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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#151

Post by j45 »

SteveNuts wrote: post #9
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?

Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity

A Synology or QNAP NAS is a good idea in that it will be an appliance type use, which is a big step from having to build and maintain it yourself, which isn't for everyone.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#152

Post by j45 »

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?

Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#153

Post by j45 »

m0xte wrote: post #34
j45 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front. Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.

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.

Once you add up multiple devices it can get out of hand.

The price/watt ratio is helpful to have something you set, forget and don't notice running in the background.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#154

Post by j45 »

gog wrote: post #33

Anybody knows if those kinds of power strips mentioned in the article are available for the Europian market ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFZ98YO/ )? I've been searching for something like that a few months ago but couldn't find anything that has schuko sockets on the other side.

You can search for PDUs (Power distribution units) in North America to get you pointed in the right direction.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pdu

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#155

Post by creativeembassy »

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?

Maybe Antsle? https://antsle.com/

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#156

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

And it works vice versa! I don't have to learn to support my home environment... I can actually do research at work for my job and also conveniently apply that to home!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#157

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fomine3 wrote: post #120
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 love homelabbing but the ongoing problem for homelabbing to training skill is that more jobs need to use cloud services, rather than on-premises.

If given an option between a job maintaining cloud services and a job maintaining on-premises technologies, I'd take the latter every time. You spend less time fighting support ticket queues and more time doing things.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#158

Post by dragonwriter »

fomine3 wrote: post #127
dragonwriter wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why not run open-source cloud software (OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.) in your homelab?

That's OK for learning general things and the software but jobs tend to use AWS.

Sure, so, you'll want to use some AWS (much of which can be within free tier), some of your homelab with CloudStack, etc., and some Terraform (etc.), and learn heterogenous hybrid cloud.

Using a homelab for learning isn't somehow mutually exclusive with having your own AWS account for learning.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#159

Post by stryan »

bregma wrote: post #144

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.

Source? The only time the author mentions his wife in the article is that she's working full-time and would dislike some server placements.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#160

Post by lallysingh »

j45 wrote: post #148
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?

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

This is a terrible use of money for expanding your skills. Rent the machine time for peanuts, learning even more relevant skills simultaneously.
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