12 ms·

Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are goi

Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are going offline to have fun. Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad. Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.

TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc. A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job). And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive). For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night. You never go full cloud.
- asveikau 6mo ago
  It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.
  - downut 6mo ago
    1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis. It was goddam glorious. Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur. It was even more goddam glorious. Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it. I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
    - h4kunamata 6mo ago
      >I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.) The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available. That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices. I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux. That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.
      - downut 6mo ago
        "The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available." Yeah, I think that's right. I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues. Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet. I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it. I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.
- Rekindle8090 6mo ago
  "Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc." dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious. If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
  - balamatom 6mo ago
    >you're being unserious PSA: the answer to "you're being unserious" starts with "are you fucking kidding me?"
- andquartzofc 6mo ago
  > and who's not a dev/sysadmin > He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    You'd be surprised. There are tens of thousands (probably millions?) of people that happily use NFS or hosted services on a bog-standard Windows device with no gripes.
billfor 6mo ago
Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
""Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad." Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead If no, then why is "hosting" the term used This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification
- balamatom 6mo ago
  Well, we're talking about network services. Which run on a host machine. Not entirely unlike how viruses (or memes) execute on a host organism ;-)
unmole 6mo ago
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer This sounds like a filter bubble plus wishful thinking. Most people can barely manage their phone settings, let alone run a homelab.
- no_wizard 6mo ago
  This is what I have seen too. Outside my tech literate bubble there’s no call to host their own things that’s being heard followed or shared. Whet I hear alot about is regulation, which is a bit new, particularly with social media platforms. I know quite a few folks who think they should have less ability to arbitrarily ban accounts for example. While that may not be the most common sentiment other I think about that in the greater context of these conversations I’ve had with other groups and the trend seems to be that nobody wants to replace Instagram per se, they want better stewards and better regulation on social media.
raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
This is very much bubble thinking. The traffic on every social media is increasing. There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips

TacticalCoder 6mo ago

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc. A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job). And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive). For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night. You never go full cloud.

asveikau 6mo ago
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.
- downut 6mo ago
  1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis. It was goddam glorious. Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur. It was even more goddam glorious. Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it. I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
  - h4kunamata 6mo ago
    >I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.) The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available. That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices. I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux. That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.
    - downut 6mo ago
      "The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available." Yeah, I think that's right. I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues. Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet. I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it. I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.
Rekindle8090 6mo ago
"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc." dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious. If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
- balamatom 6mo ago
  >you're being unserious PSA: the answer to "you're being unserious" starts with "are you fucking kidding me?"
andquartzofc 6mo ago
> and who's not a dev/sysadmin > He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  You'd be surprised. There are tens of thousands (probably millions?) of people that happily use NFS or hosted services on a bog-standard Windows device with no gripes.

billfor 6mo ago

Before we had facebook and iphones the only people that were able to run a home lab were technically adept. In 1998 I used Avantgo and Vindigo to browse the news on the train and find restaurants when nobody else could. In 2005 I remember running my netgear mp101 upnp player and everybody was impressed how I could stream music. Then we made things like iphones and facebook which got everybody on the internet, and we made all the “hard” things like music, video, news, reservations, etc.. a “service” – democratizing it (what a nice word). But for technical people it was actually shittier than just running it on your own. Not right away -- there was small overlapping period from 2005 to 2014 or so, where the pace of advancement of technology was complementary to hosting it yourself, but after the corporate monopolies got fully involved everything just went to shit. I think it has come full circle again, where the “technically illiterate” will just consume the shitty services, and will be happy or oblivious to it – they are actually serfs giving their labor/money away and they don’t care. The rest of the technical folks are just going to do their own thing again because we’re sick of the crappy services. And it will be better than the general public can ever do, just like 1998 again.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

""Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad." Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead If no, then why is "hosting" the term used This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification

balamatom 6mo ago
Well, we're talking about network services. Which run on a host machine. Not entirely unlike how viruses (or memes) execute on a host organism ;-)

unmole 6mo ago

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer This sounds like a filter bubble plus wishful thinking. Most people can barely manage their phone settings, let alone run a homelab.

no_wizard 6mo ago
This is what I have seen too. Outside my tech literate bubble there’s no call to host their own things that’s being heard followed or shared. Whet I hear alot about is regulation, which is a bit new, particularly with social media platforms. I know quite a few folks who think they should have less ability to arbitrarily ban accounts for example. While that may not be the most common sentiment other I think about that in the greater context of these conversations I’ve had with other groups and the trend seems to be that nobody wants to replace Instagram per se, they want better stewards and better regulation on social media.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

This is very much bubble thinking. The traffic on every social media is increasing. There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips