7 ms·
Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)
- tecleandor 1y agoWell, can't read the article cos' there's a soccer match right now, and the head of the Spanish league, along with Telefonica, have decided that anyone behind Cloudflare and some other CDNs and hosts are guilty of pirating the TV signal. No reading this afternoon. https://imgur.com/a/DCiE4J0 https://imgur.com/a/DCiE4J0
- theandrewbailey 1y agoYeah, I saw an article about that yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666033
- tecleandor 1y agoHe appeared on and interview a couple weeks ago saying the cuts were only affecting pirates and freaks. So... Edit: by "he" I mean Javier Tebas.
- encom 1y agoI know this isn't their fault, but this perfectly illustrates why having CloudFlare gatekeep the internet wasn't great idea.
- kmeisthax 1y agoHalf of CloudFlare's MO is just "if we gatekeep the entire Internet, then nobody will be able to censor a single site, because then they'll be censoring the entire Internet". Problem with that is that there's perfectly valid legal reasons to censor individual websites and people will absolutely block all of CloudFlare to get them to go away. In this case, the corpofascist copyright owners that happen to own Spain's legislature decided "well, then we'll have to have no Internet when there's a soccer game, then". But there's plenty of other legal or moral reasons to block a website, as much as the EFF would disagree. At the very least, CloudFlare has a sterling track record with providing infrastructure to cybercriminals. Every DDoS service puts their sales pages on CloudFlare, because when you happen to have a low-orbit ion cannon[0], the easiest thing to use it on is other vendors of low-orbit ion cannons. Same with malware, because it's very easy to get your malware on a CloudFlare server and a pain in the ass for antimalware tools to block it. [0] LOIC is a "consumer grade" DDoS tool used predominantly by trolls and activists on 4chan in the late 2000s. Probably not what the DDoS vendors are using.
- newsclues 1y agoDon’t need cloudflare to pirate content, if people nerf the internet out of fear of piracy, the pirates need to make that content so available to all for free with a superior UI/UX so that the censors give up and cease.
- ClearAndPresent 1y agoIronically, I can't see your image because Imgur assumes my VPN is malicious and rejects traffic from it. (Instead of saying this, it lies about being over capacity. This situation mysteriously resolves when I disable the VPN.) https://ibb.co/F4nG3LYL https://ibb.co/F4nG3LYL
- VoidWhisperer 1y ago403 would also be a weird error code for over capacity - 503 would be the correct error code.. The fact that it returns 403 as the error code is more proof that it isn't just 'service being over capacity'.
- theandrewbailey 1y agoWhen NVidia released GPUs a generation or two ago (RTX 3000 or 4000), I remember someone on here had got the highest end model, and asking how they could rent it out for AI workloads. I'm favoriting this just so I can pull it out quickly, should I ever come across such nonsense again.
- morkalork 1y agoThere was an interesting post here by a young developer making use of "home gpu pool" service for some ai work and it didn't look so bad. Slow, but very cost effective compared to the big cloud providers.
- LPisGood 1y agoSelling compute that is on my home network using storage that resides at my house and networking that leads back to where I live to random internet people sounds like a nightmare that cannot possibly be worth the few hundred bucks a month it may earn you. To wit, no serious business would use your services, so your market is pretty much limited to: 1.) Amateur hobbyists (very little money there) 2.) People with Bad Intentions (horrendous from a legal and security perspective, and ethics if that’s your thing) 3.) People in your social circle
- doubled112 1y agoI have some friends with Nextcloud accounts that run on my home server, and a couple have accounts on my Matrix home server. They understand that if anything goes wrong I will offer a complete refund (which is $0), because they’re my friends. I couldn’t imagine doing it for other people though. It also helps that they’re IT or at least interested in IT.
- joshgachnang 1y agoMy friends have offered to pay for some of the hard drives, but I refuse because once I accept money, there's an implicit owing them to keep it up (whether that's real or in my head). Now it's just a best effort, and I prefer that over a couple hundred bucks.
- wink 1y agoJust getting people to pay their domain fees on time (or at all) was a nightmare back then - so nowadays there's only one deal on infrastructure I own: It's free and comes with no guarantees. If you need a domain or subdomain, you own it, pay for it, and just put a DNS record to the IP I tell you.
- j45 1y agoIt's less about coming back to a "home", and more about self-hosting. Self-hosting a service, website, or SaaS happens alot more than most people realize especially with fibre to the home, and even things like Starlink. Sharing your home services doesn't seem mission critical, unless it is. It's easy to just pop in a QNAP or Synology for any individual for themselves. Businesses who have data residency and processing requirements are live and well, and pay a premium. The pendulum of cloud vs local is starting to swing the more AI models become available in datacentres to keep close to your data in 2025. Google just announced privately hosting to Gemini a few days ago iirc. For self-hosting, one has to stabilize power, internet, and decide on equipment. This is orders of magnitude more doable, easier and cheaper every 5 years going back 15. Just have to be clear on how experienced you are with this in the past and most recently. The cloud is ridiculously profitable and overpriced because in part of how much this has come down market just not used. Of course there's knowledge involved, and again, there's plenty of people who quietly have this knowledge, and it's far easier to obtain now starting with something as simple as Proxmox and/or Docker.
- dheera 1y ago> Feds have raided datacenters and taken servers What do they do, walk into a Google datacenter and randomly yank out a 1U server that they feel like and rip out some ethernet cables? I really don't quite understand how this works. Any good datacenter distributes everything geographically and encrypts everything.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoYou're thinking too big. "Normal size datacenters" is a small industrial building with 20 racks. And yes, they walk in, shut the power and start hauling drives. No joke.
- nbernard 1y ago> they walk in, shut the power and start hauling drives. Or, if they suspect disk encryption, they don't shut the power. Instead, they dissect the power cords to add a special UPS, so that they can move servers without powering them off...
- dheera 1y agoOK, so you have a special power supply that shuts off power to the system if it detects that its GPS location moved?
- wutwutwat 1y agoor, and hear me out here... you don't do fucked up shit that would require such engineering to hide your activity. crazy I know right?! it might just work though. your shit isn't getting raided unless you are facilitating some horrible stuff
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoBlock of thermite and a gyroscope? But perhaps it's still best to just... not mass seed linux ISOs for others.
- munchler 1y agoI’ve been renting compute by the hour on Vast.ai and often wonder about the servers I use. Is it reasonable to assume that any such server with, say, a 90+% reliability rating is in a data center, rather than someone’s basement?
- j45 1y agoNot really, the equipment is the main point of failure. Then maybe the connection and power, and environment (cooling) The last 2 are really well solved. It's crazy what's possible with USFF machines as mini-blade servers. Low electricity and really serviceable redundancy and failover.
- everforward 1y agoThis. 90% gives surprisingly large error budgets; that’s about 72 hours of downtime a month or 36.5 days a year. I would guess most home labs are at or near 99% availability on hardware. Scale is part of it too. I could pack my homelab into the car and take it to a friends house. They have the space, power service, and internet to accommodate me. A full data center doesn’t have that option, at least not for free-ish.
- j45 1y agoHaha, thanks. When you can buy 4 USFFs for the price of 1 new one, and run 2 have have a test one, and one for spares I'm not really sure what everyone is concerned about. Enterprise, engineering, industrial grade equipment is the same high quality level, be it a server or a desktop meant for extreme environments. Too many people are only purchasers of consumer grade equipment and would be surprised at what a huge difference the corporate/engineering/industry spec stuff is like.
- omneity 1y agovast.ai have two kinds of servers, what they call "datacenter" and regular ones. Datacenter servers seem to have better internet and a contractual agreement with vast.ai, probably the distinction you're looking for.
- solardev 1y agoIt seems like most of those issues could be solved with a distributed orchestration layer, the same kind used to power SETI@home, BOINC, crypto mining, RC5 decryption back in the day, etc. E.g. if the administration of billing, compute, and storage were decentralized and each home node could drop in and drop out as necessary. AWS itself has nodes that can be preempted by higher paying users, no, with barely a few seconds to shut down your workflows? You shouldn't misrepresent your home lab as an actual hosting business with staff and a data center and insurance and all that, but there still ought to be a way to loan out idle resources on an ephemeral basis.
- paxys 1y agoThe economics simply don't work. Add up hardware, ongoing maintenance, electricity and ISP costs, and then the cut that the middleman will take (realistically 30-50%, probably more), and there's no reality where you can compete with a $4/month VPS from Hetzner.
- solardev 1y agoNot on reliability, sure, but compute?
- lostmsu 1y agoVPS maybe not, but GPU servers are very viable (we built one).
- nucleardog 1y agoWe're not talking starting up a hosting company but renting idle capacity. I'm already paying for the hardware, maintenance, electricity, and connectivity. The only real marginal cost to renting some of my idle capacity would be additional power use. Versus current draw, the power supply running maxed out 24/7 would increase my power bill by $36/mo. If we use the $4.59/mo VPS as a point of comparison, just one of the servers heating up my utility room has 24x the CPU cores ($110/mo), 96x the RAM ($440/mo) and 1024x the storage ($4,700/mo). I would never in a million years actually do so, but I'm relatively certain I could turn several dozen CPU cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space into more than $72/mo (assuming only getting 50% of the revenue) _somehow_.
- neilv 1y ago> Scary Stuff Also, things that aren't illegal where you are, but that are persecuted by some government. Whether by a rogue tyrant regime where you are, or by a foreign government that can reach out via "cyber" with impunity. > Host stuff for friends - Friends are different because you probably trust them. A lot of the issues of customers taking advantage of you are mitigated by being friends. Back before the term "homelab", I had DSL to my apartment, which I was using to host my own server, and a similarly-minded friend asked to temporarily colo his email server on my DSL. Turns out friend's server also hosted some kind of political dissent Web site. My friend is a great friend, but he probably didn't realize he might've been "getting me on a list".
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI think that in general, "I should use my hobby to generate income" is a bad idea. Once you start trying to generate income, it's not a hobby any more, it's a business. And businesses have a lot of not very fun pieces that you have to account for (as the author here indicates). Some people find they like it... but to me, there's no faster way to suck the joy out of a hobby than to turn it into a business.
- actuallyalys 1y agoThe only way I could see this not ending badly is if you’re renting space for your friends. Presumably you would be selling whatever you’re renting at cost. Even renting space within a community you’re a part of, like a local makerspace, seems like a bad idea. While it would probably mitigate the worst risks, could still leave you with people dissatisfied with the level of service.
- petermcneeley 1y agoThe internet, as a network of peers, is basically illegal.
- candiddevmike 1y agoIMO, this is a side effect from centralization under the name of security/convenience. We deserve the Internet we have today because the majority of folks don't want to learn and prefer digital nanny states and walled gardens.
- petermcneeley 1y agoYou lost me at 'We deserve'. My enemies have not defeated me enough that I think I should deserve to be oppressed.
- ipython 1y agoThat’s not what this article is about, though. He’s not arguing that you cannot host your own content. He’s arguing that you shouldn’t sell your excess capacity to randoms on the internet for reasons enumerated in tfa.
- petermcneeley 1y agoWhat are you a peer of if not the content of others? Hosting your own content is a client-server model.
- ipython 1y agoNot sure what you mean here. In the “traditional” internet peer to peer model from the early days, it was always a client-server model. Just that everyone “ran their own server”. For example: You want to send me email? Great my smtp server is sitting at my desk and the mail spool lives on my local hard drive. That’s in contrast to the centralized model where all the servers live in a set of giant concrete boxes aka data centers run by hyperscalers.
- neilv 1y ago> Downsize - I know it’s hard to talk about, but if your quad CPU, 2TB RAM monster can’t run because it’s too expensive and you need the money, get something smaller that’s better suited for your workloads. A lot of homelabs start with free discarded enterprise gear from work, which turns out to be both power-hungry and loud. I ended up buying Atom servers for awhile, and modding them to be even quieter. Then, recently, I offloaded all 24/7 stuff to cloud servers/services.
- hsuduebc2 1y agoSame here - $5 a month for a vps with public IP is a bargain. I could even use it to tunnel larger transfers, like accessing my local media server behind a NAT. That said, it's definitely not as cool as running loud, beefy servers.
- phyzome 1y agoI run all my stuff off a 15+ year old laptop someone threw out. Start there. :-)
- ohgr 1y agoSlightly newer one here (Lenovo T470). The battery still works so it’s got a built in UPS. KVM comes with it too! All it does is scrape jobs really. I was running it on a VPS but that requires a modicum more effort to keep secure. This thing is a rotting unpatched Debian 11 and is behind a NAT with no service ports exposed on public interface.
- neilv 1y agoThis was something I considered very recently (when I realized my only remaining VGA monitor didn't support the oddball frequency put out by an old Supermicro server on which I was still running something important). Some pros of laptop servers: * Quiet. * Low-ish power consumption. * Doesn't take up much space. * Built-in secure console. * Built-in UPS. Some cons: * Limited in what drives you can put in it. Some laptops only support one drive, so you can't even do RAID mirroring. A real server will usually let you put at least a few high-capacity 3.5" drives in it, on SATA or better. * Many laptops will overheat if run with the lid closed. * If you get a burglary, a laptop is very likely to be stolen. (In a rack in a city apartment, I bolted down the servers with security head screws, and there was no way they were taking the whole cabinet, with a huge APC UPS anchoring it down.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 3oil3 1y agoI wonder if the peps that do sell space of their homelab have a significant impact on the sales of that hosting company the author mentions he works for.
- devrandoom 1y agoThe article is on point but assumes that you're providing service level agreement that you can't honour. So go ahead, sell your space and in your SLA promise absolutely nothing and bill only for what they use. Also have an explanation ready then the feds raid your house :)
- theideaofcoffee 1y ago[flagged]
- ipython 1y agoWow that’s quite a reaction over some rando’s article. Why not just write your own with your point of view and post it here?
- rdegges 1y agoI have a decently-sized homelab and I've been renting out unused disk space. I actually allocated 20TB of disk space (RAID 1) and have been renting the space out via the Storj network (https://www.storj.io https://www.storj.io). If you haven't heard of it, Storj is essentially a distributed S3 that's been around for many years now, and the way it works is that various people run Storj nodes while the Storj company runs a proxy server that breaks files up into small encrypted chunks and stores them across N peers for redundancy. In my case, I back up my family photos/videos/documents to a Synology NAS, and my NAS is backed up to Storj. So when I run a Storj node with part of my disk space, the payments they give me essentially cover my own backups. I'm not making a ton of money or anything, but it's enough to pay for my own backups and that's a great deal. If you're looking to do what the OP is talking about in a simple way, this is by far the best way I've found to do it.
- jononor 1y agoThis is on of the few cases that makes sense. Does not even money, but at least reduced cost one something one presumably already would have had. Is there anything similar for compute?
- rdegges 1y agoI’m not aware of any!
- Havoc 1y agoClosest I can think of is the sheepit render farm. Thats blender specific though not generic compute
- 3np 1y agoiExec? https://docs.iex.ec/ https://docs.iex.ec/ Don't know if Golem is still around but they were/are doing something like that to commoditize GPU. As with anything crypto there's a fractal of vaporware but at least those two had/have something.
- lostmsu 1y agoWe make a service like that: https://borg.games/setup https://borg.games/setup
- a3FgH9Lp 1y ago[dead]
- znpy 1y agoThe author says they don’t want to gatekeep and then essentially proceeds to gatekeep. If people are honest with the service level they can offer and then i don’t see any issues really. I wouldn’t do that, because i don’t like to deal with users, but other people might.
- celsoazevedo 1y agoA lot of this is correct if you're renting servers or something like that, but what a lot of people in those subs seem to end up doing is renting their storage via services like Storj or Sia, their GPUs to services like NiceHash, and so on. Users don't visit their network directly, user data is small parts of files (encrypted), there's no need for public IPs, etc. The risks are much smaller.
- bananapub 1y agoIt is incredibly sad how so many people these days are unwilling to just have a hobby. Not a way to make money, not a way to advance your career, not a scam, just a thing you do that you enjoy and get better at over time.
- NoPicklez 1y agoI think most homelab'ers are doing just that, using it as a hobby. But there is of course people that would like to explore how to make a buck from it and advance their hobby.
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- ohgr 1y agoFrom direct experience the moment someone gets to live on your kit, there’s going to be porn on it. A contract job I had a number of years ago was to undo the “I sold someone a slice of my colo box and it went badly” problem.
- NoPicklez 1y agoIt's almost like the cloud isn't just "someone else's computer" but perhaps a dedicated setup that allows for shared compute and storage managed by a dedicated team of people.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- felix76 1y ago[flagged]