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More random home lab things I've recently learned
- j1elo 1y agoI went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!
- tylerflick 1y agoIt’s another league, but I don’t get the point of mixing enterprise rack-mounts with Raspberry Pis.
- otter-in-a-suit 1y agoYou'd be delighted (or terrified) to know that I just added an old gaming computer in a 4U case to the cluster, so I can play with PCI/GPU passthrough. The Dell is essentially the main machine that runs everything we actually use - the other hardware is either used as redundancy or for experiments (or both). I got the Pi from a work thing and this has been a fun use case. Not that I necessarily recommend it...
- j1elo 1y agoI'll be terrified, thanks! Said while programming the dishwasher to have it running during the times of the day with lower electricity prices :)
- bombcar 1y agoPis are a relatively quick and cheap (including power) way to get "another computer" that isn't a VM or otherwise dependent. VMs can add a lot of complexity that you don't really need or want to manage. And (perhaps unadmitted) lots of people bought Pis and then searched for use cases for them.
- fluoridation 1y agoThey're really not that cheap anymore, though. If you just need "another computer" you can probably find something more capable in the used market.
- bombcar 1y agoThey never were terribly cheap, but there was a time when people who hadn't seen a single-board computer (that small) and didn't really keep abreast of the used market gobbled them up. One advantage over the used market is that you can easily keep getting the exact same one over and over again.
- fluoridation 1y ago>They never were terribly cheap Not really, no. Not if all you need is "a computer". They're more interesting if you want a cheap ARM computer, or a tiny computer, or a server that sips power. Although for that last one they're also kind of dubious. If you can somehow get away with running what you need off a phone, that's way better value.
- haunter 1y agoHere is an actual another league if you are curious about it https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs
- youngtaff 1y agom910q's are great – I've got a couple of them under my desk for testing things locally
- NoboruWataya 1y agoI second the shout out for Mealie, it's very useful. Importing from URLs works very well, and it gives you a centralised place for all your recipes, without ads or filler content and safe from linkrot.
- Havoc 1y agoMy most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC sticks. >No space left on device. >In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That’s… a design. Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup & compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in proxmox & reboot it. Unlike VMs you don't need to do anything inside the container to resize FS so this generally works as fix. >PiHole AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH >Raspberry Pi 5, ARM64 Proxmox Interesting. I'm leaning more towards k8s for integrating pis meaningfully
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago>AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH Technitium has all the bells and whistles along with being cross platform. https://technitium.com/dns/ https://technitium.com/dns/
- Aurornis 1y ago> My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC sticks. DDR4 anything is becoming very expensive right now because manufacturers have been switching over to DDR5.
- Havoc 1y agoYeah, built on AM4 and in hindsight spending more on mobo & CPU to hop on AM5 would have been the smart move. Live & learn. On the plus side I have a lot of non-ECC DDR4 sticks that I'm dumping into the expensive market rn
- everforward 1y agoYou seem knowledgeable so you may already know, but it's worth looking at the x86 mini PCs. Performance per watt has gotten pretty close on the newer low power CPUs (e.g. N150, unsure what AMD's line for that is), and performance per $ spent on hardware is way higher. I'm seeing 8GB Pi 5s with a power supply and no SD card for $100; you can get an N150 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD pre-installed for like $160. Double the RAM, double the CPU performance, and comes with an SSD. Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoOne of my favorite CyberPower perks is their RMCARDs for network monitoring: It's a separate module that works in basically all of their rackmount UPSes. You can replace the entire UPS without having to pay for the little mini web server again, it'll just pop right into the new unit.
- icyfox 1y agoIt's a neat chip but I couldn't bring myself to spend in excess of the price of the UPS ($439.00 for RMCARD at time of writing). I ended up hooking my UPS via USB to my existing home server via NUT and it's been working well.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoIt is a little hefty for a homelab-level setup, but the impressive bit to me is that they've kept compatibility with it longer than we've replaced UPSes at work (it looks like the RMCARD205 and 305 were introduced in 2018), so instead of paying for that hardware built into each unit, the RMCARD has been a one-time purchase we can bring from unit to unit.
- bobbob1921 1y agoAPC UPSes that support their network management card add in - then the cards can frequently be purchased on eBay for $30-$100, you have to make sure the UPS supports the card, but they are excellent. Model numbers like ap9631 (if i recall). I run about 10 of them across different locations and they work great , some of them for 8+ years now. ( about a year ago when I got a new ups, Apc still offered the older firmware for download, however after a certain FW version it started going to a cloud subscription model - so be sure to keep the old firmware. If you’re worried about the firm or not being updated on the non-cloud version, just be sure to vlan/firewall control access to them which you should be doing anyway)
- immibis 1y agoI've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.
- tehlike 1y agoYou can run whatever. You don't need specific software
- woodrowbarlow 1y agosome people think it's not "homelabbing" unless you're doing things the way it's done at large scale. i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be a resume project. but proxmox and kubernetes are overkill, imo, for most homelab setups. setting them up is a good learning experience but not necessarily an appropriate architecture for maintaining a few mini PCs in a closet long term. you can ignore the gatekeeping.
- orthoxerox 1y agok8s is definitely an overkill if your goal is not learning k8s. proxmox is great, though. It's worth running it even if you treat it as nothing more than a BMC.
- baq 1y agoI'm running an ubuntu server as a hypervisor only because the proxmox installer is using an older kernel than the actual system and wouldn't install on my box :/
- placardloop 1y agoHomelabbing is a hobby for most people involved in it, and like other hobbies, some people dip their toes in it while others go diving in the deep end. But would you say it’s “overkill” for a hobbyist fisher to have multiple fishing poles? Or for a hobbyist painter to try multiple sets of paintbrushes? Or a hobbyist programmer to know multiple programming languages? There’s a lot of overlap between “I run a server to store my photos” and “I run a bunch of servers for fun”, which has resulted in annoying gatekeeping (or reverse gatekeeping) where people tell each other they are “doing it wrong”, but on Reddit at least it’s somewhat being self-organized into r/selfhosted and r/homelab, respectively.
- srjilarious 1y agoI just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
- walthamstow 1y agoI have Proxmox running on top of a clean Debian install on my NUC, I wanted to allow Plex to use the hardware decoding and it got a bit funny trying to do that with Plex running in a VM, so it runs on the host and I use VMs for other stuff
- nodesocket 1y agoI have an Intel (12th Gen i5-12450H) mini-pc and at first had issues getting the GPU firmware loaded and working in Debian 12. However upgrading to Debian 13 (trixie) and doing apt update and upgrade resolved the issue and was able to pass the onboard Intel GPU through Docker to a Jellyfin container just fine. I believe the issue is related to older linux kernels and GPU firmware compatibility. Perhaps that’s your issue.
- ysleepy 1y agoIt's very easy to do this with LXC containers in Proxmox now, as passing devices to a container is now possible from the UI.
- phito 1y agoJust as easy with VMs, just have to pass the device to the VM
- alexgaribay 1y agoThe only downside is that you essentially lock the GPU to 1 VM which there is nothing wrong with doing. At least with LXC, you can share device across multiple containers.
- ryandrake 1y agoNot sure I understand the need to use a Raspberry Pi here. They're cool and all, but wouldn't a regular old PC be simpler to setup, maintain, and attach hardware to? It's a hobby--and you can do whatever you want, but I wouldn't involve a Pi in a home server setup unless I specifically needed something it bought me, like the small form factor, low power usage, GPIO pins and so on.
- fartfeatures 1y agoI always need lower power consumption. I'm in the UK and my power costs are $0.40 per kWh. Even running a raspberry pi 5 24/7 would cost me $25 per year
- otter-in-a-suit 1y agoI just commented on this above, but I actually got for the Pi for free and it's a very capable device. I wouldn't buy one for this use case (nor do I really recommend it, but it _does_ work).
- srcreigh 1y agoCan somebody explain the whole proxmox thing? I haven’t used it, I use k3s. I don’t get why people use VMs for stuff when there’s docker. Thanks!
- baq 1y agoit's so you can have a machine to run docker on, basically. especially useful if you want multiple of those, and also helpful if you don't want one of them anymore.
- indigodaddy 1y agoMakes backups of the KVM VM running docker easy too right
- baq 1y agoand you can move the whole vm to a different host approximately trivially
- oceanplexian 1y ago"Why would I need virtualization when I have Kubernetes".. sounds like a someone who has never had to update the K8s control plane and had everything go completely wrong. If it happens to you, you will be begging for an HVM with real snapshots.
- pletnes 1y agoNot all things run as containers.
- candiddevmike 1y agoVMs can though =D
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- philip1209 1y agoGood reminder for me to set up a UPS for my home lab before I go on vacation. . .
- slipperybeluga 1y agoThe best thing I did for my homelab is unplug the raspberry pis and throw them into the crate of no-longer-used-but-wont-throw-away electronics. Switching to an ancient tower PC with on paper poorer specs significantly improved performance and reliability across the board and no more weird issues due to SD cards and flaky network. No worries about causing a house fire with sketchy power supplies. No having to make compromises to make it work like a regular PC with using external drives and no difficulty finding compatible software. Pis are amazing little devices, but my experience from the first gen to v4 is that they are temporary solutions or for use cases that don't have high reliability needs. Just buy a cheap mini PC for the same price and you have so many more options and benefits from the get go.
- pdpi 1y ago> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU. You need to be careful with this one. The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode. Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
- wpm 1y ago5W5A is not a custom profile. It is part of the USB-PD standard, but as an optional profile that can only be provided if you ensure the cable used is safe to handle 5 amps of current. It’s why the official Rapsberry Pi 5 PSU has a non-removable cable.
- otter-in-a-suit 1y agoThat's good to know, thank you. It's using the official charger in the rack, but I used the charger I've had on my desk while setting it up. I added a note to the article.
- 0x457 1y agoI don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.
- _dain_ 1y agothe point of the hobby is to have something to tinker with. if it were too easy it wouldn't be any fun.
- 0x457 1y agoI know, that's why I have my own "lab". I just don't get why most of other labs are so cookie-cutter proxmox + home assistant + (unifi controller) + pihole and there is always RPi somewhere next to a chunky server.
- perdomon 1y agoBecause people have fun creating those sorts of setups. There are many tutorials for those setups, the hardware can be found relatively affordably, and it isn't something someone needs to have experience in enterprise networking to build. The purpose of the hobby is to have fun. If you aren't having fun, or if other people's fun is ruining your day, consider finding a new hobby. I suggest fly fishing. You could probably use more vitamin D.
- 0x457 1y ago> You could probably use more vitamin D. Nah, I get enough of that from being by the pool, managing my home lab.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago> 2x Xeon Gold 6248 CPU 300 are a lot of watts. ...I didn't used to pay attention but power costs keep rising. I recently opted for a i7 F (65w base) over an i7 K (125w base) even with the 15% performance hit.
- doubled112 1y agoI have a couple of machines that I can spin up if I need the power and performance, but it was amazing to me that the always on services that I'm actually using would run on an N95 mini PC. YMMV, I'm not saying it's enough for every use case. The CPU will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500 FPS. I don't have enough users to saturate that using Jellyfin.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago> The CPU will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500 FPS. Did you do the original encoding yourself (to insure everything is optimized for your rig)?
- doubled112 1y agoI ripped them from Bluray a long time before this machine was around. They were likely encoded using whatever preset Handbrake would have used as a default at the time
- Aachen 1y agoN95? As in, the Nokia? Edit: did some searching, probably you mean the N95 Intel CPU as the basis for a mini pc, not actually a system called N95. That thing is 30% faster than my server's cpu which has <10% occupancy, and about half of it comes from the 1 Windows VM that I need for a legacy application I should really be getting rid of. It's also very recent, you can use way older CPUs from hardware people are throwing away that use similarly little power instead of buying a new product
- doubled112 1y ago
- akeck 1y ago> You see, unlike Debian or other standard OS, Raspberry Pi OS (which I still call Raspbian in my head and likely use in this article multiple times) is designed to be flashed to the SD card directly and doesn’t actually have an installer that can be booted from USB https://github.com/gitbls/sdm https://github.com/gitbls/sdm can help with this issue.
- bsder 1y agoCan someone explain to me why people keep building "home lab" things with RPi's? Both the "Hacker" and "Cheap Bastard" ethos are better served by ... just about any cheap x86 stuff--especially used. What am I missing?
- killingtime74 1y agoIndeed. Raspberry PIs are not cheap for their price/performance or power/performance.
- ohuf 1y ago> Turns out, you don’t need an SD card at all↑ > What I didn’t know, however, is that Raspberry Pi 5s can actually support NVME drives! ...turns out you don't need local storage at all: if you already run a NAS you can bootp the RasPi over the network! This also makes backups super easy.