Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Home Lab Beginners guide

linuxblog.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 400 posts

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#291

Post by drojas »

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…

Oh I wish companies like Framework or System76 launched a reproducible manufacturing process where you code your hardware similarly to how Nix/Guix manages builds. Disaster recovery would be much easier. Perhaps Super Micro Computer can do this already but they target data centers. One can only dream.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#292

Post by buybackoff »

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

NUCs may be expensive, until you see a 40% discount on Amazon :) I've got mine this way. Now they are discontinued so one may expect to get them cheap on eBay. Anyway, I'm talking about the box itself and MB/CPU only. Vendors/people often sell a good box with bad RAM/disks at a very low price.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#293

Post by bazmattaz »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #15
zer00eyz wrote: post #14

The whole home lab scene is great. Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people far outside the industry. I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures s…

The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is interesting to you.

Absolutely. As a prolific Reddit user I have a a love hate relarelationship with the site but the home lab and self hosted communities have restored my faith in internet communities

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#294

Post by mech422 »

Andrex wrote: post #264
mech422 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sound like a shill - I have no affiliation, just a customer but I _LOVE_ the H series :-) 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…

Don't worry, I'm actually (the original?) ODROID shill! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619740 :) Glad to hear they never stopped doing what they were good at, sounds like they've gotten even better!

Oh hey - that post was pretty cool :-)

Amazing how much a kind gesture sticks with you! Glad to see stuff like that these days :-D

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#295

Post by buybackoff »

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 think people mix "homelab" and "homeprod". Here there are some other comments mentioning homeprod. To me what you describe sounds more like a homeprod setup. But I like the "lab" part. When one could just relax and experiment with lots of stuff.

I do have an ECC instance for data, to be backed up to a remote S3. I could torch it. It still remains a lab. I could just buy a new hardware and restore. But it's only about the valuable data (isolated to a couple of containers), not "restore of my entire setup".

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#296

Post by bazmattaz »

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…

Did you try r/self hosted on Reddit. Thats where you’ll get support for something like that

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#297

Post by rpcope1 »

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…

Unless something has recently changed, the SFF Precisions and Optiplexes used weird smaller PSUs and generally have really poor airflow. Generally the lower end precision mid-tower also flow air terribly and get hot and whiny. There's no way I would recommend an SFF system if you can get the MT variant, as your options for fixing the MT systems when the Dell PSU inevitably fails are much better than getting a regular ATX PSU, cutting a hole to feed the cords in, and bolting it to the side of the case, which I've done repeatedly for SFF Dell systems with blown PSUs.

Additionally, one challenge I have with all of these is that none of them have anything like a BMC. If you have more than one system, moving peripherals around sucks, and KVM technology is kind of iffy these days. It seemed easier to just jam an old Supermicro motherboard that had IPMI enabled in a reasonable ATX case with a lower power Xeon variant, and call it a day.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#299

Post by bazmattaz »

bovem wrote: post #6

Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing. I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions. With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the…

Defo invest in a mini pc. I got a powerful HP elitedesk that sips 7w on idle and runs 38 containers

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#300

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

tills13 wrote: post #108
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is interesting to you.

which lemmy instance / community do you recommend?

I like selfhosted@lemmy.world but there are probably plenty of others
Post reply on HN