My Homelab Setup | Hacker News Reader

My Homelab Setup

arslan.io

72 pointsingve51 comments

"I spent around ~$5750 for all my devices and accessories. This includes 7 APs, 6 PoE cameras, and several switches. I rebuilt it from scratch, and my house is big."

I wonder how many people this is applicable to... We have a similar setup but for a co-living house with 24 people.

It can read like an Ad for Unifi but, in our experience no other brand comes close in terms of hardware+software quality, reliability and no leaking data.

OP. Bummer that the article gave that impression. I'm just a passionate person, if you read my blog and the other articles, people would see every single of my blog post is like that. I just like to shoot nice photos and write about my experience, nicely.

The photos are indeed beautiful

Don't worry. People are naturally skeptical when they see high quality content it feels like "advertorial".

It's clear you are just sharing your experience of using the Unifi products/ecosystem and setting up an impressive home-lab. I was taken aback that an individual would spend almost $6k on their private home network. But you're clearly not short of a penny so why not spend it on having a kickass network? ;-)

I'm sure other successful software engineers have similar setups / investments; they just don't share them in public.

> no leaking data

Ubiquity collects MAC addresses (https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042384093-Analytics...) and have had data breaches in the past (https://www.twingate.com/blog/tips/ubiquiti-data-breach)

Mhh, I'm not so sure I would count that breach against them. It was an inside job from an employee who wanted to export money. I would guess most companies fail at that threat vector.

Thought that link made me curious, why did UI have peoples social security numbers? (I'm not American)

IMO this should have been included in their threat model. The only way to exclude yourself from insider threats is if insiders cannot possibly become threats.

Excellent point. Agreed. Do you have any practical tips on how to achieve this? e.g. a) don't collect data unless it's absolutely necessary to the functioning of your product/service. b) encrypt and limit access to only essential people.

But then what if one of those essential people goes rogue or falls victim to a spear-phishing attack or family ransom etc. How do you mitigate that? Perhaps have a "two keys" to unlock protocol such that two separate team members are always required to unlock sensitive data and i.e. always supervised.

I don't know the solution, genuinely curious how this is solved in practice.

The gist is that as long as your business model is collecting certain data that can be used to identify individuals you must cater for the insider threat and for instance implement segregation of duties. When you do not manage the risk of the data you’re collecting that’s when you end up together with ubiquity.

What duties would you have split up in this instance?

The engineer that stole the data should have needed to collaborate with at least one peer to exfiltrate it. There should be no way for any individual to take this data and clear himself from the audit logs. Segregation of duties in this instance should have made it possible to detect the event quicker and attribute it to this particular employee.

I like it. I use Ubiquiti gear for most of my homelab and home networking stuff with the exception of the 40g and 100g stuff. It is both easy to use and provision as well as easy to upgrade… and of course it works.

Sometimes people do really ridiculous stuff with their homelabs, like this guy: https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs?si=t_h49fv594dChYf9

Tongue-in-cheek on that of course. ;)

This reads far more like 'My Home Network Setup' than 'My Homelab Setup'.

Yeah there isn't anything about the Homelab really.

Not to put down Arslans work, but for me the best part of homelab is doing much with very little resources and this post is kinda opposite.

Pricey appliance-oriented development. And no fiber, which is critical for internet to home primary switch. And at least go with 10 GbE PoE+ for WiFi 7 APs. Non-cloud DVR security cameras are fine with ordinary PoE and 1 GbE (because cloud only WiFi cameras are inherently insecure).

I can haz a Unifi VM that works just fine running under VMware ESXi 7 (old) for free, along with a Samba and NFS NAS, Plex, PlexAmp, Transmission (with Deluge as a backup), RustDesk (on Docker), Docker and K8s boxes, and whatever else I want to throw at it. Those all run on a 512 GiB 96 thread box attached to a SAS 3 4U JBOD with 45 HDDs with PCIe passthrough to the NAS VM. 2 UPSes with 2 2U expander battery packs each; I probably should move to some sort of LiFePO4 UPS at some point.

Router is 10 GbE DECISO 740 OPNsense with Wireguard and IPv4/6 dual stack everywhere. Fast, configurable, and works.

Also have 2 dedicated 7950X3D boxes with 2x 100 GbE each for network load testing and development. 400 GbE maybe soon.

> And no fiber, which is critical for internet to home primary switch

Optical isolation isn't the only way to protect equipment.

That's not the point. The point is fast links 10-100 GbE.

Pretty curious, what was the problem with Omada, if any? It seems like a great system and I'm wondering if there are any particular shortcomings in contrast with other similar offerings on the market... Personally I'm looking to do a major home networking upgrade and Omada has come up pretty high on the list for having easily-managed SDN.

I have tp link Omada with the controller running in a container on my synology nas, works great. Got it for the fast handoff between APs, I can wander around the yard on teams calls

Nice, yeah I was thinking exactly the same (controller running in vm/container). I got a demo from someone I know and I was like "daaang", so convenient and awesome haha

Yeah I like it isn’t cloud based so my hardware at my house doesn’t depend on anything outside of my control - no updates breaking functionality etc

Yes, for sure, I feel the same way. It surprises me how many people inject a dependency on stuff like Cloudflare or similar for their local network/services!

Nice article but avoid publishing home layouts, video camera locations and networking internals for security reasons.

Do you really need 2 APs per floor?

Your internet is only 50 mbit/s any way.

Don't think APs are only about the internet speed. I have a Synology NAS, so streaming and copying files between devices (wirelessly) is also important.

What is the speed with just one AP per floor?

With my iPad Pro (which has WiFi 7), connected to the 6GHz band, I'm able to get speeds of 950 Mbps. However I also didn't optimized for Gigabit speeds, it can be maybe better.

Does it? I have newest iPad (m4 pro 13inch) and afaik it’s Wifi6E.

The just announced iPhone16 does seem to have WiFi 7 though. I’m also on UniFi gear and also why I’ve been deferring upgrading to any of the wifi7 APs since none of my devices have it yet.

You're right. I thought it had because I can use the 6GHz band. But WiFi6e also supports 6GHz and I can pull down around 950 Mbps. For me, I was in the process of getting APs, and it was just time to use the latest one, otherwise I had to upgrade the APs again in the future.

What about latency, disconnects, internal traffic, ... different types of construction materials?

Traffic to the internet is not everything. What about self hosting, sharing files between devices, or simply pushing documents to the printer...?

I have a small flat, but it has an L shape, reinforced concrete on many walls, an elevator right next to one of them, and so on. With typical setup here ("router next to tv") I would have no WiFi signal in one room at all. Regardless if it's 2.4/5/6. And it's just "a few meters". So two AP's with low signal strength are infinitely better.

I live in a three story home, a typical European row house (so completely built from concrete, with wooden doors), and have my Unifi Dream Machine in my utility closet where the electrical board and my home server is, and my a Unifi U6 access point at the top of the top most stairs. It is completely sufficient for 30 wireless clients.

2? I have 12 APs in my house. 5 ghz propagation is terrible through insulated walls, especially those with metal film and 5/8's drywall. Add the green stuff and a closed door and APs multiply.

Concrete is pretty limiting.

Love the tidy wiring. I need to learn that.

One sad thing about ubiquity cameras is that they don't support mjpeg streams.Which means if you want to do vision object detection tasks you need to waste valuable compute resources to convert the stream to stills. For me that's a killer. Plus I'm not a fan of having to have an app to configure things. like the simple web interfaces on the device.

This reads like an ad for Unifi, but I don't see it called out as a sponsored post. Would've been better if the post mentioned why he chose that stack from a technical standpoint aside from "sourcing issues" and "seeing the UI showcased at a friends".

Yep, I use similar setup, but it hardly seems that unique or interesting from technical perspective. It does feel like an ad.

It's my personal blog post and I shared what I got, how I configured my Rack, which settings I used for my WLANs, how I use double WAN, the tools, and many other things. At the end, I even shared how much I paid (I live in Turkey, there is no sponsorship here, there is not even a Unifi store). So no, it's not an ad, just my personal experience.

Apologies. It is early and lack of coffee took the best of me. I am not sure if I can delete original comment now, but maybe this exchange will serve as mea culpa.

OP here. It's not an ad at all. There is a lot of stuff there, not just the Rack. I even wrote about Wi-Fi optimization, the tools I used, how much I paid (I mean if it was sponsored, why would I pay for it).

Maybe you could elaborate here: why did you choose Unifi?

I wrote i, the beginning and at the end of my blog post. I love brands that provide quality made products, not just on hardware level, also on software level. I used TP-Link's Omada and it's not even close. Yes there is a premium, but you get for what you pay for.

Second, my cameras were dying, I had to replace it, and I had to make a choice. A friend of my who use Unifi cameras was very happy, so I thought that's a good reason to start using Unifi.

Anyway, both of these, I wrote in my blog post.

What specifically was not as good on the tp link omadas?

Thanks for sharing! I've been running an EdgeMax router and U6 router for some time without issues, but hope to upgrade to a DreamMachine some day. The information you shared will definitely help when that day comes.

Yeah, zero makeshift raspberry pi rat's nests of wires, assigned to do tasks that raspberry pis suck at (networking, or storage, or wifi, or anything else for that matter). How can you even call this a home lab by HN's standards...

Judging by the Vitsœ shelving and the Lego Porsche 911, I'd guess aesthetics played a role in the purchase decision.

From a strictly subjective and non-technical point of view, aesthetics is one of Ubiquiti's merits.

no shit, I lol'ed at the "tool that lets you judge the strength of your wifi"

thats pure snake oil.

in what way is that snake oil?

This is a really dope setup! Honestly, it sucks that your Wi-Fi is only 50 mb/s, but hopefully that gets an upgrade soon!

My ISP speed is 50 mb/s, not my Wi-FI speed (that can be larger). And thank you, I'm waiting to get Fiber soon :)

Jesus. 5+ grand to network a home. To each their own I guess & looks nice.

Bit confused about what ubiquity is doing with those APs though. Radios capable of 5.7 but they ship with 2.5 eth?

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