Matt's Home Lab Future

Today I talk about my home lab plans. Painfully noobish though I am.
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#ramble #homelab #thelinuxcast

[@TheLinuxCast]

Working on 10k Followers. Help me out: fosstodon.org/@thelinuxcast

[@sn0n]

My homelab is basic basic... I purchased a modem and router and a old beefy workstation, a HP Z620 with 2 old Xeon processors and 128 gb ram, 2x3tb HDD total cost $450. Still haven't outgrown it almost 2 years in.

[@tohur]

JBOD = Just a Bunch of Disks

[@TheLinuxCast]

I knew it was something like that. Still learning

[@bandwidthpiggy9378]

My whole home lab is a bunch of tiny debian stable VMs jammed into a single 64GB nuc running debian stable as the hypervisor... Its boring. But I've never been happier with the setup. Keeping it to that keeps the focus on actually doing things with the lab instead of tinkering my life away with how many ways I could build the lab both hardware and software wise. For gui stuff, virt-manager on the desktop has a nice "open your remote gui vm in a window over ssh" setup if youre using kvm as the hypervisor on your lab box.

[@fakecubed]

Server racks are loud because they're compact, lots of small very fast fans to push air through small spaces. If you use a larger 3U or 4U server chassis for your builds, you can use quiet desktop size fans from Noctua or whatever and just build a quiet PC, on a rack. You may find that a larger server chassis will actually be easier to build a PC from scratch in, as they typically have a lot more room inside than a standard desktop case. Data centers are trying to maximize space efficiency by cramming as much as they can in a given footprint. Home labs don't have to be so dense, so they don't have to be loud. I have a small rack. I wish it was larger. My racked servers are very quiet, quieter than my gaming PC. The next PC I build, I'm going to build on the rack. I want to put all the noise and heat from my desktops away on the rack and have a nice silent home office. I'll just run a cable to a hub in my office and have my monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. there, but no fans. Currently, I have an Unraid NAS on it that runs some other services as well with Docker. I got a little Raspberry Pi cluster with Kubernetes doing some other things, mostly for learning about Kubernetes. I got a decent, but fairly cheap network switch, and I have a dedicated firewall/router box. I put a few small mini PCs on the rack as well, which I am eventually phasing out. None of it really cost me all that much. The hard drives were the biggest expense, because I got a lot of them. Most people don't have my data storage needs. Anyway, I'm very excited to follow this journey you're going on. Every home lab is different and there's no one right way to do anything. Whatever you end up doing will be educational to all of us, even those with more "advanced" set-ups who've been doing home labs for longer than you. I think it will lead to some fun conversations and sharing of info in your comments as well.

[@advaitc2554]

Homelab videos? Sure, why not? I'd love to hear you discuss all the challenges you run into and how you resolve them. I know I'd learn a lot from that. And, for me at least, it would definitely be engaging content. Cheers! 😊

[@Mugnmastr]

My homelab consists of just a couple of raspberry pis, and a Protectli firewall with OPNSense installed on it. Very basic, but I am learning to containerize applications and automate my workflows using Github Actions so a lab can be a great way to learn and experiment with new tools and technologies.

[@alexandercrosby4538]

Really surprised you were running into so much trouble. I am using a number of older Dell Optiplexs, with an Ubuntu LTS installed on each, running Docker Swarm and GlusterFS to operate all of machines as a cluster. Self-hosting all kinds of stuff including jellyfin, home assistant, photoprism, nginx, bind9 dns, various dedicated game servers like valheim and cs... The biggest issue I have is the availability of replacement parts since the mb and power supplies are relatively customized, now that the machines are old enough to start seeing typical electronics types of failures.

[@Gibby_B]

my home lab is an old laptop connected to a cheap DAS. I’m running about 40 docker containers and the cpu usage is usually at like 5% lol. It works flawlessly.

[@CosmicChew]

CPU is nothing. I am more interested at ram usage.

[@Gibby_B]

@@CosmicChew its a lot. around 10 gb

[@LinuxLightHouse]

Awesome. I will be a noob with you. I'm looking forward to the series.

[@fakecubed]

I'm probably at the intermediate level now, but I'm also looking forward to it. Everybody's home lab is different, and everyone can learn things from each other.

[@GrahamC-eg6ln]

Second hand HP workstations are a good choice for this type of project. They usually have ECC memory and sufficient PCIe slots (no NVMe slots but these can be added with a PCIe/NVMe adapter card). BIOS upgrade files are still available even for old machines. The downsides are non-standard power supplies (different dimensions and 12 volt only) and cpu coolers - so if any of these parts fail replacements are nearly as expensive as another second hand machine. For disks I recommend considering SAS drives. Cables can be longer than SATA allows and a PCIe SAS controller can typically support 8 drives. Second hand SAS disks can also be bought at less cost than SATA disks of the same capacity, corporate users will often replace their disks when they reach 5 years of use (their design life or warranty period) but they can still work reliably for many more years. Matt did not say which HP model he has bought. I had problems with a HP Z400 (incompatibility with a SAS controller). A slightly newer HP Z440 resolved this issue.

[@derekp6636]

using 3x mini pc versions as my homelab right now via proxmox, I use a 24bay supermicro for the NAS/storage.

[@nhefner]

I use Ansible Playbooks to deploy everything in my Homelab and I absolutely love it! All my services are Docker containers and I can use Ansible to do other stuff like copy config files and setup directories in addition to spinning up the container. Its highly repeatable and gives me a single touch point for all of the configuration options for each Docker container. Highly reccommend!

[@davechristoffersen6633]

Welcome to the rabbit hole

[@keylowmike85]

I want to build a home lab of my one, so I would definitely be interested in a series of home lab videos.

[@magnificoas388]

Exciting !!

[@cheako91155]

Having troubles with web ports reminds me of a rather encouraging support ticket on #linux where the mac couldn't ssh to the linux, but the linux could ssh to the mac. It ended up being a ufw rule, or at least telling ufw to open port 22 fixed it. The lesson was that the steps to figure out what was needed is more important than knowing to check the firewall, because it could have been one of the things we checked prior to asking ufw to open the port.

[@Ish216]

I use a mini-PC (not pre-build) as a home server for various stuff (samba network share, websites, gitlab, bots etc.)

[@mikecondo]

I know you complained about your power bill. New stuff is going to be more power efficient. You made a mistake, no big deal. You can always resell the stuff you bought and make atleast some of your money back. One good thing is that you made a mistake and decided to stop right there, rather than trying to force it, and getting upset with it and stopping all together. Homelabbing is all about learning, failing, then learning more! Good luck on the journey!

[@VictoriaMan69]

I use unraid and it's been easy to get into with lots of tutorials online. Docker containers also work great, so I can recommend as an easy to way to set things up and put it into automatic mode. I'd be interested to see what you can do with unraid if you chose to use it.

[@fakecubed]

Unraid is fantastic. Every time I want to start a new project now, unless it's specifically a hardware project (like my Raspberry Pi kubernetes cluster), I end up just putting it on my Unraid server as a Docker image or a VM. It's so simple and easy to get stuff up and running.

[@user-dz3ph7dl4m]

interesting setup - I went for a 5950x with a nvidia 730 and a rtx 3090, running Truenas Scale, running NAS, a valheim server, nextcloud server (mostly for uploading phone pics automatically), a win10 vm w/gpu passthrough and Pihole. didn't put the storage in a vm though..

[@xjpsmithx]

Unraid is definitely the way to go for first time homelabers. IMO

[@ditchcomfort]

The macOS screenshot was the best part of this video.

[@TheLinuxCast]

It's kde.

[@metalfiregametime652]

In general Ebay is where you go to pay way over retail. I've also been considering buying a mini pc

[@moetocafe]

$300 for electricity? What are you doing ,dude, running a heating central or melting / casting iron? 🙂 Or living in Cali? Here in Europe, where everything is generally more expensive, my winter bill is like $100 and in the summer it's at least 2 times lower. And I heat water, heat the apartment, cook, work, etc, and it's all in this. I would be very interested to watch your HomeLab development, a lot of people will have interest too, I'm sure. As for me - I don't need this myself, for the reasons you've said. But I plan somewhere soon in the future to make my "home" super mini "lab" remotely - basically just a VPS for Podman (or Docker, not sure yet), pihole and wireguard, maybe Homepage (not a website, but that home lab soft - "Homepage") with some small extras too, but not more than that. It will be small, practical, not expensive, not making me live or pay like I'm running an airport, as you've put it. At the moment I'm exploring OpenWRT and it's so cool, although it's a limited playground and it's not that much for playing, just want to setup some things, as I want to and leave it at that.

[@raughboy188]

When it comes to home labs you don't need to buy expensive hardware to run home lab. You have insane amount of open sourve software avaliable on linux. With hardware and open source software avaliable you run on top of linux for 500 usd you can make monster of a home lab

[@stephenreaves3205]

You absolutely can use ZFS with 16GB (or less) of RAM. ZFS will use just about as much ram as you give it for the cache (ARC), but everything in there is evictable so it shouldn't interfere with day to day operations. Now you will probably see a performance difference by adding more ram, but its not a requirement

[@jo-vrn]

I took advantage of the offers to buy hardware gigabyte a520i AC, 64gb ddr4 RAM and Asus prime b450m a ii, Ryzen 5700g and Ryzen 5700x used, I like Debian, Devuan, proxmox for home use

[@Drkayb]

Proxmox and Unraid can accomplish more or less the same thing for a homelab. Proxmox is much better with VMs, Unraid has built-in Docker and NAS solutions.

[@atanas-nikolov]

For some time now I've wanted to build something like a dual system PC via VMs on a single workstation, where I can hook some monitors and basically have the server as one giant KVM switch. No luck with figuring out how to make that actually work for real (with graphics passthrough and all).

[@cheako91155]

I think you should use sftp for remote mounts, unless you need something like locking.

[@avalagum7957]

I think it depends on what you want your home lab to do. Somebody here bought "a HP Z620 with 2 old Xeon processors and 128 gb ram, 2x3tb HDD" for $450. That is great and cheap as we don't need a very beefy cpu (we can wait a few seconds every time) and we need a lot of memory to run multiple applications at the same time. However, I think the bottle neck is the spinning HDD's: they are very slow and when they die, are we still able to find some replacement? I still think that mini pc's are a good option: of course, they will be more expensive than the above solution, but they are expandable, small, fast, future-proof (if they don't die after a few months).

[@Dennis-Earl-Smiley]

My homelab is a big focus of mine right now. With linux being a big part of it. For guis try either using suse in server context or magiea with lxde and drakwizard installed.

[@guycohen4403]

I am just starting homdlab myself , hope to see more videos like this

[@cheako91155]

My thought is that with a shell you had a chance to fix your web ports... but what do you do if proxmox does something similar?

[@nightshade427]

My home server is an em780, runs gitea, matrix, mastodon, plex, sunshine/moonlight, nginx, db, etc

[@yothebob8162]

I started mine on a raspberry pi and it's now on Ubuntu server on my old desktop. Docker kinda sucks, lxc is actually pretty good if your building out containers from scratch

[@9SMTM6]

I started mine with an old pc converted to NAS, and it's now a raspberry pi thats able to boot up and down my NAS like every week for backups. Much more energy efficient.

[@jamesm2075]

You shouldn't use proxmox for your use at the standing desk, instead you should consider a low power machine like a raspberry pi at the standing desk that remotely logs in to a vm on the proxmox machine or something. Use a kvm switch to maintain the ability to use your keyboard mouse and monitor with your proxmox machine

[@FredLoCascio]

For ZFS, ask Wendell from Level1techs :)

[@bassjmr]

Old workstations and servers are very power hungry. If energy costs are a concern dint buy anything older than 2018. No to mention a modem and or intel is way more powerful than even old Xeon cpus for the same cost or less long run

[@Tech-NO-City]

Idk how far you are from stlouis but I have a 4u, 4CPU, 128gb of ram , redundant every thing server you can have.

[@magnificoas388]

Linux TV is a good idea...

[@cameronholtan3407]

First, and finally a video about my NAS, for me the noob.

[@ditchcomfort]

I only use G-Technology systems.

[@shlokbhakta2893]

Welcome to the cult

[@SykikXO]

just a bunch of disk - JBOD

[@TheThunderSpirit]

U need openstack

[@mskiptr]

I still fail to see in what way a "homelab" is a lab

[@Skelterbane69]

Your electric bill is 300 bucks? Damn, mine is 32 bucks, is your oven permanently on? lol