Doesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)?
There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products.
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
Everyone has prod; some also have dev.
1. No fault tolerance or high availability
2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
Where I live now (in a house) is way, way cheaper and I get regional co-op 2.5 Gbps internet for $90/month.
Not really. I live in an expensive area. I pay $4K+/month in rent for a nice apartment, and livable, nice houses here cost $3M+ which is over 700 months worth of rent.
1. The math doesn't work.
2. I don't have 3 million dollars.
3. I'm not going to fall into the stupid American trap of borrowing money to buy shit I can't afford just to stay poor and handcuffed to some bank. If I'm going to buy something that costs 3 million dollars I better have 3 million dollars in cash. That's how I roll. That's how I buy my car, computers, and my groceries. Make money -> spend money. Fuck borrowing. I don't do that shit.
Except you're paying a landlord money that could be going towards property that you own, and that equity is portable.
You won't have any wealth when you become very old and cannot work. You and your family will end up with nothing.
Borrowing has to be sensible for income ratio.
YMMV, but middle-/lower-income people spending an unreasonable % on rent to live in Manhattan or SF are fighting a losing battle they cannot afford to play.
What do you propose? Borrow money and buy a house for millions that I can't afford? Sounds like a faster way to go broke.
Also, we all saw how the LA fires went. You'd better have $6 million in cash if you want a $3 million house. $3 million for the house, $3 million for a backup house when the first one burns down and insurance decides not to pay for it. You do not have "equity" in anything that is flammable. Flammable == disposable. Try gold bars instead.
If I could buy a house for $300K that was livable, not moldy, and not look like it was going to come crashing down during the next big earthquake, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
> There are plenty of areas where very nice homes are $200-400k
Yeah, I know there are houses for $300K in the middle of Arkansas. But there are no jobs there, I'm not going to live on burgers and fries, and all the goddamn tech bro CEOs in the valley have decided on RTO. At least there is real food here.
My real plan though: Work and save up enough money that I can live the rest of my life in Asia on my savings.
> unreasonable % on rent
I don't spend a big % of my income on rent.
I DO spend a big % of my income on taxes. That's the real problem.
And after seeing all the unbelievably expensive surprise repair bills my homeowner friends have had to deal with, I'm not convinced I'm lighting money on fire, either.
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
I took from the article that the term homelab makes it sound like the use case is trite, hobbyist or not serious.
I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things.
It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need.
Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
For real though, I have several cars on blocks at the moment. I can’t think of a single way to rationalize not calling them projects, even though when they were put up it was just going to be a “quick fix”. At least I finally got one in a state where I felt comfortable donating it.
I don't experiment much these days, so 'lab' isn't quite right. But if I were to experiment then it would be using the same hardware as all the other stuff. So it's both accurate and inaccurate.
In this instance: who cares, it gets the message across to the necessary demographic - and isn't that what communication is about?
...and I'm someone who could care less about words and grammar (notice the correct use of the term, so as not to say the literal opposite of what I'm trying to say (notice the correct use of the word literal, rather than it's not-oft-used-but-oft-correctly-applicable figurative)).
I don't know the (in)correctness of the use of brackets within brackets.
so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great.
look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI cluster" etc. so i would argue that nonresistance to these farces actually proves OP is right. albeit i do not really see strong nor attacking rhetoric from OP in his post either, so i think problem is just that you have to chill out ;)
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days... so even american president has to say something about it, so i think there is something to it, dont you think ?
Laws don't work like this in the EU, let alone in all of Europe.
noone cares in Russia etc, you just have to make small donation to your public official (if they even care/notice) and everything is fine,
even those pizzaboxes...
EDIT: in most countries there are devices which can not be connected to grid without electrician in any case, like PV. but again germany has balkon PV something something. so yes, exceptions are to everything.
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days
Agreed.
It's still a homelab, the author just doesn't seem to like the term.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."
However in my case it definitely is a homelab, as I am always tinkering with it and the router/server ratio is way to high.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button.
But I’m not OP.
If this colloquialism continues bothering you, seek help. Of the psychiatric variety.
Just use the word we all use and get over it, dude.
> But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects.
> But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too.
If you want to split hairs on naming, then the problem here is that you're imputing an overly strict definition onto the term 'homelab' to not include your use case, complaining that your use case is different to this definition, and then failing to see that the term is generally used loosely enough that it does your use case.
Call it what you will, but from your description of things, you're using the server and associated tech as a homelab.
I'd allow you to call it a "it's not a homelab, but" if you want permission to use a different term... ;P
Normal people don’t have rack-mounted servers in their homes to “self-host” ten services for their family. If you have the skills to do that kind of thing it may very well make sense to do so but you’re basically signing up to do that as a hobby. And that’s fine! Hobbies can be productive! Some people keep chickens as a hobby and feed the eggs to their families. But if you’re running rack mounted servers in your house as a hobby, that’s called a homelab.
Most posts on Reddit are performative, not just in the homelab sub. Over time the sub defines what is "cool" to be in the in-group for that particular community and people post their overwordly set-ups just to be considered part of it for 10 minutes.
I mean, you don't need this
p_ing•5h ago