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Here's my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)
Hey it's more than good enough to run all this Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Built a year ago, didn't change anything but drives since. PCengine APU OpnSense, two Proxmox cluster hosts, one mini PC NAS with JBOD. All DIY.
mine is 3 old laptops and a switch in a pile
honestly the cable management is ok ... ish
I read "Alright let's see pictures of your super nice rack"
And then I clicked before bothering to read the rest of the sentence.
Was not disappointed though.
Not too noisy? I'm curious.
Not at all! I upgraded the heavy lifters case fans to all noctuas, there's still fan noise but it's very easily drowned out. Actually the most noise came from my HAL model. Partly sunny days would trigger its sensor and it'd randomly start spewing lines.
The white leds are a nice touch :p (i'm totally not jelly)
I like your screenshot, what distro and DE is that?
Arch, not a DE, just hyprland.
It looks much better than I have. My current infrastructure is built upon a set of mostly obsolete devices: Intel Atom 230 and 330 used processors. Also, SBCs: a few Raspberry Pi 2Bs, and a few Orange Pi Zeros (the very first gen, 32-bit). They are spread among different locations (office, relatives, home), and if Iβd get a side gig job with the next company, I may deploy a couple of used computers for them too. So thereβs not much to picture, but it looks much worse than this.
Also, is it a Surface on the left? I almost sure it is! Iβve bought 3RT (obsolete slow model) two weeks ago. Itβs piece of shit hardware, but the concept of a Linux tablet / laptop for cheap (I buy used) is beautiful, so Iβm considering getting one more modern model at some later point. I guess when my battery would be in a poor condition. Itβs a great device for sshing, at the very least.
That's the spirit, re-using "obsolete" stuff that is so not obsolete. And yes, good eye, it's a Surface Pro 7 on Ubuntu on the left ;)
@northernlights @selfhosted "re-using obsolete hardware that's not obsolete" - I'm wondering how I could use my old (still working) macbook air, and my old Time Capsule. Instead of experimenting home lab with a new mini-pc, I was wondering if those 2 machines can be used somehow.
To be precise: I'm totally blind so I'd need at least something with audio or Braille working at boot, or right after. Such as BRLTTY running to set everything up and having then the machine being usable via ssh.
As for Linux on Apple computers of that time, if i'm not mistaken, they're i386? So probably someone hacked that together. As to needing a system that works for blind people, I have no experience in that area, but if the tools you need are available on Linux, then they are.
Just cleaned mine up a bit recently!
PC on the left, RPi for simple stuff and an Odroid HC4 as my media and backup server.
Not pictured: another RPi dedicated to HomeAssistant, a magic mirror, and networking stuff.
Also not pictured: my workbench tools on the upper shelves, which have not been tidied recently.
A little late to the party, but here's mine.
What are the specs on that pepsi box? How's it handle the load???
It's only the mini Pepsi cans iirc, so they aren't as load bearing as I'd like. God willing, I'll upgrade to fanta boxes one day.
Kinda in a lull with homelabbing ATM, but here I've got my router in a custom 3d printed mini rack with 3d printed patch panel, and a couple of old NUCs. Only thing I really use day-to-day is a NUC connected to an amp so I can use the amp as a Spotify connect client
Oh now that is clean. Works really well with the overall display of vinyls.
This is a great thread. I had to join too!
I have my "network closet" which is like a hole in the wall where my ISP comes in:
And then my "server room" which is literally a closet. There's a big ass old enterprise server and a 3 node laptop cluster:
Eh, you know at work there's one closet like that per floor :)
Using the closet rod for that extra cable management
Perfection.
Here is my combination lab and workbench. I have been busy trying to buy/sell/trade computers that I have become significantly behind on cleaning as I go. I also just got the network rack:
I haven't had time between work, hustling, and home maintenance to finish getting the cabling managed or the NAS:
The goal is to get the NAS in the rack, UPS to the items in the rack, the 3D printer under the bench, and the monitors on the wall and off the bench. Then I'll start in on plastic organizers for the bits and parts that clutter my bench.
Oooh I like :D Kernel panic?!! BAM! BAM! BAM! in the punching bag!
HAHA that works :)
Also late, but here is mine.
From the bottom up:
And here's what's running:
That's actually pretty neat!
Only two of the minis are in use. The other two i am just messing with different things. Still have three more not in use and unsure what I am going to do with them. Two extreme AP not being used and probably never will.
The outdated books are a nice touch π€ :)
Oh also since you literally have more hp elite desks than you can use, please send me one :)
people put too much "lab" and not enough "home" in homelab. we need more dust, more cables, more jank. love this.
Dust and jank you say? Behold, my old basement homelab when I rented just outside Boston with a very permissive landlord who agreed to let me have Comcast gig pro fiber pulled into the basement, running off an outlet I installed without asking on a free slot in our breaker box. The dust was terrible, the rack was a hodge podge, I had to put up that sign because maintenance guys kept plugging their power tools into the UPS when I wasn't around and tripping it. But Comcast fucked up the billing and the 2gig + 1gig symmetric internet is still active to this day for free, which I left behind minimally working for the next tenants after parting out the rack. The tower by the side was a friend who wanted to colocate on my fiber, and I had some fun stuff like a slide out vga console. I also pulled Ethernet into every room, most of them installed with nice wall plates all bundled down to the rack, so with a house full of gamers, you could have multiple people pulling a gig on a game download without anyone stepping on anyone else's toes.
Man, GTFO with that hot mess..... I'm jealous really. I'm getting a chub just thinking about it.
it's a mini pc, standing sideways, with a USB to ethernet adapter and USB HDD
the hardrive just out in the wild, living life like it was meant to be lived.
I was too lazy to put on clothes and go out to my shack. This picture is a bit old. It's missing a lot of mess and my PeerTube server.
