[HN Gopher] How to Build a Homelab
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How to Build a Homelab
Author : ashitlerferad
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-04-20 08:49 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (haydenjames.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (haydenjames.io)
| ketzo wrote:
| A little off-topic, but I love the style of this writer.
|
| The humor is a little goofy in the best way; the structure is
| detailed, but still conversational. It just feels very...
| personable.
|
| Like -- computers are so goddamn neat. We should all remember to
| have fun with this stuff sometimes.
| cillian64 wrote:
| I'm always sad that 10"/10.5" racks aren't more common for this
| sort of thing. I have my "homelab" in one and it's the perfect
| size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a
| Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS.
|
| Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5" so I currently
| have things cable-tied to shelves, but I'm planning to 3d print
| some adaptors.
|
| My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg
| neilv wrote:
| Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you
| can pick up old data center gear _cheap_. Including some exotic
| stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until
| the novelty wore off).
|
| For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for
| rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro.
|
| For people that really only want something small, I've seen
| people 3D print out of plastic, build out of wood, IKEA desk
| organizers and furniture...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is what I did. My wife had an IKEA Besta media center
| cabinet and it's already mounted beneath our television. I
| just re-purposed it and put in a homemade NAS, router,
| switch, and some fanless mini-PCs as my server cluster. The
| downside is no ventilation, but I got out the jigsaw and cut
| holes in the cabinet and stuck USB fans with magnetic dust
| filters in them. Has worked fine for two years now. Upside is
| everything is small and quiet and I didn't need additional
| furniture to put servers in. You have to get Windows off the
| mini-PCs, but since Arch started bundling cloud-init with
| their installer media, I just put my configuration scripts on
| a USB stick with the cidata label on the disk, plug that in
| with the installer, hit the power button, and system
| installation up to configuring ssh so I can get in from my
| laptop happens unattended without me needing to hook up to a
| keyboard and monitor.
| heelix wrote:
| Back when my Bride and I were living in a one bedroom
| apartment, she looked at my jumble of computers around my
| desk and asked "why not just get one big box?". I was
| browsing/shopping at Lockheed's outlet store, and stumbled
| across a glorious Sun 180 server with a 19", 8' tall rack.
| Only $25! Who could resist! We picked it up and my Bride was
| horrified to discover the refrigerator sized machine next to
| my desk. It is still used today - though it is holding a
| bunch of servers in the basement rather than front and center
| in my office.
| gigel82 wrote:
| It's time to update this kind of guides with at least 2.5GbE
| networking. I suspect most FTTH ISPs will start defaulting to 2
| or even 5 Gbps soon (mine already offers theses speeds in PNW,
| but at premium costs).
|
| There's very few consumer options at 2.5 / 5 GbE; you can usually
| pick up cheaper 10 GbE gear (but on older standards, non-multi-
| gig compatible).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be
| more efficient than a bunch of old servers and more than capable
| at running three node clusters.
| sgt wrote:
| At what cost though?
| neilv wrote:
| For the UPS, I always err on the side of ones that are PFC-
| compatible, pure sine wave, line interactive. Partly because some
| of the gear I rack has PFC PSUs, but also because I don't want to
| be flirting with edge cases in other gear. I've owned 3 such
| rackmount UPSes, but it doesn't seem to be the default.
| sgt wrote:
| Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it
| necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.
| henvic wrote:
| wow! Pretty good :)
| mcovalt wrote:
| This is fun. I'm more of a minimalist with my homelab setup. It's
| a laptop and an old NAS. I love it either way: running a homelab
| is a nonsensical and fun hobby in any case.
|
| I feel like we live in a world in which it's either racks or
| cheap VPSs. In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU
| horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second.
| Consumer hardware is _insane_.
|
| I've handled 10's of thousands of unique visitors per minute and
| more than a couple front page of Reddit + Hacker News herds on
| this little laptop through a residential ISP.
|
| Here's my setup: https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/
| nomel wrote:
| > Consumer hardware is insane.
|
| With less technical management, I've had repeated, and
| bewildered, conversations trying to get them to understand that
| our one "computer" sitting on my desk is many many times faster
| than the "server" our IT team provides. "But it's a server!".
| genewitch wrote:
| looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT
| Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever
| is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your
| network:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste...
|
| Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently
| using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing
| the details on getting multiple SSL/https hosts behind that
| single IP, which is something you couldn't easily do a decade
| ago without the host with the single IP having all of the
| certificates and "MITM" the entire session.
|
| Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0]
| server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster
| overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to
| the electric bill, usually at a constant rate.
|
| [0] the iLO (lights out) actually reported the server's power
| usage in BTU. It drew the same power as a portable space
| heater.
| 7speter wrote:
| > Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0]
| server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5%
| faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable,
| adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate.
|
| What I've observed is people on subs like r/homelab and
| r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available
| horsepower with modern consumer tech because "no ecc memory"
| or the like and I wonder if you people who are looking to
| make labs using the latest ryzen or i7/i9 (really, I'm
| thinking of getting started by converting an old thinkcentre
| with a 4th gen i5, possibly undervolting the cpu, and 24gb
| ddr3 into a pfsense router and some sort of server) will
| really be missing out on some necessary enterprise feature?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _running a homelab is a nonsensical_
|
| Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my
| media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've
| tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I
| run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively
| expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection
| aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that
| might disappear, the amount of integration and automation makes
| for a very pleasant experience.
|
| > _In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower
| just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer
| hardware is insane._
|
| I just add my old devices to my cluster and call it a day. Even
| ancient hardware is suitable for it, especially if you're using
| old laptops that are optimized for power savings. Even old Core
| 2 processors in laptops can idle at a low wattage, and TDP can
| be less than a light bulb's when maxed out.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > running a homelab is a nonsensical
|
| I think a lot of people build a homelab to learn about
| technologies and get realworld experience deploying them. That
| was what drove mine for a couple of years. Once you've mastered
| servers and networking and so on, then it just becomes a fun
| hobby, I agree there. But someone who wants to get into
| networking and the like (and who lacks experience) is
| definitely going to need to practice with real or simulated
| networks to get good at it.
| hpyhpyjyjy wrote:
| Reminds me of the best homelab setup I've ever seen:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/cgi5gq/homelab_wit...
| neilv wrote:
| Excellent taste in Linux distros, pedestal rackmount cabinets,
| and space heaters.
|
| But everyone please be careful not to do much keyboarding work
| without your keyboard and monitor straight in front (as well as
| observing other usual ergonomics advice).
| abriosi wrote:
| I'm very pleased using PVE
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment for
| my homelab
| bagrow wrote:
| Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is
| relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies
| could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to
| soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really
| means just networking and servers?
|
| Seems too narrow to me.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I don't think anyone would object to wider usage, it's just
| that the sysadmin community is the only group to have adopted
| the term so far.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It's likely easier, safer and more socially acceptable to set
| up this kind of _home lab_ than the kind of maker spaces you
| are talking about. A lot of people go to (shared /public) maker
| spaces precisely because their home is not suitable for that
| kind of physical experimenting. You probably need space, money
| and expertise to do home experiments of that sort and then it's
| probably generally wise to keep it on the down low in most
| cases so you don't freak out the neighbors or otherwise draw
| problems to yourself.
| Ourgon wrote:
| I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves,
| lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The
| thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms,
| fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack
| followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-
| covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains:
|
| * HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed
| switch, EUR47)
|
| * HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB
| SAS drives (EUR450)
|
| * NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5" SAS array, currently populated with
| 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), EUR400)
|
| * the mentioned airflow divider
|
| * 8 drying frames
|
| It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of
| services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on
| the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The
| server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some
| container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD
| running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets
| used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over
| ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in
| the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware
| raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as
| replacements for failed drives.
|
| The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the
| old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which
| now sits just above the air flow divider):
|
| https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K
|
| In the not-too-distant future I'll replace the 15K SAS drives
| with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more
| space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot.
| After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the
| front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment.
| This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled
| through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown
| in through the filter(s).
|
| I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the
| DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio
| when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are
| cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement
| of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the
| DS4243) although I'm only using half of these. I recently had to
| replace a power supply in the DL380 (EUR20) and two drives in the
| DS4243 (EUR20/piece), for the rest everything has been working
| fine for close to 4 years now.
|
| On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that
| depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media
| files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably
| 'no', depending on the size of the library. Instead of using
| 'enterprise class' equipment you could try to build a system
| tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in
| power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and
| performance. You'll probably end up spending about the same
| amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a
| substantially lower performing system but you'd be rewarded by
| the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter
| can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving
| the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the
| barn, etc.
|
| As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is
| feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the
| things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made
| the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it
| is there.
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