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Comment by frnkng | Hacker News Reader

Hello,

I did appreciate reading your article. However I’m not sure on the quality of the feedback given by the reddit crowd regarding your previous home lab setup.

Reason:

1. Using pre loved (= second hand) rack servers in the living room with redundant PSUs will cause a lot of trouble with every female living in the same household. It is too noisy....

2. Consumer grade hardware is pretty reliable nowadays. I had no failure for quite some years despite the fact that I’m operating my machines on the upper limit of their thermal specifications. (I have a GPU cluster and a cluster of RPis)

3. Ryzens or Even a ThreadRipper is much more power efficient than the good old Xeon E5s. Thus you may have a lower operating cost.

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Server noise aversion isn't only a female thing. I'm male, and replace my home server fans with blessedly quiet Noctuas, and the 24/7 servers are usually passively-cooled Atoms, or running on repurposed OpenWrt SOHO routers.

BTW, although severs-at-home techies seem to be disproportionately male right now, maybe it doesn't hurt to mention that servers are equal-opportunity. For example, I know at least a few women with servers at home. One even used to have one of the fridge-sized Cray supercomputers at home, just because. Another one, when I saw a K8s-at-home post a few days ago, she was the first person who came to mind to send it to, since she's the most enthusiastic, besides being a recognized technical expert on some related enterprise architecture. It feels a bit silly to articulate examples, but seems that people (and kids, especially), subconsciously pick up on signals about what we are supposed to do, and those signals can be misleading.

> One even used to have one of the fridge-sized Cray supercomputers at home, just because.

If I wasn't already engaged....

> will cause a lot of trouble with every female living in the same household

You meant "with every people not having this hobby". You know there are females with this very hobby, don't you? Even r/homelab and r/datahoarder mods are sick of it.

> 1. Using pre loved (= second hand) rack servers in the living room with redundant PSUs will cause a lot of trouble with every female living in the same household. It is too noisy....

Speak for yourself! I love our two servers and custom-hacked rack! Yeah, it can be noisy, but we just found a way to get it out of the way a bit. Not a problem!

I had a pre-Used SAN (fully stacked with Disks).

Every once in a while the drinking glasses in the kitchen started to clink, until i found out they did that when scrubbing on the SAN was running (complete different room), not directly from the start, but the vibration amplified and after some minutes the ground/wall vibrated.

I run a smaller homelab setup on consumer-grade hardware, and the cost of replacing failed components is usually lesser than switching to Enterprise components (where I live).

One or many Intel NUCs will get you surprisingly far. Higher spec models will take a surprising 64gb of ram, and run ESXi nicely. Extra nics can be achieved with a USB dongle if wanted (a little gross) and the units fly. The higher end model has 6 cores and runs ESXi free. Licences for home usage a free for ESXi 7, although braving their website takes nerves of steel. It’s awful.

For any VM that needs a GPU the NUC8 is considerably better than the 10, but has less cores. With m2 drives they fly. Bulk storage can be achieved with network storage or USB attached storage.

This is all a rather dirty solution but I love my setup.

I use a NUC8 as my daily driver :)

Haven't tried ESXi on it yet.

Proxmox also works great, and is opensource.

Yup. I have that on another (lower spec) nuc. I need to dive deeper on it.

How do you find the NUC for noise? I've found that the CPU fans on them are annoyingly loud, and that they are a particularly irritating shrill frequency - and that they start ramping up at relatively low CPU usage.

I found going slightly bigger (around mini-ITX sized) resulted in vastly less noise, and more machine for the price.

I don’t have any issue and am noise sensitive. The real bugbear is the Synology that’s next to it. 16TB drives are very very noisey. They chatter constantly and it drives me mad. This may also cover the fan noise.

The NUCs are in a hallway cupboard, so aren’t next to me when working and this would also lessen the noise.

Hm, fair enough!

I have a NUC8i5BEH here that is used as a linux desktop for testing and the fan spins up annoyingly often (and it's quite loud when it does). Maybe the cupboard is just enough to muffle it :)

Thanks for reading and for the feedback!

Yeah, I wouldn't want to make the jump to full rack. But my current tower uses enterprise equipment, and it's fairly quiet.

But I agree with you on consumer grade equipment. My next build will likely just be consumer gear.

you should edit out the comment about female gender here.

> 1. Using pre loved (= second hand) rack servers in the

> living room with redundant PSUs will cause a lot of

> trouble with every female living in the same household. It

> is too noisy....

A great time to remind your partner that these projects put the bread on the table. Also remind them how much money it is saving.

There is of course always the possibility to move it elsewhere.

> 2. Consumer grade hardware is pretty reliable nowadays.

It really de[ends on what you're running and how much a crash with affect you. For example, a bit flip in RAM could be catastrophic. Or hard drive failure could be a serious problem (despite backups), in which case you might want some commercial grade RAID.

You also get some nice server specific silicon on your dedicated hardware that you might not otherwise, that could seriously speed up your application under high-load conditions.

> A great time to remind your partner that these projects put the bread on the table. Also remind them how much money it is saving.

My wife does all the ML and graph stuff off of her laptop and an external disk. After developing on her laptop, she just SSH’s into her cluster at work and schedule’s her job on whatever queue she needs.

I, mainly doing web projects, have and keep a small homelab.

Even in the article, they’re just doing it for the sake of saving time and not having to wait for the VM to load. Not really a requirement. Specially looking at the benchmarks at the end.

That’s just the wrong argument.

> After developing on her laptop, she just SSH’s into her

> cluster at work and schedule’s her job on whatever queue

> she needs.

Then I would imagine your partner is understanding. I would imagine most situations would be where one partner is computing orientated and the non-computing partner might not understand why there is this massive electric munching air breathing rack in their house.

> That’s just the wrong argument.

Clearly I was responding to the points in the parent comment, not specifically the article.

Not really. I mean, she's sympathetic to the fact that I want them, sure. But who really wants servers in a corner on the living room, cluttering and making noise.

It's a hobby maintaining them, but I could easily turn off vm's, turn on other vm's with some wait time. It would be cool to have them and swap quickly, but I could still do without them.

I tried buying a used 1u server and put it under the sofa so it wouldn't be seen, but the sound was insane. Quickly got turned off by me since it was just too much when watching tv.

Now we have a house and have space to put them away but that wasn't true for a long time.

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