For the UPS, I always err on the side of ones that are PFC-compatible, pure sine wave, line interactive. Partly because some of the gear I rack has PFC PSUs, but also because I don't want to be flirting with edge cases in other gear. I've owned 3 such rackmount UPSes, but it doesn't seem to be the default.
Home lab beginners guide (2021)
11–20 of 191 posts
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#12wow! Pretty good :)
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#13This is fun. I'm more of a minimalist with my homelab setup. It's a laptop and an old NAS. I love it either way: running a homelab is a nonsensical and fun hobby in any case. I feel like we live in a world in which it's either racks or cheap VPSs. In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane . I've handled 10's of thousands of…
> running a homelab is a nonsensical
I think a lot of people build a homelab to learn about technologies and get realworld experience deploying them. That was what drove mine for a couple of years. Once you’ve mastered servers and networking and so on, then it just becomes a fun hobby, I agree there. But someone who wants to get into networking and the like (and who lacks experience) is definitely going to need to practice with real or simulated networks to get good at it.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#14I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS. Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors. My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg
Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you can pick up old data center gear cheap . Including some exotic stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until the novelty wore off). For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro. For people that really only want something small, I've seen people 3D print out of plastic, bu…
This is what I did. My wife had an IKEA Besta media center cabinet and it's already mounted beneath our television. I just re-purposed it and put in a homemade NAS, router, switch, and some fanless mini-PCs as my server cluster. The downside is no ventilation, but I got out the jigsaw and cut holes in the cabinet and stuck USB fans with magnetic dust filters in them. Has worked fine for two years now. Upside is everything is small and quiet and I didn't need additional furniture to put servers in. You have to get Windows off the mini-PCs, but since Arch started bundling cloud-init with their installer media, I just put my configuration scripts on a USB stick with the cidata label on the disk, plug that in with the installer, hit the power button, and system installation up to configuring ssh so I can get in from my laptop happens unattended without me needing to hook up to a keyboard and monitor.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#15Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers? Seems too narrow to me.
It's likely easier, safer and more socially acceptable to set up this kind of home lab than the kind of maker spaces you are talking about. A lot of people go to (shared/public) maker spaces precisely because their home is not suitable for that kind of physical experimenting. You probably need space, money and expertise to do home experiments of that sort and then it's probably generally wise to keep it on the down low in most cases so you don't freak out the neighbors or otherwise draw problems to yourself.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#16I'm very pleased using PVE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment for my homelab
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#17I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS. Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors. My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg
Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you can pick up old data center gear cheap . Including some exotic stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until the novelty wore off). For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro. For people that really only want something small, I've seen people 3D print out of plastic, bu…
Back when my Bride and I were living in a one bedroom apartment, she looked at my jumble of computers around my desk and asked "why not just get one big box?". I was browsing/shopping at Lockheed's outlet store, and stumbled across a glorious Sun 180 server with a 19", 8' tall rack. Only $25! Who could resist! We picked it up and my Bride was horrified to discover the refrigerator sized machine next to my desk. It is still used today - though it is holding a bunch of servers in the basement rather than front and center in my office.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#18I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains:
* HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed switch, €47)
* HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB SAS drives (€450)
* NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5” SAS array, currently populated with 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), €400)
* the mentioned airflow divider
* 8 drying frames
It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as replacements for failed drives.
The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which now sits just above the air flow divider):
In the not-too-distant future I’ll replace the 15K SAS drives with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot. After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment. This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown in through the filter(s).
I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the DS4243) although I’m only using half of these. I recently had to replace a power supply in the DL380 (€20) and two drives in the DS4243 (€20/piece), for the rest everything has been working fine for close to 4 years now.
On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably ‘no’, depending on the size of the library. Instead of using ‘enterprise class’ equipment you could try to build a system tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and performance. You’ll probably end up spending about the same amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a substantially lower performing system but you’d be rewarded by the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the barn, etc.
As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it is there.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#19A little off-topic, but I love the style of this writer.
The humor is a little goofy in the best way; the structure is detailed, but still conversational. It just feels very… personable.
Like — computers are so goddamn neat. We should all remember to have fun with this stuff sometimes.
Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)
#20It's time to update this kind of guides with at least 2.5GbE networking. I suspect most FTTH ISPs will start defaulting to 2 or even 5 Gbps soon (mine already offers theses speeds in PNW, but at premium costs).
There's very few consumer options at 2.5 / 5 GbE; you can usually pick up cheaper 10 GbE gear (but on older standards, non-multi-gig compatible).