[ClumsyPilot]

The responses are kinda a mixed bag here - there are two totally different use cases.

If you want something for practical purposes, /r/selfhosted actually has you covered. It’s usually jellyfin for movies, etc. And you use a NAS or a PC, but the idea is normally that you setup something reliable and don’t lose your data, and it does not require too much tinkering. Maybe once in a while run some docker container to test it out. what I have now.

Then there are people who get many raspberri Pi’s or NUCs and basically play ‘build a datacenter at home’ game. It’s good for tinkering and you often mess it up and start from scratch. I’ve done that, it’s kind of fun, cool experience, learned a lot about networking, installed Kubernetes, then sold the machines.

Then a third group are people who build a whole data centre at home AND run serious applications on it. These guys need to buy themselves a motorbike or something.

[jasode]

>Then a third group are people who build a whole data centre at home AND run serious applications on it. These guys need to buy themselves a motorbike or something.

I don't think the insult to a generalized group of people is necessary.

Some enthusiasts have overkill racks, 40Gbps fiber, enterprise-class switches and vlans, etc, etc ... because it's their enjoyable hobby. The over-the-top components and making it all work is all part of their fun.

It's not a hobby I'd personally pursue but I do understand why it can attract a passionate set of people.

[ClumsyPilot]

It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit

I think it communicates the point that their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone

[nucleardog]

> their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone

Depends!

A lot of people doing this kind of stuff probably do this stuff professionally. That drops most of the “learn how everything works” part of the project and substantially lowers the effort.

I’ve got a half dozen Lenovo Tiny PCs sitting in a cobbled together wooden holder and plugged in to a cheap managed gigabit TP-Link switch. One runs TrueNAS to provide persistent storage, and the rest run Debian+k3s.

Total initial monetary investment was maybe $500 for the PCs, RAM upgrades, some additional hard drives, etc.

Total initial time investment was probably my evenings for a week. And the majority of that was fighting with the friggin’ Debian installer so I could PXE boot the machines (or any future machines) and have them automatically come up fully installed and configured and joined to the cluster with no interaction.

As far as ongoing commitment… it’s been very minimal. It just runs. If anything fails, needs an upgrade, or anything else happens… I just reboot the node and wait 10 minutes while it blows itself away and sets itself back up. Managing workloads is just editing some YAML files and pushing them up to the GitLab instance running on there.

Barely more work than running any of this on AWS and it costs substantially less than the $4k/yr or something I was paying before.

[whartung]

  > It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit

Indeed. That said it rings a bit true for me.

The day I sold my upgraded Macintosh and bought a motorcycle was, in hindsight, one of the best decisions I ever made.

I was without a home computer for about 3 years before I got another one, though I was a programmer by trade.

But the bike, well, just going to say far, far more ups than downs. Never regretted that trade.

[ClumsyPilot]

I am literally thinking of doing the same thing :)

[jasode]

>It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit

Oh ok. It's hard to tell you're joking because you've made condescending comments about generalized groups of people in the past. But I've never downvoted them and just moved on. I stopped to reply in this case because I recently saw a bunch "insane petabyte homelab tour" videos where the owners took a lot of pride in showing their setups. It sounded like the "buy a motorcycle" advice was dismissive of their hobby.