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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

haydenjames.io

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#41

Post by marginalia_nu »

mcovalt wrote: post #6

This 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…

> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane.

Yeah. I've got my search engine basically a beefy gaming PC with no graphics card and 128 Gb ram. I've not only gotten supposed HN death hugs multiple times, I've had my search engine see multiple queries per second without as much as flinching. It took Elon Musk tweeting a link to one of my blog entries before I started getting more traffic than my computer could handle and it started dropping a few connections.

Modern consumer PCs are ridiculously powerful if you make good use of the hardware.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#42

Post by qqqwerty »

bagrow wrote: post #3

Anyone 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.

Agreed. I always click the link expecting some kind of electronics or bio lab, and am instead greeted by a server and some networking equipment.

I am not really interested in reading about this kind of stuff[1]. I have a few raspberry pi's that serve as my "home lab" and that is all I really need right now. But I suspect the term took off because it gets a bunch of people like me to click.

[1] Not that I don't think it should exist, its just not high on my list of interests right now.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#43

Post by kube-system »

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?

The high power bill is due to using enterprise rack mount hardware with dual PSUs, instead of consumer hardware.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#44

Post by neilv »

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.

The two APC SMX1500RM2U rackmount units that I had at home seemed built very well.

(Currently have two Cyberpower rackmount units, which don't need as much rack depth in my living room, but I kinda expect something industrial-sounding like AMERICAN POWER CONVERSION to be more reliable than cheesy-sounding CYBERpower. :)

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#45

Post by TacticalCoder »

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).

> 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

Indeed. I'm ordering my 8 Gbit/s "fiber to the home" router and it should come soon (45 EUR / month). The router comes with one SFP port doing 10 Gbit/s (!) while the four other ports are regular 1 Gbit/s ones.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#46

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sp332 wrote: post #39
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe in your area, but it's extremely far from typical.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#47

Post by mcovalt »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #41
mcovalt wrote: post #6

This 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…

> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane. Yeah. I've got my search engine basically a beefy gaming PC with no graphics card and 128 Gb ram. I've not only gotten supposed HN death hugs multiple times, I've had my search engine see multiple queries per second without as much as flinching. It took Elon Musk tweeting a link t…

Very cool! Running the not-well-maintained https://hndex.org search engine (and other memory hungry linear algebra based services) was also my original motivation for tunneling to my home as opposed to hosting on a VPS.

Are you hosted via a residential ISP? It's my hunch that peering agreements favor routes of consumer -> data center -> consumer as opposed to consumer -> consumer. That's mainly why I tunnel. Has that been your experience?

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#48

Post by bombcar »

candiddevmike wrote: post #33
moondev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ESXi free edition is real nice and very easy to setup.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#49

Post by bombcar »

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).

10GbE is cheap enough if you get a microtek 4 port box.

I use it to connect my NAS, my vm server, my Mac, and uplink to my nortel. Works nice.

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