Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 184 posts

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#11

Post by j_walter »

SteveNuts wrote: post #9
heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I 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

Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#12

Post by dvdbloc »

heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I 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?

"Shuck" all of the drives into a Rosewill 4U chassis, if you dig around you can find them cheap open box on Amazon and sometimes even eBay. They're durable, pretty cheap and come with 8 3.5" bays.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#13

Post by OJFord »

heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I 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?

I bought, for about £150-200 iirc, a 4U chassis with 16x 3.5" bays for this reason, reckoning it will always be enough (I won't fill them before the optimal £/TB disk size increases and I can go through upgrading them). It sits in strips of U-spaced punched aluminium, sideways on some quick and dirty shelving I built. That's not crucial except that you probably don't want it on the floor, and if you're going to rack mount it (as opposed to just sitting it on a shelf) the (width) sizing is relatively crucial.

It was cheap and easy, (the chassis much more expensive than the shelving/rack - but the value's in the hot swappable bays) think I'd recommend it.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#15

Post by pmiller2 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #8
MivLives wrote: post #2

Kinda 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 f…

That's a serious amount of kit, and there's no way 20+ machines isn't going to emit a constant roar. At some point, if you're going to have that kind of setup, it needs to be in a dedicated workshop that's either free-standing, or somehow otherwise sound-isolated from the main house. I know I'd never get away with running that much equipment all at once!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#16

Post by heisenzombie »

boring_twenties wrote: post #7
heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I 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 would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#17

Post by arthurcolle »

PLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO!

I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running.

Please don't let this happen to you.

EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#18

Post by [deleted] »

arthurcolle wrote: post #17

PLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running. Please don't let this happen to you. EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#20

Post by Tijdreiziger »

j_walter wrote: post #11
SteveNuts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity

Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.

> Is Xpenology Stable?

> As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support from the community for this software, but not from the company itself. Typically once you’re up and running things are very stable without any issues but just know that calling support is not an option when you’re not running on an official Synology device.

Post reply on HN