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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#141

Post by bregma »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #104
lallysingh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

I think this misunderstands the point of the parent comment. They're not saying "replicate your work environment so that you can test your things at home", they're saying "replicate your work environment so you can learn best practices and apply your learnings at home when you're at work". There's a stark difference in that the things you host and do with your home setup are your own, but the learnings and technologi…

Yes, you should subsidize your employer by investing in your own specialized training and your own specialized equipment. With all the cutbacks the government isn't doing that for them any more so it's up to you to deliver solid value to the shareholders and quarter-over-quarter growth.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#142

Post by tilolebo »

Railworks2 wrote: post #121
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?

NUC? NAS? Kind of depends which way you wanna go. NAS is probably the term you're thinking off.

Nope, it was indeed NUC.

I already have a DIY NAS at home, I'm now looking for an extra small machine to run more experimental stuff, playing with k8s, etc.

I don't want to do that on my NAS.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#143

Post by brendawalsh »

system2 wrote: post #95
t0astbread wrote: post #60

Maybe a bit off-topic but what do people actually use for monitoring/intrusion detection on small-scale to hobby projects that are internet-connected? I feel like the "established" monitoring frameworks require too much maintenance work and care to really be effective but the operating systems generally used for this kinda work have a way too large surface area to just leave running on their own. (Hello Unikernels?)

I am using Sonicwall NSA2600. Works well, has 300mbit SSL filtering, very robust rules and nat configuration. Most small/medium size companies can use the model I am using. Has a very nice web interface too. Comes with SSL VPN and Global VPN.

What do you pay for licensing the services?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#144

Post by bregma »

The author of the article can afford all this stuff because he keeps a 'little woman' locked in his basement ironing his shorts.

Sure, the article if full of techporn but I haven't read anything so unabashedly sexist in nature since the late 1970s. It was truly cringeworthy. Reminded me of reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950s or a pulp SciFi novel by Murray Leinster or something.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#145

Post by tilolebo »

commotionfever wrote: post #133
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

Very nice! I configured my NAS a few weeks ago, went for a fractal design core 500.

Now I'm looking for a smaller, more beefy machine with less storage capacity, for some @home experiments.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#146

Post by m0xte »

j_walter wrote: post #47
m0xte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year. When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.

This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.

Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#147

Post by j45 »

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.

Dynamic DNS has existed for the better part of 20+ years.

Residential ISPs also often provide static DHCP leases that are quasi static IPs.

Some ISPs also sell an addon for a static IP to the service.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#148

Post by j45 »

lallysingh wrote: post #36
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

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 don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

It's less about the employer and some choosing to take an interest in expanding their skills in this way.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#149

Post by j45 »

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.

It's only a backup if you have more than 1 copy of it. Storing it in one cloud doesn't count. Losing data sucks, but seems to be a right of passage.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#150

Post by j45 »

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?

You might be thinking of Intel NUCs, or tiny PC's like the Lenovo m920q's, HP EliteDesks, etc.
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