[m0xte]

I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains.

So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it!

My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.

[zouhair]

Your conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you. People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.

[m0xte]

My conclusion is that my home lab was a learning exercise that comes to an end and that having physical hardware was actually detrimental to it.

I still have a home lab. It's just virtualized.

[zouhair]

Whatever works for you, just don't generalize it.

[znpy]

Maybe a bit too direct, but I 100% agree with this comment.

[msh]

Well, I guess if you are serious about a home lab you need both your normal network and a seperate homelab. I like tinkering with my homelab but I need not to depend on it for my work or internet access.

[rfoo]

What if your true Internet access depends on it? Providing un-GFWed Internet access for all my devices is so much easier with the networking gears which happens to be in my homelab setup.

[breakfastduck]

For a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management.

So I think your final line is more personal preference than a lesson most people with home labs need to realise.

[vmurthy]

>For a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management.

Bang on here. I am a PM at a startup who doesn't really "setup" servers at work but I did enjoy researching how to turn my Lenovo SFF PC (used , bought off Ebay) into a nice little home server (ESXi running multiple VMs) for things like storing media , Adguard VPN etc. Still work-in-progress but loving the experience so far :)

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Yeah, home labbing is about the journey but eventually the journey ends once you've learned how to use some of the technology you wanted.

[comprev]

My home lab helped boost my career enormously. 5 old HP servers running Windows 2000 network introduced me to AD, Exchange, MS-SQL, etc. hooked up via Cisco hardware. (100% pirated I will admit)

The cost of purchasing (eBay) and running the servers paid for itself in 6 months on my first "IT" salary.

I sold on the whole lot to another guy trying to boost his skills too.

It was fun and served its purpose.

[breakfastduck]

Never heard a single story about setting up a home lab that isn’t wholesome!

Got to be one of the least offensive hobbies going.

[xxpor]

I have a mini-itx case with 8 5400 rpm drives, and some basic xeon (E12xx, forgetting the exact model), and I'm shocked at how well modern power saving techniques work. When it's just sitting there being a file server it consumes less than 100 watts, and even when I'm pulling from it at over a gigabit it goes up to maybe 110. It also has 120 mm fans, but I barely notice when they kick on. The loudest part of the whole thing are the heads on the HDDs kicking back and forth!

[mrslave]

Mini-ITX case recommendation that holds 8 3.5" drives please?

[walterbell]

InWin MS08, https://www.ipc.in-win.com/soho-smb-iw-ms08

Norco ITX-S8, http://www.norcotek.com/product/itx-s8/

Silverstone GD07 plus 3-bay hotswap cages for dual-bay 5.25 = 11 drives total with audio device aesthetic, https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=330&area=en

[DHowett]

I’m very happy with my U-NAS enclosure (NSC-400; 4 hotswap bays), and they do have 8-bay enclosures.

https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_...

[poglet]

My recommendation would be the Fractal Design Node 804.

[mrslave]

People actually put a mini-ITX in a micro-ATX case?!?!?! faints

[Macha]

microATX motherboards are dying out - with the ability to omit drive bays entirely and just mount SSDs to the back of a motherboard tray, full ATX cases can get reasonably small now, so there's less demand.

It turns out PCI express slots are either something people want 3+ of (like a streamer setup of gpu, capture card, high end network card) or 1 of (GPU only) or none (business PC, devs happy with Intel or APU graphics). So really the only tradeoff the largest chunk of the market is making picking miniITX is that I haven't seen any with 4 RAM slots and a m.2 drive (though both features are available seperately on many motherboards). And even then the standard gamer setup is 2x8, while the amount of professionals for whom 64gb (2x32) is too little but 128gb is enough is currently a small market also.

Case manufacturers are not so quick to abandon the size though, with the result that if you get a case that you like for size/features/airflow and it happens to be a microATX case, most of your motherboard options are going to be miniITX.

[poglet]

I build my partner a PC in the Node 304(not 804). I made a mistake on the number, sorry. The 304 can only fit 6 3.5" HDD's.

I recommenced it if you only require 6 HDD's, and I don't put ITX into ATX cases haha. I've always had fun building ITX systems.

[Schwan]

I had a debian root server for years;

Did i do anything specific relevant on it which would have required it? Nope.

But boy did i learn things.

If not us as Software Engineers / Tech people, should have something like a home lab?

I have setup a k8s cluster at home; Do i need it? Nope for sure not; Is it nice? Is it running smoothly? Did i learn things? Is it interesting to use and fun? Does it help that it does run 24/7? yes, yes yes and yes.

When i have my own house, i do plan to centralize everything in it in one rack somewhere nice, optic fiber in every relevant room, vlan, backup server/nas etc. Alone something like this does require quite a lot of hardware.

And i think its very nice to have vlan capabilities to seperate that one iot device from the rest of my network.

[bregma]

> expensive to feed ... take up a lot of room ... family ... become needy balls and chains.

So you go rid of the lab instead of the obvious solution?