Here’s my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)

picture of a raspberrypi, switch, HP elite desk, KVM and mess of cables on a desk

Hey it’s more than good enough to run all this ¯_(ツ)_/¯

screenshot showing list of hosted apps and resources usage of servers

  • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
    1·
    29 minutes ago

    Here is my combination lab and workbench. I have been busy trying to buy/sell/trade computers that I have become significantly behind on cleaning as I go. I also just got the network rack:

    I haven’t had time between work, hustling, and home maintenance to finish getting the cabling managed or the NAS:

    The goal is to get the NAS in the rack, UPS to the items in the rack, the 3D printer under the bench, and the monitors on the wall and off the bench. Then I’ll start in on plastic organizers for the bits and parts that clutter my bench.

  • AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    34 minutes ago

    Kinda in a lull with homelabbing ATM, but here I’ve got my router in a custom 3d printed mini rack with 3d printed patch panel, and a couple of old NUCs. Only thing I really use day-to-day is a NUC connected to an amp so I can use the amp as a Spotify connect client

  • LemmyFeed@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    This is a great thread. I had to join too!

    I have my “network closet” which is like a hole in the wall where my ISP comes in:

    And then my “server room” which is literally a closet. There’s a big ass old enterprise server and a 3 node laptop cluster:

  • retiredIdentity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    Only two of the minis are in use. The other two i am just messing with different things. Still have three more not in use and unsure what I am going to do with them. Two extreme AP not being used and probably never will.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Also late, but here is mine.

    From the bottom up:

    • An old pc I built forever ago for live streaming when I used to run my youtube channel. It an i7 something or other with 32gb ram and a 32 tb raid (4x8).
    • m1 Mac mini
    • HP elitedesk 800 G3 mini
    • two HP elitedesk 800 G3 sff
    • Deku
    • dumb network switch
    • rpi 4 8gb

    And here’s what’s running:

    • Bottom pc is the nas
    • Mac running jellyfin
    • the hps running:
      • navidrome
      • aonsuku (pretty navidrome frontend)
      • audiobookshelf
      • qbittorrent
      • gluetun
      • vikunja
      • radicale
      • Joplin
      • matrix
      • local backup for critical data
      • some other things I’m forgetting
    • The rpi is my wireguard tunnel to ssh in on the rare occasion I need remote ssh access.
  • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    1 hour ago

    1000028194
    Including sbcs there are 8 computers in there. There are 5 more laptops and another retired desktop joining. There are plans to get solar and batteries so I’m checking how much power I can actually draw.

    edit: just found the weird netbook with usb3 ethernet that I used to run homeassistant bare metal back in the day. one more for the computer pile.

  • Unusable 3151 ⁂@lemmy.mlEnglish
    69·
    7 hours ago

    people put too much “lab” and not enough “home” in homelab. we need more dust, more cables, more jank. love this.

    • tourist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I’d be sharing the physical manifestations of my various mental illnesses

      unorganized extension cords running across the floor

      machines that have been unplugged for months

      empty energy drink cans all over the place

      excess ethernet cable length occupying a sizeable chunk of the floor

      router mounted to a plastic wall hook because I don’t have a drill

      credible fire hazards

      cable anti-management

      I can’t get that all in a few photos, even if I wanted to

      besides, I’m going to clean it up

      eventually, one day

      when I get to it

    • BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      5 hours ago

      Dust and jank you say? Behold, my old basement homelab when I rented just outside Boston with a very permissive landlord who agreed to let me have Comcast gig pro fiber pulled into the basement, running off an outlet I installed without asking on a free slot in our breaker box. The dust was terrible, the rack was a hodge podge, I had to put up that sign because maintenance guys kept plugging their power tools into the UPS when I wasn’t around and tripping it. But Comcast fucked up the billing and the 2gig + 1gig symmetric internet is still active to this day for free, which I left behind minimally working for the next tenants after parting out the rack. The tower by the side was a friend who wanted to colocate on my fiber, and I had some fun stuff like a slide out vga console. I also pulled Ethernet into every room, most of them installed with nice wall plates all bundled down to the rack, so with a house full of gamers, you could have multiple people pulling a gig on a game download without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        I had a dusty laptop running a homelab for you, and figured I should show something nice on the screen. Then, I typed in my password like an idiot. Not gonna put that online. :(

    • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      5 hours ago

      This is the best thread so far. Really enjoying seeing peoples setups! Thanks @northernlights@lemmy.today !

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Man, GTFO with that hot mess… I’m jealous really. I’m getting a chub just thinking about it.

    • thumdinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Is this the “before” shot? There’s 190 spare ports. I’m all for leaving room to expand, but that’s a lot

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      I remember looking at Sysracks racks a while back when I was trying to find sound-absorbent enclosed racks (which they do make, though I didn’t get one; wasn’t willing to pay for it, as they come at a very large premium). They were one of the very few companies making them. I don’t think that those particular ones are the sound-absorbent models, but their name stuck in my head.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I got this because it’s almost fully enclosed. Most of the noise comes from an open rear door which this doesn’t have, and an open front door which this sort of has. It’s not very loud when the hvac is set to a reasonable level, even though it’s pulling air through 4 fans on the top.

        I have additional sound deadening material if I need to apply it but I’m not there yet.

        I’m eyeing 3-5 more 1U servers though so maybe I’ll need to do it.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          I have additional sound deadening material if I need to apply it but I’m not there yet.

          That’s probably a pretty good idea in terms of cost. I checked earlier when I made the comment to see what the price difference these days was, and IIRC a non-isolated 18U is ~$800 and an isolated 18U is ~$1800. They aren’t putting anything like $1k of sound-absorbing material into the rack.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    15·
    6 hours ago

    I was too lazy to put on clothes and go out to my shack. This picture is a bit old. It’s missing a lot of mess and my PeerTube server.

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        That’s the server currently missing from the picture. Right now it’s a mess, because I’m doing a re-setup of everything. But getting my hands on hard drives have been difficult and I actually still need a CPU and motherboard.

        • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          I feel you. HD space (and everything else) is sooo expensive. I have an old spinning drive for my peertube instance just cause is easy to source.

        • northernlights@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          4·
          5 hours ago

          Lol puts “UPS” in brackets to suggest something janky, reveals it’s a battery power + solar power backup. Kudos :)

        • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          I want one! Ive been thinking of setting up one with solar since my area gets next to no rain and hot as hell. Might as well use that to my advantage!

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            4 hours ago

            I’m still not using one. The problem is that you’ve got two classes of devices that haven’t quite converged to what I want.

            UPS

            Traditionally, the purpose of UPSes isn’t to keep systems running (other than through very short outages). It’s to do one of the following:

            • Provide a small amount of buffer until a backup power system, like a generator, has time to come online.

            • Give the systems time to shut down cleanly. If the user is right there, they have time to save their work. This was particularly an issue before journaled filesystems became the norm, since an unclean shutdown in the era when Windows was using FAT, Linux was using ext2, and MacOS was using HFS had at least the possibility to corrupt your filesystem. They have the ability to report their charge level to an attached computer so that it knows when the battery level is critical and then software on it can start it shutting down. On Linux, the most-common software package to do this is Network UPS Tools, or NUT.

            These things don’t need a lot of capacity. They rarely get drained, so they usually use lead-acid batteries, which are heavy and don’t have many full charge-discharge cycles in them (but are pretty happy staying fully charged all the time). You can still get these. The lead-acid batteries are replaceable, though, so an old UPS can keep going for a very long time.

            Powerstation

            These are designed to keep attached devices running for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, they have a couple of important limitations for powering computer systems.

            • They do not normally have the ability to report their charge level. Irritatingly, they do nearly always have a voltmeter rigged up to some software to map voltage to charge remaining to drive a ‘charge remaining’ display on the device, and there are USB HID device classes for reporting charge levels to a host OS, but for some reason, powerstation manufacturers don’t seem to have an interest in making a powerstation that has the latter functionality. NUT does have a USB HID backend, which means that it can monitor and shut down a system if they’d expose it. I’d really prefer the ability to treat one of these as a laptop-style battery, as Linux (as well as other OSes) have the ability to hibernate on low battery. On Linux, these show up as /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*, and there’s lots of software to display charge information and act based on low levels…but AFAICT from looking around the kernel, there is no way to get the kernel to deal with a USB HID device reporting remaining charge like this as a BAT device.

            • Computer power supplies can only smooth out so much of an interruption in their power. Computers rely on something on the order of a 10 millisecond transfer time after AC goes out until the UPS needs to be running full-tilt. searches ATX PSUs apparently are only required to operate for 16 milliseconds without power. Other hardware attached may or may not actually deal well with interruptions, but obviously the shorter the transfer time, the better. It looks like line-interactive UPSes tend to do something like 3-6 milliseconds. The problem is that a lot of powerstations have a transfer time in excess of this.

            There are some LFP UPSes now, but these have their own disadvantages. They tend to be fairly pricey, and the batteries are often not replaceable, which means that unlike the old lead-acid UPSes, when the battery dies (which will take longer than with a lead-acid battery), the whole device is also going to the landfill.

            And lastly, you have the problem that while lead-acid batteries are pretty mature and prices are pretty stable, LFP battery prices are coming down (and sodium-ion might start competing with them for fixed batteries). If batteries are cheaper in the future, waiting means a better deal.

            I don’t currently run a UPS on my systems (though I have in the past). I kind of decided that if I’m going to run a UPS, I’m probably going to just bite the bullet and use the combination of a traditional lead-acid UPS and an LFP powerstation, with the UPS plugged into the powerstation. In that configuration, the powerstation provides provides the longer-running power, and the UPS deals with short transfer time and warning computer systems that power is about to go out. This isn’t perfect, because (a) your computing devices can’t see the remaining charge on the powerstation in an outage (b) at some point, one still has to toss the LFP powerstation, and (c) there’s a little extra hardware involved. However, it also has a number of benefits:

            • Lead-acid UPSes pretty much always have replaceable batteries. One can keep the UPS around, though the batteries will have to be periodically replaced.

            • The UPS will provide time for the system to shut down.

            • UPSes are designed specifically for this, and have short transfer times. You don’t need to worry the way one might about a powerstation having marginal transfer time.

            • You can get a lot of AC-related functionality in UPSes, like online capability (which will clean up the power, if you want), which isn’t generally available in powerstations.

            • You can upgrade the “powerstation”, even (if you want) doing a build-your-own thing with separate cells and an inverter and charge controller (which is generally more cost-effective for larger systems) down the line. These discrete-component systems are also a lot easier to provide human monitoring of remaining charge, since you can pick the components (and worst case, all you need to do is connect a voltage sensor that can talk to a computer to it), though they don’t integrate as nicely off-the-shelf with something like NUT as do traditional UPSes.

            I’m not saying that this UPS+separate-battery-system is the only route to take, but I spent some time banging my head on it, and wanted to share if anyone else is similarly thinking about the same thing – that there may be a good argument to have a traditional UPS and some kind of separate battery system.