Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by grappler 973 days ago
This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
1 comments
bobthecowboy 973 days ago
If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with.

A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc.

So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there.

It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated.

Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.

link
grappler 973 days ago
I'm really thinking mostly about the hardware part here, and maybe just enough layers of the stack to feel like an integrated hardware setup. Let the nerds play with whatever software they want above that.

To go ahead and dream a bit:

I'd hope for an online configurator like the one SoftIron's HyperCloud has [1] but instead of "talk to a sales rep", show a price for what you just configured, like you're configuring a macbook.

Relatedly, there should be a standard rack form factor in the size category of NUCs and Mac Minis, rather than having to go all the way to the 19 inch monster racks that medium to large businesses use. If it were nailed down to the point of being able to blind mate (just learned that term from Oxide's article here!) gear into it, that would be kind of perfect.

  1. https://softiron.com/hypercloud/configure/
link