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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#381

Post by Fnoord »

tombert wrote: post #372
Fnoord wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that. Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s. I got solar power. Without that, I…

A bit of a typo, I meant to write that I used to have dozens of 60W light bulbs; all the lights in my house are LEDs now. I’ve been debating trying to find a smaller, low power computer to reduce energy; it’s hard to find a small one that have 10GbE or that would take a pcie card. Maybe I can find a Thunderbolt one.

Right, I guess most of us used to, but we save a lot of money that way. Still, why waste money on energy when you don't have to? If you could invest some money on different, more efficient hardware?

Yeah, Thunderbolt would work. I use LAG on my NAS with 4x 1 gbit, I got some devices with USB-C to 2.5 gbit NIC, these are cheap (30 EUR or so). I'd then use that managed 10 gbit switch which I put off by default. If I'd need the speed, I'd put it on. Thunderbolt is even better (way faster and cheaper, multipurpose, though you'd need to set up TCP/IP over USB), but I prefer AMD over Intel.

If you want a TB4 one with Intel, there's many Intel NUCs available, very cheap on Ali. Many of the ones I saw not from Ali are just rebrands (some, admittedly, with Coreboot).

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#382

Post by justinclift »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #20
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'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?

For the "bunch of NVMe slots", the OWC PCIe NVMe adapters look interesting:

* https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2 (4x NVMe drives)

* https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2 (8x NVMe drives)

I'd personally get them without drives included, as the OWC drives seem pretty expensive.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#383

Post by justinclift »

belthesar wrote: post #277
znpy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.

Depending on the use case, this is definitely an option. I personally prefer using Proxmox under my Container Orchestration hardware because, as it seems to always eventually do, my home lab has become production, and being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable. I've been agonizing and going back and forth between various potential solutions for this for a co…

> ... being able to do software patches of the underlying system without service outages is really desirable.

Yeah, that's what I was looking at Proxmox (8.x) for recently as well, but it never made it through basic qualification testing. VM migration's would randomly hang forever about 25% of the time. Definitely not a case of bad network interconnect either. :(

I'm using Ryzen 5000 series cpus on all the test gear though, and recently saw a mention that it may have been a known problem that's fixed. But not super keen on wasting more time.

What sort of cpus are your hosts using, and are you using your VMs with Ceph as their storage? :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#384

Post by Ecsta »

BXlnt2EachOther wrote: post #349
haltcatchfire wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially now with the rumors of Unraid moving from pay-once to an annual subscription model.

I believe this was confirmed and they aim to switch by end of the month. Those interested in Unraid who prefer the old model may wish to pick up a perpetual license now. https://unraid.net/blog/pricing-change disclaimer - I'm not an Unraid user.

They're still continuing to have a lifetime license option, it's just going up in price.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#385

Post by _huayra_ »

One bit of guidance I've been trying to figure out is this: how does one properly segment one's homelab to be able to firewall potentially dangerous stuff (e.g. IoT gear, hosting publicly-available websites via Cloudflare tunnels or something, all while running on the usual "virtualize all workloads" thing with Docker/Proxmox, etc)?

The best I've come up with so far is segmentation via VLANs, then adding many rules to deal with inter-VLAN reachability (e.g. should it be forced to transit to the firewall and back? Can my laptop reach out to the IoT devices, even if I block connections in the reverse direction?).

Beyond this, I'm not sure how to best handle similar segmentation on my few servers (all running proxmox), e.g. whether to expose VLANs to the VMs (which I kinda need to do for the pfsense firewall, maybe?).

The biggest thing is how to keep these network configs in sync, e.g. when adding a new VLAN, etc. I basically have an Org file that I write all this down, but I'm guessing there's a better way.

Also, if anyone wants a cheaper alternative to Ubiquiti, Mikrotik has served me well for years. I'm considering switching to Ubiquiti stuff though, as they seem to have a solution to synchronize state between multiple switches that is much better (vs. manually using Winbox on each individual router).

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#386

Post by tombert »

Fnoord wrote: post #381
tombert wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a typo, I meant to write that I used to have dozens of 60W light bulbs; all the lights in my house are LEDs now. I’ve been debating trying to find a smaller, low power computer to reduce energy; it’s hard to find a small one that have 10GbE or that would take a pcie card. Maybe I can find a Thunderbolt one.

Right, I guess most of us used to, but we save a lot of money that way. Still, why waste money on energy when you don't have to? If you could invest some money on different, more efficient hardware? Yeah, Thunderbolt would work. I use LAG on my NAS with 4x 1 gbit, I got some devices with USB-C to 2.5 gbit NIC, these are cheap (30 EUR or so). I'd then use that managed 10 gbit switch which I put off by default. If I'd…

Annoyingly, I can't really do 2.5G because when I was looking to upgrade my network, I ordered a bunch of 15 year old old 10GbE switch, because I mistakenly assumed that that would work with 2.5G as well. It turns out that the 2.5GbE came after 10GbE and so compatibility is not guaranteed, so I ended up having to upgrade everything in my house to 10GbE to make the switches work. Fortunately, used 10GbE cards from data centers go for around $40 on eBay. Thunderbolt cards cost a lot more so I only have one for my MacBook, and it's a big chunky boy that weights half a pound.

I was looking into some of those single-purpose computers, some of which will sometimes have a PCIe slot.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#387

Post by petepete »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #9

I get an electronics workbench or a woodworking workshop, but I still don’t quite understand the purpose of this „home lab“. You can just run stuff on your laptop, or a mini computer in some corner if it’s supposed to run 24/7?

Like with every hobby, YouTube and Reddit push people from having an interest in something to pursuing it to extreme lengths.

Many people get so struck by gearlust they lose sight of what piqued their interest in the first place.

I'm not immune, I don't think I'd have a Unifi setup at home if I hadn't seen the flashing lights and convinced myself I needed some.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#388

Post by tlamponi »

caconym_ wrote: post #376
tlamponi wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxmox Dev here, albeit personally speaking here, so do not make more out of it than the educated opinion this is. No, I do not think we leave much money at the table. In short, we're targeting enterprise users with a mix of a (soft) stick (e.g. pop-up to note that one isn't having the most production ready experience) a carrot (way better tested updates and depending on the level also enterprise support). Homelab u…

Thanks for the reply. I guess if the enterprise repo is the primary reason most organizations buy a subscription (implying that your existing subscriptions are already skewed toward the community license), and you added a homelab-tier subscription that also offered it, you might indeed see some cannibalization. I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, thoug…

> I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.

I worded that part a bit oddly (sorry, not a native speaker), I meant that one already gets all features, as we don't do any feature gating or the like. I.e., you can use all features of the software with or without subscription, the latter only provides extra services.

> Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away.

Actually the "stick" part of the carrots and stick design is just as important for enterprise users, as surprisingly a significant amount of enterprise user do not care of not getting any software updates ("it's enterprise, it just needs to magically work, even for new unforeseen events!11!!1"), and the subscriptions and enterprise repo existed before the nag, I cannot share all details, but you will have to believe me that it made a big difference. It also showed that a lot of companies are willing to pay for projects supporting their infrastructure, but they need to be made aware of the possibility quite actively.

But yeah, I can understand the opinions of the home lab community here, but I also hope that I could convey that the current system was carefully optimized over many years for our business case, and that means, that it can pay a (nowadays not so small amount of) developers salaries to extend, maintain and support the growing amounts of Proxmox projects.

If anybody that stumbles over this still does not believe in the necessity of the system, or know how it will be better if we do XYZ (how, if you have zero insights in our data and obviously do not run your own company doing this?), I just have to be blunt and recommend just using an alternative, for PVE et al. the single nag on login is the price you pay to get a full-blown cluster & hyper-visor stack.

> or maybe a one-time license purchase

I feel already like some FLOSS evangelist, but that's something I just have to correct: we sell no licenses at all, our projects are, and will stay, AGPLv3 licensed. And w.r.t. the same question for a life-time subscription with a one-time fee, not planned, reasons: see above.

btw. thanks for the discussion, most often I read this more in the demanding voice, which is hard to stay polite when responding – that wasn't the case at all here.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#389

Post by gorkish »

culopatin wrote: post #322
gorkish wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.

And the n100 cpu

n100 is overhyped IMO; I would prefer vendors focus on the connectivity and application requirements first and let the choice of SoC follow. The most important factor for this type of application is really PCIe lanes. If someone (other than broadcom) could introduce a basic fanout switch with PCIE5.0 upstream and loads of PCIe 3.0 downstream ports that would hopefully open the floodgates.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#390

Post by vGPU »

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 actually picked up a refurb desktop from Walmart with a ryzen 3500 for $400, it runs basically everything without breaking a sweat. Proxmox running homeassistant, docker, my seedbox, media server, etc and it averages 3% CPU usage.

I did not know just how much heat a 16tb disk can put out up until that point though.

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