Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
161–170 of 184 posts
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Either you're exceptionally dense or you're purposefully ignoring the point.
If you're setting up a homelab, you might as well use industry best practices for it.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't understand why "pushing to GitHub more often" implies "do not value PC and are OK losing configuration"?
I think OP was referring to things like vim configs, shell customizations, nginx configs, etc. There's lots of computer customizations I could think of that aren't always thought about in context of storing in a git repo. Also you could have large files such as market data, movies, or music collection that aren't a good fit for a git repo.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#164Don't forget the amazing content on: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeLabPorn (SFW) And the more fringe but OCD-pleasing https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn (SFW) r/homelab has been a source of great inspiration since 2012.
r/homeserver for those looking at single system or less intensive setups.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why "pushing to GitHub more often" implies "do not value PC and are OK losing configuration"?
I think OP was referring to things like vim configs, shell customizations, nginx configs, etc. There's lots of computer customizations I could think of that aren't always thought about in context of storing in a git repo. Also you could have large files such as market data, movies, or music collection that aren't a good fit for a git repo.
I noticed the usage of computers changed drastically over years. When I started last millennium it was normal for people to have large amount of installed tools with large amount of customizations.
I have a bunch of custom-compiled software with options for my specific needs, and my two main computers (PC and a laptop) have both huge history of various workaround that I don't even remember any longer and would have to research all of them again. I also have a bunch of Virtualbox VMs. These are a Windows VM configured for remote work, couple Linux VMS with configurations for embedded development (I do ARM development). I have one dedicated to Matlab, Simulink and LabView and host of plugins and customizations.
While keeping dotfiles and scripts is easy (I just have a repository on bitbucket) I would still have to spend a day or two just getting everything in order and probably much more to get these VMS for embedded development which is just full of workarounds for various problems.
As a contractor paid by the hour I am aware of my hourly rate and this helps me put things in perspective. Once you calculate the value of services and tools what seemed expensive frequently becomes dirt cheap when you factor time saved or risk averted.
For backup I keep USB docking station and two 4TB HDDs. I try to keep one of them at a different site. I also keep a copy on an online service mostly for convenience but also as another layer of protection.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#166Any 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,…
USG and PoE switch are on my short list to increase functionality of my single Unifi AP AC lite that covers my apartment very well. I'd like the wireguard option and sort out how to redirect my laptop back to my home network for simple management. At the moment I just connect to a VM using Chreom remote desktop and remote out to systems from there.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Great write up and nice setup! I’ve been running Unraid on a fast box for my local storage host and using NFS and SMB with dismal performance. I’m looking at 10gbe and building up my cache pool, but as it stands it takes 40+ seconds for my laptop to mount and browse even a small share. I’m intrigued by zfs + iSCSI- do you think it would give me some improvements over SMB?
Probably highly dependent on what you're doing with it and whether or not your SMB implementation supports the direct RDMA extensions.
In my case its mostly because I tend to run VMs on various older semi-retired machines with limited or slow local storage that I only turn on when I need them, and VMware's VMFS is cluster-aware, so it really doesn't matter which hypervisor is the one I end up spinning it up on.
I haven't dealt with Unraid specifically but there are a lot of caching and network parameters that can wildly affect performance -- VMware for example wants to do synchronous writes on network storage for obvious reasons, and having a safe write-cache and large transfers with enough in-flight commands can make a night and day difference.
If you're primarily just using NFS/SMB as file shares then getting iSCSI working probably isn't going to be a good use of your time versus figuring out why the existing setup behaves that way -- Samba and SMB performance tuning can be a frustrating experience but iSCSI is far more opaque and inscrutable on Windows particularly.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#168Earlier 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.
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.
Whatever works for you, just don't generalize it.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, home labbing is about the journey but eventually the journey ends once you've learned how to use some of the technology you wanted.
My home lab helped boost my career enormously. 5 old HP servers running Windows 2000 network introduced me to AD, Exchange, MS-SQL, etc. hooked up via Cisco hardware. (100% pirated I will admit) The cost of purchasing (eBay) and running the servers paid for itself in 6 months on my first "IT" salary. I sold on the whole lot to another guy trying to boost his skills too. It was fun and served its purpose.
Never heard a single story about setting up a home lab that isn’t wholesome!
Got to be one of the least offensive hobbies going.
Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
#170Any 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 started with pfSense but very quickly got frustrated with the web UI although it was a massive step up from the ISP supplied router. Now I run a Linux VM and nftables for my router and it is by far the best system I have tried because it is so simple to manage. It took maybe half a day to learn to set up. As a bonus I am using NixOS as then all of my firewall config, interfaces, VLANs, + any other router-like confi…
Is your config file publicly available? I'm experimenting with nixos on server and thinkpad. I was thinking about using/learning opnsense.