251–260 of 400 posts
The quality of software out there these days is insane -- there are projects that cover so many crucial functions (tracking expenses, playing music, managing data, etc), that it's becoming really hard to track them all.
I've been working on converting the site to a directory and it's not quite there yet -- but some people do like the massive wall of projects.
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,…
I use nix btw. I totally agree. It (nix and nixos) is/are such a pain so often. But, wow... when you get things to work it is glorious. Quickly and easily syncing system/user/application configurations across multiple devices is incredible. The declarative approach means that the often laborious effort it takes me to get things to work pays off when I finally figure it out and realize I never have to do that again -…
I've been hearing more and more from people switching over to NixOS, so hopefully the docs will get better as well
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…
How do you handle the fact that Windows 11 is a desktop OS and it tends to want to do whatever it feels like restarting for updates and such. I would imagine it's a bit of a pain to have the system reboot at random, killing your VMs etc.
If I reboot windows, my Debian VM comes right back up, with all the docker-compose services running (a la `restart: always`). Like nothing ever happened.
So I just don't think this is a problem. But that's just my experience...
I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys: - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep…
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My first homelab thing was a laptop with a broken monitor. It wasn't terribly hard to get Ubuntu server working on there, it had a gigabit ethernet port built in, and it had USB 3.0 so it wasn't too hard to get reasonably good hard drive speeds to use as a NAS. You can buy old used laptops (especially with broken monitors) for basically nothing (or maybe literally nothing if you already have one, or you have a friend…
That's my setup. I decided to use old laptops instead of proper servers because power cuts are common in the region I live, especially when it rains. So laptops have built in UPS (their batteries) which can hold power for some minutes in the worst cases. It sounds like a poor man's home lab, but it works.
I also think it's good to prevent ewaste. There's a lot of raw computing power that just ends up in landfills. It's almost certainly better for the environment to get as much use out of existing stuff as possible than it is to buy new stuff. I can't imagine it's good for the world for a bunch of old lithium batteries to lie dormant.
If I can find a good deal on a dozen old laptops, I might honestly put this plan into action.
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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 didn't know ODROID was in this market, that's awesome! Definitely checking them out next time I need hardware, the H3 looks perfect.
plenty of power for my needs, silent, low power ... and CHEAP! I especially love the large RAM capacity as it lets me run a lot of docker/vm/etc without swapping. Most of my stuff is idle like 90% of the time (stuff like git servers, etc) so the CPU is fine for me.
I've had mine for a few years now (I had the first gen..) and never any problems!
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Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after sw…
Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs
Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with OPNsense running as a VM).
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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 a…
I don't really need that much horsepower (My stuff is like 90% idle - git server, etc.) but I _really_ appreciate the lower noise and power usage compared to my old Xeon blades
I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys: - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep…
I also found a friend who I am convincing of the same issues and so we may try mirroring our homelab documentation/process so that the "bus factor" isn't 1.
Was hoping this article would delve into hosting your own email, websites and services and the steps to expose them to the public internet (as well as all the requisite security considerations needed for such things).
A homelab is just a normal PC unless you're doing homelab stuff.