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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#171

Post by mceachen »

syshum wrote: post #54
arthurcolle wrote: post #17

PLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running. Please don't let this happen to you. EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals.

>>Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals. Sorry you lost your data, data loss is terrible while doing a simple copy to S3 is better than nothing, Everyone wanting to backup their data should follow a 3-2-1 Policy [1][2][3] 3 Copies of the data 2 different storage media's / devices 1 offsite location. backing up only to S3 can still leave you vulnerable, for example…

The "2 different media" heuristic became irrelevant as optical media capacity stagnated, tape drives didn't really drop in price, and spinning rust dropped below $20/TB.

I wrote more about it here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#172

Post by mceachen »

fomine3 wrote: post #119
j_walter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

Now it's possible thanks to Fractal Design's Define 7 XL.

Holy crap: "18 HDD/SSDs plus five SSDs"

That's a lot of spindles.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#173

Post by boring_twenties »

j45 wrote: post #152
heisenzombie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?

Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.

AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#174

Post by j_walter »

m0xte wrote: post #146
j_walter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.

Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.

Running a less efficient server or making a brand new server that consumes raw materials. Same can be said for a 10yr old Honda Civic versus a brand new Tesla. Either way is wasteful...just depends on your viewpoint.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#175

Post by j_walter »

newtoday wrote: post #88
j_walter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAS are better, but for my NAS/Media server needs I use SATA. I have 8x8TB, 2x4TB and 1x500GB SSD...all within a 2U rackmount server that set me back less than $250 that includes things like backup power supplies and 192GB of RAM. I bought another 1U rackmount to run my personal website and NVR (Zoneminder).

Out of all the setups I've read about here, I would love to hear more about yours and the costs involved, please?

I haven't tallied all the costs...nor do I want to.

The media server is an 2U HP G8 DL380P with the 12LFF drive cage. I run Xpenology (synology hacked to run on other hardware). That allows me to run Plex and Docker along with some auto backup stuff from my other computers (also serves as a central point for VM images to roll out to my computers depending on which I am using that week). I was incorrect about the RAM, this server is only 48GB since Xpenology can't use it all. Server has dual E5-2440s.

The other server/NVR is a 1U HP G8 DL380e that has a 4LFF drive cage. Came with the 4x2TB setup already and it's running Ubuntu server 20.04. Zoneminder is a great software package and easily handles my 8 1080P or better PoE cameras around my house/shop. I think it was also ~$250 on ebay...with another $50-60 in RAM from eBay (Zoneminder does a lot of caching in RAM for prior to recording movement detection). This machine sports 192GB of RAM and dual E5-2650s.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#176

Post by j_walter »

fomine3 wrote: post #119
j_walter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

Now it's possible thanks to Fractal Design's Define 7 XL.

So for the just under the price of a used 4-5 year old server you can get that case...not really practical for someone on a budget.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#177

Post by syshum »

mceachen wrote: post #171
syshum wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals. Sorry you lost your data, data loss is terrible while doing a simple copy to S3 is better than nothing, Everyone wanting to backup their data should follow a 3-2-1 Policy [1][2][3] 3 Copies of the data 2 different storage media's / devices 1 offsite location. backing up only to S3 can still leave you vulnerable, for example…

The "2 different media" heuristic became irrelevant as optical media capacity stagnated, tape drives didn't really drop in price, and spinning rust dropped below $20/TB. I wrote more about it here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

Your write up is pretty good

To me the "2 media" It is not strictly 2 media, ie hdd and dvd. Or hdd and tape.

It is primarily to ensure you are on 2 devices/systems/ etc

For individuals the could be their local system and a home nas

On reason this was created is that in enterprise most systems are backed by a SAN. Having your prod data AND backup data on the same physical storage device or cluster would violate the rule. Often times admins miss this because the storage layer is cluster and partitioned in away that could give the appearance of it being separate even if physically it is the same device

Further cloud storage can count has separate media as well

So if you have the prod copy of data + a backup on a local nas + copy on backblaze or another cloud storage provider you have followed the 3-2-1 rule

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#178

Post by mike22 »

boring_twenties wrote: post #81
heisenzombie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?

I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I wo…

> Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago.

Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#179

Post by boring_twenties »

mike22 wrote: post #178
boring_twenties wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I wo…

> Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Micro…

I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#180

Post by m0xte »

j_walter wrote: post #174
m0xte wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.

Running a less efficient server or making a brand new server that consumes raw materials. Same can be said for a 10yr old Honda Civic versus a brand new Tesla. Either way is wasteful...just depends on your viewpoint.

Yeah which is why I do neither.
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