Things I Wish I Had Known - Home Lab Edition

Today I talk about a few things I wish I would have done or known before I jumped into creating my own home lab.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
0:56 Do Better Research
3:36 Networking is Important
6:03 Learn Proxmox Sooner
7:38 I Really Overdid the Hardware
9:42 Know Why You Want A Home Lab
13:52 Wrapping Up

#homelab #linux #thelinuxcast

[froedge]

For networking, highly recommend Jeremys IT Lab CCNA course. You could or could not take the CCNA, up to you, but man did that give me an insanely strong foundation in networking. Completely free on Youtube, hands on labs for almost everything too. By the end you'll be able to configure an entire home network no problem. Awesome guy, just a recommendation for ya

[schembeck]

As someone that started the homelab journey in 2019 with a box of scraps I couldn’t agree more with your topics. Doubling down on the network side, I think is important to research and plan a little bit on the infra, like if you gonna need a dedicated appliance for your firewall or a pci with multiple Ethernet ports. No use having an op system with a single gb port to funnel your data hehe and if you end up with multiple different systems onsite and offsite the knowledge you gain from dabbling in networking will pay off very quickly !

[krid]

Thanks for the video! Planning is the key! We all love getting down the rabbit hole. Unfortunately, time is limited. For production systems, my motto is “Do one thing and one thing right.” Today, we can do a lot of small things on an i5 with 128GB RAM and 2x1TB NvME. I would do the same today! Historically, I run a NAS for my web and cloud services and a small ThinClient that takes care of home automation. For my software lab, I use an older ThinkPad and a Dell XPS. Together, these systems have around 80GB of RAM and (without the NAS) around 2TB of storage.

[tomasramoska]

My Home Lab is my Raspberry Pi5 😅 I played with Docker and ran multiple services till I got bored and installed Open Media Vault and turned it into my NAS 😂

[rickycartner]

This video sums up my current experience with Proxmox and my home lab. I want to do all the cool stuff shown on those other “high profile” YouTube channels, but lacking a specific goal and the network knowledge, I end up 20 half realized, incomplete projects hanging around. It’s really good to see that I’m not alone.

And until this video, I thought that you had one of those $20, 000 homelab setups somewhere off camera. Thank you for sharing your experience.

[guyfeldman]

As someone with a similar fear of running out of storage, careful with the ceph rabbit hole. Before you know it you want 10gbe and a bunch of machines with ssds

[ironfist]

If you use zfs on the system it helps to have a lot of RAM also for speed, don't think it can be wasted there... but yeah extra VMS and all that

[fakecubed]

I wish I got a bigger rack and got a larger, managed switch with more PoE. Oh, and I would have gotten a used enterprise chassis for my unraid server instead of buying a cheap prosumer chassis that wasn't exactly in spec and has a few problems.

A bigger rack isn't even because I need more room, it's just a real pain bending down so low for everything instead of having most things nearer standing height. A bigger rack does make for easier organization, too, though.

A managed switch ended up being a lot more important than I thought it would be, and more PoE ended up being essential for a Raspberry Pi cluster. Also, I ran out of ports pretty fast with what I started with. I figured out all of these problems at the same time so I only needed to buy one replacement switch that covered all of my needs (with some room to keep growing). Whenever I feel like starting over with a new rack build, I would also go SFP+. I was largely unfamiliar with SFP+ and I've realized it's the way to go.

I didn't even realize that datacenters dump their old hardware onto eBay until after I built my main box on the rack. I'm not unhappy with my set-up, now that it's built, but _when_ I need to replace a hard drive or add more drives to it, I would be in a lot better shape if I had a nice enterprise chassis. Also, mounting the box I got was far more difficult than it needed to be. I'll be building all my future computers onto a rack after this, just to banish noise and heat from my office for good, and when I do, I'll start each time with a nice enterprise chassis that actually fits properly with nice slide-out rackmount hardware. Enterprise hardware also comes with nice hotswap backplanes and stuff too sometimes to cut down on the insane numbers of SATA cables you might otherwise need to use. Just overall a better experience.

[patrickprucha]

i did the same and i did it as a file server attached to my desktop via ethernet. At the same time i used it for media server, backup server, file server, and it was available to every member of the family running windows via samba or nfs.

[DanPratt]

I started with Proxmox and Docker on a NUC, then thought I wanted to do Kubernetes clusters so I bought two more NUCs…then figured out that was overkill for a home media server. Now I’m running a homebuilt NAS running Unraid as well as a standalone machine running PFSense. I do have my media server running great and am also hosting my own NextCloud instance. Major ADHD start but landed in a focused use case.

[aedenspear]

I'm not running Proxmox and VMs but, as someone with a more basic workload, you don't need a big machine with a lot of memory or even a GPU. Get an old desktop, upgrade the memory to 16GB, and get started with a server distro.

I've got a basic Dell desktop from my job. It's got an i7-9700 and 16GB of RAM; that's enough to run Ubuntu Server, Docker + Portainer with 10 containers (for example: Nextcloud, Kavita, & Tailscale), and Jellyfin running natively on the machine.

[keylowmike]

Thank you for the insight. I want build my home lab so I can tinker with it since I want to become a Linux Sysadmin, but I also have a couple of used tower servers for filesharing and a Mincraft server for the kids.

[chun-li-tqlf]

You can use your extra nvme drives as backup volumes of your containers. I’m not certain if it’s nvme or spinning drives but their life spans increase by being powered on. So maybe using a mini pc or an nvme hub u can put them to use👍

[truckerallikatuk]

Errors I've made in homelab: Buying a short depth rack to save a bit of money, which couldn't mount my server... Buying a 3u rack case and not being able to afford the right PSU, buying a high end enterprise switch. All of these errors have left me with excess hardware, but the short rack is now my rack of regrets/dead stuff I don't want to throw out.
Things I'll never regret: Startech adjustable 15u rack, Mikrotik switches.

[ahpadt]

i recently repurposed my old desktop hardware for a home server. thought for months of using freenas, proxmox etc etc but in the end due to my desire of hosting a gaming server and basic file hosting with raid, i just ended up running a debian with btrfs baked in from install, with raid10 of 4 drives, with snapshots etc. multiple vms overcomplicates things for the home imo

[KeithBoehler]

My start with homelab was picking up at refurb Dell Optiplex. So far I only ssh to it and maybe run a few things. My laptop is pretty good, so there is not much that makes sense really offloading it, nor do I need more storage. I am happy just having it and messing around.

[grtbigtreehugger]

Thanks for sharing your experience! I am thinking about building a home lab for running open source LLMs (and other stuff!)

[nightshade]

Great video!

Im using a minisforum em780 (32G ram, 1tb nvme) with two external 8tb hdd in raid 1, it sites nicely next to my Internet router/switch next to my living room TV.

Its running windows, wsl2, docker desktop, plex, moonlight/sunshine 1080p game streaming, mailcow, immich, matrix, gitea, mastodon, nginx for hosting my side project sites and portfolio (rails, next js, nuxt js, kore-c, postgres, redis, etc). I'm only using about 25%-33% of machine processor and 50% of ram.

It all sits behind a tail scale intranet so I only have to expose nginx to outside for public to see my websites, the rest stays hidden behind tailscale. I can even access all my services just fine while out and about from my cell phone.

[martinborderland]

Just some general advice for folks in the comments who want to get into homelabs. You'd be surprised how little power computational power you can get away with. My first server was my dad's old computer which had a core 2 quad Q6600 I mainly used it as a NAS plus a few containers like nextcloud plex and latter jellyfin even a mincraft server which definitely was at the border of what it was capable of. I'v also done some light virtualisation on it though it did't have IOMMU so passthrough was kind of out of the question

[pamina]

I was perplexed about which hardware to use also. I settled on a used Dell T7920 --silent. So I have powerful workstation and lots of disk space.