Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
haydenjames.io
Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#2Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#3Mostly skimmed over here, but a key point is that you should be trying to build a cheap version of what you'd use at work. The closer you are to your work environment, the more you can applicably "try things" at home, and bring them to work with you. And since most of us are pretty busy, it's nice to not have to learn a whole new skill set just for maintaining our home networks.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#4Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.
120mm + closed loop watercooling makes almost no noise. 140mm makes no noise (compared to background), but don't fit in the standard "U" format. 3U (ATX) can fit a full 120mm, but not a closed loop. 4U (ATX) take a lot of space, but the airflow and WC flow is easy to get right. I used to be a self employed embedded system (Linux) engineer and had to compile whole OS images all day long on air-gapped, on premise, systems, so I ran my own "semi-pro home lab" for a few years.
Another trick is to have 5v, 12v and 48v DC lines with silent PSU like Corsair RM series directly feeding some servers so they didn't have to use an internal PSU, that leaves only the CPU and GPU as "hot" components (and the NAS, but that's another story and a solved problem).
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#5Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.
Any rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#6I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS.
That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly.
What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#7I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#8Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.
Yeah that was my first thought. Noise is really what killed my home lab in the 00s. It was over 3kW when all turned on and was audible from any room in the house.
Lasted about 18 months before my wife vetoed it.
From memory -
Sun ultra 60 x 2
Sun ultra 80 with the big foam sound deadening kit option
Sun ultra 5 x many (6?)
Sun ultra 10 x 2
Sun 6 bay scsi external disk caddy
Cisco 24 port 10/100 managed switch but i forget the model, something XL (ios 11 or something truly ancient like that)
2 cisco routers with PPPoA adsl adapters
3com unmanaged kit with POE
Terminal server
IBM AIX b50 telco 1u server
An openbsd host on an old x86 desktop
A freebsd node on a beefy (for the time) AMD opteron host
And probably a bunch of other toys i’ve forgotten by now.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#9I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#10I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?
Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.
I did this also. An HP G8 DL380p with 12LFF spots was had for <$250 with plenty of RAM. Add Xpenology and it was like having a Synology NAS for about 1/5 the price. Currently I'm running 8x8TB in RAID6...something that would have required a ~$1200 machine from Synology (at least when I was looking to upgrade).