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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

#81

Post by 0x457 »

otter-in-a-suit wrote: post #79
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…

> 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...

Building k8s from scratch, you're going to learn how to build k8s from scratch. Not how to operate and/or use k8s. Maybe you will learn some configuration management tool along the way unless your plan is to just copy-paste commands from some website into terminal.

> 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).

Yeah, if you run a VM for every thing that should be a systemd service, it scales well that way.

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

#82

Post by skelpmargyar »

srjilarious wrote: post #10

I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.

Proxmox is awesome! I've been running it for ~5 years and it's been absolutely stable and pleasant to run services on.

The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me. Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for LXC and VMs has been amazing.

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

#83

Post by fluoridation »

bombcar wrote: post #66
tylerflick wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're really not that cheap anymore, though. If you just need "another computer" you can probably find something more capable in the used market.

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

#84

Post by perdomon »

srjilarious wrote: post #10

I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.

I've had a ton of fun with CasaOS in the past few months. I don't mind managing docker-compose text files, but CasaOS comes with a simple UI and an "App Store" that makes the process really simple and doesn't overly-complicate things when you want to customize something about a container.

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

#85

Post by ab71e5 »

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!

You can manage containers with proxmox. The idea with proxmox is also to use something that you might encounter at work to practice with at home.

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

#86

Post by perdomon »

dangus wrote: post #64
everforward wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).

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

#87

Post by master_crab »

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 &…

Don’t do K8s on Pis. The Pis will spend the majority of their horsepower running etcd, CNI of choice, other essential services (MetalLB, envoy, etc). You’ll be left with a minimal percentage of resources for the pods that actually do things you need outside the cluster.

And don’t get me started on if you intend to run any storage solutions like Rook-Ceph on cluster.

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

#88

Post by reeredfdfdf »

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 &…

Maybe I just got lucky, but a year ago or so I managed to find Kingston 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM's from Amazon for a price that was more or less identical to normal non-ECC RAM. Running a Ryzen system with 128gb of memory now.

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

#89

Post by bombcar »

fluoridation wrote: post #83
bombcar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're really not that cheap anymore, though. If you just need "another computer" you can probably find something more capable in the used market.

They never were terribly cheap, but there was a time when people who hadn't seen a single-board computer (that small) and didn't really keep abreast of the used market gobbled them up.

One advantage over the used market is that you can easily keep getting the exact same one over and over again.

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

#90

Post by strbean »

skelpmargyar wrote: post #82
srjilarious wrote: post #10

I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years. I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.

Proxmox is awesome! I've been running it for ~5 years and it's been absolutely stable and pleasant to run services on. The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me. Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for LXC and VMs has been amazing.

I've been looking to get offsite backups going. Where do you keep your backups? NAS + cloud?

I also wanted to back up my big honking zpool of media, but it doesn't economical to store 10+ TB offsite when the data isn't really that critical.

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