Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear, the amount of integration and automation makes for a very pleasant experience.
> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane.
I just add my old devices to my cluster and call it a day. Even ancient hardware is suitable for it, especially if you're using old laptops that are optimized for power savings. Even old Core 2 processors in laptops can idle at a low wattage, and TDP can be less than a light bulb's when maxed out.
One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit."
I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."
I have to respectfully push back here. "hw/sw" garage is the perfect way to describe it. All of this takes place at one's home. There is no arbiter, but the individual over what is in or out to one's time at home.
Distinction springs from the person themselves.
I think ClumsyPilot's way to put it was just fine.
I just said that the distinction is not "pointless" or "gatekeeping", as some people accused, but pretty common convention which can be quite useful for readers. In particular, you are pushing back against something nobody said.
You're mistaking the consumerist urges that a lot of people partake in their hobbies and the idea of a homelab itself. A homelab can be overspec'd ubiquiti gear or it could be a RasPi running a bunch of services. It's just one or more servers that sit on your home network that you can fuck around with. Yeah, I guess something you care for stability with doesn't necessarily constitute the "lab" distinction, but a lot of times these stable things come out of experimenting in a homelab.
My "media server" (browser and downloaded media played via smplayer on a stock Ubuntu install) emerged from an experimental server running a lightweight distro that I used to do anything and everything from. Once I found that which parts of the media usecase fit into my partner and my lifestyle, it graduated to a stable decently-specced Ubuntu machine that is rarely touched other than for updates and downloading new content.
A home lab was generally seen as something to experiment with and learn something from. Setting up a Plex server is literally installing one piece of software on anything newer than a Core 2 Duo.
I started my own homelab like this, and still learned from day 1.
It grew over time to serve many purposes, has seen many stopped/failed attempts, has had many lives (I mean, recreate from scratch to learn X, Y or Z).
There's not a particular day or a particular addition or a particular level of complexity when it became a homelab, I think of it as such from day 1.
I think of a homelab as one or more servers (or a computer, laptop etc.) located in a home to play around with software, virtualization, hosting stuff both for testing and actual functional (home) use. Basically everything that's experimenting (like in a real lab) with technology. Of course the definition will be different for everyone :)
I would agree with this. While I run Plex and/or miniflux or as he put an OTS Nas, I also use it to provision Luns, or test things that I may consider for work.
Here are a few of the deployments that originated in my home lab but ended up in a prod environment at work
1. Replacing hardware load balancers with haproxy. (This started with a few options, including Nginx, and some others. But haproxy and it’s web management, csv monitoring gave me the best capability to integrate at work)
2. Vpn appliances for covid. I was able to whip up 2-4 scalable VPN appliances based on openvpn in “1/2 a day” at work because I was able to flesh out most of that at home.
3. Vulnerability scanners
4. HIDS security tools. In the end we went with a OTS vendor but options like ossec, wazuh etc were ruled out in a lab.
5. Ansible (over some of the other options)
6. Squid for reporting on the HIDS mentioned above.
There’s probably more. I know there is. And point blank a lot of this stuff had mock ups done at home because I have full control and am not subject to auditors etc when evaluating them. Whereas I do thst at work and I have to do more work writing up justification or change requests etc. it’s just easier at home.
All that said I try to keep the house as flat and plain Jane as I can.
I have a production hypervisor (HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini). This is where things run that my spouse cares about, in particular, Home Assistant. I don't generally mess with this machine.
I also have a lab hypervisor (Dell T30). This is where I feel free to experiment with VMs and accidentally on purpose have to rebuild it every once in a while, take it down to swap out hardware, etc.
My "media server" consists of a web application, backend application, multiple *arr services, transcoding automations, fibre termination, user account management shared across multiple machines and services, multiple VLANs and LUNs, etc.
All these are spready across 16RU or so, but really only serve as a "media server".
Yeah the best part of the home lab hobby is gatekeeping because you spent more than someone else and you need to belittle them to justify how much you spent on your Juniper or whatever.
Plex servers and containerizing all of the services that support it are how I learned to use docker before I became a professional. It’s now turned into a collection of containerized services all talking to each other with dynamic dns on cron, pihole, wireguard, HomeKit running all my appliances and more…
I don’t get it. Is it only a homelab if I use it to practice network certification exams?
There is some grass fed, organic, grade A level gatekeeping in this thread…and it made me want to rant.
Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear, the amount of integration and automation makes for a very pleasant experience.
> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane.
I just add my old devices to my cluster and call it a day. Even ancient hardware is suitable for it, especially if you're using old laptops that are optimized for power savings. Even old Core 2 processors in laptops can idle at a low wattage, and TDP can be less than a light bulb's when maxed out.