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

71–80 of 184 posts

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#71

Post by Cieplak »

aidenn0 wrote: post #42
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.

a 4U rackmount server is identical form-factor to a 19" tall tower.

That’s right, though 4U cases generally only ventilate from the front and back, which seems to contribute to their noise level. I figure that only a small minority of the 4U market runs their servers in apartment kitchens.

I’ve had good luck using horizontal Silverstone ATX cases with fans on three sides. That said, I’m sure there are 4U units that offer huge but low rpm fans that would satisfy the bedroom server-lab niche market.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#72

Post by mrslave »

xxpor wrote: post #63
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 whol…

Mini-ITX case recommendation that holds 8 3.5" drives please?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#73

Post by Hasz »

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?

Dunno how many is a bunch, but I have an HP microserver that's quiet and cheap. They're intended for small offices, and can be picked up refurbished for $250. I have ~12(4x3)TB in mine, in two mirrored vdevs for 6TB usable. Less than $125 for all the (used) HGST drives too.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#74

Post by jtsiskin »

fermienrico wrote: post #28
j45 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many domain registrars give you an API for DNS updates. Every minute resolve your IP and if it changes, update it. Service won’t be available during propagation but home IP’s don’t change too often

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#75

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(Sorry about your stuff.)

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#76

Post by poglet »

mrslave wrote: post #72
xxpor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whol…

Mini-ITX case recommendation that holds 8 3.5" drives please?

My recommendation would be the Fractal Design Node 804.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#77

Post by whalesalad »

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…

The goal is to have a staging area where you can encounter failures before they happen in the real environment.

A lot of times you cannot simulate the exact scenario you’re preparing for without actually doing it in a real setup. This is the point of a home lab.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#78

Post by zouhair »

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…

Your conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you. People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#79

Post by kube-system »

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…

For me, part of homelabbing is learning the entire stack from physical layer up. I learn a lot of stuff running on my own physical hardware that I would have never learned when using someone else’s hardware with many nines of uptime.

I have a reference point for how my software runs on real enterprise hardware. I know what unexpected things my software does when various hardware/VM/network issues arise, and I’ve learned ways around them and how to write better software that takes these edge cases into consideration.

Are you really full stack if you didn’t reflash the firmware on your RAID controller? When I say I’m full stack, I really mean it. :)

That said, I do keep separate VLANs for my “test” and “prod” environments here at home to keep frustrations at a minimum.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#80

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #75
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.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . (Sorry about your stuff.)

[deleted]
Post reply on HN