Home Lab Beginners guide • Hacker News Board

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#151

Post by mech422 » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff.

I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE!

0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#152

Post by neilv » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

If your homelab gear is in a non-tech-nerd living space, also think about noise, lights/displays, and otherwise being discreet.

As an apartment-dweller, for a long time I had it in a closet. Once I moved it to living room, my solutions included:

* For discreet, IKEA CORRAS cabinet that matched my other furniture. I had rackmount posts in it before, but got rid of them because they protruded.

* For noise, going with gear that's either fanless, or can be cooled with a small number of Noctua fans. (I also replace the fans in 1U PSUs with Noctuas, which requires a little soldering and cursing.) I tend to end up with Atom servers that can run fanless in a non-datacenter except for the PSU.

* Also for noise, since my only non-silent server right now is the 3090 GPU server, I make that one spin up on demand. In this case, I have a command I can run from my laptop to Wake-on-LAN. But you could also use IPMI, kludge something with a PDU or IoT power outlet, find a way to spin down the 3090 and fans in software, make Kubernetes automate it, etc.

* For lights, covering too-bright indicator LEDs with white labelmaker tape works well, and looks better than you'd think. Black labelmaker tape for lights you don't need to see.

* For console, I like the discreet slide-out rack consoles, especially the vintage IBM ones with the TrackPoint keyboards. If I was going to have a monitoring display in my living room, I'd at least put the keyboard in a slide-out drawer.

* I also get rid of gear I don't need, or I'd need more than twice the rack space I currently have, and it would be harder to pass as possibly audiophile gear in the living room.

* For an apartment, if you don't want to play with the router right now (just servers), consider a plastic OpenWRT router. It can replace a few rack units of gear (router, switch, patch panel), and maybe you don't even need external WiFi APs and cabling to them.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#153

Post by tonymet » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

buybackoff wrote: post #146

tonymet wrote: post #142

I'll go against the grain and recommend running your lab on Windows 11 Pro and Hyper V (often included with reclaimed PCs). Hyper-V is a very capable hypervisor and Windows hardware compatibility is excellent. Remote mgmt can be done over RDP, SSH or WMI Nearly everyone has a spare PC lying around collecting dust, and within an hour it can be running a dozen VMs . Reclaimed HP & Dells are cheap and include a Windows…

You could use this built-in OEM license from a Windows VM in Proxmox. Just search for that on Proxmox forum. Hyper-V is very limited in hardware support, you won't be able to pass-through stuff. And you always pay for VM layer, while in Proxmox you could use containers which give almost the host performance.

that's changed in recent years. you now have access to hardware and the gpu for inference, for example.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#154

Post by mech422 » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

cybrox wrote: post #39

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…

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to…

When I started using SBC's for my home setup, I skipped rPi's. At the time, being ARM based was a bit limiting (IIRC, at the time some stuff still hadn't been ported to ARM). So I went with odroid h2/h3 [0]. X86 based, lots of memory to work with, and much cheaper then a nuc - and uses much less power then my old Dell/HP blade servers from EBay :-)

0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#155

Post by crtasm » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #84

crtasm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partner. Spouse. This seems easy. edit: "it's just a joke" - please re-read OP. 5 to 6 syllables is too many? Why aren't you saying WAF (PAF) if that's a concern :)

I'd probably say "would it be wife-approved?" or some other thing given the context of looking at a device that is hideous and not in-line with my girlfriends intended aesthetic of the home. But an additional syllable is indeed enough friction here, and if you think it's not then that's fine: but it is. Please understand me here, I'm not arguing or fighting with you: it's not something you can argue rationally, it's…

I hear you and that makes sense for speech, but let's come back to the fact that this thread begins with a guide put online for anyone interested in the subject to read. Ease of saying a phrase out loud has less importance for written communication and there's a difference between speaking about one's own specific situation and generalising that to tips for your entire audience.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#156

Post by haunter » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

buybackoff wrote: post #146

tonymet wrote: post #142

I'll go against the grain and recommend running your lab on Windows 11 Pro and Hyper V (often included with reclaimed PCs). Hyper-V is a very capable hypervisor and Windows hardware compatibility is excellent. Remote mgmt can be done over RDP, SSH or WMI Nearly everyone has a spare PC lying around collecting dust, and within an hour it can be running a dozen VMs . Reclaimed HP & Dells are cheap and include a Windows…

You could use this built-in OEM license from a Windows VM in Proxmox. Just search for that on Proxmox forum. Hyper-V is very limited in hardware support, you won't be able to pass-through stuff. And you always pay for VM layer, while in Proxmox you could use containers which give almost the host performance.

Hyper V Server 2019 (not the same as Hyper V inside Win 10/11) is free and has GPU pass through

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualizat...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#157

Post by jijijijij » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

durandal1 wrote: post #79

ellieh wrote: post #36

Can we stop with all the "homelab in living room = divorce", "one less closet = unhappy wife" etc jokes? Reminds me of all the "so simple your could use it" comments on older tech product advertising. Just smells of yet more boys club humour that adds to the difficulty of including women in the hobby + industry. It's the small jokes that we're supposed to just quietly smile along with, as well as the big, that cause…

I generally agree, I really do. However, I also feel that the entire article shares a very personal perspective of running a home lab - and that personal perspective is probably having a wife which sometimes gets annoyed by blinky stuff in plain sight. And when we remove that personal perspective, we also lose..personality which I desperately appreciate in a world where most things are hyper professional and polished…

Yes, of course, there is a chance that's "just" the experience. But these remarks tend to fall into the always same sexist, normative stereotypes - usually the only occurrence of "woman" in the story. In any case, the author does know he isn't exactly the first one to make that joke... In the end his experience may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Communication does not happen in a vacuum, how something could be perceived usually is considered on some level - the author may not have seen it as a problem... which kinda is the problem.

Honestly, I wouldn't want for anyone to act the way pro forma either, or think the author has done anything wrong, or even misogynistic, as others have suggested.

It isn't something wrong, it is unfortunate. I think these jokes are sad, because any author would have an imaginary reader in mind, someone who might find the joke funny. And I don't think that imaginary reader is a woman, here - and it shows. So, for any woman reading these "boy's club" guides and write-ups, they will always feel othered, always have to overcome these tiny, but omnipresent obstacles in the way of their (new & fragile) interests. (Radiolab's 'Alone enough' episode comes to mind[1])

I just wish, people would introspect their motivations and intentions behind those remarks some. And especially when writing a guide, maybe consider if the take is worth discouraging even one girl's newly found interest in computers and blinky chaos, because her projected role as the opposition has just been reproduced sufficiently to stick. I wish authors would be aware of the problem implicitly alienating some readers by these reproductions, so writing welcoming texts to everyone would be intrinsic motivation.

[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/alone-enough

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#158

Post by giantrobot » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:15 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #115

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…

Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers. I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W. Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based…

Not only do NUCs sip power but they're embarrassingly fast for most "I want to play with servers" jobs. RAM is cheap and 32GB goes a long ways.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#159

Post by caconym_ » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #107

A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever) system. It's a huge pain. Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high availabili…

+1, Proxmox is awesome. I set up a cluster with two machines I wasn't using (one almost 10 years old, one fairly modern with a 5950X) and now I don't have to worry about that single Debian box with all my services on it shitting the bed and leaving me with nothing. VMs are useful on their own, but the tools Proxmox gives you for migrating them between machines and doing centralized backup/restore are incredibly freeing. It all works really well, too.

Most recently I set up a Windows VM with PCIe GPU passthrough for streaming (Moonlight/Sunshine) games to the various less-capable machines in my house, and it works so well that my actual gaming PC is sitting in the corner gathering dust.

My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid license. I would love to give back to them for what I'm getting, but > $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts to hobbyist usage. I appreciate the free tier (which is not at all obnoxious about the fact that you aren't paying), but I wish there could be a middle ground.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#160

Post by mech422 » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #104

cybrox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to…

From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains. Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bi…

The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once.

I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.