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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#311

Post by bayindirh »

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…

My homelab (or infrastructure if you will) consists of 2 ARM SBCs distributed geographically and connected via a VPN & syncthing. They are fanless, powerful enough (8 cores and 8GB of RAM is plenty for what I do), and handle 90% of the automation my old desktop was doing.

I don't need Proxmox, tons of containers or anything. If I do, I can always throw a N95 into the mix with ample RAM and storage.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#312

Post by CTDOCodebases »

tombert wrote: post #226
mech422 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff. I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE! 0) https://ameridroid.com/produ…

How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.

Not the person you are replying too but huge will largely depend how much you pay for electricity. Electricity is very expensive in Europe

In Sydney, Australia running your server just at idle would cost just over AUD $50 a month assuming it is powered by the grid.

For about AUD $400 you could replace it with a 7 or 8 series Intel i7 mini PCI and throw a 10Gbe NIC in it and that thing will cost you AUD $7 a month to run.

It gets tricky though if you want ECC RAM. Most of the cheaper low power systems that are available will take UDIMMs and that becomes prohibitively expensive if you need a decent amount of RAM.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#313

Post by bayindirh »

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…

What homelab people who do not work with/in a data center daily doesn't realize is how noisy and power hungry is the equipment they procure.

They got a managed switch, nice. It has VLANs, stacking, etc. nice. How many 48 port switches you can possibly stack in a home? You got a Sun ZFS7420. Great. That's a rack with two controllers with 1TB RAM each. That thing screams. An entry level 7320 is maybe workable, but you can't do 7420 at home. Same for HPE/Dell/Netapp storage boxen.

Doing Infiniband is home is another thing I can't understand. Fiber cables are extremely expensive. Copper is range limited and thick, plus unless you do HPC, its latency and speed doesn't mean much. Go fiber Ethernet. Much more practical.

I understand the curiosity and willingness to play, but it's not that practical to play with these at home (noise, space, heat, power wise). I also buy high end consumer hardware. TP-Link has 4/8 port smart managed SOHO switches for example, they even have PoE. Power your Raspi cluster via PoE with less cables and get some respectable computing power with no noise. Neat! No?

Dell's Rack servers are generally not noisy at idle, but a 2U server under some real load is unbearable. What's funny that an Intel N95 has the same power with an i7-3770K with better SIMD support while being 4x more efficient, and that thing is not slow by any means.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#314

Post by transpute »

nvy wrote: post #231
blackfawn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On paper, these look promising, no direct experience. Also on Amazon US/CA.

$170, N100, 16GB LPDDR5, dual 2.5GbE, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-n-box-pro-intel-n100-mi...

$210, N100, dual 3.5" SATA, M.2 NVME, dual 2.5GbE, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-r1-2bay-nas-intel-n100-...

$250, Ryzen 5700U, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-cyber-amd-ryzen-7-5700u...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#315

Post by slyall »

noobermin wrote: post #193
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…

This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby. See mechanical keyboards for example.

Whereas a "poor mans hobby" is a a 1970s muscle car and a home workshop...

Sure you can spend thousands on racks of servers and UPS/generators but you can also spend less than $500.

Personally I rent a unit in a quadplex and have:

    Old 42" rack -  $50 from old employer
    10 year old HP Microserver G7 for storage - $250 new
    repurposed old desktop virtual machines - Free
    Cheap dumb switch - $50

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#316

Post by buybackoff »

unregistereddev wrote: post #279
smallmancontrov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?

There are SFF PC's with integrated power supplies that have a few PCIe slots. PCIe -> NVME adapters are readily available (not my website or article, but posting a link to a review site seemed more genuine than posting Newegg or Amazon links to specific products): https://thunderboltlaptop.com/best-nvme-pcie-adapters/

The cheapest from Amazon works well. Just make sure it matches PCI Gen and slot overall for throughput, e.g. PCI 3.0 x4 are fine for NVMe 3.0, but for NVMe 4.0 more is needed.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#317

Post by doawoo »

mech422 wrote: post #267
blackfawn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah - I skipped rPi because back when I started replacing stuff ARM still had some gotcha's with stuff that hadn't been ported. I do use the rPi's for the 3d printers though. I've found the TP Link stuff to be good for home switches. cheap, quiet, and basically fully featured/managed. Stuff like SNMP, VLAN/Mac Lan, port mirroring/monitoring, etc. Also SSH and web interfaces... I have 2-3 currently, 1 per room feedin…

One of the coolest additions to my home lab recently was an Orange Pi 5 plus/pro - 8 core ARM 64-bit cpu and 32GB of RAM all with awesome power usage and zero noise, plus an up to date kernel. I skipped the rpi as well a while back but these newer boards are worth lookin at! :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#318

Post by Wuzado »

znpy wrote: post #115
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…

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…

Any power tuning tips?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#319

Post by mech422 »

doawoo wrote: post #317
mech422 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I skipped rPi because back when I started replacing stuff ARM still had some gotcha's with stuff that hadn't been ported. I do use the rPi's for the 3d printers though. I've found the TP Link stuff to be good for home switches. cheap, quiet, and basically fully featured/managed. Stuff like SNMP, VLAN/Mac Lan, port mirroring/monitoring, etc. Also SSH and web interfaces... I have 2-3 currently, 1 per room feedin…

One of the coolest additions to my home lab recently was an Orange Pi 5 plus/pro - 8 core ARM 64-bit cpu and 32GB of RAM all with awesome power usage and zero noise, plus an up to date kernel. I skipped the rpi as well a while back but these newer boards are worth lookin at! :)

Oh nice! - I'll have to take a look

Thanks!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#320

Post by meonkeys »

jackallis wrote: post #40

how/where can a complete noob learn all these skills to set something like this at home?

First: try running just about anything from https://awesome-selfhosted.net . Pick something useful to you.

I chose Nextcloud and Jellyfin when I started in 2020. Before then I was running a few random things like Syncthing and Samba mostly just for myself. In 2020 I decided to try and apply a more thoughtful, disciplined process. Good security, reliable backups, useful for my whole family, etc.

Shameless self-promotion: https://selfhostbook.com . My book covers justification for self-hosting, fundamental skills, and homelab (or perhaps "homeprod") setup with Ubuntu, Ansible, Docker, and Traefik.

I wrote it for folks with some light sysadmin/programming skills. It's a good general starting starting point for self-hosting.

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