Until recently, and for well over the past decade, my wife and I have been nomads. Moving from the Caribbean to Miami, New York, Las Vegas, Vancouver, and now back home. This has meant that for many of those years, my home office basically comprised of a few laptops and screens. These days, we are… continue reading.
How much would this typically cost to do it on the cheap end of things? I think most items can be sourced on Amazon or eBay these days. Could be a fun summer project for myself.
Thanks! It really depends. As per the article: see the subheading “To replace or not to replace: ISP Cable Modem”. It can be anywhere from $50 or $5000 it all depends on where you want to start and finish.
Very nice setup. I set a basic one up during the refurb of the house so it’s ok but didn’t get time to really think it through. Thanks for the ideas here.
But that keyboard. Love it. Giving me serious Wargames vibes. What’s the brand, please?
How much compute and storage do you have? And what are you running within those 150 servers? I’m starting out with extra PC components before I go down the rack-mountable route. Looking to have a CNCF lab.
Hi Jake! Welcome to the forums. Storage, not so much I believe ~ 3TB total. Those thinkcenter minis are nice but dated. @unixdude recently got a newer model. I’m on mobile but will link to his thread when I get back. Also @Ben words on a bit more stuff closer to what you describe.
Jake, for myself, I have about 40TB total, on 3 NASes at 2 locations – I guess this makes me a data hoarder. About 20TB of that is on the primary NAS (DS1821+), about 10TB on the local backup NAS (DS1618+), and 12TB on the offsite backup NAS (DS118). I store everything on these NASes, which is why I have 3-4 copies of almost everything (copy #4 is Backblaze). As @hydn mentioned, my ESXi server is a Lenovo M900 mini today – I recently retired a Dell R610.
Just found this post. Looking to unify all my random equipment into a rack. This has helped immensely. Just curious. What are you using the two ThinkCentre servers for? I’m currently using an old full size pc with an i5-2500k that I repurposed with ubuntu server.
hi @severick. I’m not using them for much at the moment. VM’s, remote access, unifi controller, Zabbix, backups and media storage. One runs Win 10 and the other Ubuntu server.
If you want a cheaper media storage solution,
what you can do is connect several SSD’s to a Raspberry Pi. (nothing much need)
You, before doing anything, should setup SSH first before continuing just so you can leave more ports for the SSDs. You can choose any distro of your choice. You then install Samba.
One of the things you can do is set the drives up with RAID and then share the RAID with samba.
After this, windows (and linux) should be able to access the NAS. Another option is to use a compute module with an IO board and compile the kernel with SATA support like Jeff Gerling does when he tries to make it go fast!
If you are going to do a raid then make sure you at least have one drive for having backups in case one drive fails. You can also use NFS instead for faster performance.
Improvements could be made to this but it’s an idea.
Hi @severick . After finding @hydn 's post here, I built my own rack, and you can see my progress here. Mine houses a Cisco lab (3 switches and 3 routers), as well as my Lenovo M900, one of my Raspberry pis, core switch, router, and patch panel.
Following along (thanks for the excellent recommendations and greping through the deets) with this guide and working on building up my own home lab. Starting with the following:
Keep us posted on your setup. Glad to have you here!