But mostly? It felt exactly like exploring computers in my childhood for the first time (I'm 43 now). I was bumping into things I had never bumped into it before, and it was really satisfying to figure all that stuff out.
I'm a game developer, too, and I realized awhile ago a big part of that is I like technical puzzles, and game development is very fertile soil. But there is a whole new world of enterprise networking/storage/virtualization/etc things that you wouldn't normally bump into in the course of software development.
And as a bonus, I have set up a lot of build systems for friends; being infrastructure-savvy is like the digital equivalent of owning a truck and helping people move all the time.
That is very good advice. I know about a datacenter outage/degradation in a very large company, which all of you know.
A couple of network switches got overloaded. The switches connected the SAN to the VMs, so it caused all kinds of weird problems in different applications.
Extra note- I would NEVER recommend a business use their home resources for work unless you know what you're doing (and why you're doing it). Even my homelab has vulnerabilities and I'm a security professional- more moving parts = much larger attack surface. There's a reason why corporations pay big buck$ for managed security services. Most homelabs I've seen are mostly for fun and personal comfort.
"What good is knowledge that is never applied" is what drives me to stuff like this. I can't speak for others but I'm sure I'm not the minority here.
If it makes you feel better, megacorps are getting out of the "self-managed data center" industry and embracing the cloud, to exemplify your very point.
I certainly have hobbies that go above any need or reasonable collection, namely synths and books. Haha.
He eventually got rid of the cameras because, well... They were shitty and only told him the critters were near AFTER he popped 'em. I think he's got a for-purpose system (in his own words "the new cameras didn't fall off a truck") now but it was a fun project!
It's the same thing with 3d printers, some like them because they want to install clipper and tune the best/fastest benchy. I do it because they love being able to CAD something and have it in my hands as soon as possible.
That said, nobody goes as far as this guy without really enjoying the tinkering
My big services are a Ceph cluster, a VPN, Borg (backups) and a K8s cluster (using kubespray).
In K8s I have the main stuff: Plex, Gitlab, Gitlab runner (for CI), vaultwarden (passwords), miniflux (RSS, might be moving to freshrss though), rust desk (remote-desktop), home assistant (smarthome).
My next project is to stream metrics into grafana. I have soil moisture sensors in my garden connected to stm32 boards, I just need to setup the receiving side and I can control my drip lines (they're using opensprinkler) with soil moisture information along with weather info.
This is a use case close to my interests. I want a network of environmental things monitoring and doing some detection stuff.
Now, I have three Internet connections bonded and balanced. It is not about the minutes of disconnection but more about the disconnection when I needed it most. I have ample non-internet time and personal/family downtime. However, when the time comes, I’m happy that the Internet is never a bottleneck in my work and play. I have had this setup since around the early days of the Pandemic and our home, per se, “never had an Internet Outage” since.
I'm not into servers, devops, networking or anything of that sorts, but I love tinkering with them. I would love to have an "overkill home network" one day.
Internet is super cheap in India and I can afford all three for a really decent price. https://www.instagram.com/p/CUWeopdPVOp/
Just wondering: 1. How often do you actually need the third? As in, both primary and secondary are down. 2. Is it that important that you always have an internet connection?
One handy trick: I had at least one drop in each room, often one for each wall of the room. Behind the wallplate was a NEMA box with a conduit running straight down to the crawlspace (6' high in my house so hardly "crawl"). That made it easy to pull cable, not only initially but if I found I needed an extra run, which hardly ever happened. Instead of trying to run through a rat's nest of conduit the conduit was a straight shot and then the cables could easily be managed.
Wifi is rock solid, networking is fast, backups good and outages are almost nonexistent and are always due to me messing with things. I have Netflix, Apple TV+ (is that what it’s called?) and a few others. Particularly with Netflix, the quality is junk so I watch off Plex.
Other benefits are pretty neat too. POE just works. You can power cycle things remotely if you want (have never needed to) and the abundant local storage makes everything easy.
Enterprise stuff that is getting old is also dirt cheap. Converting sections of the network to 10gbe was very inexpensive.
It’s all rather addictive…
If, say, you use AT&T and you need Internet for your job (WFH?), redundant Internet is crucial. It's not exactly "minutes" they are out. (Their outages states are often "meh, we'll get around to it in a day or so", figuratively)
If you live in a rural area, even more so. You're not high priority for fixes in the first place. (And AIUI, the author lives somewhere in rural Texas)
Do you need to run it as high tech as that? Probably not. My alternate Internet is my cell, tethered. (And if that breaks e.g. during travel, yes, I have a second cell with a separate provider, because heaven forbid the US had consistent cell coverage)
And most of us probably don't give a damn about e.g. 1,000 year photo retention. Or many of the other things he's doing. But it sure is fun if it appeals to your personality, and you can afford to keep it running.
Some tech people enjoy "homelabbing" and happily throw money at their hobby.
This is exactly the kind of nuts and bolts guy that is indispensable when keeping a cloud running.
First it’s a useful skill set that helps troubleshoot problems in code and apps that run on networks by knowing how such things work.
Second, try to think of it as a private cloud instead of a network. Because it uses a lot of the same types of software cloud provider do. Proxmox is one example that is a self hosted vps provider that is tremendous. So, it’s a private hybrid cloud that can push from your cloud to the other voids (or back). Build using a private hybrid cloud and you can push to,or between manu clouds
Wifi is for convenience, wired is for reliability. When wifi gets jammed, spotty, interfered with which can happen more often than imagined, especially during break ins, wired wins. Transferring files? Wired wins. 4K streaming ther doesn’t cut out when multiple devices are doing it at once? Wired wins.
Self-hosting is much easier than it was 5,10,15 years ago. Tools like proxmox loaded with yunohost running on a 1L usff/mini/tiny pc with 64 gb of ram and mirrored ssds ther maybe mirror to another i de oval box can sip power but power production grade apps for you personally. If you buy big beefy servers it will cost a bit more electricity.
Still, hosting locally can quickly pile up the savings on saas not spent.
Imagine being able to keep up all your test projects you might spin up a paid VPS for and run for way too long. They might not be production grade, but there is something valuable about having them around.
Data backups - the cloud is just someone else’s computer sold as convenient but not secure. Having your own local copy when the internet goes down means not as much of your life or work goes down. Remember it’s not a backup if there is only one copy of it.
Backing up your computers in the cloud are only so helpful when they are down, a lot of time to download them. Local backups win again.
Multiple connections can matter for people who wfh and can’t be down, or have spotty internet that is up.
If you like smart home tech, it’s a ticking clock until the cloud based supports for it that are usually free dissapear leaving perfectly good gear unusable. Instead you can run a local instance of home assistant, etc.
I used to host morethan I wanted ina. Data centre much like this rack. I was hesitant to come back to self hosting or homelabs but j have realized a home server that runs like an appliance (in between that wiring) capturing the sum of all my data and worn as services come and was pretty much unavoidable. Luckily it’s getting easier and easier to do.
Hope that helps.