I'm trying to remember the name of these really small, nearly portable homelab servers.
They're quite expensive but looked like a good homelab alternative for people lacking space for a proper rack.
Someone knows it?
Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
111–120 of 184 posts
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#112Router =/= Firewall. If you are planning to host stuff, or even just to protect your own things, you better get something like Sonicwall or similar. At my home I have a sonicwall, synology nas, 2 dell servers, power supplies. Not in a single closet though. To me, the server security is far more important than the looks. Spend the most money on firewall, rest is just for looks. Patch panel for home setup sounds excess…
Maybe a noob question, but why do you need a dedicated firewall appliance? What is it doing for you that just closing all ports and then selectively reopening as needed (my current solution) won't do? What kinds of threats is it protection your network from?
Well I dont think you need a real firewall but a serious router is nice for the home network.
A big advantage is that you can do vlans, so you can seperate your homelab from the rest of your devices. You could also do things like block outbound traffic from your home network.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#113I'm trying to remember the name of these really small, nearly portable homelab servers. They're quite expensive but looked like a good homelab alternative for people lacking space for a proper rack. Someone knows it?
I think it was Intel NUC.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#114One of the reasons I still run some servers and play with networking gear at home, even when SaaSes, Linode, and EC2 are so affordable, is as an exercise in being somewhat more self-sufficient, than depending on "other people's computers" for everything. Especially since my entire industry seems determined to see how far it can push spying on its users, leveraging power over them, etc. (All evidence is: no real limit…
> Also, it's just fun to play with gear.
Exactly my reason as well. RaspberryPi k8s cluster of some old Pi 3's I had lying around - why not? Hardware seems to generally last longer than you expect, and can be repurposed for, at the very least, a fun Sunday morning.
> Do I really want a pfSense box and some external WiFi APs, or can I make OpenWrt on plastic home routers do everything, and isn't Ubiquiti gear pretty but closed?
Just went through this too. The research and rabbit-holing down different hardware paths is so much fun. I ended up with Ubiquiti over pfSense; it is pretty, hot dang.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#115Earlier 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.
I dont value the config of my PC. I dont next to no customisation of my setup.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you. People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.
Well, I guess if you are serious about a home lab you need both your normal network and a seperate homelab. I like tinkering with my homelab but I need not to depend on it for my work or internet access.
What if your true Internet access depends on it? Providing un-GFWed Internet access for all my devices is so much easier with the networking gears which happens to be in my homelab setup.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#117PLEASE 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.)
Whats the markup format? I've tried the common MD shortcuts but they never work, maybe I'm just a trog
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#118Earlier 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?
If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount.
If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case.
If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#119Earlier 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.
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.
Now it's possible thanks to Fractal Design's Define 7 XL.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#120Mostly 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 love homelabbing but the ongoing problem for homelabbing to training skill is that more jobs need to use cloud services, rather than on-premises.