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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#61

Post by PeterisP »

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.

It would make sense to build a version of what you're not going to use at this workplace, but what you'd like to use in a hypothetical next one.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#62

Post by madjam002 »

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.

I started with pfSense but very quickly got frustrated with the web UI although it was a massive step up from the ISP supplied router.

Now I run a Linux VM and nftables for my router and it is by far the best system I have tried because it is so simple to manage. It took maybe half a day to learn to set up. As a bonus I am using NixOS as then all of my firewall config, interfaces, VLANs, + any other router-like config lives in a declarative configuration file which I can apply with one command. Before I was using Ansible + Ubuntu but I much prefer NixOS for a router.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#63

Post by xxpor »

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…

I have a mini-itx case with 8 5400 rpm drives, and some basic xeon (E12xx, forgetting the exact model), and I'm shocked at how well modern power saving techniques work. When it's just sitting there being a file server it consumes less than 100 watts, and even when I'm pulling from it at over a gigabit it goes up to maybe 110. It also has 120 mm fans, but I barely notice when they kick on. The loudest part of the whole thing are the heads on the HDDs kicking back and forth!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#65

Post by CarbyAu »

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 am working on using Syncthing. Not a cloud backup solution though.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#66

Post by dclusin »

lmilcin wrote: post #30
dclusin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same as sibling, my setup isn't super custom. I backup my dotfiles and that's about it. Takes about ~1-2 hours to setup a fresh machine.

I think for my next machine I'm going to dump Mac OS and switch Windows + WSL so may investigate fully automating my setup and config then.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#67

Post by bsder »

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.

Backups--very boring. Restore--very exciting.

Restore your data once in a while to check that it's really getting backed up.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#68

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Havoc wrote: post #55

>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…

There's been a lot of failure over here. I'd break my home server almost daily while tinkering. Now that it's been rock solid for about a year I kind of wish it would break and give me a problem to solve.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#69

Post by Cieplak »

awalton wrote: post #56
Cieplak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Yeah everything you mentioned is spot on. I wish I had a garage to operate all my equipment, but have to work within the constraints of my small apartment.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#70

Post by j_walter »

Cieplak wrote: post #48
j_walter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair point. My log machine uses six 16TB SATA drives configured as ZFS mirrors, so effectively 48TB of storage, which I back up to S3. SAS drives are better but the current setup meets my needs.

SAS are better, but for my NAS/Media server needs I use SATA. I have 8x8TB, 2x4TB and 1x500GB SSD...all within a 2U rackmount server that set me back less than $250 that includes things like backup power supplies and 192GB of RAM. I bought another 1U rackmount to run my personal website and NVR (Zoneminder).
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