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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#331

Post by m463 »

OJFord wrote: post #224
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…

Or as a compromise, you can buy strips of appropriately spaced/sized square-punched metal angle; before I moved I built a shelf unit designed so that the depth of the shelf was correct (19" between posts plus a bit for the sheet metal thickness) for a rack, I had access to the side so I had a combination shelf & rack. People do similarly with Ikea tables ('lack rack'). Nice thing about the shelves was that I could bu…

Thing is, you can get pre-built racks on amazon for < $100 that are both sturdy and designed for it. with removable sides, or casters, or whatever. For a little more you can get nice wooden audio racks that are spouse-friendly.. ish.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#332

Post by m463 »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #230
tombert wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first homelab thing was a laptop with a broken monitor. It wasn't terribly hard to get Ubuntu server working on there, it had a gigabit ethernet port built in, and it had USB 3.0 so it wasn't too hard to get reasonably good hard drive speeds to use as a NAS. You can buy old used laptops (especially with broken monitors) for basically nothing (or maybe literally nothing if you already have one, or you have a friend…

That's my setup. I decided to use old laptops instead of proper servers because power cuts are common in the region I live, especially when it rains. So laptops have built in UPS (their batteries) which can hold power for some minutes in the worst cases. It sounds like a poor man's home lab, but it works.

I wonder if it is hard to configure graceful shutdown when batteries run low and automatically come back up when power is restored?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#333

Post by lotsoweiners »

apexalpha wrote: post #134

This looks really cool, but the title has to be a joke right? This is not 'beginner'. I have a beginner setup: a single NUC and a cheap NAS with NFS. I have yet to come across something that this setup cannot handle.

My setup is even more beginner. I have an old Elitedesk running Windows with some external hard drives for extra media storage.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#334

Post by albertzeyer »

It's linked there, but I found this interesting: To get some more inspiration, visit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/

My "homelab" for now is a single Raspberry Pi (I want it silent and not take much power when idling). But from there, I can power-on my desktop, via wakeonlan.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#335

Post by macromaniac »

isopede wrote: post #241

I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys: - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep…

I accidentally wiped the drives on my server last year, but it wasn't so bad due to my setup.

My strat is having a deploy.ps1 script in every project folder that sets the project up. 80% of the time this is making the vm, rcloning the files, and installing/starting the service if needed. Roughly 3ish lines, using custom commands. Takes about 100ms to deploy assuming the vm is up. Sometimes the script gets more complicated, but the general idea is that whatever system I use under the covers, running deploy.ps1 will set it up, without internet, without dependencies, this script will work until the heat death of the universe.

After losing everything I reran the deploys (put them into a list) and got everything back.

I'm with you on some of the routing setups, mine aren't 100% documented either. I think my router/switch config is too complex honestly and I should just tone it down.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#336

Post by buybackoff »

natebc wrote: post #167
smallmancontrov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?

Maybe give this thing a look? it's newish and a little expensive but pretty dang well equipped. (not internally powered though) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01

It's a mobile CPU (with H). Unless it's fanless it will sound like a rocket lunch. Or it will be thermal-throttled with any sustained load. And it looks too expensive.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#337

Post by znpy »

k8svet wrote: post #236
znpy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

x doubt

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#338

Post by Jun8 »

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SW project guides you know?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#339

Post by nucleardog »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #102
jasode wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then a third group are people who build a whole data centre at home AND run serious applications on it. These guys need to buy themselves a motorbike or something. I don't think the insult to a generalized group of people is necessary. Some enthusiasts have overkill racks, 40Gbps fiber, enterprise-class switches and vlans, etc, etc ... because it's their enjoyable hobby . The over-the-top components and making it al…

It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit I think it communicates the point that their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone

> their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone

Depends!

A lot of people doing this kind of stuff probably do this stuff professionally. That drops most of the “learn how everything works” part of the project and substantially lowers the effort.

I’ve got a half dozen Lenovo Tiny PCs sitting in a cobbled together wooden holder and plugged in to a cheap managed gigabit TP-Link switch. One runs TrueNAS to provide persistent storage, and the rest run Debian+k3s.

Total initial monetary investment was maybe $500 for the PCs, RAM upgrades, some additional hard drives, etc.

Total initial time investment was probably my evenings for a week. And the majority of that was fighting with the friggin’ Debian installer so I could PXE boot the machines (or any future machines) and have them automatically come up fully installed and configured and joined to the cluster with no interaction.

As far as ongoing commitment… it’s been very minimal. It just runs. If anything fails, needs an upgrade, or anything else happens… I just reboot the node and wait 10 minutes while it blows itself away and sets itself back up. Managing workloads is just editing some YAML files and pushing them up to the GitLab instance running on there.

Barely more work than running any of this on AWS and it costs substantially less than the $4k/yr or something I was paying before.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#340

Post by k8svet »

znpy wrote: post #337
k8svet wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

x doubt

Which part? Like, that's what NixOS is. My config repo is declarative, describes in its history every machine I've owned. You could rebuild them at any point in time and get an identical exact machine image out.

Idk, this is why it's hard to talk about nix with people that think they know it but then also openly doubt things that you will one day take for granted if you take the time to learn it.

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