Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#21

Post by j_walter » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

heisenzombie wrote: post #16

boring_twenties wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#22

Post by j_walter » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

Cieplak wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#23

Post by harha » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

Any recommendations on home networking?

I couldn't figure out what the established approach would be to having access to the infrastructure over a consumer internet connection and without exposing the rest of the network. All resources I've seen so far don't give enough background to seem reliable.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#24

Post by dclusin » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

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.

Commit and push to GitHub more frequently for me. Don’t wait until the pr is perfect before committing.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#25

Post by j45 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #19

For people who are really into system administration.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#26

Post by j45 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

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.

Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front.

Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#27

Post by j45 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

harha wrote: post #23

Any recommendations on home networking? I couldn't figure out what the established approach would be to having access to the infrastructure over a consumer internet connection and without exposing the rest of the network. All resources I've seen so far don't give enough background to seem reliable.

A traditional router can be enough to start with depending on what you're after.

If you want a local VPN without too much fuss, Ubiquiti gear is popular, including the EdgeRouter X gear for off the shelf configuration.

A lot of this stuff is pretty neat these days, set it up once, forget it as long as it's supported and updated from the vendor.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#28

Post by fermienrico » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #25

Animats wrote: post #19

For people who are really into system administration.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection?

Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#29

Post by BluSyn » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

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.

Off-the-shelf rack servers are the worst with noise level, so I personally don't recommend that for a homelab. With my latest upgrade I went custom for this reason. You can build a quiet ATX-based NAS with fairly cheap consumer/gamer-grade components these days.

Using a Rosewill 4U ATX enclosure (RSV-L4312); replaced the stock case fans with Noctua NF-A12/NF-A8 (120mm / 80mm). It's extremely quiet, and now I have a full custom 4U with hot swappable drives, while still maintaining plenty of airflow.

My only gripe is the quality of Rosewill case isn't what I'm used to with enterprise-grade or even gamer-grade chassis. I really wish other companies would get into the homelab space and start making quality ATX rack-mounted chassis. I think there's a decent sized DIY market for this.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#30

Post by lmilcin » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

dclusin wrote: post #24

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.

Commit and push to GitHub more frequently for me. Don’t wait until the pr is perfect before committing.

So you don't value your PC and you are completely ok loosing the configuration and have to redo it from scratch?

For me personally redoing my PC is worth couple of years of backup subscription plus HDD docking station plus two 4TB hard drives dedicated to backups.