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Fuck the cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#31

Post by h4kunamata »

asveikau wrote: post #26
TacticalCoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab…

It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.

>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998

My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.

But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.

A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.

I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.

All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.

If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.

My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#32

Post by kaibee »

ajross wrote: post #20

Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…

I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#33

Post by h4kunamata »

downut wrote: post #29
asveikau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.

1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis. It was goddam glorious. Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The brow…

>I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)

The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available.

That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices.

I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux.

That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#35

Post by MinimalAction »

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#36

Post by h4kunamata »

MinimalAction wrote: post #35

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.

Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years

Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.

This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.

Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#37

Post by observationist »

MinimalAction wrote: post #35

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.

An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.

We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#39

Post by Rekindle8090 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #25
h4kunamata wrote: post #18

Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are going offline to have fun. Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad. Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are mo…

> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab…

"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc."

dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.

If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#40

Post by samplatt »

ajross wrote: post #20

Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…

All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.

I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.

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