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My home servers are not a homelab

blog.nradk.com

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Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#21

Post by breput »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

It is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting. Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Ever…

Has it? How many PiHole, ESPHome, and other random Raspberry Pi Home Assistant "servers" are out there? I suspect it has never been more popular.

On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products.

[0] https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-06-27/

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#25

Post by petesergeant »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

It is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting. Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Ever…

> that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out

I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.

Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.

The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#26

Post by petesergeant »

tehlike wrote: post #18

It's pedantic - it's what's known as a homelab. I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things. It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need. Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.

Is it really a lab if you can't break it without stopping things working that you'd like to continue working?

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#27

Post by brookst »

udev4096 wrote: post #20

A perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere. Does OP have nothing productive to say other than dunking on the term? Since when does "homelab" resemble to anything concrete? Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab

“My 1967 Camaro that’s on blocks with a couple of body panels off is not a ‘project car’”

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#29

Post by leohonexus »

I call it my "homeprod" - but then, what happens if your infra spans multiple sites, and the cloud? Then it's just "prod" at that point. Probably best to just call it your "personal infra / servers", or if you have a family, "family servers".

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#30

Post by phuff »

I present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes.

So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.

It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".

It's a home "lab for getting work done."

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