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Home Lab Beginners guide

linuxblog.io

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#11

Post by haunter »

>For this article’s purpose, I won’t recommend any specific servers because this will vary a ton depending on what you will be hosting. NAS storage, VMs, web servers, backup servers, mail servers, ad blockers, and all the rest. For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay.

This is the way. HP, Lenovo, and Dell are all making identical small form factor PCs that are more than enough for most people at home. They are also very silent and power efficient.

I have a Lenovo M720 Tiny and a Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro (they are virtually almost the same). You can change parts, there are ample ports available and you can pretty much run any OS you want.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#12

Post by glitchc »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #9

I get an electronics workbench or a woodworking workshop, but I still don’t quite understand the purpose of this „home lab“. You can just run stuff on your laptop, or a mini computer in some corner if it’s supposed to run 24/7?

Looks like it's tailored for SRE-related hobbies.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#13

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro. Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're working and using nix means all your system state is logged in git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes. Every change you've made, package you've installed, and setting you've configured is in the git log.

I find myself referring to my git repo frequently as a source of documentation on what's installed and how the systems are set up.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#14

Post by zer00eyz »

The whole home lab scene is great.

Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people far outside the industry.

I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures some of the magic of the early internet (at least for me).

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#15

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

zer00eyz wrote: post #14

The whole home lab scene is great. Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people far outside the industry. I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures s…

The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is interesting to you.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#16

Post by thrownawaysz »

mobilio wrote: post #5
toinewx wrote: post #3

what would be the typical use of such a lab? Why are so many different components needed?

Typical use for mine case - is to test things before deploy somewhere else. For example - Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker, etc, etc. All this require knowledge and experience.

>Proxmox, XCP-ng, VMWare ESXi, Kubernetes, docker, etc, etc.

It will be a bit general but what's the best use case here?

I mean try to build a home server, self host some services but there are so many options.

- Proxmox, run a VM for each service. And it supports LXC too.

- A vanilla Linux server which runs a type 2 hypervisor (QEMU) for each service

- Docker can be also done either in a single server but some people do it with something like Unraid (which is for NAS but support virtualization too). Very similarly you can install Docker in OpenMediaVault too.

Feels like there are so many ways to achive the same thing

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#17

Post by lolinder »

As an alternative perspective, this is my home lab:

* Location: Sitting on a shelf in my basement office. Ventilation is okay, the WiFi is fine but not great.

* Hardware: An old PC I picked up at a neighborhood swap meet. I added some RAM taken from another old PC and bought a hard drive and WiFi card.

* Software: Debian stable and podman/podman-compose. All my useful services are just folders with compose files. I use podman-compose to turn them into systemd units.

If the stuff in the article is the kind of thing you're into, that's awesome, go ham! But you absolutely do not need to ever, and you certainly do not need to do it right away. I run a bunch of services that my family uses daily on this thing, and we use less than half the 16GB RAM and never get over 5% CPU usage on this old, ~free PC.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#18

Post by eddieroger »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #13

I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro. Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're working and using nix means all your system state is logged in git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes. Every change you've made,…

I wish Nix had a shallower learning curve (or that I was smarter). It's been on my list of wishes to play with, but that list is long, and getting Nix over the hump hasn't been something I've been able to do yet. The concept makes sense to me, but when I see a new package or app I want to play with, I can get there with docker-compose and a VM more quickly than I can wrap my head around doing it in Nix.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#19

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #9

I get an electronics workbench or a woodworking workshop, but I still don’t quite understand the purpose of this „home lab“. You can just run stuff on your laptop, or a mini computer in some corner if it’s supposed to run 24/7?

It can be for fun or practical. Having access to ECC hardware is a big plus for some stuff so the server racks aren't all for show. It just depends on your goals.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#20

Post by smallmancontrov »

buybackoff wrote: post #10

The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers wi…

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?
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