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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 m

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.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > …I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet? Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on my QNAP. The TBS-h574TX (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280 SATA SSD slots (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx), and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any NAS.
  - buybackoff 3y ago
    It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports natively, with all goodies such as SMART.
    - znpy 3y ago
      If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.
      - belthesar 3y ago
        Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option. I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always eventually do, my home lab has become production, and being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. I've been agonizing and going back and forth between various potential solutions for this for a couple months now, with the most recent attempt being "Deploy k3s, with a fully separate control plane from the worker nodes, and run all of those atop a Proxmox cluster because being able to migrate VMs across nodes and also stand up isolated workloads to test out other solutions makes changing things in the future far less risky". That said, I was running the Homelab on effectively a single Unraid hyperconverged NAS/compute layer before then, and that worked wonders for quite a long time. I wouldn't consider Unraid my first choice now, given the advancements in TrueNAS SCALE in the time since I chose it as the solution, but the concept of NAS + Container Orchestrator as hyperconverged homelab today is quite attractive.
- natebc 3y ago
  Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
  - jay-saint 3y ago
    After massively overthinking things for my homelab / firewall, I am ordering one this weekend, just deciding which cpu.
  - buybackoff 3y ago
    It's a mobile CPU (with H). Unless it's fanless it will sound like a rocket lunch. Or it will be thermal-throttled with any sustained load. And it looks too expensive.
- unregistereddev 3y ago
  There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/ https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/
  - buybackoff 3y ago
    The cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, but for NVMe 4.0 more is needed.
- justinclift 3y ago
  For the "bunch of NVMe slots", the OWC PCIe NVMe adapters look interesting: * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 (4x NVMe drives) * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 (8x NVMe drives) I'd personally get them without drives included, as the OWC drives seem pretty expensive.
cybrox 3y ago
In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to NAS and multiple Raspberry Pi's on a shelf and I really like the mess and have learned a lot. Just use what you have and expand as you need. Racks are cool once you're into the hobby enough to care about style points.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains. Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed servers.
  - mech422 3y ago
    The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.
    - blackfawn 3y ago
      Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them. I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.
thethindev 3y ago
I actually did just that and setup my homelab with my "old" laptop [1]. [1] https://thin.computer/index.php/2024/03/08/self-hosting-my-server-from-my-room/ https://thin.computer/index.php/2024/03/08/self-hosting-my-s...
Scene_Cast2 3y ago
Yep, agreed. When living in a high cost of living area (i.e. where lots of tech professionals tend to live), space is limited. I'm annoyed at the lack of ECC-capable sub-ITX NAS boards. I have a Helios4, but I've no idea what I'll migrate to when that dies.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  N100 boards are ddr5 compatible which has internal ecc
  - mrob 3y ago
    Internal ECC doesn't protect the data in transit. It also doesn't have error reporting, so you could be operating with the error correction already operating at maximum capacity without knowing it, leaving no error correction available for unusual events. It's not a substitute for traditional ECC.
    - sitkack 3y ago
      DDR5 ECC is an internal mechanism just to make DDR5 viable due to the speed and node size. It doesn’t increase reliability, in enables not having a reduction in reliability over DDR4.
- epakai 3y ago
  If you want cheap, but non-performant, there are AMD R-series like found in Dell/Wyse thin clients. They're pretty weak machines though 2-4 cores, but support ECC DDR3 single channel.
znpy 3y ago
Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers. I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W. Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based lightbulbs.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Not only do NUCs sip power but they're embarrassingly fast for most "I want to play with servers" jobs. RAM is cheap and 32GB goes a long ways.
- mech422 3y ago
  Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress). 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
  - Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
    I got a Ryzen 7 5800H with 32gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive for 320€... I don't have the dual on board nic, but beside that, it's quite great cpu wise with Proxmox — multiple VM on it, doing transcoding, DNS, dealing with download and search, Home Assistant. Of course transcoding 4k live is costly, but that's an exception. I can use NVMe and SATA hd, that's nice. And I can update the ram and use ECC. Not bad all in all ! Still, I got a Dell SFF with an I5 and 16gb of ram for less than 100€ — updated it with a 4 2,5gbps NIC, will be good for OPnsense... If I don't switch to a Melanox Connect 3.
    - mech422 3y ago
      Very Nice :-) I don't really need that much horsepower (My stuff is like 90% idle - git server, etc.) but I _really_ appreciate the lower noise and power usage compared to my old Xeon blades
tombert 3y ago
My first homelab thing was a laptop with a broken monitor. It wasn't terribly hard to get Ubuntu server working on there, it had a gigabit ethernet port built in, and it had USB 3.0 so it wasn't too hard to get reasonably good hard drive speeds to use as a NAS. You can buy old used laptops (especially with broken monitors) for basically nothing (or maybe literally nothing if you already have one, or you have a friend of family member who has one they're willing to donate). If your goal is just to use it for Plex, it will work fine, and the power draw on laptops (particularly when idle) isn't that much more than a NUC. I use a proper rack mount server now largely because I thought they were neat, but I think for most people an old laptop is fine.
- rodolphoarruda 3y ago
  That's my setup. I decided to use old laptops instead of proper servers because power cuts are common in the region I live, especially when it rains. So laptops have built in UPS (their batteries) which can hold power for some minutes in the worst cases. It sounds like a poor man's home lab, but it works.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Honestly, I think that's probably smarter than what I do now. My personal laptop idles around 15-20W, tends to peak at about 80W. If I bought a dozen laptops, the total energy usage would be roughly the same as my server at idle, and I could use Docker Swarm or something to glue everything together, while also having a lot more power resiliency because of the batteries (like you mentioned). I also think it's good to prevent ewaste. There's a lot of raw computing power that just ends up in landfills. It's almost certainly better for the environment to get as much use out of existing stuff as possible than it is to buy new stuff. I can't imagine it's good for the world for a bunch of old lithium batteries to lie dormant. If I can find a good deal on a dozen old laptops, I might honestly put this plan into action.
  - m463 3y ago
    I wonder if it is hard to configure graceful shutdown when batteries run low and automatically come back up when power is restored?
achynet 3y ago
[dead]
mech422 3y ago
Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff. I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE! 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
- gorkish 3y ago
  One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.
  - mech422 3y ago
    Heh - maybe in the H4 ?? :-) Though you can prolly stick a 10GB nic in the PCIE slot ?? Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(
  - culopatin 3y ago
    And the n100 cpu
    - gorkish 3y ago
      n100 is overhyped IMO; I would prefer vendors focus on the connectivity and application requirements first and let the choice of SoC follow. The most important factor for this type of application is really PCIe lanes. If someone (other than broadcom) could introduce a basic fanout switch with PCIE5.0 upstream and loads of PCIe 3.0 downstream ports that would hopefully open the floodgates.
- tombert 3y ago
  How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I'll second this. My "home lab" is several small computers crammed wherever they can either be totally hidden, or where they can justify their presence. An old Celeron NUC lives under my couch, and it runs Pi-Hole, Syncthing, and some diagnostic stuff. It's extremely useful, and the impact on my electric bill is negligible. A Lenovo mini PC lives behind my TV, and serves double duty as a Syncthing node and an HTPC. I'll probably make it do other stuff eventually. It's not the most sophisticated setup on earth, but it works great, it's dirt cheap, and it's apartment-friendly.
fsckboy 3y ago
> A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk then a better name than homelab would be your "NUC/NOC-nook". with regard to TFA, I don't trust "labs" with neat wiring.
rpcope1 3y ago
Unless something has recently changed, the SFF Precisions and Optiplexes used weird smaller PSUs and generally have really poor airflow. Generally the lower end precision mid-tower also flow air terribly and get hot and whiny. There's no way I would recommend an SFF system if you can get the MT variant, as your options for fixing the MT systems when the Dell PSU inevitably fails are much better than getting a regular ATX PSU, cutting a hole to feed the cords in, and bolting it to the side of the case, which I've done repeatedly for SFF Dell systems with blown PSUs. Additionally, one challenge I have with all of these is that none of them have anything like a BMC. If you have more than one system, moving peripherals around sucks, and KVM technology is kind of iffy these days. It seemed easier to just jam an old Supermicro motherboard that had IPMI enabled in a reasonable ATX case with a lower power Xeon variant, and call it a day.
- CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  BMC is not a requirement these days as there are options like using a piKVM or AMT/vPRO on certificied Intel systems. Personally I turn IPMI off. The difference at idle can be up to 20w. Not to mention the outdated interfaces are a sercurity risk
- buybackoff 3y ago
  Thermals are perfect with these Dell SFF things. I tested it couple of times. Not 24/7 at 100%, but e.g. for 5 mins at 100% before vacuuming the outsides and after. NUCs are much more sensitive to dust. I have to *push* air through my NUC like every half a year (not just vacuum pull). But Dells are fine. Just do not put CPUs with >65W there. Or hungry PCI things.
_peeley 3y ago
I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc. That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and upgrading some of the other hardware in my lab, this "beginner"'s guide was really helpful. [0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0 https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0
- buybackoff 3y ago
  Please, do not use Raspberry Pi for a homelab unless you are 100% sure your workload is OK with it. I've just sold mine after ~2 years it being in a box in a closet. It's just to weak, too useless. I value my power socket slot more that RPi. If ARM is important, especially Mac Mx, the lowest Mac Mini is not that expensive. RPi is close to zero in performance. It could be just some unnoticeable VM in Proxmox/AnotherHypervisor performance-wise.
bayindirh 3y ago
My homelab (or infrastructure if you will) consists of 2 ARM SBCs distributed geographically and connected via a VPN & syncthing. They are fanless, powerful enough (8 cores and 8GB of RAM is plenty for what I do), and handle 90% of the automation my old desktop was doing. I don't need Proxmox, tons of containers or anything. If I do, I can always throw a N95 into the mix with ample RAM and storage.
vGPU 3y ago
I actually picked up a refurb desktop from Walmart with a ryzen 3500 for $400, it runs basically everything without breaking a sweat. Proxmox running homeassistant, docker, my seedbox, media server, etc and it averages 3% CPU usage. I did not know just how much heat a 16tb disk can put out up until that point though.

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.
CharlesW 3y ago
> …I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet? Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on my QNAP. The TBS-h574TX (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280 SATA SSD slots (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx https://www.qnap.com/en/product/hs-453dx), and the TBS-h574TX. Or you can just throw SATA SSDs into any NAS.
- buybackoff 3y ago
  It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports natively, with all goodies such as SMART.
  - znpy 3y ago
    If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.
    - belthesar 3y ago
      Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option. I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always eventually do, my home lab has become production, and being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. I've been agonizing and going back and forth between various potential solutions for this for a couple months now, with the most recent attempt being "Deploy k3s, with a fully separate control plane from the worker nodes, and run all of those atop a Proxmox cluster because being able to migrate VMs across nodes and also stand up isolated workloads to test out other solutions makes changing things in the future far less risky". That said, I was running the Homelab on effectively a single Unraid hyperconverged NAS/compute layer before then, and that worked wonders for quite a long time. I wouldn't consider Unraid my first choice now, given the advancements in TrueNAS SCALE in the time since I chose it as the solution, but the concept of NAS + Container Orchestrator as hyperconverged homelab today is quite attractive.
natebc 3y ago
Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
- jay-saint 3y ago
  After massively overthinking things for my homelab / firewall, I am ordering one this weekend, just deciding which cpu.
- buybackoff 3y ago
  It's a mobile CPU (with H). Unless it's fanless it will sound like a rocket lunch. Or it will be thermal-throttled with any sustained load. And it looks too expensive.
unregistereddev 3y ago
There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/ https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/
- buybackoff 3y ago
  The cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, but for NVMe 4.0 more is needed.
justinclift 3y ago
For the "bunch of NVMe slots", the OWC PCIe NVMe adapters look interesting: * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 (4x NVMe drives) * https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 (8x NVMe drives) I'd personally get them without drives included, as the OWC drives seem pretty expensive.

cybrox 3y ago

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to NAS and multiple Raspberry Pi's on a shelf and I really like the mess and have learned a lot. Just use what you have and expand as you need. Racks are cool once you're into the hobby enough to care about style points.

NelsonMinar 3y ago
From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains. Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed servers.
- mech422 3y ago
  The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.
  - blackfawn 3y ago
    Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them. I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.

thethindev 3y ago

I actually did just that and setup my homelab with my "old" laptop [1]. [1] https://thin.computer/index.php/2024/03/08/self-hosting-my-server-from-my-room/ https://thin.computer/index.php/2024/03/08/self-hosting-my-s...

Scene_Cast2 3y ago

Yep, agreed. When living in a high cost of living area (i.e. where lots of tech professionals tend to live), space is limited. I'm annoyed at the lack of ECC-capable sub-ITX NAS boards. I have a Helios4, but I've no idea what I'll migrate to when that dies.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
N100 boards are ddr5 compatible which has internal ecc
- mrob 3y ago
  Internal ECC doesn't protect the data in transit. It also doesn't have error reporting, so you could be operating with the error correction already operating at maximum capacity without knowing it, leaving no error correction available for unusual events. It's not a substitute for traditional ECC.
  - sitkack 3y ago
    DDR5 ECC is an internal mechanism just to make DDR5 viable due to the speed and node size. It doesn’t increase reliability, in enables not having a reduction in reliability over DDR4.
epakai 3y ago
If you want cheap, but non-performant, there are AMD R-series like found in Dell/Wyse thin clients. They're pretty weak machines though 2-4 cores, but support ECC DDR3 single channel.

znpy 3y ago

Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers. I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W. Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based lightbulbs.

giantrobot 3y ago
Not only do NUCs sip power but they're embarrassingly fast for most "I want to play with servers" jobs. RAM is cheap and 32GB goes a long ways.
mech422 3y ago
Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress). 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
- Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
  I got a Ryzen 7 5800H with 32gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive for 320€... I don't have the dual on board nic, but beside that, it's quite great cpu wise with Proxmox — multiple VM on it, doing transcoding, DNS, dealing with download and search, Home Assistant. Of course transcoding 4k live is costly, but that's an exception. I can use NVMe and SATA hd, that's nice. And I can update the ram and use ECC. Not bad all in all ! Still, I got a Dell SFF with an I5 and 16gb of ram for less than 100€ — updated it with a 4 2,5gbps NIC, will be good for OPnsense... If I don't switch to a Melanox Connect 3.
  - mech422 3y ago
    Very Nice :-) I don't really need that much horsepower (My stuff is like 90% idle - git server, etc.) but I _really_ appreciate the lower noise and power usage compared to my old Xeon blades

tombert 3y ago

My first homelab thing was a laptop with a broken monitor. It wasn't terribly hard to get Ubuntu server working on there, it had a gigabit ethernet port built in, and it had USB 3.0 so it wasn't too hard to get reasonably good hard drive speeds to use as a NAS. You can buy old used laptops (especially with broken monitors) for basically nothing (or maybe literally nothing if you already have one, or you have a friend of family member who has one they're willing to donate). If your goal is just to use it for Plex, it will work fine, and the power draw on laptops (particularly when idle) isn't that much more than a NUC. I use a proper rack mount server now largely because I thought they were neat, but I think for most people an old laptop is fine.

rodolphoarruda 3y ago
That's my setup. I decided to use old laptops instead of proper servers because power cuts are common in the region I live, especially when it rains. So laptops have built in UPS (their batteries) which can hold power for some minutes in the worst cases. It sounds like a poor man's home lab, but it works.
- tombert 3y ago
  Honestly, I think that's probably smarter than what I do now. My personal laptop idles around 15-20W, tends to peak at about 80W. If I bought a dozen laptops, the total energy usage would be roughly the same as my server at idle, and I could use Docker Swarm or something to glue everything together, while also having a lot more power resiliency because of the batteries (like you mentioned). I also think it's good to prevent ewaste. There's a lot of raw computing power that just ends up in landfills. It's almost certainly better for the environment to get as much use out of existing stuff as possible than it is to buy new stuff. I can't imagine it's good for the world for a bunch of old lithium batteries to lie dormant. If I can find a good deal on a dozen old laptops, I might honestly put this plan into action.
- m463 3y ago
  I wonder if it is hard to configure graceful shutdown when batteries run low and automatically come back up when power is restored?

achynet 3y ago

[dead]

mech422 3y ago

Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff. I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE! 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

gorkish 3y ago
One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.
- mech422 3y ago
  Heh - maybe in the H4 ?? :-) Though you can prolly stick a 10GB nic in the PCIE slot ?? Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(
- culopatin 3y ago
  And the n100 cpu
  - gorkish 3y ago
    n100 is overhyped IMO; I would prefer vendors focus on the connectivity and application requirements first and let the choice of SoC follow. The most important factor for this type of application is really PCIe lanes. If someone (other than broadcom) could introduce a basic fanout switch with PCIE5.0 upstream and loads of PCIe 3.0 downstream ports that would hopefully open the floodgates.
tombert 3y ago
How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.

ryukoposting 3y ago

I'll second this. My "home lab" is several small computers crammed wherever they can either be totally hidden, or where they can justify their presence. An old Celeron NUC lives under my couch, and it runs Pi-Hole, Syncthing, and some diagnostic stuff. It's extremely useful, and the impact on my electric bill is negligible. A Lenovo mini PC lives behind my TV, and serves double duty as a Syncthing node and an HTPC. I'll probably make it do other stuff eventually. It's not the most sophisticated setup on earth, but it works great, it's dirt cheap, and it's apartment-friendly.

fsckboy 3y ago

> A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk then a better name than homelab would be your "NUC/NOC-nook". with regard to TFA, I don't trust "labs" with neat wiring.

rpcope1 3y ago

Unless something has recently changed, the SFF Precisions and Optiplexes used weird smaller PSUs and generally have really poor airflow. Generally the lower end precision mid-tower also flow air terribly and get hot and whiny. There's no way I would recommend an SFF system if you can get the MT variant, as your options for fixing the MT systems when the Dell PSU inevitably fails are much better than getting a regular ATX PSU, cutting a hole to feed the cords in, and bolting it to the side of the case, which I've done repeatedly for SFF Dell systems with blown PSUs. Additionally, one challenge I have with all of these is that none of them have anything like a BMC. If you have more than one system, moving peripherals around sucks, and KVM technology is kind of iffy these days. It seemed easier to just jam an old Supermicro motherboard that had IPMI enabled in a reasonable ATX case with a lower power Xeon variant, and call it a day.

CTDOCodebases 3y ago
BMC is not a requirement these days as there are options like using a piKVM or AMT/vPRO on certificied Intel systems. Personally I turn IPMI off. The difference at idle can be up to 20w. Not to mention the outdated interfaces are a sercurity risk
buybackoff 3y ago
Thermals are perfect with these Dell SFF things. I tested it couple of times. Not 24/7 at 100%, but e.g. for 5 mins at 100% before vacuuming the outsides and after. NUCs are much more sensitive to dust. I have to *push* air through my NUC like every half a year (not just vacuum pull). But Dells are fine. Just do not put CPUs with >65W there. Or hungry PCI things.

_peeley 3y ago

I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc. That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and upgrading some of the other hardware in my lab, this "beginner"'s guide was really helpful. [0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0 https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0

buybackoff 3y ago
Please, do not use Raspberry Pi for a homelab unless you are 100% sure your workload is OK with it. I've just sold mine after ~2 years it being in a box in a closet. It's just to weak, too useless. I value my power socket slot more that RPi. If ARM is important, especially Mac Mx, the lowest Mac Mini is not that expensive. RPi is close to zero in performance. It could be just some unnoticeable VM in Proxmox/AnotherHypervisor performance-wise.

bayindirh 3y ago

My homelab (or infrastructure if you will) consists of 2 ARM SBCs distributed geographically and connected via a VPN & syncthing. They are fanless, powerful enough (8 cores and 8GB of RAM is plenty for what I do), and handle 90% of the automation my old desktop was doing. I don't need Proxmox, tons of containers or anything. If I do, I can always throw a N95 into the mix with ample RAM and storage.

vGPU 3y ago

I actually picked up a refurb desktop from Walmart with a ryzen 3500 for $400, it runs basically everything without breaking a sweat. Proxmox running homeassistant, docker, my seedbox, media server, etc and it averages 3% CPU usage. I did not know just how much heat a 16tb disk can put out up until that point though.