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More random home lab things I've recently learned

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Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#101

Post by dotnet00 »

ysleepy wrote: post #57
walthamstow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Proxmox running on top of a clean Debian install on my NUC, I wanted to allow Plex to use the hardware decoding and it got a bit funny trying to do that with Plex running in a VM, so it runs on the host and I use VMs for other stuff

It's very easy to do this with LXC containers in Proxmox now, as passing devices to a container is now possible from the UI.

With containers, making backups seemed to become impractical with large libraries, since it seems to copy files individually?

I had to switch to VM because of that, passing through the GPU.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#102

Post by NathanKP »

0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

Running stuff on an underpowered Raspberry Pi is a good way to sniff test whether an infrastructure or software setup is sane. Powerful computers can hide horrible decisions for a long time, while less powerful devices make it immediately obvious if you need to switch a more efficient configuration.

I think this is one of the main reasons why Raspberry Pi has such a strong representation in homelabs, including my own.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#103

Post by dangus »

perdomon wrote: post #86
dangus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC). And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for ma…

You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).

I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt.

And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc.

Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to do what you need.

Maybe five years from now we will see ARM or RISC-V mini PCs further narrow the Venn diagram for raspberry pi systems.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#104

Post by immibis »

shermantanktop wrote: post #21
immibis wrote: post #9

I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.

Most “homelabs” are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin, with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of the features. It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.

It's not exactly the same thing, but I like the term "emotional support ASN" I heard recently.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#105

Post by j1elo »

otter-in-a-suit wrote: post #36
tylerflick wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s another league, but I don’t get the point of mixing enterprise rack-mounts with Raspberry Pis.

You'd be delighted (or terrified) to know that I just added an old gaming computer in a 4U case to the cluster, so I can play with PCI/GPU passthrough. The Dell is essentially the main machine that runs everything we actually use - the other hardware is either used as redundancy or for experiments (or both). I got the Pi from a work thing and this has been a fun use case. Not that I necessarily recommend it...

I'll be terrified, thanks! Said while programming the dishwasher to have it running during the times of the day with lower electricity prices :)

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#106

Post by LTL_FTC »

Havoc wrote: post #4

My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC sticks. >No space left on device. >In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That’s… a design. Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup & compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in proxmox &…

You can also run PBS alongside PVE and you get to it by using port 8007 instead of 8006. I found this worked quite well and is fully supported.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#107

Post by akeck »

> You see, unlike Debian or other standard OS, Raspberry Pi OS (which I still call Raspbian in my head and likely use in this article multiple times) is designed to be flashed to the SD card directly and doesn’t actually have an installer that can be booted from USB

https://github.com/gitbls/sdm

can help with this issue.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#108

Post by dangus »

dangus wrote: post #103
perdomon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).

I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt. And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to d…

(By more modularity I meant stuff like storage and RAM, obviously RPi has a much higher degree of a different kind of modularity)

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#109

Post by doubled112 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #96
doubled112 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a couple of machines that I can spin up if I need the power and performance, but it was amazing to me that the always on services that I'm actually using would run on an N95 mini PC. YMMV, I'm not saying it's enough for every use case. The CPU will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500 FPS. I don't have enough users to saturate that using Jellyfin.

> The CPU will transcode my 1080p media using QSV at ~500 FPS. Did you do the original encoding yourself (to insure everything is optimized for your rig)?

I ripped them from Bluray a long time before this machine was around. They were likely encoded using whatever preset Handbrake would have used as a default at the time
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