cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32242829

Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:47 Buying cheap and power hungry homelab gear 04:53 How to configure C-States? 07:59 Does Powertop hurt your performance? 08:43 How to find out what prevents HDD spindown? 10:05 Is an all-SSD NAS worth it? 12:21 ARM-powered homelab? 13:51 Exposing your homelab services? 16:40 TrueNAS/Unraid vs. a regular Linux distro? 17:59 My backup strategy 19:32 Getting friends and family into backups 20:05 Cheap VPS for hosting Headscale 20:48 To UPS or not to UPS? 21:39 My storage setup

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    533·
    2 days ago

    This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

    It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

    Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

    • Ptsf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      12 hours ago

      I think of it as a lab because it’s my sandbox for me to do crazy server stuff at home that I’d never do on my production network at work, and I think that’s why the name stuck, because back when systems were expensive as heck it was pretty much just us sysadmin guys hauling home old gear to mess with.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        3·
        11 hours ago

        Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

        And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 hours ago

          If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product,

          When Microsoft released Windows Home Server, I felt for sure that would ignite the flame. Yeah, it’s windows, but in the right direction I thought as far as home servers go. I’ve always felt that every home should have a server of some type. We have so much digital data now that has replaced the filing cabinet full of birth certificates, deeds to properties, financial documents, pictures, media, etc. that not having one seems to me to be a bad idea.

          I think if a home server package were simple enough even a cave man could do it, and it got the average non-tech person over the hump of scary computer tech they don’t know, it would become a common appliance in homes and not the exception.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            2·
            5 hours ago

            Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

            I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

            The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

            The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Well, I’m not one to get all uppity about nomenclature. Home lab, home server, self host, what ever. I call the room all my toys are in, ‘The Lab’. It has musical instruments, keyboard controllers, servers, computers, electronics, et al. So ‘The Lab’ seemed to fit.

      He’s so stacked that he knows, when he goes back to his mobile home, that’s when its Back to the lab again yo

    • Joelk111@lemmy.world
      English
      11·
      2 days ago

      Tbh I didn’t think of my stuff as a home lab, though I guess it is. I just call them my home servers. Sounds cooler and is a better phrase for describing to non-techies imo.

      • dwindling7373@feddit.itEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        Mine is an home-lab beause I’m not sure the fuck I’m doing most of the time so it’s trial and error therefore a lab as in explosions may happen in there.

    • 4k93n2@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      yea never liked the term much either.

      while we’re venting, self-hosting isnt a great term either. it should just be ‘hosting’ and the ‘self’ part should be self explanatory because it would be madness to have someone else host it for you!

      remote-hosting still has some uses in some cases of course :)

      • HybridSarcasm@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        In the context of this community and the movement in general, ‘self-hosting’ is designed to contrast against the larger trend of “let me just trust one of the big cloud companies with all my stuff”. We’ve seen how that can go very, very wrong. So, the idea of maintaining control of your data and the methods by which it is accessed is the heart of ‘self-hosting’. It’s not meant to restrict one to only computers stored in one’s home.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        41·
        2 days ago

        Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

        Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

        I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

    • Konraddo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I feel like I’m doing something illegal by calling my home a lab. Might be thinking too much ;) Jokes aside, I’m not really testing or inventing anything so I genuinely don’t understand where the lab part comes from.