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I'm not a network guy, so apologies for the stupid question, but what is the patch panel for in this setup? It doesn't really look like it has a purpose from my view.
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It's a place to experiment with the skills you use in your profession. I don't see what you're struggling with.
I guess I'm struggling with why I would buy the same commercial grade equipment to play with at home when my profession should be fulfilling the needs of that skill set. Sounds like if you feel like you need to do so, you're more than likely unfulfilled in your current career.
Thats quite a lot of people, personally i would rather be planting trees, it i could pay the bill with that
I'm very pleased using PVE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment for my homelab
I've never understood why fiddling with IT equipment in your home is considering a "home lab" since you aren't necessarily creating anything (like a laboratory would do), you are just integrating together other people's industrial components to serve non business purposes. The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices with your own money, whether or not it…
You sound worked up. Most people who seriously invest like fiddling around and creating their own networking structure. It's a feature that they don't have to worry about "serving business needs"! I'm not sure what the difference is between this and any other moderately expensive hobby.
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It's a place to experiment with the skills you use in your profession. I don't see what you're struggling with.
I guess I'm struggling with why I would buy the same commercial grade equipment to play with at home when my profession should be fulfilling the needs of that skill set. Sounds like if you feel like you need to do so, you're more than likely unfulfilled in your current career.
I built mine in 2018 and I paid $65 each for two E5 2670 v3 ($1600 MSRP, 2014 CPU), and $300 for a dual socket motherboard with 128GB of ram. Yeah it's not the latest and greatest but it's been going strong since then.
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?
A PC is ideal as long as there is only one. Once you start adding machines, it is time to move to a rack. Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. Racks have rails like drawers, so the units are easy to service. Thats not the case with a heap of ATX towers. Also, your "collection" remains self contained and doesn't grow. Past some scale, you start to also make use of other rack mountable accessories like UPSe…
Let's be honest, it's frighteningly easy for a rack to turn into a giant ball of wires too. See r/cablecore for examples.
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> 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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a place to experiment with the skills you use in your profession. I don't see what you're struggling with.
I guess I'm struggling with why I would buy the same commercial grade equipment to play with at home when my profession should be fulfilling the needs of that skill set. Sounds like if you feel like you need to do so, you're more than likely unfulfilled in your current career.
I could say the exact same thing about however you decide to spend your weekends.
I'm not a network guy, so apologies for the stupid question, but what is the patch panel for in this setup? It doesn't really look like it has a purpose from my view.