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Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

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Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#31

Post by m0xte »

I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains.

So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it!

My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#32

Post by m0xte »

lmilcin wrote: post #30
dclusin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commit and push to GitHub more frequently for me. Don’t wait until the pr is perfect before committing.

So you don't value your PC and you are completely ok loosing the configuration and have to redo it from scratch? For me personally redoing my PC is worth couple of years of backup subscription plus HDD docking station plus two 4TB hard drives dedicated to backups.

Not OP here but it takes me about an hour to rebuild my machine from scratch.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#34

Post by m0xte »

j45 wrote: post #26
boring_twenties wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.

Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front. Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.

So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year.

When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#35

Post by TOGoS »

fermienrico wrote: post #28
j45 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection? Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

If you mean being able to access your server from elsewhere...

I have a dynamic DNS thingamabob going (a script on a raspberry pi that pings my website a few times per day) and have had no problems. Haven't even noticed my home servers becoming unavailable due to IP address changes for a few years, probably because my ISP (Charter a.k.a. Spectrum) doesn't change my address very often. I use NearlyFreeSpeech for hosting the website and they also handle DNS and have an API for it, so it's all very nice and simple.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#36

Post by lallysingh »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Mostly skimmed over here, but a key point is that you should be trying to build a cheap version of what you'd use at work. The closer you are to your work environment, the more you can applicably "try things" at home, and bring them to work with you. And since most of us are pretty busy, it's nice to not have to learn a whole new skill set just for maintaining our home networks.

I don't get why we'd pay for and maintain the test environment the employer should have. Should I bring my own printer and laptop to the office too?

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#37

Post by lallysingh »

SteveNuts wrote: post #9
heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?

Synology is really high quality stuff and will pay for itself in reduced power usage. Any ancient rackmount gear you buy will guzzle electricity

Also in reduced maintenance and suffering. They are designed to do the things we want.

I say get a beefy Synology, maybe a tape drive, and rent whatever else you need in the cloud. Plus a desktop/laptop as you prefer.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#38

Post by henryfjordan »

fermienrico wrote: post #28
j45 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection? Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

In my experience, your ISP will only give you a new IP address if your modem disconnects for a while. You can easily use the same IP address for over a year.

You can also use something like DuckDNS to have a backup in case you are away from home and your IP changes, you can still find your server. You could even theoretically write a script that then checks DuckDNS for your IP and updates the record with your Domain Registrar automatically (assuming they have an API)

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#39

Post by Legogris »

fermienrico wrote: post #28
j45 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection? Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

You can (and probably should for security reasons) have any entrypoint on e.g. cloud/vps/etc. If you have changing IP where your servers is you can just connect via VPN and then it's pretty seamless even as your IP changes.

More reliable than dyndns (since you never know how long DNS servers are actually caching)

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#40

Post by aidenn0 »

BluSyn wrote: post #29
MivLives wrote: post #2

Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.

Off-the-shelf rack servers are the worst with noise level, so I personally don't recommend that for a homelab. With my latest upgrade I went custom for this reason. You can build a quiet ATX-based NAS with fairly cheap consumer/gamer-grade components these days. Using a Rosewill 4U ATX enclosure (RSV-L4312); replaced the stock case fans with Noctua NF-A12/NF-A8 (120mm / 80mm). It's extremely quiet, and now I have a f…

I had a rosewill and hated it so much I replaced it with an iStarUSA case. I have the 3U because I wanted to fit it, plus a power-strip in a 4U rack, but I would recommend the 4U version to anyone who has the space, because iStar uses a removable motherboard tray that makes some "3U ready" parts not actually fit in the case. 4U is the same height as a standard tower is wide, so there should be zero issues with that in their 4U cases.
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