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Home Lab Beginners guide

linuxblog.io

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#391

Post by vGPU »

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…

The Omada line makes pretty decent AP’s too. A step above ubiquiti in terms of reliability but also dead simple. I’d have gone ruckus if I could have but the mailman stole my $200 eBay R550 score and I didn’t feel like shelling out $500 for one.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#392

Post by PKop »

GabeIsko wrote: post #110

If someone made a UPC in the form factor of a laptop battery, we could be off to the races. I thought a laptop battery would be good for this, but they do bad things if you leave them plugged in all the time. No reason to go crazy with your home server if it is only you using it. You can get away with a crappy laptop that your roommate is done with.

So what should you do, remove the battery on these laptop servers?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#393

Post by mtmk »

> ...or in a cardboard box

When I saw the picture of the server mounted in a cardboard box, my first thought was about fire hazards. It turns out that might not be as big an issue as I initially thought, since paper won't spontaneously catch fire until reaching ~200C [1], and the operating temperatures of computers generally shouldn't exceed 100C. However, I'd still be a little wary about a cardboard setup, considering the potential for electrical faults, the heat generated by power supplies and the risk of inadequate ventilation leading to hotspots. These factors could present a significant fire risk. My initial judgment of the setup may have been too quick but not entirely unfounded I guess!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#394

Post by k8svet »

znpy wrote: post #367
k8svet wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to keep ansible playbooks but they were just an overkill. Does it even make sense to write a playbook for a system that I'll reinstall in three or four years ? Probably not. Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years? Folks applying the Ansible mindset to NixOS are missing the point.…

> Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years? Still useless. Software change, the configs i make today might not make sense or even work in 3-5 years. Nix and stuff (ansible etc) only make sense if you have to reinstall your systems multiple times in a single week (fine if your hobby is reinstalling linux on your laptop). But if you do a…

Except that Nix literally solves that problem by abstracting over the underlying config.

Y'all don't know what you're talking about and once again the Ansible comparison belies in.

>reinstall once every five years then it’s largely an exercise in futility.

You are as wrong as you think your are right, I'd know I've been using NixOS for 8 years. You're just wrong.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#395

Post by caconym_ »

tlamponi wrote: post #388
caconym_ wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

> I worded that part a bit oddly

I actually read that off the website—not your fault at all!

> 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.

That's funny, but makes total sense. Thanks for the responses!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#396

Post by GabeIsko »

PKop wrote: post #392
GabeIsko wrote: post #110

If someone made a UPC in the form factor of a laptop battery, we could be off to the races. I thought a laptop battery would be good for this, but they do bad things if you leave them plugged in all the time. No reason to go crazy with your home server if it is only you using it. You can get away with a crappy laptop that your roommate is done with.

So what should you do, remove the battery on these laptop servers?

Yeah, especially after a few years. Perhaps there is a way to get it to charge and discharge reccurringly, but that would probably take some extra hardware.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#397

Post by belthesar »

justinclift wrote: post #383
belthesar wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great question! I haven't gotten that far yet. I have Proxmox running on a 12th gen i5 currently, and my other two compute nodes, a 3rd gen i7 laptop and a 7th gen i5, are currently still serving production workloads, so I haven't had a chance to set up a cluster yet. That said, I don't mind limiting features to lowest common denominator for the k3s control plane node, as I don't need gobs of power for it or advanced CPU features, and I imagine that's the pain you might be facing (though I'm new to Proxmox, so who can say?)

That said, I do have a NAS that I can provide both NFS and iSCSI storage to, so I imagine if I run NFS as the backing storage, I shouldn't have to worry about clustered file systems. Each compute does have local storage, but the plan is to provide that via a CSI for workloads that don't need to be highly available or where fault tolerance isn't a concern.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#398

Post by justinclift »

belthesar wrote: post #397
justinclift wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

Great question! I haven't gotten that far yet. I have Proxmox running on a 12th gen i5 currently, and my other two compute nodes, a 3rd gen i7 laptop and a 7th gen i5, are currently still serving production workloads, so I haven't had a chance to set up a cluster yet. That said, I don't mind limiting features to lowest common denominator for the k3s control plane node, as I don't need gobs of power for it or advanced…

As a data point, the vm migration hangs aren't happening in testing any more. Looks like there really was a fix added to Proxmox recently.

Can proceed with more testing now. :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#399

Post by dengolius »

NortySpock wrote: post #347
Jun8 wrote: post #338

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SW project guides you know?

Admittedly, it makes way more sense once you have more than one person in your household. I ended up running most things in docker on a Raspberry Pi 4. Started with - PiHole to cut down on ads and try to keep the kids from clicking malware links - added network attached storage to make it easier to share files with the family - added Jellyfin to share music with people in the house (kids gotta grow up listening to go…

Have you tried to use https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/quickstart/ ?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#400

Post by NortySpock »

dengolius wrote: post #399
NortySpock wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, it makes way more sense once you have more than one person in your household. I ended up running most things in docker on a Raspberry Pi 4. Started with - PiHole to cut down on ads and try to keep the kids from clicking malware links - added network attached storage to make it easier to share files with the family - added Jellyfin to share music with people in the house (kids gotta grow up listening to go…

Have you tried to use https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/quickstart/ ?

I took a look, and I have it running with nothing hooked up. I haven't decided which of the remote log-shipping tools I want to hang my hat on. Two docker plugins I tried (Loki and elastic, I think) didn't seem to be compiled for ARMv7, so... maybe I'll try to get benthos streams mode to tail the logs, format them as json, and fire them into the VictoriaLogs webhook. But who knows when I'll figure that out.

I did get a 3-node NATS cluster running across 3 servers this weekend, that was neat how easy that ended up being.

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