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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#101

Post by rhinoceraptor »

loudthing wrote: post #84
ghostly_s wrote: post #82

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.

It's the same reason why people like woodworking. Why buy a piece of furniture when you could spend 3x as much and do it yourself?

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#102

Post by loudthing »

thatsunlikely wrote: post #96
loudthing wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why you buy the last generation of common enterprise components used when industries mass upgrade, which happens every few years. 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.

That's awesome. Reminds me of retro computer enthusiasm. It's not about the hardware, it's about the experience and keeping classic tech alive.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#103

Post by noitpmeder »

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."

Why are you trying to gatekeep what is or is not a homelab. Just because it isn't sufficiently complex doesn't mean it doesn't fit the definition.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#104

Post by GekkePrutser »

> As you know, trying out new things on production equipment never ends well.

That is not my experience. Most of the time it works just fine if researched well in advance.

The problem is just the impact for the few times it does not go well. That's why you have test environments. And test groups in production for the first rollout.

My home lab is more to try out the benefits of different options, especially as I work for a huge multinational. Admin rights are split among different teams and sometimes the others don't understand what I need. It's really helpful to have full access to my own lab so I can show them what I need from them and why it works best a certain way. Without access that's hard to figure out.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#105

Post by nullwarp »

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 never spent much time with networking so a lot of it was a bit of a mystery to me so I spent the COVID time building out really awesome but overly built network.

I learned a ton and can now actually understand what's going on under the hood!

Since then though I definitely have simplified it a lot because it was a lot to manage but it was an excellent learning experience.

This is my long winded way of saying, network engineers don't get enough praise - that shit is actually really damn difficult to get right at scale!

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#106

Post by GekkePrutser »

loudthing wrote: post #77

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…

I view those as separate things.

I have a home ESXi server which I use to host all my own stuff. I don't consider that a lab as such. It's just my home production infrastructure.

And then I have another ESXi which hosts the stuff I'm testing for work, and only work.

In my work home lab I have full access which I don't do even in the testing environment at work due to fragmentation of responsibilities. Or if I do I step on people's toes when trying stuff out that belongs to their realm. Most things are interconnected so testing something at work usually gets slowed down by the need to involve other people who don't always have time or interest. That's where my own lab comes in.

It's also a lot faster due to not needing VPN and having to deal with servers halfway across the world. And not having to deal with the evil SSL-MITM Internet proxy at work saves me SO much time.. Of course that work needs to be done to put it in production but a lot of stuff never makes it to that stage and then figuring how to smooth things with the proxy is just wasted effort.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#107

Post by Ancapistani »

jackallis wrote: post #65

this is not for complete noob, fyi.

I disagree.

It’s been years since I messed with “physical” networking stuff, but it wasn’t complicated. Complex, yes, but not complicated.

If you’re a “complete noob” and want to level up this skill, then learning what all the equipment listed does, why you’d want it, and how to configure it is an excellent way to go about it.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#108

Post by thatsunlikely »

loudthing wrote: post #102
thatsunlikely wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you buy the last generation of common enterprise components used when industries mass upgrade, which happens every few years. 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.

That's awesome. Reminds me of retro computer enthusiasm. It's not about the hardware, it's about the experience and keeping classic tech alive.

Yeah, it's cheap and the hardware is still enterprise level hardware so it's more than capable of handling personal lab workloads (esxi and proxmox still fully support my hardware) and it's been very valuable for me to learn how to stand up and manage similar environments, which is not something I usually would be expected to do in my profession, but has been great for supplemental skills in my career.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#109

Post by BackBlast »

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…

> “no ecc memory” or the like

ECC is about long term stability and data integrity. For a router, meh, the network protocols will deal with any flips. For a file server or database it's better if those random bit flips don't happen to critical data.

AMD based systems can sometimes be forced to use ECC mode even if the BOIS doesn't support it.

ECC is more important in systems with very large ram footprints because there's that much larger of a memory footprint area for cosmic rays to corrupt. If you've got one-two sticks of ram, and you're not running vital business data, meh, it's not required.

I really like ECC. But I'm not really willing to pay a significant premium for it.

I run companion systems to production out of my house, mostly development lanes comparable to production deployments. If they're down, it's really not mission critical. I also run my home security/surveillance systems. The other significant systems are those related to my children's computer lab.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#110

Post by kernelbugs »

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…

> 1L Zen 3 Ryzen 7 PRO APU

What computer is this, if you don't mind sharing? Sounds great for getting 1 or 2 and hosting a lot of VMs.

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