111–120 of 134 posts
Can someone explain to me why people keep building "home lab" things with RPi's? Both the "Hacker" and "Cheap Bastard" ethos are better served by ... just about any cheap x86 stuff-- especially used. What am I missing?
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 seem knowledgeable so you may already know, but it's worth looking at the x86 mini PCs. Performance per watt has gotten pretty close on the newer low power CPUs (e.g. N150, unsure what AMD's line for that is), and performance per $ spent on hardware is way higher. I'm seeing 8GB Pi 5s with a power supply and no SD card for $100; you can get an N150 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD pre-installed for like $16…
I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
You can also distill recipes down. I find a lot of good recipes online that have a lot of hand-holding within the steps which I can just eliminate.
I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!
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…
Start with k3s, configure ingress/services/deployment, install ingress controller for cluster wide routing, install service meshes (istio, cilium), write a controller, mess around with gateway API. The possibilities are endless. Stop bitching and maybe have a real argument instead of shitting on homelabbers
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> none single-thread performance (relatively) I find horizontal scaling with many smaller cores and lots of memory more impactful for virtualization workloads than heavy single core performance (which, fwiw, is pretty decent on these Xeon Golds). The biggest bottleneck is I/O performance, since I rely on SAS drives (since running full VMs has a lot of disk overhead), rather than SSDs, but I cannot justify the expense…
> It's possible you and I learn things very differently then (and I mean this a lot less snarky than it sounds). I built Raft from scratch in Scala 3 and that told me a lot about Raft and Scala 3, despite being utterly pointless as a product (it's on my website if you care to read it). I have the same experience with everything home lab / Linux / networking - I always learn something new. And I work for a networking…
> 2x Xeon Gold 6248 CPU 300 are a lot of watts. ...I didn't used to pay attention but power costs keep rising. I recently opted for a i7 F (65w base) over an i7 K (125w base) even with the 15% performance hit.
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.
Edit: did some searching, probably you mean the N95 Intel CPU as the basis for a mini pc, not actually a system called N95. That thing is 30% faster than my server's cpu which has <10% occupancy, and about half of it comes from the 1 Windows VM that I need for a legacy application I should really be getting rid of. It's also very recent, you can use way older CPUs from hardware people are throwing away that use similarly little power instead of buying a new product
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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.
N95? As in, the Nokia? Edit: did some searching, probably you mean the N95 Intel CPU as the basis for a mini pc, not actually a system called N95. That thing is 30% faster than my server's cpu which has <10% occupancy, and about half of it comes from the 1 Windows VM that I need for a legacy application I should really be getting rid of. It's also very recent, you can use way older CPUs from hardware people are throw…
I agree about finding old hardware to use. Sometimes it is the way to go.
I ran old Dell laptops from the recycle bin at work as servers for some time. I ran old gaming machines at one point as well.
Those laptops used more power than this thing, put out more heat, and were slower.
I was just saying that people don't always need dual 150W Xeons monsters for homelab.
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Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is important, VMs are just better. Outside of that: Docker & k8s are great for sharing resources, VMs allow you to explicitly not share resources. VMs can be simpler to backup, restore, migrate. Some software only runs in VMs. Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with Docker. For my setup, I hav…
> Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is important, VMs are just better. Better how? What isolation are we talking about, home-lab? Multi-tenant environments for every family member? > Some software only runs in VMs. Like OS kernels and software not compiled for host OS? > Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with Docker. Insane t…
Defining "works better" as quicker, simpler to set up, more intuitive, or similar... I'd still argue passing through a port rather than a device "works better".
E.g., I essentially gave up trying to pass a Google Coral through to a container. When connected, it shows up as one vendor+device ID, then once you push the firmware+model to it it reconnects with a different vendor+device ID.
Saying "anything plugged in (or not plugged in) to this USB port is this VM's problem" is quite easy to set up, handles disconnecting and reconnecting as you would expect, is resilient against whatever weird stuff the device does, upgrading or replacing the device, etc.