Is there a post that covers the "why?" of all this? As someone researching maybe running some Ethernet for more stable WiFi and faster Internet access for general stuff, maybe some fiber for infotainment other purposes since it can lengthen various cables, and hooking up some security and nature cameras, I can't fathom why all of this is needed outside of it just being a hobby or running some sort of business (trading?) at home. For example, isn't $600 for redundant Internet for like the minutes the Internet is out every year worth it? Why is that level of connectivity needed?
I built a pretty serious "homelab" over a few years, in the sense of building out 24/7 services as robustly as possible. There is an element of practicality for very long-term maintenance if you run i.e. VMs off a different storage layer.
But mostly? It felt exactly like exploring computers in my childhood for the first time (I'm 43 now). I was bumping into things I had never bumped into it before, and it was really satisfying to figure all that stuff out.
I'm a game developer, too, and I realized awhile ago a big part of that is I like technical puzzles, and game development is very fertile soil. But there is a whole new world of enterprise networking/storage/virtualization/etc things that you wouldn't normally bump into in the course of software development.
And as a bonus, I have set up a lot of build systems for friends; being infrastructure-savvy is like the digital equivalent of owning a truck and helping people move all the time.
> There is an element of practicality for very long-term maintenance if you run i.e. VMs off a different storage layer.
That is very good advice. I know about a datacenter outage/degradation in a very large company, which all of you know.
A couple of network switches got overloaded. The switches connected the SAN to the VMs, so it caused all kinds of weird problems in different applications.
Speaking personally, it's just another form of tinkering. Nobody HAS to do it, much like nobody has to buy and maintain their own computer, car, home, etc... We do it because we can and it makes us happy.
Extra note- I would NEVER recommend a business use their home resources for work unless you know what you're doing (and why you're doing it). Even my homelab has vulnerabilities and I'm a security professional- more moving parts = much larger attack surface. There's a reason why corporations pay big buck$ for managed security services. Most homelabs I've seen are mostly for fun and personal comfort.
"What good is knowledge that is never applied" is what drives me to stuff like this. I can't speak for others but I'm sure I'm not the minority here.
Gotcha. Thanks for the reply! To be clear, it wasn't a judgment but just a question to understand there weren't some unapparent reasons why. I think it makes total sense as a hobby and learning, but perhaps still overkill as the post title mentions. Haha.
I apologize if it seemed like I was irate- I'm not and your question is 100% the question we all ask ourselves before doing things like this (or for some of us, it's the first question on the wife acceptance factor audit). If anyone is running a data center in their home for a serious reason they either have small loads to justify the power consumption (rpi k8s cluster says hi), stacks to blow, regulatory pressure, or isn't factoring the costs in and is in for a rude awakening. I don't think (but also don't know) these labbers are the majority, and us homelabbers are already a rarity.
If it makes you feel better, megacorps are getting out of the "self-managed data center" industry and embracing the cloud, to exemplify your very point.
Lol. I was under zero impression that you were irate or anywhere close. My question was a little judgemental perhaps but not necessarily meant in any way. I was also curious if there was some interesting need that had come up. My primary thing that I want is a bunch of PoE powered nature cameras, buy I'm still figuring that out. It will affect whatever comes up though. Oh, and stable WiFi coverage.
I certainly have hobbies that go above any need or reasonable collection, namely synths and books. Haha.
It's interesting that you mention PoE nature cams- I designed a PoE home surveillance system for a friend that involved setting up a solar panel on a 30' pole that fed a box with a shitty camera system in it at ground level. From there he set the cams around his property- particularly where the foxes and coyotes would travel to get to his hens. The whole project was apparently about $800 aside from the solar panel (I just gave him the idea- I didn't help him build it).
He eventually got rid of the cameras because, well... They were shitty and only told him the critters were near AFTER he popped 'em. I think he's got a for-purpose system (in his own words "the new cameras didn't fall off a truck") now but it was a fun project!
I still think your question is reasonable. Even when someone is doing something for joy, there's usually a spark - an essence to it. There's usually an initial motivation that sent them down the rabbit hole, and it's interesting to hear what it was.
There's a reason other than "because it's fun to tinker." I do it because I love the capabilities it provides. I don't love managing Ceph & Proxmox & whatnot, but I love being able to deploy whatever I want into a beefy cluster with 10gb without having to worry about cloudspend. If I wanted to replicate what I run in my home infra (I don't consider it a lab), it'd cost 200-300 in compute and easily another 300 in storage a month. Instead I spent ~2k on hardware and ~35/month in electricity.
It's the same thing with 3d printers, some like them because they want to install clipper and tune the best/fastest benchy. I do it because they love being able to CAD something and have it in my hands as soon as possible.
That said, nobody goes as far as this guy without really enjoying the tinkering
No, but that'd be neat! I don't have GPUs in my cluster though.
My big services are a Ceph cluster, a VPN, Borg (backups) and a K8s cluster (using kubespray).
In K8s I have the main stuff: Plex, Gitlab, Gitlab runner (for CI), vaultwarden (passwords), miniflux (RSS, might be moving to freshrss though), rust desk (remote-desktop), home assistant (smarthome).
My next project is to stream metrics into grafana. I have soil moisture sensors in my garden connected to stm32 boards, I just need to setup the receiving side and I can control my drip lines (they're using opensprinkler) with soil moisture information along with weather info.
> I have soil moisture sensors in my garden connected to stm32 boards, I just need to setup the receiving side and I can control my drip lines (they're using opensprinkler) with soil moisture information along with weather info.
This is a use case close to my interests. I want a network of environmental things monitoring and doing some detection stuff.
I have been working remotely since about 2005-2006. I have always love a good Internet connection with backups (wherever possible). I remember befriending the local cable guy so I can get 1Mbps in 2000.
Now, I have three Internet connections bonded and balanced. It is not about the minutes of disconnection but more about the disconnection when I needed it most. I have ample non-internet time and personal/family downtime. However, when the time comes, I’m happy that the Internet is never a bottleneck in my work and play. I have had this setup since around the early days of the Pandemic and our home, per se, “never had an Internet Outage” since.
I'm not into servers, devops, networking or anything of that sorts, but I love tinkering with them. I would love to have an "overkill home network" one day.
Just wondering:
1. How often do you actually need the third? As in, both primary and secondary are down.
2. Is it that important that you always have an internet connection?
After the 2nd, it was more of a fun and why-not! It is cheap, and comes built-in with a free Netflix subscription and quite a few others. I think it even has an unlimited voice call if I want to plug in a phone and use it.
Why not? I had a pretty elaborate setup in the house I sold during covid (fortunately the purchaser was enthusiastic about it) with a wiring closet in each wing and a fibre spine running between them. Not at all as elaborate an external connection as the author but I had a lot of machines and wanted to keep wireless bandwidth for things that moved around.
One handy trick: I had at least one drop in each room, often one for each wall of the room. Behind the wallplate was a NEMA box with a conduit running straight down to the crawlspace (6' high in my house so hardly "crawl"). That made it easy to pull cable, not only initially but if I found I needed an extra run, which hardly ever happened. Instead of trying to run through a rat's nest of conduit the conduit was a straight shot and then the cables could easily be managed.
Wifi is rock solid, networking is fast, backups good and outages are almost nonexistent and are always due to me messing with things.
I have Netflix, Apple TV+ (is that what it’s called?) and a few others.
Particularly with Netflix, the quality is junk so I watch off Plex.
Other benefits are pretty neat too. POE just works. You can power cycle things remotely if you want (have never needed to) and the abundant local storage makes everything easy.
Enterprise stuff that is getting old is also dirt cheap. Converting sections of the network to 10gbe was very inexpensive.
I mean, “need” is a pretty strong word. No one needs a MacBook Pro, you can do everything on a Raspberry Pi just slower (exaggerating but you get the point). Personally, having reliable internet has been a significant increase in quality of life but admittedly, mesh routers are getting closer and closer. The biggest draw are VLANs. When even the FBI recommends separate networks, it shows how prevalent these issues are. I know a bunch of people that got affected by cryptolocker. While having good practice is probably what helps me a lot, a hardened network helps tremendously.
If, say, you use AT&T and you need Internet for your job (WFH?), redundant Internet is crucial. It's not exactly "minutes" they are out. (Their outages states are often "meh, we'll get around to it in a day or so", figuratively)
If you live in a rural area, even more so. You're not high priority for fixes in the first place. (And AIUI, the author lives somewhere in rural Texas)
Do you need to run it as high tech as that? Probably not. My alternate Internet is my cell, tethered. (And if that breaks e.g. during travel, yes, I have a second cell with a separate provider, because heaven forbid the US had consistent cell coverage)
And most of us probably don't give a damn about e.g. 1,000 year photo retention. Or many of the other things he's doing. But it sure is fun if it appeals to your personality, and you can afford to keep it running.
Most of the time it's the IT Infrastructure, Operations, Security guys that love to do this for (WHY) learning, testing and as a hobby. Check out r/homelab and r/selfhosted for more on this.
Although not as elaborate as this, I have what one would call a "homelab" and it's for, well, testing and experimenting -- I write a lot of high-performance server/network-centric software (e.g, saturating a 100G link with 64B frames is a common test) and virtual machines just aren't suitable/capable most of the time.
It’s a good question, as long as the why is not a burden to be met.
First it’s a useful skill set that helps troubleshoot problems in code and apps that run on networks by knowing how such things work.
Second, try to think of it as a private cloud instead of a network. Because it uses a lot of the same types of software cloud provider do. Proxmox is one example that is a self hosted vps provider that is tremendous. So, it’s a private hybrid cloud that can push from your cloud to the other voids (or back). Build using a private hybrid cloud and you can push to,or between manu clouds
Wifi is for convenience, wired is for reliability. When wifi gets jammed, spotty, interfered with which can happen more often than imagined, especially during break ins, wired wins. Transferring files? Wired wins. 4K streaming ther doesn’t cut out when multiple devices are doing it at once? Wired wins.
Self-hosting is much easier than it was 5,10,15 years ago. Tools like proxmox loaded with yunohost running on a 1L usff/mini/tiny pc with 64 gb of ram and mirrored ssds ther maybe mirror to another i de oval box can sip power but power production grade apps for you personally. If you buy big beefy servers it will cost a bit more electricity.
Still, hosting locally can quickly pile up the savings on saas not spent.
Imagine being able to keep up all your test projects you might spin up a paid VPS for and run for way too long. They might not be production grade, but there is something valuable about having them around.
Data backups - the cloud is just someone else’s computer sold as convenient but not secure. Having your own local copy when the internet goes down means not as much of your life or work goes down. Remember it’s not a backup if there is only one copy of it.
Backing up your computers in the cloud are only so helpful when they are down, a lot of time to download them. Local backups win again.
Multiple connections can matter for people who wfh and can’t be down, or have spotty internet that is up.
If you like smart home tech, it’s a ticking clock until the cloud based supports for it that are usually free dissapear leaving perfectly good gear unusable. Instead you can run a local instance of home assistant, etc.
I used to host morethan I wanted ina. Data centre much like this rack. I was hesitant to come back to self hosting or homelabs but j have realized a home server that runs like an appliance (in between that wiring) capturing the sum of all my data and worn as services come and was pretty much unavoidable. Luckily it’s getting easier and easier to do.
