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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#281

Post by fsckboy »

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…

> A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk

then a better name than homelab would be your "NUC/NOC-nook".

with regard to TFA, I don't trust "labs" with neat wiring.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#282

Post by sophacles »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #208
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 am honestly kind of anti-rack at this point. "Deals" on used enterprise are IME dreadful unless you can get in on your own employer offloading old stuff, which requires you to a) even have an onprem setup at all and b) be friendly enough with the IT/NOC people that they give you a tip when it's going to happen. (For me b seems to happen naturally so it's really all on a). eBay is a fools game, terrible prices. Crai…

10-15 years ago the deals were real. I picked up a lot of off-lease and/or used stuff on ebay really cheap. As more and more companies move to cloud, and as more people get into homelabs, prices on decent gear have gone up. I was starting to think the good times were over in 2018 and in 2020 I stopped defaulting to ebay when I saw a great lot getting broken up and sold cheap suddenly pull all their stuff and relist it at much higher prices - "the scrappers are on to us" is what I realized.

These days I've been replacing the guts of my old servers with mini-itx setups for the most part. It does what I need and lets me shove 2 or 3 nodes into a 2u case so I can keep the aesthetic of "a personal rack".

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#283

Post by tills13 »

duped wrote: post #170
tills13 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditioned attics are the new rage. Once it's conditioned, you can move other mechanical devices up there like HVAC etc to reduce the amount of ducting your home needs (especially if it's single-story). It's nice because that loose, shredded insulation is garbage and so easy to mess up (walking on it can change it from R40 to R20, for example). With a conditioned attic you use standard batting in between the roof me…

Sounds like a nightmare for your energy bills. At least with interior ductwork the losses go to heating/cooling your home instead of your attic, which even with insulation is going to act like a giant heatsink that you get nothing out of.

I don't think so -- you _are_ paying to condition that part of your house, sure, but it becomes just another part of the overall envelope and acts like a buffer between the weather and the actually livable parts of your home. Anecdotally, in my home in the summer months, when unconditioned the attic is 50 degrees on a summer day it literally radiates heat down through the ceiling on the floor below into the rooms there. The attic acts like a heat battery -- long after the sun goes down the attic is radiating heat into the upper floors of my house. Not sure why it retains heat so well it's got louvres and vents ...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#285

Post by internet101010 »

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…

The caveat to this is noise. People who have never seen a rack server in person don't understand how loud they really are. PSUs, case fans, cpu fans (if applicable) all gotta go. You kind of have to go into it knowing you are going to spend an additional $100-200 replacing it all, and that's assuming you will not have to 3D print a custom bracket to house the new fans.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#286

Post by adhamsalama »

isopede wrote: post #241

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…

Maybe something like Nix/NixOS can help you?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#287

Post by tick_tock_tick »

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…

What's the main value vs using something like K3?

I've mostly just been defaulting to k3 since I use k8s at work so lots of my knowledge maps over.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#288

Post by buybackoff »

mech422 wrote: post #160
NelsonMinar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basical…

Power draw also comes with terrible noise. They were designed to be in a server room, not a living/bed room.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#289

Post by bazmattaz »

isopede wrote: post #241

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’m quite a homelab novice and I’m always tinkering so I have the same problem as you.

So I spent time creating a robust backup solution. Every week I backup all the docker volumes for each container to an external NAS drive.

Then I also run a script which backs up my entire docker compose file for every single container in one gigantic compose file.

The benefit of this is that I can make tweaks to containers and not have to manually record every tweak I made. I know that on Sunday at midnight it all gets backed up

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#290

Post by treflop »

Shawnecy wrote: post #274
Andrex wrote: post #260

This article has such a focus on hardware, when that's like... 1% of my homelab decision making. 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.

This is always my area of interest, and I rarely see it covered. Maybe all the people who do it just understand it so well that's it just an after thought for them? I've tried on numerous occasions to host my own services at home and use dynamic DNS to map to an IP, but when things don't work, it's hard to know if it's the hardware (consumer modems, routers, etc.), dirty ISPs who want to force you into a business tie…

I think it is because most of those things are just regular sysadmin things and homelab more refers to setting up hardware or software that you wouldn’t normally find at work.

As for your actual problem, a lot of ports are blocked by ISPs because a LOT of computer worms have used them to spread malware in the past. However you usually can test to see if the port is open as well as try alternative uncommon ports like 47364 to see if they work.

Some ISPs, although I believe mostly mobile ones, also use something called CGNAT where your Internet IP is actually an internal network IP within a part of the ISP, and you can usually test for this by checking if your IP is in a private range.

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