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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#81

Post by boring_twenties »

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?

I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card).

You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it.

Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago.

Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID).

All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#83

Post by walterbell »

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?

InWin MS08, https://www.ipc.in-win.com/soho-smb-iw-ms08

Norco ITX-S8, http://www.norcotek.com/product/itx-s8/

Silverstone GD07 plus 3-bay hotswap cages for dual-bay 5.25 = 11 drives total with audio device aesthetic, https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=330&area=en

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#84

Post by Teever »

dvdbloc wrote: post #12
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.

Unfortunately those Rosewill 4U cases with 15x 3.5" drive haves have been out of stock since COVID started.

I wish I could find an alternative that is as affordable.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#85

Post by tjbiddle »

What I'm most fascinated by is that this is a solo blog that has sponsors and plenty of affiliate links, and has over 4 million readers. Very curious what kind of revenue it's pulling in. Can't seem to find a search function to see if the topic was already covered.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#86

Post by icedchai »

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 recommending setting up "restic" to S3 or one of its many clones: https://restic.net/

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#87

Post by tomc1985 »

Great, now the time-honored nerd practice of running shit out of your closet/garage has been picked up by hucksters as "homelab"ing. If it's anything like the damage that YouTube did to computer building, next thing you know this practice is going to suddenly turn into aesthetics and bragging rights.

I am SOOO SICK of watching this highly technical and aesthetically inconsiderate hobby turn into an issue of neckbeard Modern Living. A new generation of boutique providers selling storage racks at silly markups.

Pretty soon you're going to have the worst kind of hipsters -- keyboard nerds -- obsessing over the material used in rack standoffs or something. Because you know that aged Persian rubber dampens vibrations +.03db better...

Yay.....

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#88

Post by newtoday »

j_walter wrote: post #70
Cieplak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Out of all the setups I've read about here, I would love to hear more about yours and the costs involved, please?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#89

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

num wrote: post #64

Don't forget the amazing content on: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn (SFW) And the more fringe but OCD-pleasing https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn (SFW) r/homelab has been a source of great inspiration since 2012.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ is an adjacent interesting subreddit

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#90

Post by znpy »

zouhair wrote: post #78
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.

Maybe a bit too direct, but I 100% agree with this comment.
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