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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

#71

Post by 0x457 »

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason?

Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill.

Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.

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

#72

Post by shermantanktop »

titanomachy wrote: post #61
shermantanktop wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a small setup that could be considered homelab-ish - a NAS, a server, Docker+Portainer running a variety of services including HomeAssistant, a Plex server, UPS with graceful shutdown, and other stuff. I agree it's educational, it certainly has been for me; but everything I run has a practical purpose.

People will build a huge multinode cluster in their basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby, but it's shaped like someone's actual job.

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

#73

Post by 0x457 »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #32
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!

Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is important, VMs are just better. Outside of that: Docker & k8s are great for sharing resources, VMs allow you to explicitly not share resources. VMs can be simpler to backup, restore, migrate. Some software only runs in VMs. Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with Docker. For my setup, I hav…

> Primarily, docker isn't isolation. Where isolation is important, VMs are just better.

Better how? What isolation are we talking about, home-lab? Multi-tenant environments for every family member?

> Some software only runs in VMs.

Like OS kernels and software not compiled for host OS?

> Passing through displays, USB devices, PCI devices, network interfaces etc. often works better with a VM than with Docker.

Insane take because we're talking about binding something from /dev/ to a namespace, which is much easier and faster than any VM pass-through even if your CPU has features for that pass-through.

> plex has a dedicated network port and storage device, which is simpler to set up this way.

Same, but my plex is just a systemd unit and my *arrs are in nspawn container also on its own port (only because I want to be able to access them without authentication on the overlay network).

> I don't want plex, home assistant, or the backup orchestrator to be affected by issues relating to my other services / k8s.

Hosting Plex in k8s is objectively wrong, so you're right there. I don't see how adding proxmox into the place instead of those services being systemd units. If they run on the same node - you're not getting any fault tolerance, just adding another thing that can go wrong (proxmox)

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

#74

Post by TacticalCoder »

varun_ch wrote: post #42
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!

Maybe my use case is abnormal, but I allocate the majority of my resources to a primary VM where I run everything, including containers, etc. but by running Proxmox now I can backup my entire server and even transfer it across the network. If I ever have some software to try out, I can do it in a new VM rather than on my main host. I can also ‘reboot’ my ‘server’ without actually rebooting the real computer, which me…

[dead]

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

#75

Post by otter-in-a-suit »

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…

That's good to know, thank you. It's using the official charger in the rack, but I used the charger I've had on my desk while setting it up. I added a note to the article.

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

#76

Post by _dain_ »

0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

the point of the hobby is to have something to tinker with. if it were too easy it wouldn't be any fun.

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

#77

Post by 0x457 »

_dain_ wrote: post #76
0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

the point of the hobby is to have something to tinker with. if it were too easy it wouldn't be any fun.

I know, that's why I have my own "lab". I just don't get why most of other labs are so cookie-cutter proxmox + home assistant + (unifi controller) + pihole and there is always RPi somewhere next to a chunky server.

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

#78

Post by unethical_ban »

0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

Someone who successfully configures and tests a k8s cluster at home knows more about it than I do.

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

#79

Post by otter-in-a-suit »

0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

> none single-thread performance (relatively)

I find horizontal scaling with many smaller cores and lots of memory more impactful for virtualization workloads than heavy single core performance (which, fwiw, is pretty decent on these Xeon Golds).

The biggest bottleneck is I/O performance, since I rely on SAS drives (since running full VMs has a lot of disk overhead), rather than SSDs, but I cannot justify the expense to upgrade to SSDs, not to mention NVME.

> Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill.

That is a core part of the hobby. You do some things very enterprise-y and over-engineered (such as redundant PSUs and UPSs), while simultaneously using old hard drives that rely on your SMART monitor and pure chance to work (to pick 2 random examples).

I also re-use old hardware that piles up around the house constantly, such as the Pi. I commented elsewhere that I just slapped an old gaming PC into a 4U case since I want to play/tinker with/learn from GPU passthrough. I would not do this for a business, but I'm happy to spend $200 for a case and rails and stomach an additional ~60W idle power draw to do such. I don't even know what exactly I'll be running on it yet. But I _do_ know that I know embarrassingly little about GPUs, X11, VNC, ... actually work and that I have an unused GTX 1080.

Some of this is simply a build-vs-buy thing (where I get actual usage out of it and have something subjectively better than an off the shelf product), others is pure tinkering. Hacking, if you will. I know a website that usually likes stuff like that.

> You're not going to learn much about k8s from that

It's possible you and I learn things very differently then (and I mean this a lot less snarky than it sounds). I built Raft from scratch in Scala 3 and that told me a lot about Raft and Scala 3, despite being utterly pointless as a product (it's on my website if you care to read it). I have the same experience with everything home lab / Linux / networking - I always learn something new. And I work for a networking company...

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

#80

Post by 0x457 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #78
0x457 wrote: post #71

I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason? Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill. Sometimes it's peop…

Someone who successfully configures and tests a k8s cluster at home knows more about it than I do.

You overestimate the complexity. Even if you don't use k8s installer/distribution and do it from scratch - you are not going to learn much about operating/using k8s.
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