Hacker News Reader

Comment by bagrow | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers?

Seems too narrow to me.

View on HN

I don't think anyone would object to wider usage, it's just that the sysadmin community is the only group to have adopted the term so far.

It's an interesting use of the word lab when rack, server, stack, etc. would have been more accurate.

My personal homelab (a stack of old laptops connected to a network switch) is mostly built around various experimental antenna arrays used for rtl-sdr hobbies (aircraft and maritime telemetry collection mostly) + home automation over a zwave mesh network. The home automation ecosystem also has a lot overlap with automated gardening/growing, since automated sensing and irrigation are a great use case for tools like home assistant.

I often wish, that this kind of thing would be called something more like homedatacenter

Hoarderdatacenter? I heard you say Hoarderdatacenter.

Hoardatacenter

/r/homeserver ?

It's likely easier, safer and more socially acceptable to set up this kind of home lab than the kind of maker spaces you are talking about. A lot of people go to (shared/public) maker spaces precisely because their home is not suitable for that kind of physical experimenting. You probably need space, money and expertise to do home experiments of that sort and then it's probably generally wise to keep it on the down low in most cases so you don't freak out the neighbors or otherwise draw problems to yourself.

Agreed. I always click the link expecting some kind of electronics or bio lab, and am instead greeted by a server and some networking equipment.

I am not really interested in reading about this kind of stuff[1]. I have a few raspberry pi's that serve as my "home lab" and that is all I really need right now. But I suspect the term took off because it gets a bunch of people like me to click.

[1] Not that I don't think it should exist, its just not high on my list of interests right now.

>Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be?

I wasn't before I read this thread!

I mean, my "home lab" are old computers from 2008 to 2016 and half of what I "do" involves simply testing what weird installations (eg netbsd) I can get up and running. It's for tinkering -playing; the "lab" part coming from experimentation: "What happens when I do this...?"

I agree when it comes to the definition being to narrow. Then again, I mostly engage with it on /r/homelab and the HN attitude seems to be much more restrictive...too restrictive for my tastes, personally.

Agreed. My home lab does include some services and networking to support them, but also some nutso wifi and other radio data hardware, electronics, 3d printing, large format 2d printing, mechanical fabrication, precision metrology...

I agree. “Home Data Center Lab” is not always implied.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com