Homelab & Selfhosting Thread - One Day it will be a Home Datacenter, you just gotta believe!

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Is it worth the Power Bill?

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Check this out: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

Some guy's GitHub repo:

Utilizes Infrastructure as Code to automate provisioning, operating, and updating self-hosted services in my homelab. It can be used as a highly customizable framework to build your own homelab.

Project status: Alpha (see roadmap below)
  • Common applications: Gitea, Seafile, Jellyfin, Paperless...
  • Automated bare metal provisioning with PXE boot
  • Automated Kubernetes installation and management
  • Installing and managing applications using GitOps
  • Modular architecture, easy to add or remove features/components
  • Automated certificate management
  • Automatically update DNS records for exposed services
  • Expose services to the internet securely with Cloudflare Tunnel
  • CI/CD platform
  • Private container registry
  • Distributed storage
  • Monitoring and alerting 🚧
  • Support multiple environments (dev, stag, prod) 🚧
  • Automated offsite backups 🚧
  • Single sign-on
Click to expand...

If you are interested in a home lab and learn k8s this might be a good way to go about it
 
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Have any of you guys tried powering a home server with solar power in order to cut down costs with your power bill? If so, is it worth it or is it just a stupid idea?
 
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Moon Mage said:
Have any of you guys tried powering a home server with solar power in order to cut down costs with your power bill? If so, is it worth it or is it just a stupid idea?
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I don't think it makes sense to "solarize" individual devices unless you're planning on living out of a dune buggy in the Sahara. If you want to get into solar, just cover your roof in solar panels, feed power back into the grid, and get your savings on the power bill that way. Whether your server happens to be using power from solar panels at any given instant is beside the point.
 
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Moon Mage said:
Have any of you guys tried powering a home server with solar power in order to cut down costs with your power bill? If so, is it worth it or is it just a stupid idea?
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I have a hard time seeing how that could make sense economically. Maybe if you lived in a place with extremely expensive and/or unreliable utility power, and you were in an area with high amounts of solar radiation, and your equipment either had very low power needs (hence a small and cheap solar array) or so large that your power company thinks you’re running a marijuana grow op. And in that latter case it’s probably cheaper to just colocate. Or as Kosher Dill suggested, you are way off the grid, but if you’re going Uncle Ted then why are you homelabbing?
Kosher Dill said:
If you want to get into solar, just cover your roof in solar panels, feed power back into the grid, and get your savings on the power bill that way.
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In California so many people have been doing this that the power companies were starting to lose money from it, and they tried to cut the rates they pay to buy solar power. They dropped the proposal after backlash but they are going to have to do something about it.
 
Moon Mage said:
Have any of you guys tried powering a home server with solar power in order to cut down costs with your power bill? If so, is it worth it or is it just a stupid idea?
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I priced out a proper solar setup for my house and it was going to be like 40k with questionable ROI. But I could just run my home server stuff on a 10k setup with the capability to divert the juice during power outages to keep the lights on, which is pretty compelling. I will probably end up going through with it.

My rack:
Screen Shot 2022-02-21 at 10.17.59 AM.png
 
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I’m not running as much hardware as I did back when it was relevant to my occupation, but I still keep a spare 8600k build as an ftp server / NAS / plex server. It’s got 42tb of storage and that brings me to around 115tb total on my network.

Debating hosting a site or two myself as I’ve got a dedicated 2.5gbit symmetrical connection, but it’s been over a decade since I’ve messed with the concept so I’ve got a lot to re-learn.
 
Linus released a pretty cool video about setting up your own cheapo Synology clone, much more upgradeable and serviceable.

 
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Moon Mage said:
Have any of you guys tried powering a home server with solar power in order to cut down costs with your power bill? If so, is it worth it or is it just a stupid idea?
Click to expand...
Yeah I had solar put in because my power bills would routinely exceed AUD$1k (2 month period) and it did basically halve the power bills. It cost about AUD$6k to install a 5 kW system, which is a bit expensive for over here (installs usually are half that) but I opted for fancier panels and a consumption meter which drove the price up a bit.

If your power usage is constant and really high then you'll break even pretty quickly. I did a quick calculation just now and given my system is about 2 years old now and I have a retard sized homelab that requires dedicated AC, it has paid for itself.

Not sure how you'll go if you're in the US given solar is probably more expensive there (it's subisidised here), you probably get less sunshine than I do and power is really expensive in Australia
 
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hhaergenreyt said:
I got one of these for cheap off ebay:
View attachment 3074494
It lives in a drawer and is connected to an external HDD. All it does right now is sync from the other devices on my network and then runs a backup program every night. Seems like a waste of watts if that's all it's doing though, what are some other cool things I can run on it?
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Tor middle relay
 
Currently running a 40TB setup composed of 8tb drives in a snapraid+mergerfs array with two extra drives providing parity tied to an archivebox instance and several scripts to archive stuff regularly. Works well and if a drive fails it only takes 12 hours to get the array back online with less than a day's data loss, which has happened once in a decade due to everything only being spun up a few hours a day at most.

If anyone knows a better mediawiki archiving solution than mwoffliner let me know. It fucking sucks and one malformed page will crash the whole task. I want dumps of ED and other weird culture wikis before they're gone.

Trivial ghetto YouTube archiving solution I like : make a hidden public playlist on your account and run a ten-minute cronjob to save said playlist with ytdlp. Makes it easy to grab videos remotely without actually exposing any services by just throwing them on the playlist.
 
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should i upgrade my server? i have been using some laptop i found in a garbage bin for 3 years now, i was able to host websites on it and some instances of gitea, but my main issue is the low amount of ram and no virtualization which i want to make use of
i was thinking of building a low budget server or get something for cheap second hand
 
Just started to give it a shot the past week and while technically not self-hosted yet since it's hosted on a free tier AWS Lightsail instance for me to try things out without committing anything, it has been a fun experience so far. I'm surprised that setting up things are so much easier with Docker nowdays, and I wish I hadn't only learnt about it only now.

1653244678389.png

Mostly been using Linkding to bookmark stuff to read later and Youtube-DL Material to grab videos, and feeling like a retard for not finding out how useful and easy that shit was.

I can definitely see the allure of self-hosting though... 💸
 
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