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My home servers are not a homelab

blog.nradk.com

51–60 of 104 posts

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#51

Just call it a puddle :) 1. No fault tolerance or high availability 2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed 3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants) On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).

I have a rack for convenience, not education.

It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#52
post #36

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

Well, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)

I self-host a few things that are important to me but likely unimportant to anyone other than me. I use the term 'homelab' because that's the use that seems to be the norm in describing various computers in a network running shit at home that, if it were in production, would be on more modern, serious and redundant hardware.

I don't experiment much these days, so 'lab' isn't quite right. But if I were to experiment then it would be using the same hardware as all the other stuff. So it's both accurate and inaccurate.

In this instance: who cares, it gets the message across to the necessary demographic - and isn't that what communication is about?

...and I'm someone who could care less about words and grammar (notice the correct use of the term, so as not to say the literal opposite of what I'm trying to say (notice the correct use of the word literal, rather than it's not-oft-used-but-oft-correctly-applicable figurative)).

I don't know the (in)correctness of the use of brackets within brackets.

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#53

dont be such a sook. if you're not making money off it, its a homelab. If its just infrastucure to run your house its then you wouldnt be blogging about it. your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting. which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge o…

I definitely have a homelab, though I’ve tried to keep mine concealed and out of the way. It’s fairly reliable, but so overkill I wouldn’t want to talk to loudly about it in fear that people would burst my tiny little bubble of justification.

I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button.

But I’m not OP.

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in europe you can not have haphazardly build electricity system without calling it "lab". (you need electrician to do your electricity work, but calling it "lab" you can do it yourself ) so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great. look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI c…

> in europe Laws don't work like this in the EU, let alone in all of Europe.

of course you can not have your whole house be build like that, but calling one room as lab is allowed in most continental europe countries.

noone cares in Russia etc, you just have to make small donation to your public official (if they even care/notice) and everything is fine,

even those pizzaboxes...

EDIT: in most countries there are devices which can not be connected to grid without electrician in any case, like PV. but again germany has balkon PV something something. so yes, exceptions are to everything.

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in europe you can not have haphazardly build electricity system without calling it "lab". (you need electrician to do your electricity work, but calling it "lab" you can do it yourself ) so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great. look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI c…

As a Canadian who doesn't follow daily news, I'm very curious to know what you're referring to in your last paragraph. Care to elaborate?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/world/canada/trump-digita...

sorry paywall .

Re: My home servers are not a homelab

#60
post #36

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

Well, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)

Indeed we do. I call it the same but in a local network I bought domain. Lake backups.mylocaldomain or webs.mylocaldomain or storage.mylovaldomain or kavita.mylocaldomain
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