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It’s always fun to see how people build their home labs but I went exactly the opposite route. I focused on energy consumption, because of cost and - gasp - wa

It’s always fun to see how people build their home labs but I went exactly the opposite route. I focused on energy consumption, because of cost and - gasp - wanting to be mindful about it given the current predicament. Anything that needs to be on 24/7 is on a Pi, and anything that consumes more power is turned off by default (remote poweron possible). For me at home there is zero need for redundancy and I use a cluster of four tini-mini-micro 1L PCs for my lab work. There are also turned off by default and are also low-power.

bionsystem 1y ago
That's what I want to do as well, Pis running a vpn and some wake-on-lan scripts for a couple of old boxes (I will probably run SmartOS on those). Anything to share about your setup ? (blogs/gits that you wrote or followed) I also got some cloud credits from my employer, but a bit paranoïd about putting my data there (although most of it isn't sensitive).
- louwrentius 1y ago
  No links but it’s just a Pi5 as a Linux router and three Pi4s for grafana (iot stuff), jellyfin and hosting my blog on solar power.
  - baq 1y ago
    If you’re thinking about rpi5, reconsider an n100 minipc. Rpi5 is surprisingly expensive, both upfront and tco.
    - louwrentius 1y ago
      I wrote a HN hit about something similar https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a-tini-mini-micro-pc.html https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...
g-clef 1y ago
It's funny, I started with rPis for the same reason, but I'm about to replace them. I bought 20 rPi 4Bs for my homelab, and I just couldn't get them to do what I needed. I was looking to run a home k8s cluster and the Pis were just not suited to it at all (don't use sd storage for k8s 'cause it'll burn out the card w/writes, booting off usb was unstable even with powered usb hubs, netboot turned into an enormous pain in the neck).
- emilburzo 1y ago
  If you have another machine with a SSD or at least a fast-ish HDD and want to give it another go, you could try running k3s with an external datastore (e.g. postgres). That's the setup I've been using on 3 x rPi since 2021 and I'm super happy with it as I can host all my own personal projects, some OSS ones (changedetection, n8n, etc), even longhorn for distributed storage and still have capacity left -- and this with just microSDs (to be fair, A1s, but still).
- louwrentius 1y ago
  Yes, I moved to 1L PCs for lab work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831

bionsystem 1y ago

That's what I want to do as well, Pis running a vpn and some wake-on-lan scripts for a couple of old boxes (I will probably run SmartOS on those). Anything to share about your setup ? (blogs/gits that you wrote or followed) I also got some cloud credits from my employer, but a bit paranoïd about putting my data there (although most of it isn't sensitive).

louwrentius 1y ago
No links but it’s just a Pi5 as a Linux router and three Pi4s for grafana (iot stuff), jellyfin and hosting my blog on solar power.
- baq 1y ago
  If you’re thinking about rpi5, reconsider an n100 minipc. Rpi5 is surprisingly expensive, both upfront and tco.
  - louwrentius 1y ago
    I wrote a HN hit about something similar https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a-tini-mini-micro-pc.html https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...

g-clef 1y ago

It's funny, I started with rPis for the same reason, but I'm about to replace them. I bought 20 rPi 4Bs for my homelab, and I just couldn't get them to do what I needed. I was looking to run a home k8s cluster and the Pis were just not suited to it at all (don't use sd storage for k8s 'cause it'll burn out the card w/writes, booting off usb was unstable even with powered usb hubs, netboot turned into an enormous pain in the neck).

emilburzo 1y ago
If you have another machine with a SSD or at least a fast-ish HDD and want to give it another go, you could try running k3s with an external datastore (e.g. postgres). That's the setup I've been using on 3 x rPi since 2021 and I'm super happy with it as I can host all my own personal projects, some OSS ones (changedetection, n8n, etc), even longhorn for distributed storage and still have capacity left -- and this with just microSDs (to be fair, A1s, but still).
louwrentius 1y ago
Yes, I moved to 1L PCs for lab work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831