Comment by immibis
Comment by immibis 8 hours ago
I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.
Comment by immibis 8 hours ago
I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.
LARPing as a sysadmin has a lot of benefits. It's taught me Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
Which are all pretty useful considering my day job is a software engineer.
Many of these things have been directly applicable at work, e.g. when something weird happens in AWS, or we have a project using obscure Docker features.
I don't personally have a homelab, but I think that (unlike a giant amp or SUV) the homelab lets you learn interesting skills that would be hard to learn otherwise. It seems more defensible to me.
I have a small setup that could be considered homelab-ish - a NAS, a server, Docker+Portainer running a variety of services including HomeAssistant, a Plex server, UPS with graceful shutdown, and other stuff. I agree it's educational, it certainly has been for me; but everything I run has a practical purpose.
People will build a huge multinode cluster in their basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby, but it's shaped like someone's actual job.
some people think it's not "homelabbing" unless you're doing things the way it's done at large scale. i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be a resume project.
but proxmox and kubernetes are overkill, imo, for most homelab setups. setting them up is a good learning experience but not necessarily an appropriate architecture for maintaining a few mini PCs in a closet long term.
you can ignore the gatekeeping.
Homelabbing is a hobby for most people involved in it, and like other hobbies, some people dip their toes in it while others go diving in the deep end. But would you say it’s “overkill” for a hobbyist fisher to have multiple fishing poles? Or for a hobbyist painter to try multiple sets of paintbrushes? Or a hobbyist programmer to know multiple programming languages?
There’s a lot of overlap between “I run a server to store my photos” and “I run a bunch of servers for fun”, which has resulted in annoying gatekeeping (or reverse gatekeeping) where people tell each other they are “doing it wrong”, but on Reddit at least it’s somewhat being self-organized into r/selfhosted and r/homelab, respectively.
> i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be a resume project.
It's funny. I did this (before it really became a more mainstream hobby, this was early 00s), but now that I work in ops I barely even want to touch a computer after work.
k8s is definitely an overkill if your goal is not learning k8s.
proxmox is great, though. It's worth running it even if you treat it as nothing more than a BMC.
Run whatever you like!
I personally enjoy the big machines (I've also always enjoyed meaninglessly large benchmark numbers on gaming hardware) and enterprise features, redundancy etc. (in other words, over-engineering).
I know others really enjoy playing with K8s, which is its own rabbit hole.
My main goal - apart from the truly useful core services - is to learn something new. Sometimes it's applicable to work (I am indeed an SWE larping as a sysadmin, as another commenter called out :-) ), sometimes it's not.
Where’d we get this term? I hear “home lab” and I think of having equipment to accomplish something new, not… running ordinary server software in fairly ordinary ways. Like Tony Stark designing his suits has a “home lab”. People 3D printing Warhammer figures or with a couple little servers running PiHole and Wireguard and such… not so much?
I’ve had one or two machines running serving stuff at home for a couple decades [edit: oh god, closer to 2.5 decades…], including serving public web sites for a while, and at no point would I have thought the term “home lab” was a good label for what I was doing.
Most “homelabs” are built by a developer LARPing as a sysadmin, with a user population of one (themselves) or zero for most of the features.
It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.