd still be a little wary about a cardboard setup, considering the potential for electrical faults, the heat generated by power supplies and the risk of inadequate ventilation leading to hotspots. These factors could present a significant fire risk. My initial judgment of the setup may have been too quick but not entirely unfounded I guess! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature