Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

No. Real suffering in the homelab is getting N 20 year old servers and swapping parts between them to get N-M servers that work. I feel like the project will be successful if I get all the drives wiped and I am within site of that although I discovered the wiping was going to be a process of triage: some drives did not spin up, one drive took 14 hours to wipe whereas a normal drive would take about 30 minutes. My collaborator will use the bad drives for target practice for a black powder rifle that shoots round balls.

Noisy fans take the "home" out of the homelab; the machines are 64 bit Intel but top out at 4GB. The latest version of Ubuntu installs fine but the desktop struggles. I think I'm going to install the desktop Ubuntu again just to see if I can watch YouTube with it but the plan now is install the server edition and give it to my collaborator to run an occasional minecraft server, which might free up a (much more powerful) i3 machine to watch videos from my Jellyfin server on the TV downstairs, something the XBOX ONE oddly can't handle. (No patent licenses for codecs if it's a game console?)

At least I dug out the old VGA-supporting monitors out of mothballs so I'll be ready to play around with the RISC-V and eZ80 SBCs I have which are, at the very least, a lot quieter.

Well, a translation can be: a NixOS user tried some from the IT dark-modern age and find how much it suck, nothing extraordinary, unfortunately most people fails to even understand that some Big of IT have interest in crappy solutions because they allow commerce while good ones do not.

Back then was the full-stack-virtualization era where a large flock of biped sheep say that VMWare "is the future, today" of course on x86 with the incredible overhead it have. For some times the psyco-PR-drug works, than paravirtualization start to be know with docker before, k8s after. Again the aforementioned flock run for the mania again ignoring the fact it's a nonsense.

Ladies and gentlemen this solution have only ONE purpose sell pre-build crap for those who do no know how to work themselves, mostly the Dev part of DevOps who in mean have issues even deploying their own private personal desktop at home, not even a homelab. They do not care about the tremendous overhead, "hw it's relatively cheap and I'm rich enough to buy more", and they consider normal the abysmal level of complexity. So we see in-production docker images built by no-one-know who, perhaps with his/her ssh keys authorized "oups, I forgot to remove them" and so on.

NixOS unfortunately have a terrible language, Guix System unfortunately it's mostly focused on HPC/academic usage instead of homelab/desktop usage, but that's the "modern IaC" since years. They are incredibly simpler and light than the modern crap pushed to sell pre-made images, offering "cloud services" of various kind and so on, yes Hetzner or OVH or Amazon do need to been able to sell so they do need these monsters, but users do need to AVOID them and re-learn how to use and deploy OSes and app, perhaps in a less archaic ways than the 80s style...

I had the same experience.

Immutable OS are great when you have a team of people to manage the tooling and process complexity of deploying and managing them, end users who only want to use software running on those servers, not the servers themselves, and you are bringing servers up and down all the time, then you actually reap the benefits of standardization and infrastructure as code.

But when it's just you, you want to interact directly with the OS, and it's just one device, it's just foot guns all day.

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This was a tremendous write-up. I appreciate the detail including your ingressd setup. I agree, though, that this is a pain. It's for this reason that we made Cloud Seeder [1] so you can have hands-free setup of your homelab and IPv6rs for painless ingress [2]

[1] https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder

[2] https://ipv6.rs