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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#171

Post by mech422 »

ashtonian5 wrote: post #145
jrm4 wrote: post #130

At the risk of yucking others' yum; I wish there was more of an effort to get people to do this sort of thing without buying new equipment (including perhaps the reduction of of the idea that you need/want a "rack") There are just SO MANY perfectly good computers that are bound to be e-waste that would be good for this.

Most people don't buy "new" hardware. Power efficiency has changed drastically to a point anything before ~2016 is not worth plugging into the wall, and sata to NVME drastically improve responsiveness which didn't become the base standard until 2018ish. Most people use an old desktop or buy old server equipment on ebay.

Yeah - Old EBay server equipment can be had for like $200/node and will burn at least that much in electricity every year :-/ Also, the noise is hellacious!

Old laptops / desktops can be better - especially since you can get newer/more power efficient units without all the noise. But I started moving to even smaller SBC based stuff (0)

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

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#172

Post by doublepg23 »

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…

I feel like it’s a harder sell than it used to be because post-Ryzen there’s been real increases in CPU performance. Modern NUCs and prebuilt also having native NVMe is a boon too.

All depends on what you’re going for though.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#173

Post by 0x457 »

toinewx wrote: post #3

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

> what would be the typical use of such a lab?

Usually self-hosting things and making things more complicated for fun.

> Why are so many different components needed?

Learning experience. Many home lab enthusiasts are sysadmins(-adjacent) and use it as a learning experience.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#174

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

Arelius wrote: post #141
ninetyninenine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just feel it doesn't have to be this way. We can get the benefits of nix without the hardness of nix. It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet. It's annoying enough that I won't use nix personally. I've used it at work so I'm quite knowledgeable with it.

IMO, this thing is Nix, it just needs better UI and a lot better documentation. The problem I've realized is that for many core Nix developers, the source is the documentation. Which doesnt scale.

Luckily the ecosystem is literally getting better by the hour right now. There's been a huge uptick in interest and lots of people are writing really good documentation and starter templates.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#175

Post by radiowave »

cmehdy wrote: post #136
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…

Proxmox is incredibly helpful especially for homelab beginners familiar with Linux. You can easily create and destroy various things as you learn. Only thing that's not so easy to use is storage in general : it's very difficult to truly understand the consequences of various choices and therefore it's kinda difficult to properly set up the backbone of a NAS unless you're fairly comfortable with zfs, lvm, lvm-thin, re…

Another handy feature of it is snapshots, very useful before trying out some modification.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#176

Post by mech422 »

bradley13 wrote: post #37

Rack mount equioment is often more expensive. Also noisy. I have mostly consumer (non-rack) equipment in a small Ikea closet. Looks less nerdy, which also improves the WAF.

If you go the Ebay route, the price isn't bad... But people can literally hear my servers on the phone (1 adjacent wall) if I fire all of them up. Also, power draw was crazy - each blade chassis pulls 2500w-3000w !

SBC based stuff is plenty powerful for most stuff now, MUCH cheaper then Nucs, and SILENT! (Great for my sanity)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#177

Post by nextos »

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…

Also there are great fanless cases for NUCs and RPis.

Actually, Asus has taken over NUCs from Intel and they are releasing fanless machines, so now there is not even the need to mod them.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#178

Post by gorkish »

IMO one of the biggest frustration I currently have with homelab-scale gear (and edge compute in general) is how everything has massively regressed to only offering 2.5gbit connectivity at best.

Try to find one of these hundreds of small form factor products that has anything faster than a 2.5Gbit nic and despair! What good are these machines if you cant even get data in and out of them?!

The list of hardware with 2x10GBe or better connectivity is amazingly short:

  - Minisforum MS-01
  - GoWin RS86S*, GW-BS-1U-*
  - Quotom Q20331G\*
From major manufacturers, only the following:

  - Mac Mini (1x10gbaseT option, ARM, )
  - HPE Z2 Mini\* (1x10GbaseT option)
Please someone, anyone, build a SFF box with the following specs:

  Minimum of 2 NVMe
  Minimum of 2 additional storage devices (SATA or more NVMe)
  Minimum of 2 10GbE
  Dedicated or shared IMPI/OOBM
  Minimum of 8 Core x86 CPU
  Minimum of 64GB RAM
Make sure the nics have enough PCIe lanes to hit their throughput limits, give the rest to storage. Stop with the proliferation of USB and thunderbolt and 5 display outputs on these things, please already!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#179

Post by huimang »

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…

It comes down to what you want to do and what you're comfortable with.

For the last 4 years, I've used a Proxmox and LXC-based setup. I create LXCs for specific services like nfs, jellyfin, and minecraft where I can fine-tune the memory and cpu specs or turn off the LXC when not in use. Then I have an LXC for all of my docker-based services.

I manage the LXC provisioning with ansible, the source code is available on github. https://github.com/andrewzah/service-automation/tree/master/...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#180

Post by oceanplexian »

bradley13 wrote: post #37

Rack mount equioment is often more expensive. Also noisy. I have mostly consumer (non-rack) equipment in a small Ikea closet. Looks less nerdy, which also improves the WAF.

It is, mostly, but if you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can easily solve that problem with a lot of equipment as long as you have good airflow and cooling where your rack is located.
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