Ask HN: Do you have a home lab? Tell us about it

I build myself a home server last year, without any particular plan just to try it. Specs: Ryzen 7 3800X, 32 GB ECC RAM, 2 TB HDD and 500 GB SSD. I use it to run PLEX, Torrent, TrueNAS, WireGuard, NextCloud, and my side projects.

The server runs Proxmox, some of these services are separate VMs, others are running as Nomad jobs. I also have a dedicated development VM which I can access remotely through the VPN wich is pretty nice.

Used to! I restored vintage oscilloscopes, played around with high voltage and low noise power supplies, and did some microwave stuff, too. Of the scopes I used, one was a tek 556 dual beam vacuum tube scope, and the other a 2 GHz lecroy for everything else. I had a 20 GHz specan, 6 GHz VNA, a handful of power supplies, hot air rework and all that good stuff. Now I’m doing a postdoc and have joined a group that’s much more tinker-oriented so the lab I work in is a big mix of research stuff with a few personal projects. The major one now is a machine for rewinding the specialized HV transformers in the 500 series scopes that I love so much.

What sort of "lab"? I've recently created a home manufacturing "lab" in my apartment due to Covid-19. I'm cooking up electrodes (EEG), soldering PCBs, silicone enclosures, 3D printing and sewing.

I'd like to be testing cortisol, GH, and a few other things but don't think that's possible in a home lab. Let me know if I'm wrong.

No home lab to report, but this is a chance to recommend for:

Invest in uniform, stackable storage boxes. This can pay off over apartment and house moves, and decades.

I got motivated to have a mini cluster from an old blog post by the person who did duckduckgo. There is a website called servethehome (sp?) that has useful resources. My home cluster did not age well .. it still has a ton of RAM and cores but I worry about my power bill when the beast is running.

I also have a nice desktop with a 3090 for DL stuff and a modest electronics hobby lab (basic stuff like oscilloscope, function generator, bench power supplies along with a healthy stock of MCUs and electronic components).

On the fabrication side, I have a 3D printer and just got a cricut (hoping to use it as practice for intricate prints on the library epilog, which I have accessed in the past).

I also have young kids now and time is scarce. I'm really trying to teach the oldest one (5 years old) and some days are really rewarding!

I have a pair of white box ESXi hosts. The specs are.

Ryzen 5 3600, 64GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD ASRock Rack X470D4U Motherboard Ryzen 9 3900X 64GB DDR4 RAM 2x 1TB SATA SSD ASRock Rack X470D4U Motherboard

I have a VMUG Advantage Membership, so I have a full VMware stack running. I recently setup Tanzu to start learning Kubernetes. Since it is just a lab for shared storage I just have a Linux VM running on one of the hosts with an NFS share. Guess that counts as hyper-converged. I could setup vSAN, but I'd need get get a couple of more disks and another host to use as a witness. This solution works for me. Plus vSAN uses a lot of RAM.

Is there an accepted definition of a homelab? Will my Raspberry Pi 4 running TiddlyWiki and a few custom scripts count ? :) What about an Intel NUC that is running a Plex Server and a blog ?

Yep! An Intel NUC running TrueNAS w/ a bunch of external HDDs (yes, I know the risks), an old laptop running Hassio (processing video frames through TensorFlow all day), and a router with FreshTomato. It's not perfect, but it was cheap and it gets the job done.

Running about 10-15 Docker containers on there, an instance of Windows 10 Pro (to RDP into because I don't want it anywhere near my dev machine), and two Minecraft servers.

I have a 4 node Raspberry Pi 4 k3s cluster that I use to run some scripts, a 4 node Raspberry Pi Zero W Cluster that I'm planning on trying barebones Hadoop on, a Pi Zero W running PiHole, and a whole bunch of Arduino and STM32 devices I use to build my keyboards. I also have samba running on one of the Raspberry Pis, with an 8 TB hard drive connected to it, for my movies and media.

I use my gaming computer for my linux homelab. Nothing fancy but KVM + FreeIPA + BIND + Foreman for launching and maintaining bunch of servers.

Depends on what you mean by lab.

The first thing that comes to mind is my flow hood, glove box hybrid work area that I use for culturing mushrooms (not that kind).

From a tech standpoint, I also have some Pi and Audrino stuff. I have a laptop that I use for a lot of dev stuff. Although I'll use my desktop for big data since it's beefier.

Half of my home office is setup for video recording.

The robotic projects are stacked on the shelves among the book. At some point I am going to setup my soldering station in my basement along with my tools.

Currently running 4 Dell 5820s + A S5148 switch for a home Kubernetes cluster. It was built with running production grade workloads in mind, and serving that purpose fairly well :)

Titan RTX eGPU for ML training