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More random home lab things I've recently learned

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Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#61

Post by titanomachy »

shermantanktop wrote: post #21
immibis wrote: post #9

I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.

Most “homelabs” are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin, with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of the features. It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.

I don't personally have a homelab, but I think that (unlike a giant amp or SUV) the homelab lets you learn interesting skills that would be hard to learn otherwise. It seems more defensible to me.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#62

Post by shepherdjerred »

shermantanktop wrote: post #21
immibis wrote: post #9

I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.

Most “homelabs” are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin, with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of the features. It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.

LARPing as a sysadmin has a lot of benefits. It's taught me Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

Which are all pretty useful considering my day job is a software engineer.

Many of these things have been directly applicable at work, e.g. when something weird happens in AWS, or we have a project using obscure Docker features.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#63

Post by matthewfcarlson »

blitzar wrote: post #47
wltr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Few Moments Later

There is time dialation in the homelab vortex ... what feels like a few hours can turn out to be years in the real world.

My best McConaughey voice: “this little server is gonna cost us 51 years”

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#64

Post by dangus »

everforward wrote: post #55
Havoc wrote: post #4

My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC sticks. >No space left on device. >In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That’s… a design. Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup & compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in proxmox &…

You seem knowledgeable so you may already know, but it's worth looking at the x86 mini PCs. Performance per watt has gotten pretty close on the newer low power CPUs (e.g. N150, unsure what AMD's line for that is), and performance per $ spent on hardware is way higher. I'm seeing 8GB Pi 5s with a power supply and no SD card for $100; you can get an N150 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD pre-installed for like $16…

The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC).

And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.

The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#65

Post by pdpi »

> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU.

You need to be careful with this one.

The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode.

Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#66

Post by bombcar »

tylerflick wrote: post #8
j1elo wrote: post #2

I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!

It’s another league, but I don’t get the point of mixing enterprise rack-mounts with Raspberry Pis.

Pis are a relatively quick and cheap (including power) way to get "another computer" that isn't a VM or otherwise dependent.

VMs can add a lot of complexity that you don't really need or want to manage.

And (perhaps unadmitted) lots of people bought Pis and then searched for use cases for them.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#67

Post by bombcar »

immibis wrote: post #9

I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.

People might gatekeep it, but in my opinion if it is YOUR fault the TV won't play the show, you've a homelab; if it's the ISP or streaming service's fault, then you don't have a homelab.

You know when you know.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#68

Post by Modified3019 »

srcreigh wrote: post #19

Can somebody explain the whole proxmox thing? I haven’t used it, I use k3s. I don’t get why people use VMs for stuff when there’s docker. Thanks!

For my home archive NAS boxes, Proxmox is just a Debian distro with selective (mostly virtualization) things more up to date, and has ZFS and a web UI out of the box.

I disable the high availability stuff I don’t use that otherwise just grinds away at disks because of all the syncing it does.

It has quirks to work through, but at this point for me dealing with it is fairly simple, repeatable and most importantly, low effort/mental overhead enough for my few machines without having to go full orchestration, or worse, NixOS.

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#69

Post by phito »

ysleepy wrote: post #57
walthamstow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Proxmox running on top of a clean Debian install on my NUC, I wanted to allow Plex to use the hardware decoding and it got a bit funny trying to do that with Plex running in a VM, so it runs on the host and I use VMs for other stuff

It's very easy to do this with LXC containers in Proxmox now, as passing devices to a container is now possible from the UI.

Just as easy with VMs, just have to pass the device to the VM

Re: More random home lab things I've recently learned

#70

Post by wpm »

pdpi wrote: post #65

> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU. You need to be careful with this one. The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a cus…

5W5A is not a custom profile. It is part of the USB-PD standard, but as an optional profile that can only be provided if you ensure the cable used is safe to handle 5 amps of current. It’s why the official Rapsberry Pi 5 PSU has a non-removable cable.
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