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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#131

Post by flipbrad »

tuananh wrote: post #96

i'm temped to buy the used enterprise equipment but in the end, i ended up buying small Intel NUC machines for my homelab. power consumption of these NUCs is almost negligible while one Dell R620 with dual CPU takes 150-200W at idle.

I looked at NUCs and settled for a used ThinkPad. Integrated keyboard, monitor, mouse and battery, and potentially even more judicious with power consumption, but oomphy enough to run image recognition on my photo collection while hosting lots of dockers. Backup to a local NAS that I only switch on during the backup window, and backup remotely to backblaze B2.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#132

Post by shifto »

tilolebo wrote: post #113
tilolebo wrote: post #111

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?

I think it was Intel NUC.

Funny. I have a full 42U rack at home but because I am moving to another city I had to dismantle everything to get it packed. All the critical VM's and services are now running on an old NUC and a HP low-spec laptop. Made me rethink if I really need all the hardware I have or I should downsize.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#133

Post by commotionfever »

tilolebo wrote: post #111

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?

I am very happy with my proliant microserver gen10 plus. holds 4x 3.5" drives, is absolutely tiny, good at virtualisation, quiet-ish, upgradeable

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#134

Post by m0xte »

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.

My conclusion is that my home lab was a learning exercise that comes to an end and that having physical hardware was actually detrimental to it.

I still have a home lab. It's just virtualized.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#135

Post by ThatPlayer »

twicetwice wrote: post #105
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 can't replace/reconfigure the router I'm behind right now, so I set up a Wireguard VPN. A $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet is the "hub", which then has point-to-point connections through Wireguard to each of my devices. They all get their own IP addresses through the network—I used the 10.101.101.0/24 subnet for memorability—and since I manually allocate IP addresses, I can actually remember which one is which! Then they…

Not as popular as Wireguard, but Tinc VPN is a mesh VPN where each client is also a node. I've got it running on my actual router (pfsense), so my phone will then attempt to connect to the router node when I'm on my home network so any connections will stay in my home network. And then for everything external I can have it go through a VPS (or multiple) like you.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#136

Post by tuananh »

flipbrad wrote: post #131
tuananh wrote: post #96

i'm temped to buy the used enterprise equipment but in the end, i ended up buying small Intel NUC machines for my homelab. power consumption of these NUCs is almost negligible while one Dell R620 with dual CPU takes 150-200W at idle.

I looked at NUCs and settled for a used ThinkPad. Integrated keyboard, monitor, mouse and battery, and potentially even more judicious with power consumption, but oomphy enough to run image recognition on my photo collection while hosting lots of dockers. Backup to a local NAS that I only switch on during the backup window, and backup remotely to backblaze B2.

i bought used NUCs too. new one cost way too much :D

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#137

Post by ashitlerferad »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #68
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.

Hahaha I know that feeling!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#138

Post by koyote »

neilv wrote: post #108

One 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…

> 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?

So I went from Tomato on an old Cisco router to buying a fitlet2, installing Proxmox on it, setting up pfSense as one of the VMs and then finally connecting a Ubiquity Unifi AP to the box.

pfSense is very nice and definitely beats Tomato in terms of things you can do with it (although Tomao/OpenWrt is great for 'upgrading' an existing router). Because my network is 100% wireless the Unifi UI has a great overview of all connected devices and I get to set up separate SSIDs with their own VLAN tags which then feed into the pfSense's firewall. This means my IoT devices are on their own network and can't interact with the rest of my stuff and my one external camera has no direct internet access at all.

It's all great fun setting up!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#139

Post by Macha »

mrslave wrote: post #100
poglet wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recommendation would be the Fractal Design Node 804.

People actually put a mini-ITX in a micro-ATX case?!?!?! faints

microATX motherboards are dying out - with the ability to omit drive bays entirely and just mount SSDs to the back of a motherboard tray, full ATX cases can get reasonably small now, so there's less demand.

It turns out PCI express slots are either something people want 3+ of (like a streamer setup of gpu, capture card, high end network card) or 1 of (GPU only) or none (business PC, devs happy with Intel or APU graphics). So really the only tradeoff the largest chunk of the market is making picking miniITX is that I haven't seen any with 4 RAM slots and a m.2 drive (though both features are available seperately on many motherboards). And even then the standard gamer setup is 2x8, while the amount of professionals for whom 64gb (2x32) is too little but 128gb is enough is currently a small market also.

Case manufacturers are not so quick to abandon the size though, with the result that if you get a case that you like for size/features/airflow and it happens to be a microATX case, most of your motherboard options are going to be miniITX.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#140

Post by bregma »

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…

> expensive to feed ... take up a lot of room ... family ... become needy balls and chains.

So you go rid of the lab instead of the obvious solution?

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