My Homelab Build | Hacker News Reader

My Homelab Build

christine.website

Old desktop hardware works pretty well as a server for homelab/personal use. My server is mainly cast off parts from my desktop, and initially it was using a 4670k + 16GB RAM. Running vaultwarden (nee bitwarden_rs), jellyfin, gotify, graylog, Foundry VTT, unbound, a local Arch package repo, calibre-web.

Performance was pretty fine, it turns out even services like jellyfin and foundry don't have much in the way of idle usage and a personal server doesn't have much in the way of multiple users. It's since been upgraded to a 3900x, mostly to justify 3900x->5900x upgrade in my gaming machine, but also because there were two tasks it got cpu bound:

1. Running multiple h265 hevc to h264 transcodes for jellyfin - I don't have a GPU with supported video acceleration support, since both the r9 290x and igpu on the i5 were too old for both h265 decoding or h264 encoding.

2. Writing to my storage array was actually CPU limited (it's got lvmraid raid 6 on LUKS devices, LUKS on LVM would likely have worked better than LVM on LUKS here).

Not to be picky but: "Then I tried pinging it from the same machine, another machine in the same room, another server on the same continent and then finally another server on the same planet. "

Could just be 4 machines in the same room.

The last server was the one that is serving christine.website, which is being served from the EU for GDPR reasons.

Buying integrated graphics CPU because discrete GPUs are impossible to find. THIS. is my pain too right now. Can’t wait for the Crypto bubble to burst.

Ethereum is to transition to PoS late 2021 / early 2022. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

Rest of GPU-mining is likely small enough so that we will see lots of GPUs on second-hand market.

Why aren't the crypto folks buying up all of the integrated graphics CPUs as well?

* Poor support for APIs used to perform compute on GPUs

* Poor area density. If you were to try mine with igpus, you need one system per igpu, and even if you just stacked motherboards and power supplies together in some sort of custom case, you clearly get a lot more compute per area with dgpus.

* Poor performance.

No doubt that they're poorer performance than discrete GPUs, but given the scarcity and cost of the latter I would think they would settle for integrated gpus rather than no gpus at all?

Mining isn't free. You need to pay for space and power (especially when we're talking about the large scale miners capable of making an impact on the hardware supply). With most bitcoin like coins, the hashrate of the network has diminishing returns as the difficulty increases and the amount of compute resources needed to mine blocks at a decent rate increases. If your computing capabilities are worse than your competitors, it's unlikely you'll make a profit (which is part of why bitcoin mining is the land of ASICs these days, gpu/cpu mining of bitcoin doesn't happen, most gpu miners mine ethereum or monero, then if they want bitcoin sell that and buy bitcoin).

Cost/benefit. The iGPUs are low hash, you only get one per complete system. With dGPUs, you can stack 3-4 into a single system, and each one of those is orders of magnitude more powerful than the iGPU.

When I upgraded my homelab last year, I got around this by buying a motherboard with IPMI. It has a cheap little Aspeed video card on board. I also get the advantage of a built in IP KVM, remote power control, and a virtual CD-ROM. Basically all the stuff you get in a Dell iDRAC or HP iLO, but in a micro-ATX board.

I gave up on IPMI/DRAC/ILO on my old server equipment - it was the most fragile part of the machines.

I ended up just getting a used Raritan IP KVM off ebay, and its worked perfectly.

This author is prolific. I wish I had so much time. I really don't understand how people can do so much.

Unmedicated ADHD :D I need a sink for that energy and writing seems to help a lot.

Entertaining read. I enjoyed the dialogue-like banter. Nice write up!

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