Comment by sfRattan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfRattan | Hacker News Reader

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I very much like how the name "homeprod" contrasts against "homelab."

But I'm not as convinced as the article's author that "NAS" is outdated as a separate concept, just that as new people learn more about networking they rediscover why just having storage on in its own box can be a good setup. And when new people are brand new, having everything on one box is conceptually simpler, though not always optimal.

I think, in the family/household context, I like the names:

Homelab: the box/cluster you use to experiment and test new stuff.

Homeprod: the box/cluster you use to deploy stable services for family. Runs only things that have graduated from at least a yearlong successful deployment or so on homelab.

Homebase: the box/cluster you use to make ZFS pools and databases available to both homelab and homeprod (on the same network or overlay network). Basically a NAS in the older sense of the word, before homelabs started expanding its scope in casual use.

Famadmin: the sysadmin for the family (i.e. "you" in the three items above). The person to whom, as you say, "providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry," is a matter of deep principle. And well put, BTW.

Putting aside the awesomeness of the term homebase, what exactly differentiates the base from the prod? Aren't those ZFS pools just production? Or something like an MQTT broker that supports home automation - you're likely running experimental devices/services over that as well, right? And to the extent that experimental MQTT or NAS traffic could inadvertently disrupt the production services, you could separate those out if you really cared. But that would still just be lab and prod.

Maybe the division is more apparent if you're using containers, and/or have more of a social group to communicate support levels to? Personally I'm just using NixOS and am still at the stage of "I'm going to reboot the router now, it might take ten minutes or it might take days" [0]

If we don't need this distinction, then perhaps "homebase" could actually make more sense than "homeprod" ? Slightly different connotations, less putting on a show for lots of people but more homey like for a small family?

[0] from a technical perspective I'd love to separate the router out onto its own machine, but I want fast wireguard/openvpn/TOR/etc so it's a VM on a larger machine and I'm not really looking to expand my power consumption footprint to another large machine. I suppose I could split it out to two routers, one with straight NAT+wireguard and one with openvpn/TOR/etc, then the main could run on its own low-power box.

My homebase has the around 30TB usable storage, but the only workloads I've found really need to run on the same machine (rather than the same local network) are media transcoding for Jellyfin and ML classification of footage in frigate. With those two happening, and with ZFS (appropriately) using a majority of the RAM as a cache, it makes sense to put the rest of services on another machine.

My prod (now homeprod, thanks for the name!) has no HDDs, just SSDs. It's a proxmox cluster that runs opnsense in a VM for the whole network, Home Assistant also in a VM[1], and most other services in containers. In the age of expensive storage, it has just enough SSD space for VMs and containers. VM backups live on homebase, except for opnsense which also needs a backup on the same machine (same machine, not just same cluster) if the network goes down.

So my conceptual distinction is mostly that the only services/containers I put on homebase are doing work that really benefits being that close to the data. Oh, and I'm in the jolly position of needing to replace the hard drives this or next year. Yaaaaay.

My homelab is currently a cluster of 4GB Pis that I had lying around from before even the Raspberry Pi shortage. Whenever I upgrade my Framework 13 mainboard, I'll probably use the old one as a homelab instead of the Pis.

[1]: Home Assistant's plug-ins are themselves containers, so it's a good idea to give it either a VM or its own machine.

In my experience, transcoding works fairly well over NFS (over fiber Internet). Mind you, I didn't try 80+ GiB media files.

I was just naming general concepts, or describing on how one thinks of a service. It seems like you're using the terms as specific labels for a logical group of machines (eg a proxmox cluster), so I understand the need for a third name there for the specific hardware that's providing the common services.

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