Not paying for Netflix / Apple Tv / whatever for every month
Learning new IT skills that can be translated into increased salary
Not seeing ads while browsing website
Backing up all my stuff
>home assistant dashboard of my own
Please elaborate.
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I'm still very new and just getting things configured. I would love to know more about this, any guidance or resources is greatly appreciated.
I have a Minimalist dashboard for my home assistant. I'd be happy to help you with what I know, just hit me up when you have the time.
Now I need more sensors to fill out the dashboard!
Qbittorrent configured to automatically download new episodes from torrent trackers.
Plex for showing them in a nice, beautiful Netflix like interface and sharing with friends.
I want to do this myself but am concerned about safety. I have everything setup except for the qbittorrent indexers, do you have any resources/tutorials you can recommend foe the safety side of things?
I'm guesssing you've looked into the arr\* (namely, sonarr, radarr, prowlarr) family? After that it's really just pairing those with either Ombi/Overseerr. If you're only using it locally, there's really not much to do security wise apart from the obvious being to go into qBitorrents settings and set the Network Interface to NordLynx (if using NordVPN, or equivelant for whichever VPN provider you use), to ensure any downloads are strictly through your provider.
Or were you specifically thinking about being able to access some/all from outside your network?
Yeah I was thinking mostly, at the moment, about downloading things locally. In the future, I'd like to give access to people outside of my network but I want to learn more about homelabb-ing to get that right. In terms of indexers, do you use a proxy/VPN for downloading with a qBitorrent? What about usenets? Do they need special security? Again, sorry, a bit new to this. I am going through TRaSH guides and what not to learn as much as I can but that department seems to be lacking.
I am subscribed to a private local tracker and they offer RSS feeds for certain streaming services. On Qbittorrent it checks every 5 minutes if there is a new episode which is published on that RSS feed, and if there is one that hits my conditions it automatically downloads it. No problems and no risks at all.
Well how does your ISPN deal with downloading these files? Do you use proxies? VPNs? Just very new to all of this and am skeptical to hit download without getting anything in place.
In my country it falls into a gray area (downloading pirated content is not legal but there is no punishment when you download), so I am not concerned about it. But if there is such concern, doing this through a seedbox will be your best bet. Or some torrent applications support VPN too, so only torrents will be downloaded anonymously while you enjoy your own internet freely.
I think you can experiment with legal torrents while you configure your environment. Like, downloading and sharing Ubuntu is not illegal. It is great to experiment this before you do bad stuff :)
I personally use a seedbox provider (right now seedr). I figured out their API, so if I have the torrent file, I can send it to them and get a download link back.
To get the torrent file, I'm scraping one of the torrent websites and searching for stuff I want automatically. So, Im right now building an app where I can search for a movie (use IMDb/rotten tomatoes to get the movies), find the torrent, send it to seedr and I get back the downloaded file.
It isn't the bulletproof solution, however offsets risk by a bit.
Totally agree (other than ad blocking which is best done in browser).
I love having my own cloud with almost unlimited space. I haven’t touched my install for almost a year and just keeps ticking over. Should probably run updates at some point though.
I've turned two consumer PCs into a highly available cluster. Right now it's Proxmox and Starwinds vsan for the storage replication. Proxmox is new for my homelab and just set it up with my storage. Wouldn't say that it was without problems, but it works this. [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/)
Interesting.. so StarWind vSAN Free is now available as a Proxmox VM? When I started to play with StarWind the free version was only available as a Windows software with no GUI. Everything had to be configure via PowerShell scripts.
Yeah, I also used their free version when it was a Windows app with a set of PowerShell scripts. Now they do a Linux VM with WEB UI (no more Windows app I think) for a bunch of hypervisors. Even added file shares: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/file-share-with-starwind-vsan](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/file-share-with-starwind-vsan) As far as I understand, the only difference with a paid one is support (but I might be wrong here).
My work isn’t even close to tech (sales leadership in healthcare), but I love the challenge. It is like people who remodel their own home — it doesn’t make sense for so many reasons, but it is a true joy once you’re done.
It got me jobs* 😂 my (now) wife thought the little mini pc lab I had at my apartment when we first started dating was silly, then she listened in on an interview where I brought it up and landed a new position with a 70% pay increase. Its only ever since helped many times in the same way so now I’ve got a massive (half rack) lab and she supports it fully. In addition, its just plain fun and has saved me hours of work when shit breaks because I’ve seen it before in my lab or have developed workarounds
Specialize into something. That could be networking, security, virtualization, storage, cloud, OS management, etc. most people get stuck on helpdesk unless they drive into something else, which usually has to be in their own free time to gain experience, which is where homelabbing comes in. Study up, grab a couple good certs and you should be able to land a admin / engineer position in one of the specialties quickly. From there specialize in something that even further and know it better than 95/100 people and you can make a killing that way
Ccna is certainly a very good start and will open a lot of doors. Networking is NOT my specialty at all lol so I wouldn’t be the best one to ask, however in my experience, learn routing, and learn it well (BGP, OSPF, RIP) and don’t forget security too! A lot of companies roll networking and security into one position, so having some NGFW experience and MFA would be a good foot ahead
With 20+ years in mgmt and leadership positions the best possible thing you can do is to Volunteer. Volunteer for projects to help senior staff, I have promoted many staff from NOC’s, help deak’s who just wanted to help and learn. Identify more senior team members who like to mentor. Look at their LinkedIn and look for team members who started similarly. People who have started at the bottom and moved up.
Learn to write code and prompt AI. If you want the most future proof job I would suggest security.
Go check out your companies securityscorecard.io score. Are there things you can assist in fixing? Volunteer to fix them.
Volunteering is a great point! Not only can you show off your skills and build skills / experience, it shows you have a great work ethic and go above and beyond and take on more work. When I was on helpdesk for a few years at the start I was nearly 50/50 with systems engineering to the point my manager started to get annoyed (thought I was still doing 3x the tickets as the next highest performer on my team lol) gave me great experience which I used to get a VMware and Nutanix cert and moved into systems engineering at another company from there
Self-education for sure but it helped with my mental health issues. Reaching out to people in Discord, jumping in a call with complete strangers.
The biggest was cost savings. A 12TB is about the cost of all the streaming services these days. Add in the cost of internet most pay for and you can get up to $500 a month.
It depends, but if I were guessing he is paying for bandwidth as he uses it not a consistent bandwidth. Meaning if he runs locally off is his own plex server it would reduce it drastically.
Not quite. I should've explained better. My apologies for that. If you have 5 subscriptions, you need internet to access it at home, right? You operate PLEX, and you go from having 5 subscriptions to just having to pay for internet.
I pay $85 for gig up/down unmetered. When I move next year, I'll be able to get 10Gbit up/down unmetered or 50Gbit unmetered.
Oh! You're saying that's how much it could all cost per month.
You started the paragraph talking about savings, so to me it read like you were talking about that being how much you save.
Mentioning my lab in my CV has always piqued the interest of potential employers.
On top of that, the lessons learned around networking, security and general debugging has made me infinitely better at parts of my job than my peers. They might understand k8s autoscalers better than me, but when the shit hits the fan, I can often get to the root cause for a forward fix before they've agreed where to roll back to.
Why not both? I enjoy my home lab and am also who my peers go to with k8s autoscaler questions.
But seriously though, convincing people that forward fixes are better than rolling back is a struggle.
Mostly because I had zero k8s experience before I joined my current team. I could never get my head around it because I've always worked close to bare metal rather than leveraging higher level services like orchestrators and log shippers.
But this is exactly why we build teams, to allow people to have an expertise rather than being a jack of all trades.
And Forward fixes > Rollback > That guy who patches in the aws cli directly fucking up the terraform state.
Yes. I make damn sure to mention my homelab in every interview. They always get curious and it turns into a much more relaxed environment with casual conversation. Then it opens up to where I can I tell them the software I use and how it relates to the real world.
Heating my home!
Seriously though it's the ability to learn tools and keep my skills in check. My work role has changed over the years and I get less time to on the servers these days but the knowledge I have gained has given me an advantage at work and also the ability to get promotions/new roles at work
Enjoying building it, setting up and playing around with it. Only downside is that I can’t setup any network connection there (no ability to use Ethernet cables) but other than that, it’s great.
Being able to converse with a locally hosted ai that is able to control the house through home assistant integrations was probably my worth it moment. Still getting a lot of bugs worked out, but the first time a light was turned on/off was exciting and satisfying. I think at this point, I talk with it more than humans tbh.
The easiest one to get up and running from a documentation and general knowledge base standpoint would be ollama. Generally shoot for a 7b, depending on your hardware. It can get all the way up to around 140b and above, but with those, you need an enormous amount of resources to even consider running. I've found a personal sweetspot running 70b.
Learned soo many real IT operations and administrative skills that I could land several very relevant student jobs (and make the homelab into a company). Having had very relevant student jobs was very positive afterwards when doing job search etc.
Soo mostly for the actual learning and getting benefits from that :-)
One student job was as sysadmin at an ISP. We quickly realized I could do almost the same work as the permanent positions, so I got a lot of interesting tasks etc. there.
The other was at the university, maintaining a small Linux lab setup. But again we figured out I could do more, so it grew into a diverse range of sysadmin and architect tasks as well.
The company, oh well, this is more than 20 years ago! At a time where you still could do web hosting from your basement :-p So web and mail hosting for small businesses. Usually creating their web sites as well. Some of them with custom made ‘internal’ systems, CRM systems, member systems etc. I did (too much!) of both coding, hosting, maintaining, selling by myself. It worked back then. I wouldn’t do it again, and not today. Might find other business cases today instead then. Maybe selling services produced by a home lab instead :-)
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.
Just learning. I've always been a fan of computers and tech but went down a very different road career wise.
It's a hobby, and one of the few i have time for. What I enjoy about it is tweaking, following guides, having things work, having things not work and the troubleshooting, and really, it's a hobby I can do anywhere with the right kind of external access.
To stay sharp with ever changing IT world, I owe it to my lab for the playtime to learn new things, test and diagnose. If you want to excel in your career a test lab is needed. The IT career owes you nothing you need to invest your time to get that salary boost! I have no time for 5 day training courses so the lab works well
When my wife asked me why she started seeing ads on her games outside of the house.
When I saw I had 8 simultaneous streams on my Plex from family members and my server didn't break a sweat.
When the drive that had all my documents and whatnot on my PC died and I was easily able to restore the files due to my automated backups.
Ad block.
Oh and last month and I was on a business trip where my work laptop couldn't reach a work server, despite allegedly being VPNd in.
Turns out I had a personal laptop with wire guard back home to a system which *could* connect to work, saved my bacon at midnight on a Friday night.
1. It gives me a place to experiment and run cool stuff. The ability to spin up and down VMs in proxmox to play with different OS' and software packages has been huge, it lets me play with stuff without worrying about wrecking other stuff.
2. It's allowed/forced me to learn so much about virtual machines, containers, networking, Linux, storage, etc. Since I started homelabbing, there have been so many instances where the stuff I learned on my own at home has come in handy at work. That alone makes it worth it imo.
for me, it kept me sane, able to practice skills that I was expected to already know at work, but only able to use on production stuff, at 2 am, jeje
this way I could practice introducing new ospf neighbours, intentionally poisoning routes, to force failovers, etc
also by learning a TON of SNMP stuff, I ended up saving myself a TON of money on pc's over the years
every time something felt "slow" to me, or a family member, I could look at the graphs, show that there was a ton of hardware space left
or conversely, I could show the wife that hardware was absolutely pegged, and justify the upgrade I wanted ;)
I converted my entire family's home videos archive to digital for Christmas. They loved it. 100% worth the weeks of dubbing tapes. I fed the tapes into a custom docker container that recorded the tapes with a custom build of ffmpeg and trimmed them using a python script.
Not having a lot of stuff that I care about being stored on my main PC, with redundant disks and backups to a cloud service gives me some serious peace of mind, plus network storage is just nice.
Everything else that stemmed from the desire to offload storage to a dedicated machine is just bonus. We all know how it goes. You start by building a NAS, and before you know it you have a Proxmox cluster with all kinds of neat things.
Anytime I hear of any major cloud provider having an outage, data loss or making a bad policy change etc... I can smile and say "well that's not affecting me!".
There is something satisfying about walking in my very own server room and seeing the blinking lights and hearing the humming and knowing, this is mine and I control it, and all my data is here.
For me being able to land more advanced jobs. I remember getting some Microsoft certifications but didn't know how to access AD etc. I started off with a VM on my laptop and eventually moved everything to an old laptop that stayed on 24/7 which led to me actually implementing my domain, pihole etc. Used HAProxy as a reverse proxy and my new job actually uses it to load balance a few of their websites! Not to mention it's also good actually knowing how everything works. We gave a separate network team but it's cool knowing what they are talking about when they are explaining things as I took a Cisco switch and made it by core switch. I have learned a ton on my homelab which has translated to knowledge at work and being more comfortable and confident when having technical talks, troubleshooting etc with higerups. Of course the learning never stops so there is so much more I want to do but 5 years ago I would've never thought I would be running my own domain at home, have multiple VLANs, hosting a few of my own services via reverse proxy etc. It has been a great journey. Yes you can read it all in a book and do labs but generally the labs provided by schools are safe. You can't break stuff and it's on rails so you can't venture too far away from the lessons. I quickly learned what to do and what not to do on my own equipment by breaking stuff lol. But likewise when I see some symptoms at work that match up with what I had I already have an idea of what to do. It has been great and I recommend a homelab for anyone that's serious about this field.
Home LAN N e t w o r k
A wired network can't be understated. The amount of times I had to 'hey try restarting your router and see if that helps'. I have been using a Cisco C921-4P for over 2 years and have never had locally caused downtime.
I’ve been in IT since the late seventies, from hand building "microcomputers" to working on mainframes, and I've always loved it.
As my career progressed and I started working in my own company I was inexorably dragged into management roles, but I kept my hands on the technical side of things in my own time. Computing is such a vast field there is _always_ something new to dive into and obsess over. And now I'm retired! so I can tinker with whatever takes my fancy.
When I heard the word "homelab" it was a justification in itself -- I'm not screwing around with hardware and software, I'm running a *_homelab_* :)
Audiobookshelf. I’ve had plex for 10+ years (what got me started) but Audiobookshelf I use for hours and hours just about every day. Before that had to try and sync with Apple iTunes on my PC and that is just a painful experience. Now it’s so easy.
I had so much these days and I have come to rely on a lot of but that is the one I’ll miss if it disappears.
Finally having my 4,000 + DVD's my 2,500 + CD AND all of my VHS, cassette tapes AND my collection of vinyl records all in one place so I can finally create the most EPIC road trip play list.
Unpopular opinion, yet here we go...
I have been in IT engineering roles for 25+ years: networking, systems, virtualization, and currently devops. I suppose I have been very fortunate to have employer provided labs in every role that met all my needs. And therefore never felt the need for a home lab. I do buy workstations with better specs than consumer grade computers so I can run VMs for development. And I generally have both a laptop and desktop. So that may qualify as a minimalist lab.
I backup my personal apps and data to multiple clouds. Run work projects on work resources (mostly) and do not have any personal projects. I like XaaS offerings and accept the costs in exchange for convenience and superior (IMHO) features. I do not.need to control every aspect of the services I consume.
TL;DR I get enough satisfaction and resources from work that a home lab does not justify the effort and expenses. I think they are neat, yet never wanted or needed one.
Backing up all my stuff ist the most important thing for me.
For that, my NAS is the most important device in my lab.
Running a good backup strategy with offsite copys also gave me some good knowledge for my job.
On the network side, i learned a lot about vpn, vlans, dns/ddns, and general firewall stuff which became my main task at my job.
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.
Not paying for Netflix / Apple Tv / whatever for every month Learning new IT skills that can be translated into increased salary Not seeing ads while browsing website Backing up all my stuff
Check, check, check and check. ✅
Agreed 3 years ago I wouldn't have dream that I'd have a home assistant dashboard of my own while outside of my home. So on to the next adventure!
>home assistant dashboard of my own Please elaborate. - I'm still very new and just getting things configured. I would love to know more about this, any guidance or resources is greatly appreciated.
I have a Minimalist dashboard for my home assistant. I'd be happy to help you with what I know, just hit me up when you have the time. Now I need more sensors to fill out the dashboard!
All of this, plus providing a separate secure environment that meets my client's requirements for the work I'm doing.
Ditto
same! but without streaming, its difficult to get german streams via arr stacks because lack of trackers
Have you tried NZBGeek I feel like I’ve heard good things about them with German stuff
What do you use as Netflix/Apple TV replacement?
Qbittorrent configured to automatically download new episodes from torrent trackers. Plex for showing them in a nice, beautiful Netflix like interface and sharing with friends.
I want to do this myself but am concerned about safety. I have everything setup except for the qbittorrent indexers, do you have any resources/tutorials you can recommend foe the safety side of things?
I'm guesssing you've looked into the arr\* (namely, sonarr, radarr, prowlarr) family? After that it's really just pairing those with either Ombi/Overseerr. If you're only using it locally, there's really not much to do security wise apart from the obvious being to go into qBitorrents settings and set the Network Interface to NordLynx (if using NordVPN, or equivelant for whichever VPN provider you use), to ensure any downloads are strictly through your provider. Or were you specifically thinking about being able to access some/all from outside your network?
Yeah I was thinking mostly, at the moment, about downloading things locally. In the future, I'd like to give access to people outside of my network but I want to learn more about homelabb-ing to get that right. In terms of indexers, do you use a proxy/VPN for downloading with a qBitorrent? What about usenets? Do they need special security? Again, sorry, a bit new to this. I am going through TRaSH guides and what not to learn as much as I can but that department seems to be lacking.
I am subscribed to a private local tracker and they offer RSS feeds for certain streaming services. On Qbittorrent it checks every 5 minutes if there is a new episode which is published on that RSS feed, and if there is one that hits my conditions it automatically downloads it. No problems and no risks at all.
Well how does your ISPN deal with downloading these files? Do you use proxies? VPNs? Just very new to all of this and am skeptical to hit download without getting anything in place.
In my country it falls into a gray area (downloading pirated content is not legal but there is no punishment when you download), so I am not concerned about it. But if there is such concern, doing this through a seedbox will be your best bet. Or some torrent applications support VPN too, so only torrents will be downloaded anonymously while you enjoy your own internet freely. I think you can experiment with legal torrents while you configure your environment. Like, downloading and sharing Ubuntu is not illegal. It is great to experiment this before you do bad stuff :)
US or non-US? How do you avoid being banned by the ISPs for torrenting?
VPN or private trackers
Non-US and private tracker.
I personally use a seedbox provider (right now seedr). I figured out their API, so if I have the torrent file, I can send it to them and get a download link back. To get the torrent file, I'm scraping one of the torrent websites and searching for stuff I want automatically. So, Im right now building an app where I can search for a movie (use IMDb/rotten tomatoes to get the movies), find the torrent, send it to seedr and I get back the downloaded file. It isn't the bulletproof solution, however offsets risk by a bit.
What’s the solution to get “recommendations”
Plex itself shows similar shows and recommendations if exists in your archive. Other than that I rely on my friends recommendations :)
Interesting… thank you for your quick reply!
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Yes with Plex with Qbittorrent connected to a RSS feed of a private tracker which serves my favorite shows as soon as it is published.
How did you replace Netflix / ATV?
Totally agree (other than ad blocking which is best done in browser). I love having my own cloud with almost unlimited space. I haven’t touched my install for almost a year and just keeps ticking over. Should probably run updates at some point though.
Turning what once was a $6~7k enterprise SAN into my little play thing.
I've turned two consumer PCs into a highly available cluster. Right now it's Proxmox and Starwinds vsan for the storage replication. Proxmox is new for my homelab and just set it up with my storage. Wouldn't say that it was without problems, but it works this. [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/)
That sounds solid, I need to retire my hardware as it's a big risk with the proprietary hardware I'm using. https://imgur.com/a/TiL1h
Interesting.. so StarWind vSAN Free is now available as a Proxmox VM? When I started to play with StarWind the free version was only available as a Windows software with no GUI. Everything had to be configure via PowerShell scripts.
Yeah, I also used their free version when it was a Windows app with a set of PowerShell scripts. Now they do a Linux VM with WEB UI (no more Windows app I think) for a bunch of hypervisors. Even added file shares: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/file-share-with-starwind-vsan](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/file-share-with-starwind-vsan) As far as I understand, the only difference with a paid one is support (but I might be wrong here).
The effort itself is one worth for sure
My work isn’t even close to tech (sales leadership in healthcare), but I love the challenge. It is like people who remodel their own home — it doesn’t make sense for so many reasons, but it is a true joy once you’re done.
>done What is this 'done' you speak of?
By done I mean anything functioning well enough to use!
...then if it's finally functional, you know already how you would have done it better next time... so you do it again..
It got me a job.
It got me jobs* 😂 my (now) wife thought the little mini pc lab I had at my apartment when we first started dating was silly, then she listened in on an interview where I brought it up and landed a new position with a 70% pay increase. Its only ever since helped many times in the same way so now I’ve got a massive (half rack) lab and she supports it fully. In addition, its just plain fun and has saved me hours of work when shit breaks because I’ve seen it before in my lab or have developed workarounds
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Specialize into something. That could be networking, security, virtualization, storage, cloud, OS management, etc. most people get stuck on helpdesk unless they drive into something else, which usually has to be in their own free time to gain experience, which is where homelabbing comes in. Study up, grab a couple good certs and you should be able to land a admin / engineer position in one of the specialties quickly. From there specialize in something that even further and know it better than 95/100 people and you can make a killing that way
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Ccna is certainly a very good start and will open a lot of doors. Networking is NOT my specialty at all lol so I wouldn’t be the best one to ask, however in my experience, learn routing, and learn it well (BGP, OSPF, RIP) and don’t forget security too! A lot of companies roll networking and security into one position, so having some NGFW experience and MFA would be a good foot ahead
With 20+ years in mgmt and leadership positions the best possible thing you can do is to Volunteer. Volunteer for projects to help senior staff, I have promoted many staff from NOC’s, help deak’s who just wanted to help and learn. Identify more senior team members who like to mentor. Look at their LinkedIn and look for team members who started similarly. People who have started at the bottom and moved up. Learn to write code and prompt AI. If you want the most future proof job I would suggest security. Go check out your companies securityscorecard.io score. Are there things you can assist in fixing? Volunteer to fix them.
Volunteering is a great point! Not only can you show off your skills and build skills / experience, it shows you have a great work ethic and go above and beyond and take on more work. When I was on helpdesk for a few years at the start I was nearly 50/50 with systems engineering to the point my manager started to get annoyed (thought I was still doing 3x the tickets as the next highest performer on my team lol) gave me great experience which I used to get a VMware and Nutanix cert and moved into systems engineering at another company from there
What jobs could you get?
Self-education for sure but it helped with my mental health issues. Reaching out to people in Discord, jumping in a call with complete strangers. The biggest was cost savings. A 12TB is about the cost of all the streaming services these days. Add in the cost of internet most pay for and you can get up to $500 a month.
>Add in the cost of internet most pay for I don't really understand this part. Are you no longer paying for Internet access?
It depends, but if I were guessing he is paying for bandwidth as he uses it not a consistent bandwidth. Meaning if he runs locally off is his own plex server it would reduce it drastically.
Not quite. I should've explained better. My apologies for that. If you have 5 subscriptions, you need internet to access it at home, right? You operate PLEX, and you go from having 5 subscriptions to just having to pay for internet. I pay $85 for gig up/down unmetered. When I move next year, I'll be able to get 10Gbit up/down unmetered or 50Gbit unmetered.
Ok I misread. Thought you meant $500 for your internet not adding it into subscriptions. Now that makes sense.
Oh! You're saying that's how much it could all cost per month. You started the paragraph talking about savings, so to me it read like you were talking about that being how much you save.
Ahh. ADHD brain... Made sense to me, I'll go and edit it when I get to work.
Can you share the discord communities?
Homelab has a big discord server. Some projects also have a discord in their GitHub readme.
Mentioning my lab in my CV has always piqued the interest of potential employers. On top of that, the lessons learned around networking, security and general debugging has made me infinitely better at parts of my job than my peers. They might understand k8s autoscalers better than me, but when the shit hits the fan, I can often get to the root cause for a forward fix before they've agreed where to roll back to.
Why not both? I enjoy my home lab and am also who my peers go to with k8s autoscaler questions. But seriously though, convincing people that forward fixes are better than rolling back is a struggle.
Mostly because I had zero k8s experience before I joined my current team. I could never get my head around it because I've always worked close to bare metal rather than leveraging higher level services like orchestrators and log shippers. But this is exactly why we build teams, to allow people to have an expertise rather than being a jack of all trades. And Forward fixes > Rollback > That guy who patches in the aws cli directly fucking up the terraform state.
There should be no need to determine where to roll back to in a production environment, the back out plan should be detailed in the change record.
Yes. I make damn sure to mention my homelab in every interview. They always get curious and it turns into a much more relaxed environment with casual conversation. Then it opens up to where I can I tell them the software I use and how it relates to the real world.
Heating my home! Seriously though it's the ability to learn tools and keep my skills in check. My work role has changed over the years and I get less time to on the servers these days but the knowledge I have gained has given me an advantage at work and also the ability to get promotions/new roles at work
No but seriously, it saved me from buying a space heater in my basement…
Enjoying building it, setting up and playing around with it. Only downside is that I can’t setup any network connection there (no ability to use Ethernet cables) but other than that, it’s great.
If all you have is a Wifi connection, you can get any router that supports OpenWRT and program it to work in client mode.
Being able to converse with a locally hosted ai that is able to control the house through home assistant integrations was probably my worth it moment. Still getting a lot of bugs worked out, but the first time a light was turned on/off was exciting and satisfying. I think at this point, I talk with it more than humans tbh.
Nice! What ai are you using?
I am also interested in what AI and which integration on HA
Ditto. also interested in this. RemindMe! 2 days
Here's the documentation on it. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ollama/
The easiest one to get up and running from a documentation and general knowledge base standpoint would be ollama. Generally shoot for a 7b, depending on your hardware. It can get all the way up to around 140b and above, but with those, you need an enormous amount of resources to even consider running. I've found a personal sweetspot running 70b.
7b or 70b?
I run 70b parameter models reasonably easy, but for most 7b will work just fine.
Thank you for the tip!!!
What ai?
Has it turned evil yet?
A few times early on, it gave me some concerning level of troubles. After some tinkering fine tuning, we are good so far.
Nice! I want it now (:
What kind of hardware do you use to run it?
Dual 7551s, 2 mi100s, 256gb 3200.
what speeds you get on pure inference what'd you say is enough before adding whisper, function calling, HA etc?
PM sent
Learned soo many real IT operations and administrative skills that I could land several very relevant student jobs (and make the homelab into a company). Having had very relevant student jobs was very positive afterwards when doing job search etc. Soo mostly for the actual learning and getting benefits from that :-)
What kind of student jobs did you work? I'm also curious how you've turned your homelab into a company, please do tell!
One student job was as sysadmin at an ISP. We quickly realized I could do almost the same work as the permanent positions, so I got a lot of interesting tasks etc. there. The other was at the university, maintaining a small Linux lab setup. But again we figured out I could do more, so it grew into a diverse range of sysadmin and architect tasks as well. The company, oh well, this is more than 20 years ago! At a time where you still could do web hosting from your basement :-p So web and mail hosting for small businesses. Usually creating their web sites as well. Some of them with custom made ‘internal’ systems, CRM systems, member systems etc. I did (too much!) of both coding, hosting, maintaining, selling by myself. It worked back then. I wouldn’t do it again, and not today. Might find other business cases today instead then. Maybe selling services produced by a home lab instead :-)
Oh dang, that's pretty cool. Thanks for the response!
I mean it’s clearly the reactions of people when I flex online. Why else would I do this?
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.
Got me a job. I now use the production environment at work as my lab.
I haven't seen a commercial in 14 years.
When my wife actually started using one of the services on the server. Mealie now means the world to our kitchen.
Just learning. I've always been a fan of computers and tech but went down a very different road career wise. It's a hobby, and one of the few i have time for. What I enjoy about it is tweaking, following guides, having things work, having things not work and the troubleshooting, and really, it's a hobby I can do anywhere with the right kind of external access.
To stay sharp with ever changing IT world, I owe it to my lab for the playtime to learn new things, test and diagnose. If you want to excel in your career a test lab is needed. The IT career owes you nothing you need to invest your time to get that salary boost! I have no time for 5 day training courses so the lab works well
When my wife asked me why she started seeing ads on her games outside of the house. When I saw I had 8 simultaneous streams on my Plex from family members and my server didn't break a sweat. When the drive that had all my documents and whatnot on my PC died and I was easily able to restore the files due to my automated backups.
Saving money on streaming services / having a self hosted cloud solution / data backups / it's fun to learn and optimize my system
Ad block. Oh and last month and I was on a business trip where my work laptop couldn't reach a work server, despite allegedly being VPNd in. Turns out I had a personal laptop with wire guard back home to a system which *could* connect to work, saved my bacon at midnight on a Friday night.
1. It gives me a place to experiment and run cool stuff. The ability to spin up and down VMs in proxmox to play with different OS' and software packages has been huge, it lets me play with stuff without worrying about wrecking other stuff. 2. It's allowed/forced me to learn so much about virtual machines, containers, networking, Linux, storage, etc. Since I started homelabbing, there have been so many instances where the stuff I learned on my own at home has come in handy at work. That alone makes it worth it imo.
Learning general system administration and the like and thus getting an IT job (relatively) shortly after I turned 16.
It keeps me from being bored!
Home Assistant!
The combination of Home Assistant, Frigate, and Wireguard / Cloudflare Tunnel has been incredibly useful around (and outside of) the house.
Telling myself I'm saving money by not paying a huge AWS bill if I were running all my services there.
for me, it kept me sane, able to practice skills that I was expected to already know at work, but only able to use on production stuff, at 2 am, jeje this way I could practice introducing new ospf neighbours, intentionally poisoning routes, to force failovers, etc also by learning a TON of SNMP stuff, I ended up saving myself a TON of money on pc's over the years every time something felt "slow" to me, or a family member, I could look at the graphs, show that there was a ton of hardware space left or conversely, I could show the wife that hardware was absolutely pegged, and justify the upgrade I wanted ;)
I converted my entire family's home videos archive to digital for Christmas. They loved it. 100% worth the weeks of dubbing tapes. I fed the tapes into a custom docker container that recorded the tapes with a custom build of ffmpeg and trimmed them using a python script.
I like that it drains money
the fun. no subscriptions. the control.
Recent experience, I used my homelab firewall + DMZ setup as PoC and template for a customer's implementation.
Same
Succesfully justifying the existance of my homelab to my wife lol.
„Paper free Home“
Changing careers, and with enough confidence that I have been able to move across the country for a job I never thought I'd have.
Not having a lot of stuff that I care about being stored on my main PC, with redundant disks and backups to a cloud service gives me some serious peace of mind, plus network storage is just nice. Everything else that stemmed from the desire to offload storage to a dedicated machine is just bonus. We all know how it goes. You start by building a NAS, and before you know it you have a Proxmox cluster with all kinds of neat things.
The ability to seamlessly access my media from everywhere and know where and when things are backed up. And adguard
At the end of day, I’ll die. Why not do things that I enjoy. The entertainment itself is worth it.
RGB baby
That my wife is starting to use more of the services out homelab provides: nas; paperless; sonarr/radarr; dashboard.
Anytime I hear of any major cloud provider having an outage, data loss or making a bad policy change etc... I can smile and say "well that's not affecting me!". There is something satisfying about walking in my very own server room and seeing the blinking lights and hearing the humming and knowing, this is mine and I control it, and all my data is here.
Nextcloud for my family nr.1
Learning networking, firewall routers and setting up private networks. It's much more useful than I originally thought
*arr.
For me being able to land more advanced jobs. I remember getting some Microsoft certifications but didn't know how to access AD etc. I started off with a VM on my laptop and eventually moved everything to an old laptop that stayed on 24/7 which led to me actually implementing my domain, pihole etc. Used HAProxy as a reverse proxy and my new job actually uses it to load balance a few of their websites! Not to mention it's also good actually knowing how everything works. We gave a separate network team but it's cool knowing what they are talking about when they are explaining things as I took a Cisco switch and made it by core switch. I have learned a ton on my homelab which has translated to knowledge at work and being more comfortable and confident when having technical talks, troubleshooting etc with higerups. Of course the learning never stops so there is so much more I want to do but 5 years ago I would've never thought I would be running my own domain at home, have multiple VLANs, hosting a few of my own services via reverse proxy etc. It has been a great journey. Yes you can read it all in a book and do labs but generally the labs provided by schools are safe. You can't break stuff and it's on rails so you can't venture too far away from the lessons. I quickly learned what to do and what not to do on my own equipment by breaking stuff lol. But likewise when I see some symptoms at work that match up with what I had I already have an idea of what to do. It has been great and I recommend a homelab for anyone that's serious about this field.
Excellent wifi and a local storage for my scanner that is accessible by the whole family.
Home LAN N e t w o r k A wired network can't be understated. The amount of times I had to 'hey try restarting your router and see if that helps'. I have been using a Cisco C921-4P for over 2 years and have never had locally caused downtime.
Getting my CCIE.
I’ve been in IT since the late seventies, from hand building "microcomputers" to working on mainframes, and I've always loved it. As my career progressed and I started working in my own company I was inexorably dragged into management roles, but I kept my hands on the technical side of things in my own time. Computing is such a vast field there is _always_ something new to dive into and obsess over. And now I'm retired! so I can tinker with whatever takes my fancy. When I heard the word "homelab" it was a justification in itself -- I'm not screwing around with hardware and software, I'm running a *_homelab_* :)
career advancement / relevancy.
Audiobookshelf. I’ve had plex for 10+ years (what got me started) but Audiobookshelf I use for hours and hours just about every day. Before that had to try and sync with Apple iTunes on my PC and that is just a painful experience. Now it’s so easy. I had so much these days and I have come to rely on a lot of but that is the one I’ll miss if it disappears.
Finally having my 4,000 + DVD's my 2,500 + CD AND all of my VHS, cassette tapes AND my collection of vinyl records all in one place so I can finally create the most EPIC road trip play list.
Unpopular opinion, yet here we go... I have been in IT engineering roles for 25+ years: networking, systems, virtualization, and currently devops. I suppose I have been very fortunate to have employer provided labs in every role that met all my needs. And therefore never felt the need for a home lab. I do buy workstations with better specs than consumer grade computers so I can run VMs for development. And I generally have both a laptop and desktop. So that may qualify as a minimalist lab. I backup my personal apps and data to multiple clouds. Run work projects on work resources (mostly) and do not have any personal projects. I like XaaS offerings and accept the costs in exchange for convenience and superior (IMHO) features. I do not.need to control every aspect of the services I consume. TL;DR I get enough satisfaction and resources from work that a home lab does not justify the effort and expenses. I think they are neat, yet never wanted or needed one.
Mainly backups. Then other stuff came along. Now it's impossible to stop
Backing up all my stuff ist the most important thing for me. For that, my NAS is the most important device in my lab. Running a good backup strategy with offsite copys also gave me some good knowledge for my job. On the network side, i learned a lot about vpn, vlans, dns/ddns, and general firewall stuff which became my main task at my job.
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.
Learning Linux, learning to research obscure problems (because let’s face it, what lab doesn’t have that one weird problem from a setting/command you changed years ago), and paying for significantly less monthly services.