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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.
by 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 agoSimilar, my homelab is an old gaming rig shoved in a corner running a bunch of docker compose services via systemd.
- SystemOut 3y agoThis 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 agoI see this a lot with certain home labs. A ton of ram for vms. Why not just run on the metal?
- drewzero1 3y agoEasier 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.
- icedchai 3y agoI have about a dozen VMs running on a couple of large-ish servers (16 cores, 128 gigs RAM, 8 TB storage) Many of these are small, experimental environments (8 gigs RAM max, few hundred gigs storage) Running all those on metal would be expensive and annoying.
- drewzero1 3y agoMy favorite home lab setup was when I had an old (originally XP, switched it to Ubuntu) laptop and a couple of USB drives in the top drawer of a scavenged file cabinet. I cut a hole in the back for the wires and it never generated enough heat for airflow to be an issue. I hosted my personal website on it, including a webcam of my aquarium, hooked it up to my doorbell, XMPP, used it for document storage... anything I needed a server for. I switched to an old Mac Mini for NAS after I moved and haven't had much time to mess with it since.