[car_addict]

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

11. qBittorrent - A torrent manager that I **exclusively** use to download only **Linux images**.

I recommend to use USENET for your getting your **Linux images**. I am using it on a regular basis & do not get throttled or blocked by the ISP. They don't even bother with it and get full speeds when downloading **Ubuntu**.

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

My one gripe with my HomeLab is the lack of Docker. When I was first setting it up, I was concerned about the overhead of Docker over the application and instead chose to install everything bare metal. This has often lead to breaking changes or problems when I want to remove the program, and has often limited my scope, because certain projects don't support building from source. However, every time a project arrives destined for Docker, I tell myself, "Why Docker just for this one application" and find ways to install it bare metal.

Please use docker WITH docker-compose. My ubuntu installations are as clean as new installs as I run everything in containers. All the dependencies are included in the container itself & updates do no break the programs. Plus non-critical containers can be auto updated with Watchtower etc. Its just a stop, pull and start command, if you have docker-compose, and want to manually update critical containers. Its make your life much much easier.

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

About the Oracle cloud free tier, I just set it up a few days ago, I was planning on running a simple website or a VPN that'll negate the need for Tailscale. And maybe try my hand at an E-mail server for absolutely non-critical items, like when my torrents finish downloading.

I chose Hyderabad to be my region and now can't change it and neither do I have the option of choosing ARM. I instead went with an AMD core.

I have a few questions for you:

1. How long have you been using the Cloud free tier and what region are you in?

2. Considering Oracle's history with the "free" tier, how do you continue using them?

3. As far as you know personally, has Oracle decided to up and delete someone's instance? (Other than for obvious reasons like torrenting or acting as a Tor node)

4. Could you please explain more about Duplicati and why you chose it? Have you tired other backup software?

1. I got them as soon as they were available ( I think more than 2-3 years ago). Using HYD. In many other regions, they run out of ARM servers very very quickly.
2. I am okay to loose them. Most of it is non-critical stuff & I have backups of the one's I care about.
3. Yes. There are many instances where this happened even for trivial things. Use it do the heavy lifting, but have daily backups of the things you care about.
4. I have tried most of the programs like rClone, Duplicacy etc. I prefer something with a GUI, hence no rclone. Duplicacy does the same thing as duplicati, but is paid. Duplicati works well and supports all cloud drive like GDrive, Onedrive etc. Take a look @ https://www.duplicati.com/

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

Also a general question to everyone here, have any of you managed to get a static IP or atleast a non CGNAT dynamic IP from your ISP?

I also have ACT and was able to get a static IP (2K/year) after a little bit of badgering. However, this is also about 5-6 years ago when ACT was still small and had good customer service. Honestly speaking, I haven't found any need for a static IP as the only port which is open is 22. All others are routed through Traefik on Oracle Instance into my Orange Pi 5 via Tailscale. This is better in terms of network security also. Otherwise, as told by @pranavt, try to change your ISP.

Originally Posted by pranavt

PS: For homelabbing, Pis never really made sense as the primary server(earlier because they came with 100mbit ethernet and only USB2, and recently due to the cost and lack of availability). You can get refurbed desktops/1LPCs on Amazon for 10-15k that have Intel CPUs 6th Gen or newer, 8-16 gigs of ram and an SSD.

This was true until Pi3. Pi5 is now available with upto 32GB RAM & 1GB network. They also do transcoding & all ports are USB 3. My OrangePi5 is available with upto 32 GB and even comes with a M.2 port. All of this the powered with just a phone charger and can even be run with passive cooling. OLD Desktop PC's draw a lot more power, need active cooling with fresh air & they run HOT. I am able to achieve 99% with the ARM CPU's. The amazing part is that 99% of the programs come with a ARM docker image now. The only thing they can't match when very CPU intense tasks are required. Availability also is back to normal.

[xcentrk]

Kudos for the effort! As an IT professional, I've been meaning to do this for a long time and even got the setup ready except Pi. Had even bought small form factor intel box, couple of HDDs lying unused. All because I hoped to build it one day.

With your post, my urge to do that is getting high. Thanks again to remind me how much effort it takes to do this. Hoping to set it up soon and post it here!

[pranavt]

Originally Posted by car_addict

This was true until Pi3. Pi5 is now available with upto 32GB RAM & 1GB network. They also do transcoding & all ports are USB 3. My OrangePi5 is available with upto 32 GB and even comes with a M.2 port. All of this the powered with just a phone charger and can even be run with passive cooling. OLD Desktop PC's draw a lot more power, need active cooling with fresh air & they run HOT. I am able to achieve 99% with the ARM CPU's. The amazing part is that 99% of the programs come with a ARM docker image now. The only thing they can't match when very CPU intense tasks are required. Availability also is back to normal.

I've run SBCs in the past (have a Pi3 running Pihole and Octoprint currently. Dietpi ftw.) Due to the limitations of the Pi3, I used to run an Odroid XU4 that handled my linux isos business through transmission and sharing them via SMB (one of the few SBCs back in the day that had gigabit ethernet.)

Unfortunately, once you add up the cost of the SBC + Good power adapter, you've spent around 8k already, or more. A refurbed 6th gen 1LPC can be had for a little more. And yes, the power usage for SBCs when idling is going to be around 2-4w. However, an old 6th gen i3 idles at around 6w, the form factor provides a LOT of expandability and features (HBAs for storage, hardware encoding/transcoding for media, the ability to add RAM, and software support for things like game servers, and sometimes even basic stuff like printers which often don't have drivers for ARM), and can ramp up to it's 30-60w TDP depending on which CPU you go for.

I guess we just differ in how we look at homelabbing. An SBC can do most of what an average user might need, but once your requirements grow (which they invariably do, once you go deeper down the selfhosting rabbithole), the not-inexpensive non-upgradeable mostly-out-of-stock-stuff becomes a limitation.

Different strokes, I guess.

[alphamike_1612]

Originally Posted by vijai

The Pi wont be capable of handling your firewall + your other SDRs. SDR in itself is CPU resource intensive. Best bet is to get a separate Pi may 4? and use pcie raiser card over usb 3 but your performance will have major hit. USB 3 itself is on a shared pcie lane and then you are maxing it out with a pcie NIC. Another bottleneck would be your pi's cpu it self. At best case, you'll get same performance as a standalone off the shelf router or even worse!
Although my firewall handles about 30 clients at peak

If I'm not wrong, the new Pi 5 has a dedicated PCIE 2.0 slot right? The bandwidth of which is not shared with the USB or Networking? The idea is to use the inbuilt ethernet port as an input and the NIC on the local side. Ofcourse, the Pi 4 will also remain, the Pi 5 will simply be an addition.

I find my HomeLab to be a place where you can never remove something until you destroy it completely, whereas there is always room for addition.

Originally Posted by pranavt

Change your ISPs if you can.

Thank you sharing your experience with Oracle.

Other operators in my area don't have a very good experience especially with regards to speed and downtime. In addition, ACT has it's optical routing box on my roof, so speeds are always high.

This is kind of a "Caught between a rock and a hard place" moment for me and since tailscale now serves my needs, I'm not urgently looking around. Also very difficult to explain to my family why I need them to change providers when everything is working well.

Originally Posted by car_addict

I recommend to use USENET for your getting your **Linux images**.

Thank you for sharing your experience with Oracle.
Have DM'ed you for more info about Usenets.

Originally Posted by xcentrk

Hoping to set it up soon and post it here!

Thank you, waiting for your setup .

Originally Posted by pranavt

Unfortunately, once you add up the cost of the SBC + Good power adapter, you've spent around 8k already, or more. A refurbed 6th gen 1LPC can be had for a little more. And yes, the power usage for SBCs when idling is going to be around 2-4w. However, an old 6th gen i3 idles at around 6w, the form factor provides a LOT of expandability and features (HBAs for storage, hardware encoding/transcoding for media, the ability to add RAM, and software support for things like game servers, and sometimes even basic stuff like printers which often don't have drivers for ARM), and can ramp up to it's 30-60w TDP depending on which CPU you go for.

I guess we just differ in how we look at homelabbing. An SBC can do most of what an average user might need, but once your requirements grow (which they invariably do, once you go deeper down the selfhosting rabbithole), the not-inexpensive non-upgradeable mostly-out-of-stock-stuff becomes a limitation.

Everything you said holds true, but it's just that for almost any non-IT person wanting to get into HomeLabbing, a Pi seems like the only choice from the outside world.

I say this because this is how my thought process was. This is coming from someone who is reasonably tech-savvy and stays on top of the consumer electronics world. Had I known prior to buying the Pi 4 about slim PCs or thin-clients, I definitely would have bought those. There are days where I've regretted not buying them.

But when I started, I knew nothing but Pis. It was only later, after YouTube videos and the like that I got to know there exist much more powerful machines with almost the same dimensions and power requirements.

Also, with the Pi, at least for me, I got a raw sense of how much I had to do to get a fully functional machine. You get just the board, everything else is on you. Of course, there will be people who prefer the convenience that a fully built 1LPC gives, but for people like me, the Pi was a blessing indeed. Also with the Pi being a

I got mine in the end of May this year. This was just before stocks opened up to older levels.

[vijai]

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

If I'm not wrong, the new Pi 5 has a dedicated PCIE 2.0 slot right? The bandwidth of which is not shared with the USB or Networking? The idea is to use the inbuilt ethernet port as an input and the NIC on the local side. Ofcourse, the Pi 4 will also remain, the Pi 5 will simply be an addition.

I find my HomeLab to be a place where you can never remove something until you destroy it completely, whereas there is always room for addition.

With pi5, your bottleneck wouldn't be the network port anymore but the cpu itself. Pi isn't powerful enough to run a full firewall yet. There's a reason why off the shelf routers don't provide a full fledged firewall but very basic ones. It has to do with a ton of computing power which will simply overwhelm a pi at this point. That being said, the better encryption support on pi5 will help to some extent but still not viable which should be obvious from my previous vm load screenshot.

Besides all, pfsense simply has no support for arm yet. I think their UTM are based on pi but they don't release those images to public which means you build your own image which may or may not be reliable. I'd say if you are serious in investing in a firewall, get a used desktop and convert that into a firewall.

And for your static IP, my old ISP was act (chennai too) and I had static IP with them (current isp - Airtel also gave me static IP). It was constant call to customer care until you find the right person in network team to assign you a static IP. I told I have CCTV at home (which I do) and their cgnat and port forwarding wasn't working since someone or the other seem to use the same port and it's causing me issues.

That being said, I'd warn you, they changed my static IP once without warning me. When asked, they told their IP leases has expired and they have new blocks from tata and hence the change.

[NaXal]

Hello,

Woah.. You may call it a Home-lab but compared to mine, your one is more like a pro-grade lab. With a lot of tool set.

But, at the end of the day, individual requirements are different, and one would setup / design the setup according to the available resource.

Here is my "Home Lab", located at a dusty corner of my storage room.



Old and rejected hardware, destined for back of some "kabar-wala" cart. Saved and serving the purpose ever since.

Running Ubuntu Server 22 LTS + Docker/Docker-Compose as platform with following services.

1. OpenVPN Client
2. CloudFlare Tunnel Client
3. Nginx Proxy Manager
4. NextCloud
5. PhotoPrism
6. Jellyfin
7. Apache Guacamole

I have one ARM based Free Tier VPS at oracle running just Ubuntu 22 LTS and OpenVPN Server. 3 Incoming ports (80/443/xxx) of that VPS Static IP is forwarded to this local server via OpenVPN Tunnel. While CloudFlare tunnel acting as backup access.

Only thing that is paid in my setup is a top level domain for easy access and SSL certificate.

This setup runs 24x7x365 non stop. Apart from me, friends and family too use it for their backup and certain streaming needs.

Thanks.

[da3mn]

1. HP Z440 workstation (Used) running Windows 10

   Processor: Intel Xeon E5-2680-v4 14 Cores
   Ram: 32gb DDR4 (Planning on updating it to 128gb)
   Storage: 1TB SSD
   1 TB HDD (gutted from my old laptop)
   500 gb HDD (Salvaged from my wife's laptop)
   Graphics card: Nvidia M2000 4gb

2. Mac Mini 2019 (Used) (MacOs)
3. Macbook Air 2015 (Ubuntu)
4. Macbook Pro M1 2020 (Not part of homelab)

For now I am running all the services in docker containers.



Planning giving proxmox hypervisor a try on z440 tonight will update on how it goes.

[deep_bang]

Originally Posted by alphamike_1612

Thank you deep_bang. Do share how Immich goes. What is your current Photos setup?
Also, a word of caution, Immich explicitly states to not run it with your main source of Photos. This is the reason for me not trying it. I don't have enough space to take a backup copy and run it on a separate system.

For starters, on my raspberry Pi 2 which is a 32 bit armv7 based system, I could not install Immich. Apparently Immich needs a 64 bit machine and further they recommend atleast 4gb ram.

So was contemplating on buying the pi4 but then realised that I have an old 10 year old Pentium dual core system which actually has 4gb ram. Installed Linux on it and started Immich. Let's see how it goes. Its doing it's indexing activities.

The plan is to also use the same PC or the old raspberrypi to run cctv captures too instead of storing on the camera itself on the SD card. This enables me to have the video outside the camera as well as increased storage for a smaller cost.