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

[snn]

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.

[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.

[bandwidthpiggy]

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.

[advaitc]

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! 😊

[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!

[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.

[GrahamC-egln]

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.

[VictoriaMan]

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.

[keylowmike]

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

[CDE.Hacker]

I can give a suggestion of what I'm using. I'm using VMware to run multiple virtual machines one of them is the firewall another VM is the main server and then on.

I feel this gives the most flexibility to test new systems and not worry about your main system.

[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.

[cheako]

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.

[alexandercrosby]

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.

[LinuxLightHouse]

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

[stephenreaves]

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

[jarman]

HomeLab is as expensive as you want it to be. Networking could be just what is provided by the ISP (not recommended) and virtual box on your windows laptop. Old Atom boxes running Alpine Linux and docker, an obsolete gaming laptop/desktop with Proxmox and a few LXC's, I started and still run it as a backup an old AMD Athlon running truenas scale (freenas previously) with 4 drives virtualizing a Debian server for running docker containers. It was less than $200 10 years ago using new parts.

[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).

[guycohen]

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

[dzphdlm]

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..

[metalfiregametime]

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