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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#51

Post by cmckn »

lallysingh wrote: post #36
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Mostly 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.

I don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

I have done what the parent describes, but also agree with you. I have enjoyed doing things "the right way" at home when I've seen something heinous at work, but....why? I try to spend personal time on personal things these days. I've been playing with IPFS lately :)

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#52

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

breakfastduck wrote: post #44
m0xte wrote: post #31

I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains. So roll…

For a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management. So I think your final line is more personal preference than a lesson most people with home labs need to realise.

Yeah, home labbing is about the journey but eventually the journey ends once you've learned how to use some of the technology you wanted.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#53

Post by VHRanger »

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.

I think backblaze will come cheaper than writing to S3 and avoids you maintaining the cronjob for the script

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#54

Post by syshum »

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.

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

Sorry you lost your data, data loss is terrible

while doing a simple copy to S3 is better than nothing, Everyone wanting to backup their data should follow a 3-2-1 Policy [1][2][3]

3 Copies of the data

2 different storage media's / devices

1 offsite location.

backing up only to S3 can still leave you vulnerable, for example I remember one person that was doing cloud backups and their card was declined and they missed the emails for awhile so their data was deleted...

[1] https://medium.com/@nakivo/the-3-2-1-backup-rule-an-efficien...

[2] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

[3] https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-follow-the-3-2-1-backup-ru...

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#55

Post by Havoc »

>Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home.

This is the exact opposite of my thinking.

I want my experiments to happen on a remote server I don't care about...not on my home network that I really don't want to compromise/open up by accidentally misconfiguring something.

VPS are cheap - I'm paying like 7 bucks for a 16 gig / 4vcore. (Admittedly a once off deal). 7 bucks to have the blast radius of my networking noobness somewhere else seems like a bargain.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#56

Post by awalton »

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.

I won't be the first to admit that the rackmount hardware is a nuisance, but at the same time, it's relatively inexpensive since there's no practical reason to buy new hardware for a homelab and the IT renewal companies are absolutely overflowing with reclaimed hardware on the cheap. Also it's often easier to find hardware configurations that require no tinkering at all, verses having to slog through a PC build and hope that nothing goes wrong. My favorite hardware though are workstations and tower servers, since they're basically the best of both worlds - commercial machines with a decent amount of replacement parts with tool-less (or even hot) swapping and people with experience servicing them while still being fairly quiet at heavy load.

I've done it every other way - I have a dual chip Xeon Silver machine that I hand built, an IT reclaimed Dell rack server, three NUCs (used to be 4 but one bit the dust after 4.5 years of hard service), and a smathering of other hardware (NASes, 10G and 1G switches, etc.)...

After the absolute pain of the Xeon Silver build - having a brand new motherboard that was DOA and basically being told I was out $600 after multiple rounds of escalation, then having the replacement board fight with my GPUs, I'm not sure if I'm willing to bother doing it again. It would have been worth it to pay the markup on a gently used commercial machine and I would have been up and running faster... Probably would have been cheaper, in fact.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#57

Post by syshum »

lallysingh wrote: post #36
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Mostly 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.

I don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

With more companies doing Work from Home, and MS offering Autopilot I have see a few companies start to explore BYOD for things like Laptops and printers... so I dont think this is very far off

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#58

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

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?

There are a number of PCIE SAS HBAs ,or SAS RAID that you can run in HBA mode, which will handle SAS and or SATA drives with an adapter. Getting 16 drives off a single HBA is totally doable and you don't need the more expensive battery-backed cache models since ZFS is doing the pool work.

I personally prefer the QNAP options as those either re-branded or integrated from chipsets that are widely supported in Linux and BSD.

There are rackable ATX cases like the Rosewill RSV-L4500 which don't have the enterprise-y niceties but are perfectly service-able and fairly quiet for a dozen disks.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#59

Post by syshum »

henryfjordan wrote: post #38
fermienrico wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, your ISP will only give you a new IP address if your modem disconnects for a while. You can easily use the same IP address for over a year. You can also use something like DuckDNS to have a backup in case you are away from home and your IP changes, you can still find your server. You could even theoretically write a script that then checks DuckDNS for your IP and updates the record with your Domain…

There are also prebuilt Docker images that will update duckdns for you if you are using docker in your lab

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#60

Post by t0astbread »

Maybe a bit off-topic but what do people actually use for monitoring/intrusion detection on small-scale to hobby projects that are internet-connected? I feel like the "established" monitoring frameworks require too much maintenance work and care to really be effective but the operating systems generally used for this kinda work have a way too large surface area to just leave running on their own. (Hello Unikernels?)
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