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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#31

Post by kube-system »

sgt wrote: post #25
neilv wrote: post #11

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.

Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.

I had a UPS fail last week, but I have two of them and my servers have dual PSUs plugged into each one. I don’t really need the uptime, but I’m mostly glad I was able to finally justify my unnecessarily high power bill to myself. :)

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#32

Post by mbreese »

powersnail wrote: post #28

As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?

There isn’t anything that isn’t doable on a sufficiently sized desktop. IMHO a rack is more helpful when you start doing larger cable runs or networking gear that isn’t available as a VM. With a well sized desktop (or pedestal server more likely), you can recreate most homelab setups virtually.

You might use less power if you have separate low power devices as opposed to a single (large) server though, so that’s one consideration. Another those is what it is you hope to accomplish. If you want to test gear or hardware that you can’t virtualize, then a rack can be handy. But even things like pulling out hard drives from a running server can be simulated with a VM in some way.

But it’s easier to brag about having a rack than a really elaborate VM configuration.

Otherwise, as I missing something?

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#33

Post by candiddevmike »

moondev wrote: post #26
candiddevmike wrote: post #22

Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be more efficient/faster GHz than a bunch of old servers and more than capable for running three node clusters.

I went the "prosumer" route too. Threadripper maxed with 256G memory. It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru. This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.

Why ESXi just out of curiousity? Seems like most businesses I work with are ripping it out (some with glee) and going acropolis/kubevirt/QEMU or cloud.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#34

Post by namecheapTA »

kube-system wrote: post #31
sgt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.

I had a UPS fail last week, but I have two of them and my servers have dual PSUs plugged into each one. I don’t really need the uptime, but I’m mostly glad I was able to finally justify my unnecessarily high power bill to myself. :)

How does a UPS cause a high power bill? Doesn't it just charge up the batteries once and basically maintain after that?

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#35

Post by neilv »

heelix wrote: post #17
neilv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 3/180? Awesome score.

That's the "one big box" version of the 3/75 and pair of Sun shoeboxes that I once bought for home. (Bought used, from the local Sun office, which would occasionally email out of list old gear to sysadmins at customer sites, but for quite a lot more money than $25, unfortunately.)

Hopefully the 3/180 isn't as crazy-loud as the big old 4/390 that my employer was still using for email and some NFS.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#36

Post by marginalia_nu »

MrFoof wrote: post #29
candiddevmike wrote: post #22

Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be more efficient/faster GHz than a bunch of old servers and more than capable for running three node clusters.

Honestly, depending on what you're doing? Not even that. * Don't underestimate the number of services you can having running in containers on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, sipping just 2.1W (yes, that little!) at idle over PoE or as low as 1.35W over WiFi powered by USB-C. With distributions like DietPi you can have a mere 10 processes at startup (using just 44MiB of RAM) , but still all the flexibility in the w…

> Raspberry Pi

> old laptop

> Also don't forget you can cluster them. Want Kubernetes experience?

Just don't be thinking about mixing ARM and x86 in the same Kubernetes cluster. Like even if you technically can run a multi-arch kubernetes cluster, it's a major footgun. Docker's multi-architecture support leaves a lot to be desired and is a real pain to work with.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#37

Post by [deleted] »

namecheapTA wrote: post #34
kube-system wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a UPS fail last week, but I have two of them and my servers have dual PSUs plugged into each one. I don’t really need the uptime, but I’m mostly glad I was able to finally justify my unnecessarily high power bill to myself. :)

How does a UPS cause a high power bill? Doesn't it just charge up the batteries once and basically maintain after that?

[deleted]

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#38

Post by accountofme »

7speter wrote: post #21
genewitch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple…

> Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like a…

On that note ryzen does support ecc.

It is not validated. So YMMV, but it works and is seen by Linux for me at least .

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#39

Post by sp332 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27
gigel82 wrote: post #20

It'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).

The areas this sort of thing is available is way too scarce to matter. I'm in a major metropolitan highly competitive area, and 1.2Gbps non-symmetrical coax is the fastest option. Most PCs where I work run through 100 Mbps switches. Your experience is very far from the average.

Verizon FIOS and Comcast/Xfinity already offer 2+ Gbps, plus AT&T and Frontier.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#40

Post by Macha »

powersnail wrote: post #28

As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?

My primary home server _is_ my old desktop with some extra drives in there. It can be useful to have a bit more stability for something that you want to be generally up and change less than your workstation setup, and that drives the need for the extra setup. Then I've got a pi for some low load services that I'd rather not be on the same host as anything internet accessible in case of a security vulnerability (things are containerised, but container escape exploits still feel like they come up relatively frequently).

The only thing I feel I'm missing over over a real server would be an IPMI so I can boot it remotely in the event of a power loss. There are solutions to use a rPi for that which I plan to look into... some day.

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