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Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

xeiaso.net

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Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#31

Post by xena »

walterbell wrote: post #25

> I ran a poll on Mastodon to see what people wanted me to do. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of Rocky Linux. As an online "content creator", who am I to not give the people what they want? Truman would be proud! > the NAS. It has all of our media and backups on it. It runs Plex and a few other services, mostly managed by docker compose. Does the NAS run NixOS?

Yes, it runs NixOS and I am too cowardly to bother changing that any time soon. It's got everything on a giant ZFS array and most distros have poor ZFS support.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#32

Post by walterbell »

rubenbe wrote: post #16
fallingsquirrel wrote: post #3

The CoreOS diversion was interesting to read. I've been daily driving CoreOS+i3 for the past year (I might be the only one in the world). I thought having a tiny immutable base OS would make the system easier to manage over time, but unfortunately that hasn't been the case. It's been an adventure but I'm ready to give up and switch to something more vanilla.

I've keep running Fedora coreos on my home server. My biggest issue with it, is that it is very cloud oriented and doesn't seem to allow to rerun the provisioning config on an already existing machine. This turns the thing again into a stateful pet instead of a "one cow cattle". Although I do very much like the rollback feature which has allowed me temporarily roll back an update a couple of times

> doesn't seem to allow to rerun the provisioning config on an already existing machine

In theory, a generic existing machine could have been compromised by malware, in which case the configuration may not match the previously provisioned version.

With OS launch integrity to guarantee absence of tampering, and prove that current=expected config+binaries, it could be feasible to rerun provisioning config.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#33

Post by xav0989 »

shrubble wrote: post #11

My contrarian take is that eventually k8s will be recognized as the overcomplication it is; and better methods of managing less than 10,000 VMs will be researched and used.

I switched my home lab to nomad, which I find much easier to wrangle, but we’ll see what happens with the IBM acquisition.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#34

Post by walterbell »

jt2190 wrote: post #19
wint3rmute wrote: post #14

After running NixOS for 6+ months on my homelab and also re-using part of the configuration on my work machine, I feel the same way as Xe each time I'm interacting with a non-declarative OS. There's just no simple way to share configuration between machines or to automagically clean things up after making changes. Ansible feels like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of the OS state, hiding in a multitude of non-t…

I’m picking this nit: > When is a build reproducible? > “A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.” > Neither Nix or NixOS gives you these guarantees. This really makes me question whether all of the quirkiness of Nix is worth it if it can’t actually “pay off” with true reproducibility…

Does Guix offer guarantees of build reproducibility?

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#35

Post by Aurornis »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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 col…

I think we need a different word for collecting a lot of old, underpowered computers and tinkering endlessly.

I understand the attraction of playing with old, cheap hardware. However, hardware has come so far that it’s easy to build a 16-core server with a lightly used AMD consumer chip and 64-128GB of RAM for under $1000. It will have more power and use far less energy than these clusters of old machines that I see people assembling.

> Noisy fans take the "home" out of the homelab;

Again, a completely unnecessary thing to suffer. If the goal is a homelab. It’s really easy to make a near-silent PC with modern parts and cooling that will outperform an entire rack of 20 year old PCs. Even 10G switches that are quiet or fan less are common.

I get it. It can be fun. But I don’t think this is homelabbing.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#36

Post by Aurornis »

shrubble wrote: post #11

My contrarian take is that eventually k8s will be recognized as the overcomplication it is; and better methods of managing less than 10,000 VMs will be researched and used.

People don’t use Kubernetes at home because it’s the easiest tool for the job.

They use it in home labs because it’s a safe and easy environment to learn, practice, and explore.

Most importantly: It’s a low-consequence environment. If you accidentally bring everything down at your homelab, the only person who suffers is you. You don’t get that degree of safety to explore and experiment when you’re using company resources.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#37

Post by Yotsugi »

jt2190 wrote: post #19
wint3rmute wrote: post #14

After running NixOS for 6+ months on my homelab and also re-using part of the configuration on my work machine, I feel the same way as Xe each time I'm interacting with a non-declarative OS. There's just no simple way to share configuration between machines or to automagically clean things up after making changes. Ansible feels like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of the OS state, hiding in a multitude of non-t…

I’m picking this nit: > When is a build reproducible? > “A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.” > Neither Nix or NixOS gives you these guarantees. This really makes me question whether all of the quirkiness of Nix is worth it if it can’t actually “pay off” with true reproducibility…

It isn't worth it, if you care about freedom and configurability, Gentoo exists.

>reproducibility

would like to see people reproduce software that embeds build timestamp into the binary.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#38

Post by zamadatix »

distances wrote: post #30
jjbinx007 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently bought 2 of these and they are EXCELLENT! I can leave them running 24/7 without worrying about how much electricity they're using. The performance, flexibility and reliability far exceeds the Raspberry Pis that are confined the to cupboard and they're probably a fair bit faster than my old desktop PCs that I rarely switch on any more. I've gone uber-minimalist and only have NVME drives attached via USB-3.…

> reliability far exceeds the Raspberry Pis In which ways? Most commenters say the exact opposite, that cheap N100 mini PCs are less reliable than Raspberry Pis. I'm just now trying to decide which way to go. Raspberry Pi 5 is definitely much much more interesting from the nerdy point of view, but would cost about the same as some cheap N100, for half the power. Though half the electricity usage too.

If you get away with a 1/2 GB RAM version I'd say the Pi 5 is worth it, otherwise cheap mini PCs are better. I've found mini PCs to be more reliable than the Pi's I've owned as well (including the 5), though a lot of that is mitigated if you go for an m.2 hat on the Pi. In general though, if you're thinking of using a Pi more like a regular computer there isn't really anything special about it that makes it worthwhile. Well, beyond "I get to tinker more" if you particularly like assembling the thing, picking out the exact case, finding your favorite m.2 hat, etc. Even if you enjoy doing all that by the time you're done you still end with a PC that is worse than one you could just buy but maybe with a claim of saying you saved $20 doing so.

Where I like the Pi is use cases that don't quite fit with a normal mini PC like IP KVM.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#39

Post by notabee »

sgarland wrote: post #27

> What's not fine is how you prevent Ansible from running the same command over and over. You need to make a folder full of empty semaphore files that get touched when the command runs... > One of my patrons pointed out that I need to use Ansible conditionals in order to prevent these same commands from running over and over. Yes-ish. As I'm pretty sure OP figured out due to the pre-made roles comment, there exists a…

It's true, the flexibility can be both a boon and a curse. There should be a little more "best practices" info out there that's not too prescriptive. It doesn't help that a lot of pre-made roles on Ansible Galaxy vary widely in style and quality. Certainly no one wants to inherit Ansible code that's nothing but shell and command modules, but sometimes those are crucial gap fillers when an idempotent module isn't available for the task or is missing needed functionality. And even then, specialized (as opposed to general use) modules are only idempotent within themselves and you still sometimes need to check and pass the state of things between tasks and stick that in a registered variable combined with conditionals if the multiple tasks are dependent on each other or require a specific ordering.

I think a good generalized "best practice" is to keep those inter-task dependencies and conditionals to a minimum though. Small chunks or no chunks at all. It's always better to find a way to just run tasks independently with no knowledge of each other. The block module with "rescue" is useful for failing out a host gracefully if there's a bundle of finicky inter-dependent tasks that just have to run together though.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#40

Post by snapplebobapple »

Aurornis wrote: post #36
shrubble wrote: post #11

My contrarian take is that eventually k8s will be recognized as the overcomplication it is; and better methods of managing less than 10,000 VMs will be researched and used.

People don’t use Kubernetes at home because it’s the easiest tool for the job. They use it in home labs because it’s a safe and easy environment to learn, practice, and explore. Most importantly: It’s a low-consequence environment. If you accidentally bring everything down at your homelab, the only person who suffers is you. You don’t get that degree of safety to explore and experiment when you’re using company resou…

Incorrect sir. I am way more concerned about my wife and kids as end users than i am about any employees
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