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Comment by ipsento606 | Hacker News Reader

I find the way people talk about "homelabs" endlessly confusing. Is it "a playground for devops"? OK - that sounds about as appealing to me as a playground for washing the dishes, or a playground for changing the oil on my car, but people like different things and there's nothing wrong with that.

But wait, you also run your plex instance on there? And a git server? And wait, it stores your tax documents too?

Is it a playground, or a functional home server?

I run plex and a NAS and a VPN server on a machine in my home, too. But it's a home server. It's definitely not a "homelab" or a "playground" of any kind, any more than my freezer is a playground for storing food.

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There is certainly no hard division between "playground" and "functional", and I'm barely convinced there's a soft division. Consider car enthusiasts: Some people like playing with cars, and have a fully kitted-out garage to support that interest. Some of them certainly have cars that are only for shows and they'd never actually drive, but more commonly they lavish time and care on their "babies" and then drive them to work. Home labs are the same.

This. I'd say it's a matter of scale.

I certainly don't consider my home server that packs a 30 W TDP CPU from 10 years ago to be a homelab. Someone with half a rack that peaks at 2 kW? That's clearly a homelab.

I mean, scale is also a valid range to include, but I was more thinking about utility and stability. Like, I personally think that a single Raspberry Pi in the corner can be a home lab so long as you're learning something from it. But the thing you're learning on it can be "how do I write a toy HTTP server and the only traffic it gets is me testing it", or "this DNS server is in the critical path for every device on my network". High stakes, low stakes, big, small, careful, YOLO; if you experiment and learn things, it's a (home) lab.

To go back to your car analogy, isn't an RPi like a 25 year old econo beater? I always took homelab to refer to a home datacenter; I always assumed (possibly incorrectly) that the origin of the name was due to the analogy of someone who sets up something like a chemistry lab in their garage.

I think of it as the computational equivalent to a home machine shop. If you don't have some heavy duty equipment can you really claim you have your own shop setup?

If someone works on and tweaks and gets to know their 25 year old econo beater, I don't think anyone has the right to say they aren't a car enthusiast. It's less about the horsepower (or ghz) and more about the passion put into it. For example you could add an ad-blocking DNS server on your devices and it would work just fine - but if you put in the effort to self-host it, even on a Pi, it's (IMO) a home lab.

> Is it a playground, or a functional home server?

It’s both for me! I’ve had a homelab in some form since high school (~12 yrs ago).

Having a home lab has gradually taught me Linux, Shells/Terminals, Ansible, Docker, and most recently Kubernetes.

I have to be careful with backing up data when I do something new. I use this setup for Home Assistant, Plex, small self-hosted apps, a personal Jenkins instance for my open source stuff, and game servers for friends.

It has taught me a lot and has had significant (unintentional) benefit to my career by exposing myself to new concepts/tech and thinking about how operations works solo vs in a team setting.

If you wanna see it: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab

Homelabs are for people who enjoy unrestrained and irrational exercise of technology in whatever way they decide to. It doesn't have to be about reliability or efficiency. It's just poking at things until neat stuff happens or it all breaks.

The surest way to take all the joy out of a hobby is to do it as a job. You sound thoroughly employed.

I think the vibe is kinda like maintaining an old car or something. Some people like doing this kind of work, especially in a space where you get to decide how it all works.

Good way to explore ideas without having to do concensus building with those around you. Its your own little pet project!

Yes, it is a playground for devops, but IMO the appeal is being able to run any service you want without paying for a SaaS. It often fills the "I want that"/instant gratification void. That and organizing things "just so". Which makes it a hobby.

I get the appeal for other people, but for me I quickly burnt out just trying to keep Deluge, Jellyfin, Zoneminder, and Homeassistant up and functional— Zoneminder in particular is (or was, anyway) an absolute nightmare to deploy and run.

> Zoneminder in particular is (or was, anyway) an absolute nightmare to deploy and run.

Install it, configure it, make sure to give it enough storage so you have the desired retention duration - here about 2 days - and restart it regularly to keep memory leaks in check. Once you've got it set up don't mess with it anymore. I've run it this way for close to 5 years now without too many problems. I did a thorough survey of the available free and cloud-free software before I settled on ZM and regularly check whether something 'better' has shown up but have not seen anything which matches the functionality yet. There's lots of other surveillance camera software but most developers seem to consider a Javascript-heavy glitzy UI the prime directive while the backend is more of an afterthought. I hardly ever use the UI, most interaction goes through apps (ZMNinja etc.) or other systems (OpenHAB etc.). ZM, once configured, does very well this way as long as you keep the memory leaks in the zmc processes in check.

In short ZM is a flawed but functional piece of software with the best balance between functionality and flaws for our application - stable and farm monitoring services. It may not be what your want if you want to have a web interface to that camera on the front porch.

Out of curiosity, what features are missing from Frigate⁽¹⁾? I switched to it from ZM a while ago.

⁽¹⁾ https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate

Yes and yes. What good is a devops playground without some low stakes production services to run and some data to manage.

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