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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#21

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

eddieroger wrote: post #18
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.

If you get the base system up you don't have to exclusively use their containerization system. I have a mix of nix environments and k3s deployments that are saved off in another git repo. There are advantages to purity but practically speaking you can just do what's convenient.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#22

Post by justinclift »

quaffapint wrote: post #4

Unless you simply want to play with all the various bits of hardware, a standard PC tower will be more power efficient and save a lot of room. I use that with unRaid and a simple router and switch and it's power efficient, doesn't make much noise, cheaper, and takes up much less room.

> a standard PC tower will be more power efficient

How much does it average in power draw (watts) from the wall?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#23

Post by globular-toast »

I'm older than 30 so I just call this having a home network and more than one computer.

Why do I have a home network? Like many here, I develop network applications. I'm not a network technician, but being able to truly understand how the various components of the internet work, like TCP/IP, DNS etc., is really useful and sets me apart from many developers. I also just like being in control and having the flexibility to do what I want with my own network.

Why do I have multiple computers? Playing with different operating systems etc. isn't really the reason as virtualisation is pretty good these days. It actually comes down to locality of the machines. I want my hard disks to be in a cupboard as they are quite noisy, but I want my screens and keyboard to be on a desk. So I've got a NAS in a cupboard and a (quiet) PC at my desk, plus a (silent) media centre in my living room and other stuff.

One thing I would say is don't be tempted by rack mounted server gear. Yeah, it looks cool and you can get it second hand for not much, but this isn't suitable for your home. Use desktop PC cases with big fans instead. Rack mounted network gear is pretty cool, though.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#24

Post by justinclift »

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?

Yeah, it's the same kind of thing as running something 24/7 in a mini computer in some corner, but scaled up.

It's fairly common for people that like to muck around with this stuff (or learn it for whatever purpose). Think of it like a hobby I guess. :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#25

Post by buybackoff »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #20
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?

For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4, 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago.

It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with them. No games of course.

I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1 native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters there (2 slots), it works well with ZFS mirror.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#26

Post by c-hendricks »

lolinder wrote: post #17

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 u…

Similar, my homelab is an old gaming rig shoved in a corner running a bunch of docker compose services via systemd.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#27

Post by globular-toast »

toinewx wrote: post #3

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

It means different things to different people, but I'd say for most it's some mixture of the following:

1. Enjoyment of building an enthusiast system from select components,

2. Having a more capable and flexible system,

3. Learning how networking works by being your own network admin.

You don't need all the components. Many will get more just because they want to (see point 1), but mostly you get them because you need to (see point 2).

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#28

Post by jbverschoor »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #16
mobilio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

Proxmox + portainer

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#29

Post by mobilio »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #16
mobilio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

But how you can install Proxmox under VM (QEMU/KVM)?

Sometime you need a hardware that you can trash it within day or two.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#30

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]
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