My home servers are not a homelab
blog.nradk.com
blog.nradk.com
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
For real though, I have several cars on blocks at the moment. I can’t think of a single way to rationalize not calling them projects, even though when they were put up it was just going to be a “quick fix”. At least I finally got one in a state where I felt comfortable donating it.
I don't experiment much these days, so 'lab' isn't quite right. But if I were to experiment then it would be using the same hardware as all the other stuff. So it's both accurate and inaccurate.
In this instance: who cares, it gets the message across to the necessary demographic - and isn't that what communication is about?
...and I'm someone who could care less about words and grammar (notice the correct use of the term, so as not to say the literal opposite of what I'm trying to say (notice the correct use of the word literal, rather than it's not-oft-used-but-oft-correctly-applicable figurative)).
I don't know the (in)correctness of the use of brackets within brackets.
I definitely tend to think of networking labs, of things meant for short term use & experimentation, but many of us really enjoy & rely on these systems serving our homes, our lives, reliably, consistently. I've heard some defenses of labs, but rarely is a lab doing the same reliable work again and again and again at a lab; labs feel like forerunners, not established bedrock.
Some day I really hope home servers cross the chasm, become more and more accepted & common. I know there's so many countervailing reasons, conveniences that keep this unlikely, but still I hope some folks find reason & find it not hard to back off from big cloud, to find advantage in running things ourselves.
There's the well known home-ops repo & folks. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops among techies I've seen some lightbulbs go off by calling the system a home-cloud. I'm curious what other nomenclature people have seen used, and how they feel it's been received?
so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great.
look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI cluster" etc. so i would argue that nonresistance to these farces actually proves OP is right. albeit i do not really see strong nor attacking rhetoric from OP in his post either, so i think problem is just that you have to chill out ;)
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days... so even american president has to say something about it, so i think there is something to it, dont you think ?
Laws don't work like this in the EU, let alone in all of Europe.
noone cares in Russia etc, you just have to make small donation to your public official (if they even care/notice) and everything is fine,
even those pizzaboxes...
EDIT: in most countries there are devices which can not be connected to grid without electrician in any case, like PV. but again germany has balkon PV something something. so yes, exceptions are to everything.
So I guess we are not civilized enough then.
Ah, lovely. Racism.
Please speak clearly, which parts of Europe do you consider to be civilized, and which parts uncivilized?
edit: this is racism. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEowCqd4zug
or he has schizophrenia and he cares but not cares,
or he is passive aggressive.
so which one you need me to address?
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days
Agreed.
It's still a homelab, the author just doesn't seem to like the term.
1. No fault tolerance or high availability
2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
Where I live now (in a house) is way, way cheaper and I get regional co-op 2.5 Gbps internet for $90/month.
Not really. I live in an expensive area. I pay $4K+/month in rent for a nice apartment, and livable, nice houses here cost $3M+ which is over 700 months worth of rent.
1. The math doesn't work.
2. I don't have 3 million dollars.
3. I'm not going to fall into the stupid American trap of borrowing money to buy shit I can't afford just to stay poor and handcuffed to some bank. If I'm going to buy something that costs 3 million dollars I better have 3 million dollars in cash. That's how I roll. That's how I buy my car, computers, and my groceries. Make money -> spend money. Fuck borrowing. I don't do that shit.
Except you're paying a landlord money that could be going towards property that you own, and that equity is portable.
You won't have any wealth when you become very old and cannot work. You and your family will end up with nothing.
Borrowing has to be sensible for income ratio.
YMMV, but middle-/lower-income people spending an unreasonable % on rent to live in Manhattan or SF are fighting a losing battle they cannot afford to play.
What do you propose? Borrow money and buy a house for millions that I can't afford? Sounds like a faster way to go broke.
Also, we all saw how the LA fires went. You'd better have $6 million in cash if you want a $3 million house. $3 million for the house, $3 million for a backup house when the first one burns down and insurance decides not to pay for it. You do not have "equity" in anything that is flammable. Flammable == disposable. Try gold bars instead.
If I could buy a house for $300K that was livable, not moldy, and not look like it was going to come crashing down during the next big earthquake, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
> There are plenty of areas where very nice homes are $200-400k
Yeah, I know there are houses for $300K in the middle of Arkansas. But there are no jobs there, I'm not going to live on burgers and fries, and all the goddamn tech bro CEOs in the valley have decided on RTO. At least there is real food here.
My real plan though: Work and save up enough money that I can live the rest of my life in Asia on my savings.
> unreasonable % on rent
I don't spend a big % of my income on rent.
I DO spend a big % of my income on taxes. That's the real problem.
Tax accountant/financial planner? A good one might be able to find a minimization strategy.
And after seeing all the unbelievably expensive surprise repair bills my homeowner friends have had to deal with, I'm not convinced I'm lighting money on fire, either.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."
Everyone has prod; some also have dev.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products.
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
Since i have to have the home server for that, it's trivial to use it to host everything else too.
Another reason is locality - all of my media still works at home when my ISP is down, to the point I sometimes don't notice the outages.
Doesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)?
There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
On-premises means in a physical location, i.e. data center (or garage) in this context.
On premise would mean based on an argument/inference.
Just today I saw a post (on Reddit) 'Mauling' over whether to get a Framework 16 or not (I assume that English was not their native tongue). Me? I would have just let the bear have it ;-p
> But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects.
> But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too.
If you want to split hairs on naming, then the problem here is that you're imputing an overly strict definition onto the term 'homelab' to not include your use case, complaining that your use case is different to this definition, and then failing to see that the term is generally used loosely enough that it does your use case.
Call it what you will, but from your description of things, you're using the server and associated tech as a homelab.
I'd allow you to call it a "it's not a homelab, but" if you want permission to use a different term... ;P
If this colloquialism continues bothering you, seek help. Of the psychiatric variety.
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things.
It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need.
Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.
Email in profile. Please reach out
your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button.
But I’m not OP.
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
However in my case it definitely is a homelab, as I am always tinkering with it and the router/server ratio is way to high.
Normal people don’t have rack-mounted servers in their homes to “self-host” ten services for their family. If you have the skills to do that kind of thing it may very well make sense to do so but you’re basically signing up to do that as a hobby. And that’s fine! Hobbies can be productive! Some people keep chickens as a hobby and feed the eggs to their families. But if you’re running rack mounted servers in your house as a hobby, that’s called a homelab.
I took from the article that the term homelab makes it sound like the use case is trite, hobbyist or not serious.
Most posts on Reddit are performative, not just in the homelab sub. Over time the sub defines what is "cool" to be in the in-group for that particular community and people post their overwordly set-ups just to be considered part of it for 10 minutes.
I mean, you don't need this
Just use the word we all use and get over it, dude.
virtualization is available in commodity hw from 1999 when VMWare allowed to have 56 virtual machines inside of one computer...
email"relay" server. because i do not want hassle of DKIM and other useful and appropriate technologies, needed to have to be able to have reliable delivery of mail. which i had problems with having my own email server not being able to deliver mail to some small business in past. im just using one of the big guys mail system, but all mail is archived in my "relay server". i can change email provider in few minutes that way. and take address with me.
fileserver. rsync or iscsi or btrfs send/receive works great. Most linux distros use rsync + small script as a "installer". under GUI.
Owncloud, jitsi, wireguard.
Whonix. nothing nefarious. 2 vm setup for reality checking shadowbanning, price manipulation based on your social network profiles etc. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25okvSzFUZY] - video explaining Federal Trade Commissions pricing study about individualizing prices.
network connected cameras, collection device is "frigate nvr", every camera is just streaming RTSP anyway... you can check on them even with MPV/VLC. cameras are not exposed in any way to internet. your cameras get updates 2 times per lifetime... your windows at least once per month...
subnet / internal network - every service has its own IPV6 address so i can have visibility on multiple places into activity on my network. one of the services is changing ip address every 5 minutes. for security reasons. it is great indicator of intrusion, proved that twice already. :( if you do not have IPS, IDS, file change monitor etc, you know NOTHING about activity in your net. most linux distros are awful in default config. nonsense like WINE or products built on top of WINE are worst thing for security ever invented. you pay for unhampered surveillance of you.
Externally i rent for 2 dollars per month a private DynDNS relay / wireguard helper server for nat holepunching. because i do not have public ipv4 address, and you still need ipv4 for internet ADs ADs ADs ADs to work. I use service similar to Hurricane Electric IPV6 service.
i host my own SoftwareDefinedRadio for few "friends".
Also bought kiwi sdr to sit in "DMZ" for public to use, it is great service/device. HAMs can check if their signal is received / receivable in my location. space weather, antenna misconfiguration, jamming ... also wspr beacon. i can show people how many radio signals are out there free to use.
im thinking about deploying DMR and/or dPMR "basestation" to enable connectivity in my area. "neighbourhood watch" can work even in no grid situation. we already have own wifi network but wifi handhelds (PTT, talkpod, zello etc) are not reliable for us, for some known to us reason. already big users of PMR446 but lacks privacy, but children like them for small formfactor. (roughly 60 users) and that will be self hosted too.
meshtastic / reticulum / sideband is great as a home alarm notification system. PtMP.
homeassistant as a home manager + pv data aggregator/visualizer, it is almost not updated, i do not have nerves to deconflict plugins etc after every update. it is not exposed to wan anyway. to update only after newly bought devices require that.
passive house standard. + PV with storage. 92 % of hot water from solar photovoltaic (not solarthermal) past 365 days. ( first three months were exceptionally sunny this year) other years 88-90%. my house needs same amount of energy for heating as a 40 houses near me combined... why?
electric - house, cars, bikes, lawnmower, semi self driving cart for garden (no AI/ML just basic "bug racing" arduino project magnified 1000 times. ).
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.