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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#371

Post by hpstewed »

transpute wrote: post #350
ninetyninenine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just feel it doesn't have to be this way. We can get the benefits of nix without the hardness of nix. It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet. It's annoying enough that I won't use nix personally. I've used it at work so I'm quite knowledgeable with it.

> It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet. DietPi [1] has one massive (15KLoC) bash script [2] for system config. [1] https://dietpi.com [2] https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/blob/master/dietpi/dietpi...

Not exactly an easy nix alternative

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#372

Post by tombert »

Fnoord wrote: post #364
tombert wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.

> Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that. Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s. I got solar power. Without that, I…

A bit of a typo, I meant to write that I used to have dozens of 60W light bulbs; all the lights in my house are LEDs now.

I’ve been debating trying to find a smaller, low power computer to reduce energy; it’s hard to find a small one that have 10GbE or that would take a pcie card. Maybe I can find a Thunderbolt one.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#373

Post by JamesSwift »

_peeley wrote: post #304
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,…

Same, I originally had a bunch of RasPi's in my lab running differing versions of Raspbian until I got tired of the configuration drift and finally Nixified all of them. Writing a single Nix Flake and being able to build declarative SD card installation images for all of them makes managing a bunch of different machines an absolute dream (tutorial here[0], for those interested). The only issue is remotely deploying N…

Im really happy with nixinate if you havent tried it. Basically does the bare minimum so theres no real concern over continued development.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#374

Post by transpute »

hpstewed wrote: post #371
transpute wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet. DietPi [1] has one massive (15KLoC) bash script [2] for system config. [1] https://dietpi.com [2] https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/blob/master/dietpi/dietpi...

Not exactly an easy nix alternative

Easy for users, one step backup and restore of system-wide state.

Less easy for developers, but code is mature and stable in production for years.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#375

Post by Spivak »

dusanh wrote: post #354
Spivak wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperconverged Ceph is both trivial to set up and amazing. Would highly highly recommend it, it makes everything so much easier when your VMs are backed by RBDs.

Any good tutorials for dummies like me?

I've followed the official one with good success. They do assume some familiarity with ceph but it's not too much.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Clu...

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#376

Post by caconym_ »

tlamponi wrote: post #357
caconym_ wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Proxmox Dev here, albeit personally speaking here, so do not make more out of it than the educated opinion this is. No, I do not think we leave much money at the table. In short, we're targeting enterprise users with a mix of a (soft) stick (e.g. pop-up to note that one isn't having the most production ready experience) a carrot (way better tested updates and depending on the level also enterprise support). Homelab u…

Thanks for the reply. I guess if the enterprise repo is the primary reason most organizations buy a subscription (implying that your existing subscriptions are already skewed toward the community license), and you added a homelab-tier subscription that also offered it, you might indeed see some cannibalization. I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.

Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away. I certainly would, just as I've paid for shareware-style licenses in the past simply because I wanted to support the developer, and not because they made their software unusable if I didn't.

Either way, thanks for your excellent work on Proxmox.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#377

Post by ClumsyPilot »

whartung wrote: post #346
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit Indeed. That said it rings a bit true for me. The day I sold my upgraded Macintosh and bought a motorcycle was, in hindsight, one of the best decisions I ever made. I was without a home computer for about 3 years before I got another one, though I was a programmer by trade. But the bike, well, just going to say far, far more ups than downs. Never regretted…

I am literally thinking of doing the same thing :)

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#378

Post by rpigab »

Do you have easy ways to monitor power usage on any power plug over time, without needing to check out a display on the plug or to install some shady chinese Android app?

I have a nice used Dell Poweredge T320 with a single Xeon E5-2428L that's been running on only an SSD (and then a raid 1 of 3.5" HDDs) for over 8 years, but electricity prices are rising and I wish I could measure it precisely, idle and under load.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#379

Post by jasomill »

rpigab wrote: post #378

Do you have easy ways to monitor power usage on any power plug over time, without needing to check out a display on the plug or to install some shady chinese Android app? I have a nice used Dell Poweredge T320 with a single Xeon E5-2428L that's been running on only an SSD (and then a raid 1 of 3.5" HDDs) for over 8 years, but electricity prices are rising and I wish I could measure it precisely, idle and under load.

While no broken out per plug, APC UPS network management cards provide total power output data (current, voltage, frequency, power) via SNMP, which you can log using a wide variety of tools.

And even without external tools, historical power usage logs are available via the APC Web UI.

While I don't currently log anything externally, I use an xbar[1] script[2] to display UPS output current in my Mac menu bar.

[1] https://xbarapp.com

[2] https://jasomill.at/apc-nmc-status.5s.sh

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#380

Post by windexh8er »

buybackoff wrote: post #292
mech422 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress). 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

NUCs may be expensive, until you see a 40% discount on Amazon :) I've got mine this way. Now they are discontinued so one may expect to get them cheap on eBay. Anyway, I'm talking about the box itself and MB/CPU only. Vendors/people often sell a good box with bad RAM/disks at a very low price.

They were discontinued by Intel but the brand was picked up by Asus [0], so not discontinued [1].

[0] https://www.asus.com/us/content/nuc-overview/ [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/say-goodbye-to-intel-nuc-as-asus-t...

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