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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#191

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

mech422 wrote: post #164
znpy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress). 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

I got a Ryzen 7 5800H with 32gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive for 320€... I don't have the dual on board nic, but beside that, it's quite great cpu wise with Proxmox — multiple VM on it, doing transcoding, DNS, dealing with download and search, Home Assistant. Of course transcoding 4k live is costly, but that's an exception. I can use NVMe and SATA hd, that's nice.

And I can update the ram and use ECC.

Not bad all in all !

Still, I got a Dell SFF with an I5 and 16gb of ram for less than 100€ — updated it with a 4 2,5gbps NIC, will be good for OPnsense... If I don't switch to a Melanox Connect 3.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#192

Post by blauditore »

I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is: Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common production servers?

Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e. what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is not too critical for most applications and devs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of building stuff like this, and will always be able to find an excuse to do it anyway. :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#193

Post by noobermin »

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…

This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby. See mechanical keyboards for example.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#194

Post by CharlesW »

noobermin wrote: post #193
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…

This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby. See mechanical keyboards for example.

There's always the $70 IKEA Lack Rack: https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-Rack/

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#195

Post by skazazes »

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…

You should check out the Xeon D offerings from Supermicro. They make some M-ITX motherboards with embedded Xeon D chips that sport dual 10GB Ethernet. Used one in a freenas system at one point for years

Looks like the X10SDV-TLN4F[1] has everything you mentioned besides a second m.2 slot. Although its 8 cores they are a few generations old and low power (45w TDP on x86). For true compute its not exactly fast but for something like a high performance file server in 1U connected to a disk shelf, they are really nice.

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/x10sdv-tl...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#196

Post by haunter »

tonymet wrote: post #161
haunter wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why are you downvoted, Hyper V is perfectly fine Hyper V Server 2019 is also free you don’t have to pay for anything https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-... And you can install a full GUI too https://gist.github.com/bp2008/922b326bf30222b51da08146746c7...

that's an interesting option. does it boot into cmd.exe by default?

Yes that only but you can install a GUI + a web interface

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#197

Post by Semaphor »

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…

In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving devices are in the selfhosted communities.

There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out that way.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#198

Post by optimal-choices »

blauditore wrote: post #192

I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is: Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common production servers? Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e. what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is not too critical for…

It's a hobby. It doesn't need to have a point. It's kind of like playing games - it doesn't need to have a point, but it's enjoyable, and you get a community out of it.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#199

Post by jll29 »

blauditore wrote: post #192

I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is: Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common production servers? Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e. what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is not too critical for…

It's a server, so the goal is to have it run something you care about (whatever that may be) 24/7, not because you cannot live without it, but to get experience with administrating a server.

In contrast, your dev machine may need to be rebooted any time, or switched off if you leave for the weekend.

A second defining characteristic of a homelab is that part of the rationale for owning it is in order to tinker with it, to try out new software packages, to play with tools & concepts (VMs, containers, admin and remote admin tools, KVMs).

Ultimately, you may define a homelab as a "physical server setup for learning and for running personal services". Homelab operators may also take pride of the independence from large IT or cloud providers attained by operating their lab.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#200

Post by laweijfmvo »

haunter wrote: post #11

>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…

> For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay.

This deserves a shout out. These things are everywhere on eBay and they Ryzen ones rock.

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