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Comment by aparticulate | Hacker News Reader

Very nice work. Though, is "homelab" meaningful jargon to people here? I definitely had to google that term.

Yep. Used the term since obtaining used networking hardware for learning. Then some super power-hungry Xeon rack servers. Now I loosely use it to refer to home-stored anything used for learning, fiddling, researching: old laptop which acts as a temporary Kubernetes node, Arduino clones or raspis doing various home automation stuff (even untouched for a long time, t's always work in progress in my mind, so "lab" applies) and some equipment used for hobbies unrelated to CS but very much laboratory-like.

It's a fine term.

Unfortunately, yes. But in my opinion a proper "homelab" requires microscopes, lasers, custom glasswork, etc.

That's a different kind of lab =)

I think so. I understood it immediately; but I've also been dabbling in the self-hosted space for a bit.

It's like the ultimate nerd term. Only IT nerds could take a rack of servers and rename it a homelab. :p

My installation in in the top shelf of a closet (server, switch UPS, fiber, RPi, ...).

I call it of course my datacenter.

Even better.. mine is on a rack of shelves and made of consumer hardware (what is a "U"? haha)

It's nothing more than an old PC and a NAS if I'm honest. The "lab" part is all virtual. Does the job though!

I only really use mine for testing different web setups for work at the moment

Yes. Check out /r/homelab

It was meaningful for me, personally. I don't know that many people who run homelabs, though -- I think it's fallen out of favor somewhat.

Homelabs can be super handy if you want to grow your linux sys admin skills, but since we all use cloud services these days the need for that skill is diminishing.

I decommissioned my homelab a couple years back because there was just no longer the need. But there is still a pretty hardcore community around it (just checkout /r/homelab if you have a burning hole in your wallet).

Cloud services (and networking in general) still depend on these low-level skills, plus with the increased scarcity of VC money companies might actually start to be cost-conscious and do things in-house again instead of burning money by offloading it onto the cloud.

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