I diagrammed out my home lab/home server setup, mostly to keep a complete overview of how everything connects. I didn’t want to get bogged down in aesthetics around colour scheme, or layout – as you can no doubt tell. After a while diagramming it started to feel like a meme where I was trying to convey some crazy conspiracy theory on a wall of pinned paperwork and connecting threads. I think I am done documenting everything. But now I am wondering how obsessive I should be about detailing every little thing and VLANs and IP assignments. I don’t really care if it looks like a dog’s dinner, I really just care about “okay, where does this wire go to?” Is that the right approach?
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That’s mostly semantics, for me at least.
I have only one NAS, and one Proxmox host that is up 24/7, so they are in production.
I regularly tinker with those two as well, it’s all part of my lab.
This is how it works for me. I am using the homelab to learn new things. Part of that learning process is getting things into production and maintaining them. Because managing a production environment is one of the things I want to learn.
Home Lab is a lab environment to test out stuff and, rebuild things to test out something else.
Homeserver would be something more longlived.
Home Datacenter when you have more compute and storage in your basement than your whole town combined.
I feel like this is much more than many people on here are ready to undertake.
Also, homelab is a kinda vague designation, so it stops being one when you say so. I know people who call homelabs their NAS running a couple of containers, so go crazy.
A nas with containers IS a homelab, bros just on a smaller scale, love not hate :)
It stops being homelab when the focus goes from labbing to production, when it becomes a homeprod enviroment instead.
My take too.
A lab is a testing space, a playground, something that can be brought up and down and broken and fixed at will. It will be destroyed and rebuilt frequently.
As soon as it stops being possible to do that without someone (even if just yourself) getting annoyed that a service or functionality isn’t working, then you’ve graduated to homeproduction/homeserver/homedatacentre (depending on its size!).
It’s not truly prod unless you’re messing with it, though.
90% of the posts here are homeprod.
Nothing more permanent than a temporary fix as well?
I’m curious about what program that is and if its free
Can you do rm -rf / on everything in your “lab”? Yes: still a lab. No: not a lab.
homelab = everything is in prod
homeserver = you have a dev/prod environment
This has evolved to a HomeCloud setup.
You are asking the wrong question… when does server become lab (multiple servers).
One man’s way too much shit is another man’s enjoyable hobby.
This isn’t a hobby, it’s a horde /s
If you can turn it off and still do things, it’s a homelab. If you run services on it that are vital to your home, then it’s a home server.
Stops being a homelab when you have SLA’s
You, diagram? I just keep throwing crap into the mix and trying to remember which vlan and ip scheme its supposed to use and which device has access. Order is for work, Chaos is for personal enjoyment.
The meaning of “homelab” has changed over the years. Originally it was literally just having the hardware you’d find in the lab at home. e.g. you were taking classes for a CCNA and instead of going to the school’s lab for hands-on with the hardware you’d just replicate the setup at ‘home’. Nothing in the setup would be relied on beyond the specific thing you’re testing in the moment. If you’re going to stick to the original intent of the name, anything beyond “lab” use wouldn’t be “homelab”.
Now it skews more to meaning anything you’re using to learn the technology even if you’re using it as the equivalent of production and rely on it being up as a part of your daily life.
are you running 9" displays in place of physical photos in frames? Curious how this is setup. Is there a write-up somewhere?
edit: same for “the wall” with the 6x 55" screens.
I don’t see a single other person mentioning it, so I’ll just say it: 52TB of flash storage alone is enough to make me jealous. 52TB of flash storage in an RV is just a few more layers on top.
Sad that the picture-wall project repository isn’t open on github - I hoped to see it in action. Seems very neat.