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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#211

Post by E39M5S62 »

geek_at wrote: post #124
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…

I did just the same. Built myself a little movable 6 node rack out of wood. With 3d printed powerbrick holders on the sides and a switch with a 10g uplink so all servers can use the full 1g nic. Warms my home office in the colder months and can be put in the garage on the warmer months. Photo front: https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png Photo back: https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png Photo of the 3d printed power brick holde…

I can't quite see which Thinkcentre's those are, but the M920x can fit a 10GbE PCIe NIC in it and provide it enough power. I have one on my desk with 2x2TB NVMe, 32GB RAM and a 10GbE fiber connection to it.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#212

Post by tonymet »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #203
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…

This is how I have my setup running, a moderately-outdated, but still beefy (E5-2699v4, 512GB ram, etc), Dell Precision tower, which originally started as a design machine with a handful of Autodesk and EDA tools. I wanted to try out proxmox, but I was too lazy to want to move all of those installed things off onto another host, reinstall, then move it back into a Windows VM. I suppose I could still run proxmox in a…

sounds like an awesome setup. this is what I tell my friends. Just run Hyper-V. They can easily be checkpointed and moved to another hypervisor.

Use what you got!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#213

Post by gorkish »

skazazes wrote: post #195
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…

I actually do run a production edge cluster with these exact boards; they are just too old. The price/performance is so far off the mark WRT modern hardware they are simply not worth using anymore. I have started hitting CPU instruction set issues with current software due to the ancient microarchitectures in these lowend parts.

On one hand they are able to still sell them because nobody is competing, but what is the reason for the lack of competition?

I have a theory about Broadcom buying and blocking up the low end PCIe switch market to purposely hold back this segment, but I'm not sure how significant that is.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#214

Post by kmos17 »

runjake wrote: post #88

If you're old and grumpy[1] and don't want a homelab but paradoxically want homelab functionality, I can't recommend the Firewalla[2] enough. And heck, it would fit right into a homelab situation, as well. It allows you to go deep into settings and configure anything to your heart's content. But, if you want to ignore it for a year and not mess with it, it will run as smoothly as an Eero or a similar consumer product…

I've seen it mentionned on hn before and was intrigued as a replacement/simpler solution to a home pfsense setup. It seems there are issues with it though: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewalla/comments/18wvlqa/steer_cl...

The software is open source apparently? https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla Anyone running this on their own hardware? Or in a VM homelab :) ?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#215

Post by bombcar »

mech422 wrote: post #168
bombcar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem with off-lease enterprise hardware is the power usage can quickly outrun the original costs - but that may not be an issue for everyone. The nice thing about off-lease enterprise hardware is there is so much of it, and it's enterprise. You can easily find replacement parts, and working on that stuff is a joy, everything is easily replaceable with no tools.

THIS! My Dell and HP blade chassis/server EAT power (10+ Xeon blades). I actually shut them down and started moving to SBC based stuff like odriod H2/H3's. Basically silent and just sips power. All much less heat (I live in a desert, so thats important)! 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

For what it's worth, we're just starting to get to where enterprise stuff that cares about power usage is coming off-lease. Some of the newest stuff actually sips power relatively when not under load.

My biggest (current) problem is finding something that supports a ton of SATA drives and still is low power (though at some point even the power usage of spinning rust can become noticeable).

I live in the icy wilderness, so excess power to heat isn't a problem for most of the year.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#216

Post by jmbwell »

skazazes wrote: post #195
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…

I use one of these. For a system that’s honestly mostly idle, it’s plenty for proxmox with Plex and pihole and whatever else, and it’s good on power and heat and noise.

I made the mistake of getting Seagate 10TB rock tumblers, but they’re the only source of real noise. WD would probably have been quieter.

I have this and my switches and a ham radio base station all racked up on top of the cabinets in my laundry/utility room, out of the way but not hidden away, so I can still notice if the fans are too loud or the wrong lights are blinking or not blinking or there’s weird smells etc.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#217

Post by hedgehog0 »

neilv wrote: post #152

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 g…

I’m a math grad student and want to play with LLMs as well, so I have been thinking about getting a 3060 or 3090, due to budget. However, I’m using a MacBook Pro from 2011, thus not very convenient for these kinds of things.

What do you think the lowest budget or spending that I should have, given my “requirement”? Or would you say that vast.ai or similar websites would suffice?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#218

Post by jmbwell »

Borealid wrote: post #184
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?

If a home lab is for tinkering, it’s something to play with first of all, but it also helps facilitate re-patching things or moving things around, which in many cases you can do one port/cable at a time without interrupting services.

I once moved a server from one room to another by moving its redundant power cables one at a time to a UPS on a cart, then swapping its short network cables for longer ones one a time, wheeling the thing to the other room, then “reversing” the procedure in the new location. Zero downtime!

Zero point really, but fun in the way I reckon a home lab is meant to be.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#219

Post by gorkish »

CharlesW wrote: post #186
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...

By "good" I assume you mean "possible" because there is nothing really good about a connectivity solution that is both technically inferior and vastly more expensive than it ought to be.

I'm not opposed to Thunderbolt though; let me know when someone ships a 8+ port thunderbolt interdomain/multi-root PCIe switch. That would be a good solution.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#220

Post by znpy »

caconym_ wrote: post #159
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 freei…

> 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 don't use proxmox anymore at home (1) but as an user I would have loved to pay, say, $5/month and just get access to the updates repository (the stable ones) or maybe something similar. $100/year/cpu was just too much for me as an hobbyist.

[1]: not because I don't like it, for life reasons I had to downsize that hobby a bit and I don't need proxmox anymore.

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