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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

haydenjames.io

171–180 of 191 posts

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#171
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…

Thanks for the guide. Congrats on the wedding!

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#172
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. 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.

It's r/cablegore

That's what I get for typing on my phone.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A home lab was generally seen as something to experiment with and learn something from. Setting up a Plex server is literally installing one piece of software on anything newer than a Core 2 Duo.

you don't need to spend money to have a homelab. you can do it all using VMs in your personal device (laptop/desktop) just fine

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#174
post #18

I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains: * HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Giga…

Your switch alone idles at almost 50W.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#175

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…

When I was in college at the turn of the century, the rooms full of computers at university were called "labs". During the same timeframe, folks paying for a networking course+certification (eg Cisco's CCNA) would get access to a "lab" full of networking gear to play with.

These days, the nomenclature survives, but the facilities are often virtualized or remote eg https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-learning-labs

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#176
post #174
post #18

I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains: * HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Giga…

Your switch alone idles at almost 50W.

After the stack has taken what it needs there are 35 solar panels left on the barn roof. Excess heat is used to heat the upper floor, given that it is well-insulated it needs no additional heating. Problem, solved.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#177

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."

[deleted]

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#178
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a “HomeLab”. You can create a Plex Media server with a $249 Nvidia Shield and some low cost USB hard drives.

Yeah the best part of the home lab hobby is gatekeeping because you spent more than someone else and you need to belittle them to justify how much you spent on your Juniper or whatever.

Plex servers and containerizing all of the services that support it are how I learned to use docker before I became a professional. It’s now turned into a collection of containerized services all talking to each other with dynamic dns on cron, pihole, wireguard, HomeKit running all my appliances and more… I don’t get it. Is it only a homelab if I use it to practice network certification exams? There is some grass fed, organic, grade A level gatekeeping in this thread…and it made me want to rant.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#179
post #8

I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS. Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors. My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg

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…

Ikea lack tables can double as a rack.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#180
post #176
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your switch alone idles at almost 50W.

After the stack has taken what it needs there are 35 solar panels left on the barn roof. Excess heat is used to heat the upper floor, given that it is well-insulated it needs no additional heating. Problem, solved.

Only if you can’t sell the excess power.
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