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Home Lab Beginners guide

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231–240 of 400 posts

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#231

Post by nvy »

blackfawn wrote: post #209
mech422 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basical…

Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after sw…

Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#232

Post by eisa01 »

bombcar wrote: post #87
jmakov wrote: post #78

So running 24/7 and having no ECC is not a probl at all?

Not ... really? https://www.klennet.com/notes/2022-11-25-zfs-and-ecc-rant.as... is a pretty good overview. ECC is "nice to have if you can get it cheap enough" but it is not a ride or die.

> Whatever method you use to prevent tampering with your backups (e.g., when a cryptovirus silently corrupts your data) should catch the RAM problem too. If it does not, you need to change the method rather than rely on ECC RAM.

> If your backup and recovery strategy relies on ZFS using ECC RAM, you should rework your backup strategy. After you do not need ECC RAM, you can buy it as a matter of convenience to save time troubleshooting and/or restoring from the backup.

What's the solution the article alludes to?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#233

Post by k8svet »

kiney wrote: post #60
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #13

I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro. Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're working and using nix means all your system state is logged in git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes. Every change you've made,…

Ansible code in git solves the same problem for ANY distro

No, no it doesn't. It doesn't solve the same problem, at all, certainly not holistically like NixOS.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#234

Post by caconym_ »

znpy wrote: post #220
caconym_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, Proxmox is awesome. I set up a cluster with two machines I wasn't using (one almost 10 years old, one fairly modern with a 5950X) and now I don't have to worry about that single Debian box with all my services on it shitting the bed and leaving me with nothing. VMs are useful on their own, but the tools Proxmox gives you for migrating them between machines and doing centralized backup/restore are incredibly freei…

> My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid license. I would love to give back to them for what I'm getting, but > $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts to hobbyist usage. I don't use proxmox anymore at home (1) but as an user I would have loved to pay, say, $5/month and just get access to the updates repository (the stable ones) or maybe something similar. $100/year/cpu was just too much for me as…

My thoughts exactly.

Anyone from Proxmox reading? Could it be that you're leaving money on the table here?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#235

Post by didntcheck »

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…

As someone still in monolithic home server tech debt I've been meaning to migrate too. The part I always wonder about is storage - said server is a NAS, serving files over SMB and media over Plex. From what I hear some people mount and export their data array [1] directly on Proxmox and only virtualize things above the storage layer, like Plex, while others PCI-passthrough an HBA [2] to a NAS VM. I suppose one advantage of doing the former is that you might be able to directly bind mount it into an LXC container rather than using loopback SMB/NFS/9p, right?

I also hear some people just go with TrueNAS or Unraid as their bare-metal base and use it for both storage and as a hypervisor, which makes sense. I might have to try the Linux version of TrueNAS now that it's had some time to mature

I also rely on my Intel processor's built-in Quicksync for HW transcoding. Is there any trouble getting that to run through a VM, except presumably sacrificing the local Proxmox TTY?

[1] As in the one with the files on, not VHDs. I default to keeping those separate in the first place, but it's also necessary since I can't afford to put all data on SSDs nor tolerate OS roots on HDDs. Otherwise a single master ZFS array with datasets for files and zvols or just NFS for VM roots would probably be ideal

[2] Which I hear is considered more reliable than individual SATA passthrough, but has the caveat of being more coarse-grained. I.e. you wouldn't be able to have any non-array disks attached to it due to the VM having exclusive control of all its ports

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#236

Post by k8svet »

znpy wrote: post #222
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #13

I know it's becoming the new "I use arch btw" meme but if you go down this route I highly recommend using nix as the distro. Ideally you can just leave these systems running once they're working and using nix means all your system state is logged in git. No more "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" or having to manually put the system back together after a Ubuntu dist upgrade explodes. Every change you've made,…

I actually went the complete opposite way and I run RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux - with the developer subcription) or RockyLinux at home. Because: > "wait, how did I fix that thing 6mo ago?" Such things just don't happen. That thing (RHEL/RockyLinux) just doesn't break. I do update software once every six (or more) months, reboot and it just works. I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to keep ansib…

>I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to keep ansible playbooks but they were just an overkill. Does it even make sense to write a playbook for a system that I'll reinstall in three or four years ? Probably not.

Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years?

Folks applying the Ansible mindset to NixOS are missing the point. NixOS is *not like a runbook*. It's declarative, it's prescriptive, it's not some god-forsaken state machine that tries to paper over the horrors of modern computing. It IS the definition of my computers, not some glorified pile of scripts and conditional checks encoded in fking jinja. The same as it's been mostly for 8 years now.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#237

Post by nullify88 »

Alternatively, If you don't fancy patching your own cables you can get female to female RJ45 keystone jacks which use plugged / crimped cables. The longer cable run is plugged in behind the patch panel, and a shorter cable in front to keep your cabinet or rack clean.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#238

Post by didntcheck »

Semaphor wrote: post #197
cybrox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving devices are in the selfhosted communities. There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out that way.

You can add "data hoarder" to the Venn diagram too!

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#239

Post by ardaoweo »

Tiny PC's make excellent low-power servers for lots of purposes, but personally in the end I just decided to build my own desktop PC from cheapish previous gen parts to have more flexibility. Now I have an AM4 consumer board based system with 8 core Ryzen 7, more ECC ram than I will ever need, 4 enterprise grade SSD's with ZFS, intel NIC, and RTX 3060 for some AI experimentation. Thanks to efficient PSU choice the whole thing idles at just 30W running Linux, about 10 of which is due to the dedicated GPU. I should be even able to game on it through GPU passthrough to Proxmox VM, though I haven't tried it yet.

For networking I can recommend Fujitsu Futro S920 thin clients, especially for EU users. They are dirt cheap here, and with aftermarket riser & intel NIC they are great routers with opnsense/pfsense. Apart from that, I have a couple of raspberry pi's running dedicated tasks, and space heaters (e-waste tier enterprise desktops) running BOINC during coldest months.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#240

Post by [deleted] »

mech422 wrote: post #151
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…

Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff. I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE! 0) https://ameridroid.com/produ…

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