321–330 of 400 posts
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In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving devices are in the selfhosted communities. There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out that way.
You can add "data hoarder" to the Venn diagram too!
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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…
One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.
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…
here's my home assistant deployment as a single file: https://github.com/pl4nty/homelab/blob/main/kubernetes/clust...
I deliberately nuked my onprem cluster a few weeks ago, and was fully restored within 2 hours (including host OS reinstalls). and most of that was waiting for backup restores over my slow internet connection. I think the break even for me was around 15-20 containers - managing backups, config, etc scales pretty well with k8s.
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…
Just do not put CPUs with >65W there. Or hungry PCI things.
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…
>Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device I just wish there was something like Unraid's Docker support but in a FOSS distro. Proxmox with LXC is just not the same. Unraid is good, love the UI and easyness too but the proprietary paid Linux is just something I don't like.
I like LXC alright but I do miss the ecosystem of DockerHub.
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…
Proxmox is incredibly helpful especially for homelab beginners familiar with Linux. You can easily create and destroy various things as you learn. Only thing that's not so easy to use is storage in general : it's very difficult to truly understand the consequences of various choices and therefore it's kinda difficult to properly set up the backbone of a NAS unless you're fairly comfortable with zfs, lvm, lvm-thin, re…
Proxmox' official solution for this is Ceph but that seems like overkill for a small home setup.
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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…
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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…
I don't think fiber cables are expensive. I ran CAT6 in my house and at the same time pulled an OS2 single-mode 30m fiber cable to my office for core switching. The 30m fiber cable was $17 on Amazon, plus two 10G-LR modules at $18 each. The equivalent CAT6 is more power hungry, has less range, the cable is the same damn price, and the 10GBase-T SFP->RJ45 transceivers are twice the price of the LR transceivers at $50…
A 5m, 200gbps cable is $1,149.00 a pop [0].
Mind you, this is neither the longest, nor the fastest cable.
[0]: https://esaitech.com/products/mellanoxmfs1s00-h005v-200gbps-...
More cables: https://esaitech.com/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D...
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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?
Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
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…
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…
- shelf with two mini systems - power strip with individual switches - power strip always-on outlets front/back - ethernet switch - "broom" thing to feed cables through - many-port USB 3 hub
other systems are under the desk.
It's really convenient. I have hooked some systems to power switches, others are always on. It is organized, takes up space but doesn't fall over, and gives me desktop access to ports if I need them.
That said, many years ago I had a server setup where I really organized everything, zip ties for all cables for neatness, etc. I turned out to be a pain every time I rewired something (cut zip ties, etc). I eventually learned there's a neat and organized vs flexibility balance you have to maintain.