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I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB). The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then a
by Normal_gaussian 1y ago
I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB).
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
- D13Fd 1y agoThis does sound like a massive PITA. what is the point of it? What are you using it for?
- usagisushi 1y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/s92fk7/my_wife_is_pregnant_and_goes_to_bed_early_i_stay/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/s92fk7/my_wife_is_... A man can turn the means into the purpose.
- Normal_gaussian 1y agoyeah that is exactly what came after the work use case
- Normal_gaussian 1y agoInitially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa. Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
- j45 1y agoIt's not a PITA at all. I followed a few youtube videos and had Proxmox up and running and was a little shocked that the inter node/server settings were largely point and click.
- vorpalhex 1y agoWhat were the underlying storage needs? Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab. Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it. Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
- scuff3d 1y agoI've never heard of Talos until now, but it looks interesting. How was it to work with?
- Normal_gaussian 1y agoPretty awesome tbh. The talosctl CLI is amazing and the exposed health utilities are great. If you need anything special its pretty easy to add a patch file for the underlying system (e.g. networking).