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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#301

Post by Dig1t »

>That said, be careful with the power consumption! You don’t want to end up with… mortgage of $1,100, a power bill of $1,200, the feeling when walking into your home lab… NOT priceless.

This is the biggest thing for me, I would love to have a big fancy lab setup at home, but when you start adding up the power consumption and put a monthly dollar amount to it, then it becomes less exciting. Especially if you live somewhere like California where home electricity bills are incredibly high nowadays, it is extra painful.

There are some low-power setups that are great, but it seems like once you start using rack-mounted equipment, the machines get more power-hungry.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#302

Post by bazmattaz »

Andrex wrote: post #247
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…

I've been pretty happy with the EliteDesk G3 I got off eBay a couple months ago. I actually use it for light work (mostly spreadsheets and emails) too. I think I paid less than $130 including shipping and sometimes it (anecdotally) has better performance than my home PC which is a full tower I bought new 4-5 years back.

I love my G3. I found with a beefy i7 8 core cpu that sips 7w at idle. These machines are gold

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#303

Post by _peeley »

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…

I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc.

That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and upgrading some of the other hardware in my lab, this "beginner"'s guide was really helpful.

[0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/homelab-0

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#304

Post by _peeley »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #13

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,…

Same, I originally had a bunch of RasPi's in my lab running differing versions of Raspbian until I got tired of the configuration drift and finally Nixified all of them. Writing a single Nix Flake and being able to build declarative SD card installation images for all of them makes managing a bunch of different machines an absolute dream (tutorial here[0], for those interested).

The only issue is remotely deploying Nix configs. The only first-party tool, nixops, is all but abandoned and unsupported. The community driven tools like morph and deploy-rs seem promising, but they vary in terms of Flakes support and how much activity/longevity they seem to have.

[0] https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/nixos-install-custom-image

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#305

Post by tanelpoder »

I recently bought an old Mac Pro 2013 (trashcan) with 12 cores/24 threads and 128 GB ECC RAM for my upgraded "always-on" machine - total cost $500. Installed Ubuntu 22.04, works out of the box (23.10 had some issues). Unfortunately it's hard/impossible to completely suspend/disable the two internal AMD Radeon GPUs to lower power consumption. I got it down to ~99W consumption when idle, when using "vgaswitcheroo" to suspend one of the GPUs (and it set the other one to D3hot state). My Intel NUC consumes almost nothing when idle (my UPS reports 0 W output while its running, even with 4 NVMe disks attached via a Thunderbolt enclosure). I don't want a 100W heat generator running 24x7, especially when I'm away from home, so will need to stick with the NUC...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#306

Post by duped »

tills13 wrote: post #283
duped wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

When you have ductwork in the attic your heating/cooling efficiency is hurt by the amount of heat lost through the roof and out into the environment. When the ductwork is all in interior walls, there's no efficiency lost because those losses go into the rooms the system was trying to heat/cool already.

Where I live, we have extreme ranges of temperature (both hot and cold) and almost all ductwork is on the interior for this reason. You'd be spending a fortune in the winter heating an attic when it's getting lost to -17C air temps outside...

It sounds like your attic needs more insulation.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#307

Post by buybackoff »

tanelpoder wrote: post #305

I recently bought an old Mac Pro 2013 (trashcan) with 12 cores/24 threads and 128 GB ECC RAM for my upgraded "always-on" machine - total cost $500. Installed Ubuntu 22.04, works out of the box (23.10 had some issues). Unfortunately it's hard/impossible to completely suspend/disable the two internal AMD Radeon GPUs to lower power consumption. I got it down to ~99W consumption when idle, when using "vgaswitcheroo" to s…

GPUs are bad with power. My RTX 3060 still consumes around 20W doing nothing, no display or real load whatsoever. More than the rest combined when idle. I wanted to sell the entire box, but made that machine on-demand (it's mostly off). It's also noisy for it's relatively powerful overall. Yes, NUCs are great for 24/7 and light/spiky loads.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#308

Post by CTDOCodebases »

rpcope1 wrote: post #297
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…

BMC is not a requirement these days as there are options like using a piKVM or AMT/vPRO on certificied Intel systems.

Personally I turn IPMI off. The difference at idle can be up to 20w. Not to mention the outdated interfaces are a sercurity risk

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#309

Post by buybackoff »

_peeley wrote: post #303
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…

I agree. For most people just starting out, it's a lot more worthwhile to get a single cheapo repurposed desktop or a single Raspberry Pi to run PiHole or something on and then expand from there. My homelab[0] started as a single Pi running PiHole and has expanded to four machines running everything I need from Jellyfin to Calibre to DNS, etc. That being said, when I finally got around to rackmounting and upgrading s…

Please, do not use Raspberry Pi for a homelab unless you are 100% sure your workload is OK with it. I've just sold mine after ~2 years it being in a box in a closet. It's just to weak, too useless. I value my power socket slot more that RPi. If ARM is important, especially Mac Mx, the lowest Mac Mini is not that expensive. RPi is close to zero in performance. It could be just some unnoticeable VM in Proxmox/AnotherHypervisor performance-wise.
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