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Home Lab Beginners guide

linuxblog.io

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#111

Post by tills13 »

tivert wrote: post #80

> Attic > Pros: Less noise, easier cable runs. > Cons: can get hot depending on where you live, roof leaks, humidity/condensation, and creepy at night. Where do attics not get hot? I live in northern climate, and ours regularly gets hotter than 140F during sunny summer days. And I say hotter, because the remote temp sensor I have up there maxes out at 140F. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually gets up to 150F or mo…

Conditioned attics are the new rage. Once it's conditioned, you can move other mechanical devices up there like HVAC etc to reduce the amount of ducting your home needs (especially if it's single-story).

It's nice because that loose, shredded insulation is garbage and so easy to mess up (walking on it can change it from R40 to R20, for example). With a conditioned attic you use standard batting in between the roof members -- impossible to mess up.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#112

Post by drewzero1 »

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…

My favorite home lab setup was when I had an old (originally XP, switched it to Ubuntu) laptop and a couple of USB drives in the top drawer of a scavenged file cabinet. I cut a hole in the back for the wires and it never generated enough heat for airflow to be an issue. I hosted my personal website on it, including a webcam of my aquarium, hooked it up to my doorbell, XMPP, used it for document storage... anything I needed a server for. I switched to an old Mac Mini for NAS after I moved and haven't had much time to mess with it since.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#113

Post by kjkjadksj »

bombcar wrote: post #83
MrVitaliy wrote: post #31

Surprised author didn't mention https://labgopher.com/ for finding used enterprise hardware at low cost on ebay. This hardware is cheap and typically out-of-service for enterprise, but great for home labs.

The big problem with off-lease enterprise hardware is the power usage can quickly outrun the original costs - but that may not be an issue for everyone. The nice thing about off-lease enterprise hardware is there is so much of it, and it's enterprise. You can easily find replacement parts, and working on that stuff is a joy, everything is easily replaceable with no tools.

For the price of an 8th gen off lease pc on ebay you can buy a new alder lake N minipc with 6 tdp.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#114

Post by astockwell »

2024throwaway wrote: post #109
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?

Some defense against the class(es) of availability problems that occur from OS + upwards. No defense against the class(es) that occur below that (metal).

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#115

Post by znpy »

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…

Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers.

I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W.

Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based lightbulbs.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#116

Post by karolist »

2024throwaway wrote: post #109
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?

It doesn't on its own but it simplifies things hard to roll by hand that does, like observation nodes, consensus algorithms, Ceph storage, live migrations etc.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#117

Post by znpy »

buybackoff wrote: post #38
CharlesW wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet? Have you considered using a NAS as your homelab? I run a few containers (no VMs yet, although I can) and just do that on my QNAP. The TBS-h574TX ( https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx ) has five E1.S/M.2 slots. The HS-453DX-8G has two SATA 3.5-inch drive bays and two M.2 2280 SATA SSD…

It's easier to turn an OptiPlex into NAS. Actually you could pass-through entire SATA stack as a PCI device into TruNAS running in Proxmox VM so it sees SATA ports natively, with all goodies such as SMART.

If you just need to run a few containers, you might want to take a look at TrueNas (Scale) rather than Proxmox.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#118

Post by mrob »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #103
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Internal ECC doesn't protect the data in transit. It also doesn't have error reporting, so you could be operating with the error correction already operating at maximum capacity without knowing it, leaving no error correction available for unusual events. It's not a substitute for traditional ECC.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#119

Post by unpopularopp »

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…

>Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device

I just wish there was something like Unraid's Docker support but in a FOSS distro.

Proxmox with LXC is just not the same. Unraid is good, love the UI and easyness too but the proprietary paid Linux is just something I don't like.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#120

Post by wutwutwat »

2024throwaway wrote: post #109
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?

Proxmox comes with baked in support for live vm migration[0], high availability[1] and clustering support[2] if you run multiple host nodes. I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to

0: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_mig... & https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_guest...

1: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_how_i...

2: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapte...

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