Why is everyone 'Home Labbing'??? Well, you and Network Chuck and Techno Tim and Hardware Haven keep telling me I have to home lab or I'm a loser. Duh.
My home lab and projects landed me a entry level tech job. Nothing super glamours but coming from trucking it's a start. Once I started talking about all the projects I did it impressed them. Great to do. Fun and educational.
He’s spot on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been onboarded to new projects at work because I already had experience in the technology from home labbing.
I do it for fun. It started with a Pi-hole, then some UniFi gear, then UNRAID on my old computer, then moving to proxmox and Truenas on older free PC’s I’ve gotten. I also love to keep stuff out of the landfill for a while if I can. SO now I host stuff 90% for my self and I love to learn docker.
For me, I started out by getting a Pi Zero W to block ads using Pi-hole. I then started doing some smart home stuff with Homebridge and Infinitude (it allows me to control our smart thermostat locally -- only works with Bryant ones tho). Then eventually during Uni I meet some friends and they got me into the idea of running a NAS (TrueNAS) and Home Assistant, and from there I've branched out a lot and have many things self hosted. I've learned a ton and it's made my life a lot easier (better smart home stuff, easier storage management, etc.)
Come on! HomeLabbin is about building rack full of equipment that is less than 10% utilized, that you can then show to other sysadmins to make them envious 😀
According to the Homelab subreddit, "homelab" is a full enterprise system inside a house. You have to have a complete domain, all the bits you'd see in a Fortune 500 company HQ. Anything less is just self-hosting. The way I see it, if you have two computers dedicated to different tasks, that's a homelab. I really want to split my system up- put torrents on one box, media server on another, keep my current rig in its HTPC role, etc. But I don't need authentication servers and all the other widgets to make that happen.
Redditors making up definitions and then being pedantic about them is my favorite part of the community lol. I agree with you though as long as you've set up another system to offload some work from your main system you're homelabbing
Really solid take. Look, use what you love. I use ProxMox, hosted Truenas (passing through an LSI & an Asus 4X NVME) on a 5955WX Pro Threadripper. It's amazing that on good days you can find threadripper pro parts (especially 3945/3955/5945/5955) at fair rates on Ebay/etc. and stuff them with memory. The PCI-E lanes matter to me to handle enough drives. I'm using a more basic Rosewill case but it supports 15 sled drives, so that's OK (4U). I stacked it up with 16Gb drives and I'm good for a while. When it comes to virtualization, it is so sad that the person who maintained proxmox scripts passed away; thanks to the community for keeping his work alive.
So when i was in college and fresh out of college right when the 2008 job market crash happened, I was a computer network tech for almost a decade. (2005-2014) I got out of the field to chase bigger dollars in the trades. But in the last year and a half the siren call of a larger power bill rang in my ears and called me back and i decided it was time to start learning the ropes again. Im running a dedicated pfSense firewall router, a dell t7600 workstation (windows), a dell r720xd (PVE), 4 of the Lenovo m73 tiny form factor computers that I shoehorned e3 xeons into (3 PVE 1 Windows server 2022, yes i actually paid for the licence) and I have on standby a dell c6100 4 node server thats waiting for me to get around to deciding to learn Harvester OS. Last i checked in my ProxMox guest count was 48 nodes between VMs and LXCs and it does what needs doing for me. But I'm ever plagued by the storage dilemma that no matter how much you have, you are always right up against your total capacity almost all the time.
Thanks for another great video. I had been watching TH-cam videos for months and was overwhelmed by all of the options. It wasn't until I came across a NAS Killer guide, that I finally decided to build my first home lab server. The NAS Killer guide provided a very limited number of hardware choices using easy to find hardware. Limiting the choices of each component gave me a small menu to choose from, gave me a checklist of components to buy, and lastly ensured that they would all work together.
It's cool to see the stuff that I and my housemates were into as students 20 years ago (back then, using our old AMD Athlon PCs as a household file/web server running Debian Linux) is still a goer in a much more expanded way.
Just a FYI. Storage Spaces will do the pooling of various drive sizes with redundancy. It'll even do multi-parity drive configurations. Works by placing the drives in a pool, then when you make the virtual disks you select the amount of parity you want.
Was the CasaOS comment meant to be a dig?! Presented about homelabbing to a club at my college the other night, you and those you had chip in on what a homelab is were all featured as great resources. Thanks to all of you for sharing your knowledge and experience!
just to nitpick a bit: - Containers = a specific kind of environment (for applications to run on) - LXC = Linux-based system container implementation and APIs (run isolated Linux environments or distributions on the host's kernel, basically) - Docker = fork or reimplementation of LXC to move the focus from system containers to application containers (entrypoint moved from /sbin/init to /bin/bash so to speak, can't do systemd by default) - LXD = LXC container management platform/tool (this is for LXCs the same as Kubernetes is for application/docker containers) - (P)CT = Proxmox's own implementation/integration of LXC's into their VE (Virtual Environment) platform
I got into home labbing after years of working with rack servers and finding out that I could buy a sufficiently old used one relatively cheaply. More recently it's evolved into hosting my own open-source AI stuff. Good intro video, and the analysis paralysis is real. Even 3 years into running my lab, I still run into it constantly. It would definitely be helpful to have some kind of framework to build from; recommended/essential services to start with that open doors to new possibilities, and how to decide what goes in the framework. This could be the first video in a near endless series...
Totally agree! It would be great to have alternative tracks to follow with complete examples including backup, monitoring, security, remote access, etc.
I got into Home Labbing waaaaaaay back in the late 90s, early 2000s. We're talking back when Pentiums of whatever brand was there. The reason was simple. I'd want to run game servers on one computer, while I played the game on my "main rig" of the time. Then file sharing across the rest of the house where I'd run a PC with a phat multi-gigabyte drive and share files with all the other computers in the house. Running mIRC on one machine to act as a channel admin bot while I "logged off" my main machine. Then I started to work for a computer shop and that dealt with learning Linux to a small degree, and learned a little bit about virtualization. I'd run small web servers, and applications, and file servers and all that kinda stuff on "retired from gaming" systems after upgrading. I now run a 3-server set of retired server grade hardware, amounting to about 600gig of RAM, 104 threads worth of CPU, couple tens of TBs of drive space, and so on. At home. Running in my basement. Locked down and barely exposed to the internet. I have a dedicated PC for my programming machine, obviously my main gaming rig, two gaming laptops, my wife has her own set of machines, my kids have their own gaming machines. If I train them right, my two dogs and cat would have their own machines. The rabbits don't show any interest in tech. But seriously, having the 3-server set, it's fantastic. Proxmox on the machines, and when I need a 'Nix machine up and going, 20 minutes later, done (With all the patching and downloading, etc).
I started my Homelab with just a small windows server for network drives for a media center and then moved on to a RaspberryPi 4 which has Pi-Hole (adblocking) and Unbound on it for my DNS lookups. My HP MicroServer Gen 10 with Windows Server on it is for housing my network shares for my HTPC downstairs. The server also has FTP setup so I can upload and download files from it no matter where I am in the world. As Yoda once said "size matters not" if there is something that you want to do in your home for tinkering or anything or even just adblocking (PiHole, Adguard etc) then grab a Pi and go for it. You can always expand later on down the line.
You are correct. Each person has their reason for a home lab. It all starts with a use case. What is your use case? Once you figure that out, you can start building.
Hey there Raid Owl! Network Engineer here! Home labbing is not just a great way to learn but is also an incredible resume in and of itself. I have shown off my home lab in several interviews and each time I have done so I landed that job that I was gunning for. As a network engineer I want to show off my knowledge of various protocols, show that I understand the practical knowledge and the down in the weeds details. If you have friends that are also into the hobby (and you can trust them) I recommend everyone getting into network engineering understand IPSec tunnels and how routing works in such an envrionment. I also recommend folks understand how remote access solutions work, show off that you can properly create firewall policy with a zone based firewall. My homelab is my playground, my resume, and my testbed to learn something new! And it has made me a much better network engineer as I can now speak to how sysadmins / developers understand networking on top of being able to speak the network engineers language and be able to explain to those devs that no it isn't the networks fault and here is why.
It feels great HomeLabbing and has helped me to offer more of my worth to my current job to allow us to do more and monitor things better to have a better understanding of what we are deploying and also to better support our clients with different technologies under one roof and a single device deployed on-site.
My "home lab" started because I wanted my computers off my desk and I wasn't willing to put them on the floor. A 25U rack, two Rosewill 4U chassis later and I thought I was done. Now I have all kinds of shenanigans going on. I am officially a data hoarder now. What started as just a way to clear off my desk has turned into a 20 bay 4U storage box, a 4U threadripper workstation, a Dell R720XD home security server and an R7910 to play with AI by Christmas. I'm glad my switch has 48 POE ports.
I do not know if you know this, but VMware is free for personal use on Windows, and VMware lets you host TrueNAS with hard drive pass-through. I am saying this because with VirtualBox, I tried to do a hard drive pass-through it didn't let me because every time I try to make a pool, it's always losing the hard drive, but VMware has the option of hard drive pass-through, so VMware makes it easy to host a TrueNAS server pulsed other hosting application. VirtualBox and VMware are two good option to use on Windows computers if you want to host applications.
I'm running a small corporate network on Raspberry PIs. NAS, DNS, MySQL and GOGs. I'll be adding a mail server. I was pretty stoked when I booted a PI 4 from a 4TB SSD. These little machines are versatile.
I have many home labs. The proxmox cluster type, audio production lab, and the lovely electrical engineering lab. So many tables, so many overhead lights,so many shelves
I started out just setting up a NAS with only local access for my parents with an RPi 4 Openmediavault and a HDD. My dad always has issues, and I'm not there to play tech support... I then got an old i7 4770 PC, put OMV on it and ZFS two HDDs for my data. I learned to set up a wireguard vpn to access it from anywhere, set up nextcloud, and pihole in docker containers. That was when I really understood the power of my server, because I could upload the pictures I took every day to my NAS from Italy, and I could access websites just like from home. Folders on my phone get automatically uploaded to nextcloud, no need to pay for google space! Home labbing for me is a lot of fun, and I get a usually functional product at the end! I'm going to upgrade to tailscale and host nextcloud for my parents, brother, and fiance, and maybe even a jellyfin server is in the cards.
Love this! Sharing with peeps. UnRaid was my gateway drug & still running as my dev NAS. Love the ease of use & is my #1 suggestion for folks just getting started. I now have… “prod” QNAP NAS, UnRaid dev NAS, a Pi CM4 2.5” SSD NAS, & a decomm’d 45Drives Stornado flipping between Proxmox & Windows10. Hoping to virtualize the Windows machine but… NVIDIA.
My learning was only set in cement after I was able to either lab or emulate environments to practice my learning. Honestly, I likely owe a portion of my career to labbing. If you are out there trying to breakthrough to the next level of your learning... you need to consider labbing. There will be challenges, but you can do it...don't be scared.
Great video, on point. Wonderful also seeing other YTers throwing in their two cents (tuppence for Jim). I stumbled into this realm studying my A+ and wanting more hands-on experience. I’m now working through Network+ and have a pi-hole and pi-NAS in the closet, two laptops and two nucs (running Ubuntu, Win10 & Win11), and building my first cluster. Looking to explore proxmox and docker over the winter, with an eye on ansible. There are so many routes to pursue I feel like a kid in their first candy store. You and your fellow content makers are providing the vector and encouragement to explore, question and succeed. Thanks and happy Thanksgiving 🦃👍
Never called it "Home Labbing" but in the 90's I got my NT4 MCSE and A+ Certs by building a 10-computer network through my house (that my wife and kids used, to guarantee that it would have issues). It was connected to an early DSL line that hosted 3 websites, an eMail Server, and an FTP Server. I even had a server that I referred to as a Crash-n-Burn that was beat like a red headed stepchild...
I don't think EVERYONE is home labbing. I have 3 NAS, some VM's and a few cameras but I don't think that quite makes me a home labber. And, among my friends and acquaintances, I don't know anyone with anywhere close to this amount of computer gear. As to why anyone does it, I can only say for myself that as my eyes were opened with my first NAS with what it could do, natural curiosity took over and I kept doing more stuff with them. I'm still not sure if I should love you and your peers or hate you for all of the time and money that I've spent but the education and entertainment has been invaluable. Thank you all for that.
As soon as you have any virtualization stuff at home, you're home labbing. Nobody needs virtual servers to run anything that is essential at home in 2024.
@@V1N_574 Yeah, I get it. It's just a YT click bait word for the algo's like the "abandoned" x, y, or z that I just paid $10,000 for. It's the world we live in.
Home labbing gives a lot of people the unfair advantage to create real job experience without officially being paid to do it. It's hard to imagine any one white collar jobs that can't do this. Network Engineering and software engineering of course aside, you can do this with SEO and PPC in digital marketing, you can do data analysis with the plethora of free data out there, you guys get the point. No degree is needed anymore to start.
I love tech, but I get bored with how some tech has stagnated lately. So, I’ve jumped into the networking space & started using UniFi gear & love it. I’m learning a lot & having fun at the same time. My next project is smart home automation oh so much fun. 😂😂😂🎉🎉
My home lab started so I could begin learning how to use linux better, set up cool web projects, learn how to hack with Kali, and to see how active directory servers function with a wazuh SIEM. Granted all of this is virtualized on my gaming setup so it's more a proof of concept then actually on and churning. But it works! One day I hope to get the hardware to run a proxmox machine that can handle all the VMs I want to run and tinker with. That's my next setup and I already have a build theorycrafted for the task!
which home lab? The server racks? The electronics lab? The chemistry station? The industrial workshop? The garage? Some of us have several labs... It's a problem, but one that solves other problems
Homelabbing is a slippery slope to buying thousands of dollars of loud hot servers, this can cause your SO to evict you to the couch. Its also a great way to benchmark your wallet's bandwidth
If its definition is as simple as self-hosting services useful to me, then my desktop computer is a "home lab". I require more and more self-hosted services to compensate for features that have been formerly available in out-of-the-box solutions, but the software landscape changed to remove those features. Node js for example, just to be able to directly link to files (which used to be a feature at all cloud services and now it's gone), so the links can be resolved into actual displayables for the thumbnails of the new tab browser extension I use. Little things like that all requiring their own solutions which ends up with you contemplating to put all of that on a separate low-powered device so your baseline 24/7 power consumption wouldn't be 203 Watts, so now I have a barebones i3-6100 mini ITX system on my shelf next to the ONT that I have yet to set up with proxmox, pfsense, ubuntu server, URL cleaning reverse proxy and pi hole as the end goal (along with the scripts I have on my desktop).
i started building my homelab cause the settings on my isp router were very limited. honestly there is almost too much information and options that it quickly gets confusing and overwhelming. the hardest part, is understanding what software is right for your use case; setting it all up it's pretty easy with the amount of resources available
I want to get into HomeLabbing, my problem is that I want a machine I can use to learn about networking (and also a NAS), but I also want a machine that can run GIS processing jobs. Which means I want a powerful machine. I know I should probably start with something small, like a Rasberry Pi or a 45Drives/45Homlab HL4/HL8, but I really want something more powerful.
I can't call my single home server a "homelab", but I was planning on having a media center PC to watch movies on when I've friends come by. Then I said "why don't I expand the use case for this PC since I also want to keep backups as well? One thing brought the other and basically my home server is now a backup/media center/nas/game server thing.
For me homelabbing is like playing my with my childhood LEGO without being AFOL. I just play with hardware lying around, then I put them back into the box. Except the OMV server, I just don't touch it, so I don't break it.
Heck, as far as windows goes, especially if you're homelabbing for education rather than just self hosting: My job uses almost exclusively Hyper-V clusters for their many many virtual machines.
I have an old HP computer with an Intel i3-2100, 8gb of DDR3-1333 and Quadro FX 580, I've considered making a media server out of it since it has a 1tb HDD that came with it, but I'll consider upgrading the PSU if the connectors allow it, get a PCIe to SATA adapter, get a GPU that can use PCIe x1 or x4 since I only have one PCIe x16 slot and possibly some HDDs for a NAS, but IDK if that's worth it or not, so I'll check for other solutions.
Homelab is an IT "lab" (generally in the home) where one learns to deploy, configure and run software, while breaking it without affecting production. Anyone who refers to a homelab as a place to run your jellyfin instance or your file share are actually talking about what I like to call "homeprod." People should use this term more often, to strictly separate labs from actual personal workloads. Homeprod are production workloads at home that wouldn't have a high impact if they went down. Inconvenience? Sure, like your video library, file share, or home automation not working, but nothing one couldn't live without (browse the internet, use the actual light switches in your house instead etc.).
Darn, and here I expected to find some LIL gems for home-automation to run on my Proxmox system. as I have mainly lightweight programs like adguard, docker based containers, and a few more, A intel N100 based mini-PC is more than enough for me.
Frankly speaking I just want a file sharing system that I can pull files from as needed, use them locally on my network, THEN be able to back, back up to my file server the end result of what projects I am working on, as a shared file to a couple other systems on my network!! Certainly some possible automation in the future or even security cam system would be nice, BUT my main focus is to NOT have to dig for the files I need, when I need them, which currently live on 30 or 40 back up drives stored on a shelf next to my desk!! I am also fed up with having to download certain files I have already download 376 times in the past....like that song from TH-cam I "know I have some where"!! And with the holidays in full swing, I'd like to see my family photo album at times what company comes over at will!!! I tried my hand at building a TrueNAS box and it worked OK for about four days, until the power went out....then I could never get the thing to reboot again after that!!! SO I need an option that is NOT permanently on, and I can reboot easily like a shared Windows 10 system with a huge array living on it!! And why a huge array?????????????? I have over 30,000 songs in my MP3 library, and I constantly add more too it as I dig through my massive media collection!!! I am after all 60 years old, and have been collecting music since I was 12 years old in 1976!!! Then there are the home movies, family photos and the list goes on and on, of data I have made into digital format!!!
I blame TH-cam for my bad decisions. Paid more for my core switch than the server I recently bought for NAS/homecloud lol. Need to stop bring lazy and get to wiring my house finally and put my stuff in my rack
I run VMware Workstation 17 on my Windows laptop that run all my legacy software (e.g Windows Server, CRM, SharePoint, exchange, etc.) then RDP into that box
So I have been using Unraid for a bit. I like it overall but have had some issues with it. Recently DHCP just decided not to work and I had to go take it down, move it and connect it to a monitor to try and troubleshoot it. I turned off Ethernet Bonding and now it works fine. But because of this I am thinking that I am going to install Proxmox on my NVMe drives on the motherboard that I am not using right now and then run Unraid as a VM by passing the USB through to it. I have 2 Unraid licenses. Not sure if I will ever need more than one but I hve the other if I want to use another computer as a backup to the main server. Also, I want to move to Proxmox for Portainer and having multiple computers working as Nodes for my apps for redundancy.
Because even if you practice the theory of the ccna material employers need to know you can do stuff. So home lab so so you can be more employable by Tech
You're doing a fantastic job! Could you help me with something unrelated: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Good intro - maybe we'll gain some new enthusiasts! (Oh, and "Hi" to the "usual suspects"! Our super power is the community! And no, I don't have time to start my own TH-cam channel, so... But if you want to collab, we can talk.)
'Cause I've been watched videos in channels like this! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣I've just bought an HP POS used to make my home lab. At 56yo, I want to learn TI and back to work. That's my point. At The Odin Project, at the moment.
Thanks for letting me be a part of this awesome video!
Anyone call the police on you wearing that tshirt?
I want to appear in a homelabbing video 😢
Why is everyone 'Home Labbing'??? Well, you and Network Chuck and Techno Tim and Hardware Haven keep telling me I have to home lab or I'm a loser. Duh.
Great video, thanks for including me
My home lab and projects landed me a entry level tech job. Nothing super glamours but coming from trucking it's a start.
Once I started talking about all the projects I did it impressed them.
Great to do. Fun and educational.
same lol, my supervisor also has a homelab himself and that on my resume said it meant i was truly interesting in tech
may I ask what projects did you do? I'm starting my home lab journey soon, too.
what should i use to start? i have a rpi4 8g
Home labbing is the FUN way to learn stuff in a few days instead of 1 term at college or uni - and much cheaper too! I miss homebrew club.
Home Labbers Assemble!
I'm trying but is not compiling 😂😂😂😂
0.0
Red Five standing by!
He’s spot on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been onboarded to new projects at work because I already had experience in the technology from home labbing.
Home lab is a protest against cloud computing. Early PC's were all "home labs".
I do it for fun. It started with a Pi-hole, then some UniFi gear, then UNRAID on my old computer, then moving to proxmox and Truenas on older free PC’s I’ve gotten. I also love to keep stuff out of the landfill for a while if I can.
SO now I host stuff 90% for my self and I love to learn docker.
Ditto! Except I started with Proxmox then switched to unraid. Set up a Unifi network with teleport and tailscale for remote access.
Omg you added all my favorite tech TH-camrs in one video! Thanks Brett!!
Love the homelab TH-cam creator community. No jealousy, just support and good fun
For me, I started out by getting a Pi Zero W to block ads using Pi-hole. I then started doing some smart home stuff with Homebridge and Infinitude (it allows me to control our smart thermostat locally -- only works with Bryant ones tho). Then eventually during Uni I meet some friends and they got me into the idea of running a NAS (TrueNAS) and Home Assistant, and from there I've branched out a lot and have many things self hosted. I've learned a ton and it's made my life a lot easier (better smart home stuff, easier storage management, etc.)
Come on! HomeLabbin is about building rack full of equipment that is less than 10% utilized, that you can then show to other sysadmins to make them envious 😀
I've started home labbing to deal with this disposable income that's been plaguing me. Good news, it's working! I'm so poor now.
This is a fantastic beginner's entry point into homelabbing!
According to the Homelab subreddit, "homelab" is a full enterprise system inside a house. You have to have a complete domain, all the bits you'd see in a Fortune 500 company HQ. Anything less is just self-hosting.
The way I see it, if you have two computers dedicated to different tasks, that's a homelab. I really want to split my system up- put torrents on one box, media server on another, keep my current rig in its HTPC role, etc. But I don't need authentication servers and all the other widgets to make that happen.
Redditors making up definitions and then being pedantic about them is my favorite part of the community lol. I agree with you though as long as you've set up another system to offload some work from your main system you're homelabbing
Really solid take. Look, use what you love. I use ProxMox, hosted Truenas (passing through an LSI & an Asus 4X NVME) on a 5955WX Pro Threadripper. It's amazing that on good days you can find threadripper pro parts (especially 3945/3955/5945/5955) at fair rates on Ebay/etc. and stuff them with memory. The PCI-E lanes matter to me to handle enough drives. I'm using a more basic Rosewill case but it supports 15 sled drives, so that's OK (4U). I stacked it up with 16Gb drives and I'm good for a while. When it comes to virtualization, it is so sad that the person who maintained proxmox scripts passed away; thanks to the community for keeping his work alive.
So when i was in college and fresh out of college right when the 2008 job market crash happened, I was a computer network tech for almost a decade. (2005-2014) I got out of the field to chase bigger dollars in the trades.
But in the last year and a half the siren call of a larger power bill rang in my ears and called me back and i decided it was time to start learning the ropes again.
Im running a dedicated pfSense firewall router, a dell t7600 workstation (windows), a dell r720xd (PVE), 4 of the Lenovo m73 tiny form factor computers that I shoehorned e3 xeons into (3 PVE 1 Windows server 2022, yes i actually paid for the licence) and I have on standby a dell c6100 4 node server thats waiting for me to get around to deciding to learn Harvester OS.
Last i checked in my ProxMox guest count was 48 nodes between VMs and LXCs and it does what needs doing for me. But I'm ever plagued by the storage dilemma that no matter how much you have, you are always right up against your total capacity almost all the time.
Thanks for another great video. I had been watching TH-cam videos for months and was overwhelmed by all of the options. It wasn't until I came across a NAS Killer guide, that I finally decided to build my first home lab server. The NAS Killer guide provided a very limited number of hardware choices using easy to find hardware. Limiting the choices of each component gave me a small menu to choose from, gave me a checklist of components to buy, and lastly ensured that they would all work together.
It's cool to see the stuff that I and my housemates were into as students 20 years ago (back then, using our old AMD Athlon PCs as a household file/web server running Debian Linux) is still a goer in a much more expanded way.
Just a FYI. Storage Spaces will do the pooling of various drive sizes with redundancy. It'll even do multi-parity drive configurations. Works by placing the drives in a pool, then when you make the virtual disks you select the amount of parity you want.
Proxmox will do it using ceph
Was the CasaOS comment meant to be a dig?!
Presented about homelabbing to a club at my college the other night, you and those you had chip in on what a homelab is were all featured as great resources. Thanks to all of you for sharing your knowledge and experience!
Fair stuff. Thanks for doing the work to provide fairly newbie-friendly education with context/relevance.
just to nitpick a bit:
- Containers = a specific kind of environment (for applications to run on)
- LXC = Linux-based system container implementation and APIs (run isolated Linux environments or distributions on the host's kernel, basically)
- Docker = fork or reimplementation of LXC to move the focus from system containers to application containers (entrypoint moved from /sbin/init to /bin/bash so to speak, can't do systemd by default)
- LXD = LXC container management platform/tool (this is for LXCs the same as Kubernetes is for application/docker containers)
- (P)CT = Proxmox's own implementation/integration of LXC's into their VE (Virtual Environment) platform
Happy to see you sponsored by Into the AM. I love their shirts! Definitely recommend them! My wife's ordering some shirts with your coupon code now.
I got into home labbing after years of working with rack servers and finding out that I could buy a sufficiently old used one relatively cheaply. More recently it's evolved into hosting my own open-source AI stuff. Good intro video, and the analysis paralysis is real. Even 3 years into running my lab, I still run into it constantly. It would definitely be helpful to have some kind of framework to build from; recommended/essential services to start with that open doors to new possibilities, and how to decide what goes in the framework. This could be the first video in a near endless series...
Totally agree! It would be great to have alternative tracks to follow with complete examples including backup, monitoring, security, remote access, etc.
I got into Home Labbing waaaaaaay back in the late 90s, early 2000s. We're talking back when Pentiums of whatever brand was there. The reason was simple. I'd want to run game servers on one computer, while I played the game on my "main rig" of the time. Then file sharing across the rest of the house where I'd run a PC with a phat multi-gigabyte drive and share files with all the other computers in the house. Running mIRC on one machine to act as a channel admin bot while I "logged off" my main machine. Then I started to work for a computer shop and that dealt with learning Linux to a small degree, and learned a little bit about virtualization. I'd run small web servers, and applications, and file servers and all that kinda stuff on "retired from gaming" systems after upgrading.
I now run a 3-server set of retired server grade hardware, amounting to about 600gig of RAM, 104 threads worth of CPU, couple tens of TBs of drive space, and so on. At home. Running in my basement. Locked down and barely exposed to the internet.
I have a dedicated PC for my programming machine, obviously my main gaming rig, two gaming laptops, my wife has her own set of machines, my kids have their own gaming machines.
If I train them right, my two dogs and cat would have their own machines. The rabbits don't show any interest in tech.
But seriously, having the 3-server set, it's fantastic. Proxmox on the machines, and when I need a 'Nix machine up and going, 20 minutes later, done (With all the patching and downloading, etc).
Fun labbing is great! Self hosting is the perfect way to be autonomous in an ever growing digital future. Btw, loved the cameos.
I started my Homelab with just a small windows server for network drives for a media center and then moved on to a RaspberryPi 4 which has Pi-Hole (adblocking) and Unbound on it for my DNS lookups. My HP MicroServer Gen 10 with Windows Server on it is for housing my network shares for my HTPC downstairs. The server also has FTP setup so I can upload and download files from it no matter where I am in the world. As Yoda once said "size matters not" if there is something that you want to do in your home for tinkering or anything or even just adblocking (PiHole, Adguard etc) then grab a Pi and go for it. You can always expand later on down the line.
You are correct. Each person has their reason for a home lab. It all starts with a use case. What is your use case? Once you figure that out, you can start building.
Hey there Raid Owl! Network Engineer here!
Home labbing is not just a great way to learn but is also an incredible resume in and of itself. I have shown off my home lab in several interviews and each time I have done so I landed that job that I was gunning for.
As a network engineer I want to show off my knowledge of various protocols, show that I understand the practical knowledge and the down in the weeds details. If you have friends that are also into the hobby (and you can trust them) I recommend everyone getting into network engineering understand IPSec tunnels and how routing works in such an envrionment. I also recommend folks understand how remote access solutions work, show off that you can properly create firewall policy with a zone based firewall.
My homelab is my playground, my resume, and my testbed to learn something new! And it has made me a much better network engineer as I can now speak to how sysadmins / developers understand networking on top of being able to speak the network engineers language and be able to explain to those devs that no it isn't the networks fault and here is why.
I love this Home Lab community. Great seeing my favorite creators share the space like this.
C'Mon... Everyone Secretly likes their Own Farts LOL
It feels great HomeLabbing and has helped me to offer more of my worth to my current job to allow us to do more and monitor things better to have a better understanding of what we are deploying and also to better support our clients with different technologies under one roof and a single device deployed on-site.
My "home lab" started because I wanted my computers off my desk and I wasn't willing to put them on the floor. A 25U rack, two Rosewill 4U chassis later and I thought I was done. Now I have all kinds of shenanigans going on. I am officially a data hoarder now.
What started as just a way to clear off my desk has turned into a 20 bay 4U storage box, a 4U threadripper workstation, a Dell R720XD home security server and an R7910 to play with AI by Christmas. I'm glad my switch has 48 POE ports.
I do not know if you know this, but VMware is free for personal use on Windows, and VMware lets you host TrueNAS with hard drive pass-through. I am saying this because with VirtualBox, I tried to do a hard drive pass-through it didn't let me because every time I try to make a pool, it's always losing the hard drive, but VMware has the option of hard drive pass-through, so VMware makes it easy to host a TrueNAS server pulsed other hosting application. VirtualBox and VMware are two good option to use on Windows computers if you want to host applications.
I host TrueNAS in proxmox and it's very easy too
I'm running a small corporate network on Raspberry PIs.
NAS, DNS, MySQL and GOGs.
I'll be adding a mail server.
I was pretty stoked when I booted a PI 4 from a 4TB SSD.
These little machines are versatile.
that windows tip at the end got you a sub and like from me. I appreciate all the info you've shared. cheers
I have many home labs. The proxmox cluster type, audio production lab, and the lovely electrical engineering lab. So many tables, so many overhead lights,so many shelves
Really like the back to back videos on helping people on the fence make that jump
I didn't knew I wanted this video thank you Mr. Owl
I started out just setting up a NAS with only local access for my parents with an RPi 4 Openmediavault and a HDD. My dad always has issues, and I'm not there to play tech support... I then got an old i7 4770 PC, put OMV on it and ZFS two HDDs for my data. I learned to set up a wireguard vpn to access it from anywhere, set up nextcloud, and pihole in docker containers. That was when I really understood the power of my server, because I could upload the pictures I took every day to my NAS from Italy, and I could access websites just like from home. Folders on my phone get automatically uploaded to nextcloud, no need to pay for google space! Home labbing for me is a lot of fun, and I get a usually functional product at the end! I'm going to upgrade to tailscale and host nextcloud for my parents, brother, and fiance, and maybe even a jellyfin server is in the cards.
Love this! Sharing with peeps.
UnRaid was my gateway drug & still running as my dev NAS. Love the ease of use & is my #1 suggestion for folks just getting started. I now have… “prod” QNAP NAS, UnRaid dev NAS, a Pi CM4 2.5” SSD NAS, & a decomm’d 45Drives Stornado flipping between Proxmox & Windows10. Hoping to virtualize the Windows machine but… NVIDIA.
My learning was only set in cement after I was able to either lab or emulate environments to practice my learning. Honestly, I likely owe a portion of my career to labbing. If you are out there trying to breakthrough to the next level of your learning... you need to consider labbing. There will be challenges, but you can do it...don't be scared.
Great video, on point. Wonderful also seeing other YTers throwing in their two cents (tuppence for Jim).
I stumbled into this realm studying my A+ and wanting more hands-on experience. I’m now working through Network+ and have a pi-hole and pi-NAS in the closet, two laptops and two nucs (running Ubuntu, Win10 & Win11), and building my first cluster. Looking to explore proxmox and docker over the winter, with an eye on ansible. There are so many routes to pursue I feel like a kid in their first candy store. You and your fellow content makers are providing the vector and encouragement to explore, question and succeed. Thanks and happy Thanksgiving 🦃👍
I loved the thumbnail. It makes me feel happy.
Never called it "Home Labbing" but in the 90's I got my NT4 MCSE and A+ Certs by building a 10-computer network through my house (that my wife and kids used, to guarantee that it would have issues). It was connected to an early DSL line that hosted 3 websites, an eMail Server, and an FTP Server. I even had a server that I referred to as a Crash-n-Burn that was beat like a red headed stepchild...
I'm homelabing because I don't think Google,Amazon, etc. Has great intentions with my information
Spot on video!
I don't think EVERYONE is home labbing. I have 3 NAS, some VM's and a few cameras but I don't think that quite makes me a home labber. And, among my friends and acquaintances, I don't know anyone with anywhere close to this amount of computer gear. As to why anyone does it, I can only say for myself that as my eyes were opened with my first NAS with what it could do, natural curiosity took over and I kept doing more stuff with them. I'm still not sure if I should love you and your peers or hate you for all of the time and money that I've spent but the education and entertainment has been invaluable. Thank you all for that.
As soon as you have any virtualization stuff at home, you're home labbing. Nobody needs virtual servers to run anything that is essential at home in 2024.
@@Traumatree Well, technically my VM's are not servers, just Windows, Linux, and Home Assistant, but I get your point.
"Everyone" is like sayin 60% of the time it works all the time... 😂😂😂
@@V1N_574 Yeah, I get it. It's just a YT click bait word for the algo's like the "abandoned" x, y, or z that I just paid $10,000 for. It's the world we live in.
My current homelab project is a 2014 Mac Mini. Aka, the one you CANT upgrade normally. :)
I started homelabbing years ago out of necessity. Somehting about having to buy my package repos in CD box sets
Home labbing gives a lot of people the unfair advantage to create real job experience without officially being paid to do it. It's hard to imagine any one white collar jobs that can't do this. Network Engineering and software engineering of course aside, you can do this with SEO and PPC in digital marketing, you can do data analysis with the plethora of free data out there, you guys get the point. No degree is needed anymore to start.
3:52 what was that guy doing with his hand LOL
Unraid's ability to use multiple siz wed drives is what sold it for me. I had a couple 8tb, 10tb, and 12tb drives and it was really the only option
I love tech, but I get bored with how some tech has stagnated lately. So, I’ve jumped into the networking space & started using UniFi gear & love it. I’m learning a lot & having fun at the same time. My next project is smart home automation oh so much fun. 😂😂😂🎉🎉
My home lab started so I could begin learning how to use linux better, set up cool web projects, learn how to hack with Kali, and to see how active directory servers function with a wazuh SIEM. Granted all of this is virtualized on my gaming setup so it's more a proof of concept then actually on and churning. But it works! One day I hope to get the hardware to run a proxmox machine that can handle all the VMs I want to run and tinker with. That's my next setup and I already have a build theorycrafted for the task!
which home lab? The server racks? The electronics lab? The chemistry station? The industrial workshop? The garage? Some of us have several labs... It's a problem, but one that solves other problems
3:30 I can really relate to this. Happens to me a lot.
Thanks for justifying my insane hobby. Keep up the great work!
I used to have so many PCs running in the apartment over my garage, the cops raided it thinking I had a grow op. Nope, just a render farm
Because when we hit the casual/consumer product limits, next step is doing it ourselves. 👍
Homelabbing is a slippery slope to buying thousands of dollars of loud hot servers, this can cause your SO to evict you to the couch. Its also a great way to benchmark your wallet's bandwidth
Benchmark your wallet's bandwidth 😂😂😂
If its definition is as simple as self-hosting services useful to me, then my desktop computer is a "home lab".
I require more and more self-hosted services to compensate for features that have been formerly available in out-of-the-box solutions, but the software landscape changed to remove those features. Node js for example, just to be able to directly link to files (which used to be a feature at all cloud services and now it's gone), so the links can be resolved into actual displayables for the thumbnails of the new tab browser extension I use.
Little things like that all requiring their own solutions which ends up with you contemplating to put all of that on a separate low-powered device so your baseline 24/7 power consumption wouldn't be 203 Watts, so now I have a barebones i3-6100 mini ITX system on my shelf next to the ONT that I have yet to set up with proxmox, pfsense, ubuntu server, URL cleaning reverse proxy and pi hole as the end goal (along with the scripts I have on my desktop).
So many people confuse HomeLab with HomeProd, and thus it seems to have *way* more people than it actually does.
I now have my own frankenlab, mainly thanks you Raid Owl👍
i started building my homelab cause the settings on my isp router were very limited.
honestly there is almost too much information and options that it quickly gets confusing and overwhelming.
the hardest part, is understanding what software is right for your use case; setting it all up it's pretty easy with the amount of resources available
That's the thing about appliances, someone has did most of the hard work.
I am a bit disappointed that Wolfgang isn't in the ... gang.
But the guide is solid for beginners. Thank you.
Man you're right
Its fun! 🎉
Random guy justified my purchase. Haha and nice colab
I want to get into HomeLabbing, my problem is that I want a machine I can use to learn about networking (and also a NAS), but I also want a machine that can run GIS processing jobs. Which means I want a powerful machine. I know I should probably start with something small, like a Rasberry Pi or a 45Drives/45Homlab HL4/HL8, but I really want something more powerful.
I can't call my single home server a "homelab", but I was planning on having a media center PC to watch movies on when I've friends come by. Then I said "why don't I expand the use case for this PC since I also want to keep backups as well? One thing brought the other and basically my home server is now a backup/media center/nas/game server thing.
Only people missing are LevelOne tech, Network Chuck, Linus, and Craft computing.
A few days ago I saw a meme that said home labbing is cosplaying a sysadmin.
5:51 "...reuse laptops..." So many laptops flooding the planet right now
For me homelabbing is like playing my with my childhood LEGO without being AFOL. I just play with hardware lying around, then I put them back into the box. Except the OMV server, I just don't touch it, so I don't break it.
Heck, as far as windows goes, especially if you're homelabbing for education rather than just self hosting: My job uses almost exclusively Hyper-V clusters for their many many virtual machines.
I have an old HP computer with an Intel i3-2100, 8gb of DDR3-1333 and Quadro FX 580, I've considered making a media server out of it since it has a 1tb HDD that came with it, but I'll consider upgrading the PSU if the connectors allow it, get a PCIe to SATA adapter, get a GPU that can use PCIe x1 or x4 since I only have one PCIe x16 slot and possibly some HDDs for a NAS, but IDK if that's worth it or not, so I'll check for other solutions.
Homelab is an IT "lab" (generally in the home) where one learns to deploy, configure and run software, while breaking it without affecting production. Anyone who refers to a homelab as a place to run your jellyfin instance or your file share are actually talking about what I like to call "homeprod." People should use this term more often, to strictly separate labs from actual personal workloads.
Homeprod are production workloads at home that wouldn't have a high impact if they went down. Inconvenience? Sure, like your video library, file share, or home automation not working, but nothing one couldn't live without (browse the internet, use the actual light switches in your house instead etc.).
I call Bingo on all these homelaber guys - watching and subscribed to all of them! What price have I won? 😬🤪😇
1:00 I'm sure you'd get a lot of strange looks and maybe a few calls to the police wearing a tshirt out in public that has "homelab" written on it.
Probably at least 420 looks
Darn, and here I expected to find some LIL gems for home-automation to run on my Proxmox system.
as I have mainly lightweight programs like adguard, docker based containers, and a few more, A intel N100 based mini-PC is more than enough for me.
Almost spit up my drink when I saw Raid Owl's leg flash. lol
;)
Im so down for homelabbing soon! I need my intro with some given hardware.
Frankly speaking I just want a file sharing system that I can pull files from as needed, use them locally on my network, THEN be able to back, back up to my file server the end result of what projects I am working on, as a shared file to a couple other systems on my network!! Certainly some possible automation in the future or even security cam system would be nice, BUT my main focus is to NOT have to dig for the files I need, when I need them, which currently live on 30 or 40 back up drives stored on a shelf next to my desk!!
I am also fed up with having to download certain files I have already download 376 times in the past....like that song from TH-cam I "know I have some where"!! And with the holidays in full swing, I'd like to see my family photo album at times what company comes over at will!!! I tried my hand at building a TrueNAS box and it worked OK for about four days, until the power went out....then I could never get the thing to reboot again after that!!! SO I need an option that is NOT permanently on, and I can reboot easily like a shared Windows 10 system with a huge array living on it!! And why a huge array?????????????? I have over 30,000 songs in my MP3 library, and I constantly add more too it as I dig through my massive media collection!!! I am after all 60 years old, and have been collecting music since I was 12 years old in 1976!!! Then there are the home movies, family photos and the list goes on and on, of data I have made into digital format!!!
3:45 that girl really likes you head 😂😂
It’s an easy way to make use of your old unused systems.
Thanks.
😢 good to know I'm not a weirdo for taking an interest in this stuff
I’m to broke to home lab rn, I’m trying to get a job in IT, so I can play around and get a home lab
I was actually curious what it was... you didn't mention that option.
I blame TH-cam for my bad decisions. Paid more for my core switch than the server I recently bought for NAS/homecloud lol. Need to stop bring lazy and get to wiring my house finally and put my stuff in my rack
I run VMware Workstation 17 on my Windows laptop that run all my legacy software (e.g Windows Server, CRM, SharePoint, exchange, etc.) then RDP into that box
"Don't look away". Ha!
So I have been using Unraid for a bit. I like it overall but have had some issues with it. Recently DHCP just decided not to work and I had to go take it down, move it and connect it to a monitor to try and troubleshoot it. I turned off Ethernet Bonding and now it works fine. But because of this I am thinking that I am going to install Proxmox on my NVMe drives on the motherboard that I am not using right now and then run Unraid as a VM by passing the USB through to it.
I have 2 Unraid licenses. Not sure if I will ever need more than one but I hve the other if I want to use another computer as a backup to the main server.
Also, I want to move to Proxmox for Portainer and having multiple computers working as Nodes for my apps for redundancy.
Because even if you practice the theory of the ccna material employers need to know you can do stuff. So home lab so so you can be more employable by Tech
You're doing a fantastic job! Could you help me with something unrelated: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Some home lab from youtuber with a $5000 plus setup also with another $3000 network.
bruh that a whole IT department at that point.
It’s way more than $5000 bro
@@RaidOwl I am leaving💀
Adios
Good intro - maybe we'll gain some new enthusiasts! (Oh, and "Hi" to the "usual suspects"! Our super power is the community! And no, I don't have time to start my own TH-cam channel, so... But if you want to collab, we can talk.)
'Cause I've been watched videos in channels like this!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣I've just bought an HP POS used to make my home lab.
At 56yo, I want to learn TI and back to work.
That's my point.
At The Odin Project, at the moment.