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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#61

Post by KennyBlanken »

heavyset_go wrote: post #24
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…

> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear…

A media server is not a "homelab."

One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit."

I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#63

Post by runjake »

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses.

My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were.

Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in.

It’s not that I don’t like learning and experimenting, it’s just that I get to do that all day at work and I need some work/life balance.

But, I still love seeing these posts and commenters chiming in with their own configurations.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#64

Post by Psychotherapist »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #61
heavyset_go wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear…

A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."

I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#66

Post by KennyBlanken »

nomel wrote: post #9
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…

> Consumer hardware is insane. With less technical management, I've had repeated, and bewildered, conversations trying to get them to understand that our one "computer" sitting on my desk is many many times faster than the "server" our IT team provides. "But it's a server!".

Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it takes up 4-6x more space than it needs to in what is likely the most expensive commercial real estate the company owns/leases.

Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it can't be remotely lights-out managed and its hardware monitored using standardized tools (or at all.)

Many times faster doesn't mean shit if it doesn't have redundant PSUs.

Many times faster doesn't mean shit if failed drives can't be hotswapped.

Also, the computer sitting on your desk is not "many many times faster" than a current, or even few years old, server.

Etc.

If you want better hardware from IT, tell management to give them more money. IT is almost always viewed as a cost center and given a shoestring budget yet asked to do, and be responsible for, he world.

You know how you're experienced from all your years as a programmer? Imagine IT people are the same, instead of assuming they're all idiots who are too stupid to go out and buy desktop computers instead of servers like your genius self.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#67

Post by eminence32 »

runjake wrote: post #63

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses. My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were. Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in. It’s not that I don’t l…

I like your observation. I think the flip side applies in some cases too: the people who don't get to run fancy network gear at part of $dayjob get some enjoyment running them for fun at home.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#68

Post by xen2xen1 »

noizejoy wrote: post #52
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.

I often wish, that this kind of thing would be called something more like home datacenter

Hoarderdatacenter? I heard you say Hoarderdatacenter.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#69

Post by marginalia_nu »

mcovalt wrote: post #47
marginalia_nu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah it's on residential broadband. Haven't really had much trouble to be honest. Though I'm based in Sweden and we have fairly well robust networking infrastructure all around, I guess that may be a factor.

I was hit by a botnet after my first big HN hug, so right now at least the search engine goes visitor->cloudflare->server, but if anything that's just added a bunch of ping.

I'm also doing crawling and so on on the same network and it's really not bad for that either. Granted my crawls are fairly slow and very far from saturating any connections.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#70

Post by [deleted] »

Psychotherapist wrote: post #64
KennyBlanken wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."

I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)

[deleted]
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