Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Home Lab Beginners guide

linuxblog.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 400 posts

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#101

Post by dijit »

nonameiguess wrote: post #70
dijit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, actually, but "wife-acceptance-factor"[0] (or; "wife approved") is useful terminology; I would love if there was some colloquially acceptable gender neutral term for that. Some have suggested some truly cumbersome terminology to replace it which is unfortunate because you very quickly run into the same problem the vegans have: If your choices are too unpalatable then reasonable people (who don't care or shar…

It should really be something like family acceptance factor. Your spouse is usually not the only person living with you for long periods of time you'd ideally like to accomodate as a permanent co-user of shared spaces. That said, this writer never says anything about the general idea being wife-approvable as far as I can tell, just that putting a homelab in the living room will lead to a divorce. That is already gend…

I started my comment with an agreement to the sentiment you're expressing and the sentiment expressed by the parent.

The only thing I added was a caveat that there is a useful term I'd like to see a replacement for.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#102

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jasode wrote: post #97
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The responses are kinda a mixed bag here - there are two totally different use cases. If you want something for practical purposes, /r/selfhosted actually has you covered. It’s usually jellyfin for movies, etc. And you use a NAS or a PC, but the idea is normally that you setup something reliable and don’t lose your data, and it does not require too much tinkering. Maybe once in a while run some docker container to te…

>Then a third group are people who build a whole data centre at home AND run serious applications on it. These guys need to buy themselves a motorbike or something. I don't think the insult to a generalized group of people is necessary. Some enthusiasts have overkill racks, 40Gbps fiber, enterprise-class switches and vlans, etc, etc ... because it's their enjoyable hobby . The over-the-top components and making it al…

It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit

I think it communicates the point that their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#103

Post by kjkjadksj »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #99
buybackoff wrote: post #10

The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers wi…

Yep, agreed. When living in a high cost of living area (i.e. where lots of tech professionals tend to live), space is limited. I'm annoyed at the lack of ECC-capable sub-ITX NAS boards. I have a Helios4, but I've no idea what I'll migrate to when that dies.

N100 boards are ddr5 compatible which has internal ecc

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#104

Post by NelsonMinar »

cybrox wrote: post #39
buybackoff wrote: post #10

The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers wi…

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to…

From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains.

Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed servers.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#105

Post by sgarland »

toinewx wrote: post #3

what would be the typical use of such a lab? Why are so many different components needed?

Partially to practice things you do (or want to do) at work, partially because it’s just fun.

I set up a Mellanox mesh network between my three compute nodes a couple of weeks ago. 56 Gbps Infiniband is pretty sweet, although my CPU is too slow to fully take advantage of it (I don’t have RoCE working yet, so it’s IPoIB). Still, a ~20x speed up for my Ceph cluster on NVMe is lovely, and makes it actually viable for use.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#106

Post by kjkjadksj »

SystemOut wrote: post #56
lolinder wrote: post #17

As an alternative perspective, this is my home lab: * Location: Sitting on a shelf in my basement office. Ventilation is okay, the WiFi is fine but not great. * Hardware: An old PC I picked up at a neighborhood swap meet. I added some RAM taken from another old PC and bought a hard drive and WiFi card. * Software: Debian stable and podman/podman-compose. All my useful services are just folders with compose files. I u…

This could almost be me. The main difference is my "server" is an off-lease Dell Micro PC that I maxed out the RAM on running ProxMox with a mix of VMs with everything stored on a Synology NAS all sitting in my basement office closet. I have tailscale setup so I can access it remotely.

I see this a lot with certain home labs. A ton of ram for vms. Why not just run on the metal?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#107

Post by NelsonMinar »

A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever) system. It's a huge pain.

Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high availability, etc. But now I'm starting to split off services into their own containers and it's just so tidy!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#108

Post by tills13 »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #15
zer00eyz wrote: post #14

The whole home lab scene is great. Everyone has some set of goals... low power, interesting processors, data ownership, HA, UPS/whole home UPS... and the home is the only common intersection of all these overlapping interests, and bits of software. Even more fascinating is the types of people it attracts, from professionals playing to people far outside the industry. I have really taken the plunge and it recaptures s…

The community is absolutely amazing. It's incredibly active on Reddit and Lemmy. People are always quick to help you find solutions and give you advice on setting things up using best practices. It's an absolute gem if learning this stuff is interesting to you.

which lemmy instance / community do you recommend?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#109

Post by 2024throwaway »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #107

A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever) system. It's a huge pain. Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high availabili…

How exactly does running a VM in proxmox give you high availability?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#110

Post by GabeIsko »

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.

Post reply on HN