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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#181

Post by icedchai »

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,…

Nearly every time I do an Ubuntu dist upgrade, there is some relatively easy to solve but critical problem. A couple examples from a few years back: default route was lost, network interfaces were renamed. In both cases, remote connectivity was obviously lost. Good thing it was in my basement...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#182

Post by nucleardog »

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…

Racks are nice from an organization perspective as well, but agreed it’s an unnecessary complication and expense and limits your options.

I run a half dozen Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny PCs I picked up off eBay super cheap. Sure, I could go buy some rack mounts for them all… to the tune of $750. It would look really nice. That’s about it. If I’d decided that was a “requirement” I never would have done any of this.

For anyone considering diving in to any of this stuff, don’t let the pursuit of “perfect” stop you before you’ve even started.

My PCs are quite content sitting in a pile with some scraps of wood shoved between to help with airflow.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#183

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

How do they compare to SFF (like thinkcentre tiny) or other minipcs (e.g. Minisforum um790)? Power usage seems to be fairly similar (5-7W) but maybe there are less obvious perks?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#184

Post by Borealid »

gorkish wrote: post #178

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 2x…

I understand that more is better in some sense, but why the emphasis on having two (2) 10GbE instead of one for a single device that isn't a router?

What's the second link for? Just more bandwidth, or is there some crucial use case I'm missing?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#185

Post by gorkish »

mech422 wrote: post #151
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/produ…

One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#186

Post by CharlesW »

gorkish wrote: post #178

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 2x…

> Stop with the proliferation of USB and thunderbolt…

If you don't need it built-in, external adapters are a good way to get to 10GbE and even 25GbE.

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qna-t310g1s

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/ethernet-netw...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#187

Post by jprd »

I have an obscene amount of retired Chromeboxen that I have flashed with Mr.Chromebox[0] EFI and running as either K8s, Proxmox or independent Linux/Windows nodes at any given time.

These are mostly 1st-gen i7-4600U Haswell's, upgraded to 16GB RAM and 128G+ SSDs. I ripped them out of their cases, added heatsinks to the new SSDs, and then "racked" them by wedging the front-bottom mainboard corner (if plugs are oriented to the rear and the heaviest plug, AC, at the rear-bottom for balance) into a slotted piece of super-strong and right-angled cardboard that came from inside some re-inforced shipping box (I think it was an X-mas tree).

I assembled all of this juuuuuuust before COVID while learning K8s and craving the physical plan aspect, as I had just transitioned to a remote SaaS role from one that involved multiple physical DCs and travel.

My "go small lab" initiative turned into some sort of Tribble fable.

[0] https://mrchromebox.tech/

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#188

Post by madphilosopher »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #131

I’m trying to come up with the best 3/2/1 solution for me. Two forms of storage seems bizzare, are people really backing up to tapes? What does that workflow even look like? What about your offsite? Backblaze b2 seems expensive compared to backing up on a big external drive off site at my desk at work.

I rotate two 8 TB USB hard drives between home and my locker at work, every month or two. Full-disk encrypted, of course. This covers my entire system and media files.

For /etc and my source code repositories, I use restic and cloud storage, because this data is small (The whole system is not quite 3/2/1, but it's close enough for me.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#189

Post by ranger207 »

toinewx wrote: post #3

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

Piling on, my homelab is currently running

* calendar/contact sync (webdav)

* personal crm

* notes webapp

* email (yes, my primary one. helps when you're running business internet from home rather than a random ip on a vps)

* mediawiki for writing

* rss reader webapp

* internet file sharing (basically selfhosted dropbox)

* virtual tabletop for d&d-like games

* reverse proxy/dns/cert management (a let's encrypt post renew hook that scps the certs where they need to go)/zfs

This runs on an old rackmount server under a table using KVM/QEMU (once you get the commands written it your notes it's not so bad to manage purely from the command line), a cheap managed switch, and x86 router. I back up important stuff (email on the server, then lots of stuff on my desktop) to BackBlaze

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#190

Post by whalesalad »

unpopularopp wrote: post #119
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 makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device I just wish there was something like Unraid's Docker support but in a FOSS distro. Proxmox with LXC is just not the same. Unraid is good, love the UI and easyness too but the proprietary paid Linux is just something I don't like.

Proxmox is ultimately just debian linux. You can install portainer on the host. Or create a VM running portainer.
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