The Open Home Lab Stack (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Open Home Lab Stack (2017)

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98 pointsindigodaddy41 comments

There is a whole sub reddit community around building "home labs" here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

There's some great discussion on there, as well as guides

I have been subscribed for a while because it seems like something I _would_ like, but I honestly still don't get it. It seems like a hobby driven by a deep reverence toward enterprise hardware and software, especially network-related, most of which is no longer in production. Is there more to it?

You get private / self-hosted alternatives to various popular online services? Own your own data, and it's fun to setup.

List: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

Ok, that's what I was missing, I think--I see that stuff as "advanced home networking" and less lab-like. But I do really enjoy it.

How do you manage with all the upgrading and maintenance? It seems like a simple distro upgrade could throw various stability-oriented subsystems like "photos of my family" into compete chaos.

That's where "stable" distributions (like, e.g., Debian stable) come into play.

You only get updates for security-related stuff (and, IIRC, stuff-breaking bugs), which seldom break things.

Snapshots. Make them, screw up, revert.

That's the exact reason I stopped using that stuff. Nothing is worse than the roommate complaining about being unable to watch tv while the raid 5 rebuilds.

I can't speak for others, but for me it's just a hobby pure and simple. I enjoy experimenting with new software for personal and professional reasons.

Also, hosting a home media server allows for perfect 4k streaming regardless of bandwidth speeds and/or your home networks current load.

Serves as a hub for my home automation setup as well.

Lots of things, all fun!

These lab environments are useful for studying and prepping for industry certification exams like the CCNA, LPIC, MCSE and so on.

That homelab sub has a big population of people who feel personal empowerment or hobby satisfaction as either the secondary or primary utility to exam prep. Some even to the complete exclusion of exam prep.

For me it's just practice for cert exams and a way to move my career forward.

I don't get what you mean by "... most of which is no longer in production."

It seems like most home lab folks run a lab to gain experience on platforms people actually use.

Depends, I just enjoy running my own server rack and self hosting a bunch of stuff. It's nice not having a dependency on third party cloud storage for example, I run my own "cloud storage". I also learned Kubernetes using my lab and it was a lot more interesting than if I had just deployed one using a cloud provider, bare metal is really cool. The amount of compute power + storage + memory that I have for my cluster would easily cost £300+ a month in the cloud.

I think the homelab community has people from one extreme (racks of servers) to the other (smaller servers like the TS140). All share a desire to host their own services and just have fun learning and doing.

For me, there are two reasons -

First of all, it's a sense of enjoying to tinker, same as a lot of people do with Raspberry Pis or Arduinos. The challenge is partly why I'm a developer in the first place.

Secondly, when storing large amounts of data (> 20 TB) or running high powered systems, cloud hosting can become very expensive very fast, especially if you don't need 99.9999% reliability (although for anything important - 3 backups, 2 devices, 1 offsite). I bought a used xeon 6-core server with 24gb of ecc ram on ebay for around $400 a couple years ago, along with a half dozen 5TB HDDs.

It makes it easy and was a mostly one time cost to mess around with DNA algorithms, docker/k8s, media encoding, home automation, and more. I've been considering upgrading to use an SAS backplane next, but with commercial 8 and 10TB hard drives getting cheaper, I may never need to jump to more drives then I have now.

A fun hobby and also a reminder that maybe, just maybe, you don't need "the cloud".

As a third-world citizen, I'll have to wait like 15 years for the price of that hardware to come down and be rejected by the first-world before I can ever hope to run all that crap.

Till then I'll keep feeding the Google/NSA machine.

ebay or auction websites. Lots of places dump their equipment at 3-5 years.

another secret is 'you don't need the latest', in fact, almost nobody needs the latest.

I second this. I have a Dell Poweredge R610 I got off ebay in a quiet cabinet in my computer room. You can get pretty beefy ones for $500, add your own drives. Mine has been running fine for the last 2.33 years.

Do you realize that there are more people in the world who can't afford 5 year old server equipment from eBay than those who can?

Shipping alone would cost 100USD at minimum.

... and magically cloud services become more affordable than they are in richer countries?

No, but self-hosting has a significant initial investment overhead cost compared to the places where Amazon and eBay deliver almost for free.

Living in Bulgaria and having a pretty solid income (programmer) I can tell you the prices are rarely the problem by itself.

My current cart in Amazon is about $470. With shipping and handling the whole thing goes to almost $800.

We might as well go to the local flea markets and spend the afternoon asking people around for the same things because almost everybody outside the comfy zone of Amazon and eBay ends up paying almost double due to shipping + handling costs.

Maybe I missed something, but what problem is this setup the solution to?

The problem of not having a home lab.

More seriously, people might set up home labs for a variety of reasons, ranging from practical to fun.

You can self host your own replacements to various online services.

Here are some lists:

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted

Excellent reddit discussion of a lot of the self-hosted applications here as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/7n6bgh/what_sof...

Are we really so far down the "cloud" rabbit hole that owning computer hardware is this perplexing? Many things you'd want to experiment with can be best done at home (home automation, media servers, SDR, etc), and I'd rather do this and run VMs for everything than have a rat's nest of RPi cables for every home-based project.

Very fun to read but may be too advanced to start with... is there a particular reason why I couldn't or should't run this on a regular core i7 7700k powered machine?

You won't have the fun lugging big iron into your basement and hearing it whir up.

Which is at least 51% of the point!

That mini-mini tower pictured (HP Proliant Gen 8) sure doesn't look like big iron.

It's either a decoy for the girlfriend or the start of a Beowulf clusture of many more.

For home use, I'd say start with what you have. You can always upgrade later.

Power consumption is the biggest thing. For an always-on home server, you want something that sips as little power as possible. (Some of the Intel Avoton CPUs have a 17W TDP, compared to an i7 which can have a TDP anywhere between 65-150W.)

Outside that, the only other issue is going to be lack of ECC RAM. Whether that's needed for a home server is debatable. Many folks can get by fine without it.

Oh, and lack of lights-out management utilities. Which is convenient, especially in headless setups... but hardly required when the server is a few feet away.

If people don't want to run Zentyal, pfSense is a great way to keep your internal (and external?) DNS in order.

It's also got a nice certificate authority wizard.

I don't know ..

"You may have heard of Docker, well this is essentially the same thing, except it’s been around a bit longer."

... really?

Linux containers have been around for decades. Docker made the concept popular and more approachable.

A quick wikipedia search says Solaris Containers date back to 2004 but Linux Containers "only" 2008. Unless you're lumping chroot jails under the "containers" header.

Yes, LXC (the author meant LXC for "LXE" I think; the ProxMox appliance believe currently uses KVM and LXC (Proxmox previously used OpenVZ for containers, but that (OpenVZ) has lost much of its Linux OS support)) has definitely been around longer than Docker. Docker originally used LXC as its container tech.

Yes, the author is specifically refering to KVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine) which was merged into the Linux kernel in 2007.

Whereas Docker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_(software)) was first released in 2013.

Believe that the author was actually specifically referring to LXC (misnamed as "LXE" in the article), with his Docker reference.

Have anyone tried Intel NUC for home lab setup? What are pros and cons?

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