121–130 of 184 posts
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?
Kind of depends which way you wanna go. NAS is probably the term you're thinking off.
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.
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 love homelabbing but the ongoing problem for homelabbing to training skill is that more jobs need to use cloud services, rather than on-premises.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a serious amount of kit, and there's no way 20+ machines isn't going to emit a constant roar. At some point, if you're going to have that kind of setup, it needs to be in a dedicated workshop that's either free-standing, or somehow otherwise sound-isolated from the main house. I know I'd never get away with running that much equipment all at once!
18 months, lol. His wife must be a saint.
Router =/= 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?
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.
Seconding that Ubiquiti Edgerouter if you want a mostly GUI guided config. They're solid enough for gigabit internet in the better models and the builtin firewall and tunneling options are good enough for most purposes -- the recent releases also let you install Wireguard, which is getting to be the preferred low-effort VPN solution for most platforms if you have a limited set of remote clients. PFSense or OPNSense,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So, why not run open-source cloud software (OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.) in your homelab?
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.
My personal AWS resources are on FreeBSD. My home server is on Windows Server. The few places where I need Linux are at least Debian.
Home projects are to scratch a personal itch, try and avoid getting too rusty at the things I don't get to keep up with at work, and/or expand the breadth of my knowledge, not to replicate what I'm doing at work.
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…
Did i do anything specific relevant on it which would have required it? Nope.
But boy did i learn things.
If not us as Software Engineers / Tech people, should have something like a home lab?
I have setup a k8s cluster at home; Do i need it? Nope for sure not; Is it nice? Is it running smoothly? Did i learn things? Is it interesting to use and fun? Does it help that it does run 24/7? yes, yes yes and yes.
When i have my own house, i do plan to centralize everything in it in one rack somewhere nice, optic fiber in every relevant room, vlan, backup server/nas etc. Alone something like this does require quite a lot of hardware.
And i think its very nice to have vlan capabilities to seperate that one iot device from the rest of my network.
For people who are really into system administration.