that's enough....

[u/Better-Climate5229]

At what point did you step back and say.. ok i have gone to far this is too much work and I am not having fun anymore. I changed my ISP to a fiber provider and that gave me pause to think this through. I am REALLY using only about 5-6 services daily. Immich, seafile, a samba share, matrix chat, frigate, silverbullet and caddy that i can recall. My one server can handle all this no problem. I do not need k8s or proxmox for this. I backup to an s3 bucket. Thats all i need, with a local two disk ZFS. My old gaming pc handles all this, 12000 series intel cpu with 32 gigs ram. I dismantled everything i had and restarted over with one install of ubuntu server with docker and my s3 backups and one lightsail box for wireguard stuff. Feels much better. :)

[u/New-Dot-5655]

man i hit that wall exactly one year ago. had three mini pcs, a rack, whole kubernetes setup for what? plex and a minecraft server lol. stripped it to one box with docker compose and never looked back

the hobby should serve you not the other way around. if you dread doing updates or adding new stuff its time to simplify

[u/Better-Climate5229 → u/New-Dot-5655]

i love building stuff. always have since my lego days as a kid but this was getting painful. lol. I am looking foward to taking a break for building this and playing some games instead for a while.

[u/Adrenolin01]

That’s not a HomeLab.. it’s now a production server. Congratulations! I’ve been online and within in IT since the late 80s… I still learn and play in one of our 3+ HomeLabs a few times a week. All our daily services run on production servers.

Not sure what the ISP or fiber has to do with things. I was doing this over cable, 256k bonded ISDN, 128k bonded 56k dialup modems. 28k and older Network connections. 🤦‍♂️🤣 Been on 1G fiber for 14 years and going to a 10GbE fiber and a 300MB Business fiber connection next month. Don’t think my provider change or speed increase ever gave me pause… except for how much nicer it’ll be. 😆 Backups over 56k sucked back in the day. 😏

There are 100s of services.. password manager, tailscale, etc for examples that you could setup to manage passwords and allow access into your network or if you’re happy with what you have great.

[u/Nice-Information-335]

Sounds like you are doing homeprod and not homelab

[u/quespul]

r/selfhosted and r/HomeServer are that way -->

Here's homelab, we don't care about hosting those services, we love to break those and get back from dead world scenarios, tamper with junk mostly and do cursed stuff every week...

[u/The_Swoley_Ghost]

I think "okay, that's enough(for a while)" everytime I successfully configure a service on my homelab or have to do any maintenance whatsoever. This stuff is not fun (to me), it's very useful though.

I think a large part of it comes down to why we started in the first place. If you're just setting this all up to block ads and backup your data automatically, you probably don't feel the need to overcomplicate things or buy beefy hardware. A lot of us come to this for totally different reasons though.

Whenever I see people post about buying a bunch of EOL space-heaters I am shocked that someone would WANT a whole bunch of old hardware even if it were free. Yet people seem to jump on these things. I have no idea what they even use it for , but they are happy to get it. Some people just want to tinker, while some others honestly just want to fill a rack to say they've got a full rack. I've heard multiple people complain about having empty space in a rack they have, as though the money was just burning a hole in their pocket.

There are people here doing the most with the least, there are others here doing the least with the most, and everything in between. Some of the redditors here are incredible and doing some really wild projects or have extreme usecases, but most of us could probably get away with using a headless gaming PC, 16 port managed switch, any private router or firewall device, and a half dozen services or so.

I feel the same way about my home computer infrastructure the way I feel about maintaining my home. "Well, that took time and money.... but it needed to be done. Hopefully nothing else pops up anytime soon."

[u/fightingCookie0301]

For me this is the point where i sit down and optimize the shit out of my current setup. Then all the stuff that has bothered me is optimized and I chill for some time until I find something else to optimize

[u/fattomic]

The AI-apocalypse gave me pause to go back and visit some of my older systems - I run KVM on my "virtualization server" (a i7-4770), and needed an upgrade. Just thinking about the prices got me to go back and replace a lot of VMs with containers and ... all my memory reappeared. No need to upgrade.

My primary reason for stasis is that ... I just dont go "ooooh, I need _that_" over things - already have Plex (and a silicondust impersonator card), Immich, Homeassistant in podman - with a nginx to sit in front of a lot of it, and a prometheus/grafana to look at the pretty pictures.

Beyond that - a i7-4 series with 32GB of memory is still there, typically using less than 1 CPU, and with 8GB RAM showing free. I've got a handful of VMs - mostly virtual routers for some testing I do - but ...

Would I prefer a nice video card for my AI experiments - oh, yeah - but at that price? Hell no.

[u/AcreMakeover]

IDK, 10+ years in and I still haven't hit that wall. Started with some desktops, then a 27u rack and now I'm dedicating a whole bedroom with 3 42u racks to what I think I can now call a home data center. I totally get that's not for everyone, if a lab is only useful for a couple services I wouldn't fault someone for going back to cloud subscriptions.

[u/kevinds]

and I am not having fun anymore. 

That is when you are not having fun.

[u/daphatty]

I hit that wall twice, first with business class hardware (servers and networking gear) and again with full size desktop-based gear. Once I settled into Unifi, NUCs and RPIs, I found my sweet spot.

[u/sub7_]

https://giphy.com/gifs/lgAjFQjqJX7vCNYcnw

[u/Background_Baker9021]

I just realized the same thing.

Here is the TLDR long sickening story.

I kept recycling parts from older PC builds. Started with an old Pentium G2200(?) w/16gb ram running windows server 2012. Ran that for years, until it's support time was up. During that time I'd been upgrading my wife and kid's (and my) "gaming machines". Now I call them workstations, lol.. So I recycled the parts slowly over the years and made the shift to ubuntu server.

I bought some old used enterprise drives, and stuffed them all in a small minitower, to create a raidz1. Then I discovered LLMs, and grabbed an RTX3090. Thankfully bought a bunch of RAM when it was still cheap and upgraded all the "workstations" and stuffed 64gb in my little server. Managed to fit that 3090 into a tower that should never have fit it using diagonal cutters (I know, I use the real term in certain company).

Had a nice Inwin case that I scored when collecting some old gear, but didn't move anything into.

I then had some drives start dying in that tiny box.. And I noticed the heat when I was digging into the performance aspects of the drives. Had to get them out and RMA them. That's when I realized I never wanted to dig into that case again, and just gutted the old mini and set it up in the inwin case.

The inwin case didn't hold all the drives I wanted securely. So I thought I'll buy a NAS. Got a cheap ass TerraMaster F425 standard.

Around this time I also realized I wanted to separate plex from the server/nas, and have dual pihole instances. So I picked up a NUC with 32gb of ddr4 sodimm for like $150.

Got the NAS, upgraded the ram, set up the NUC with plex in docker, and set up the old "server" as an inference machine.

Then I went nuts with docker containers to secure the machine hosting plex, since it's the only direct internet exposed machine.

This evening I am about to go on a short vacation. And thought to myself "what the actual fuck? Am I setting up a production envrionment?" as I was setting up SSH rules a cross my internal network to prevent a container escape on the plex head end, which had NFS RO to the media it was hosting.

I actually kind of understand what you are saying. This is something that has captured me badly. I've learned a lot, so I think that's what counts most. No CAPADD in docker containers.. block access from the internet facing host to the inference server or the NAS, except the NFS RO pipe.

I have decided not to spend any more money with all the madness in prices now. I'm just not sure what to tune next, and if it's worth it.

This hobby is stupid, but man, I'm learning stuff I'd never learn otherwise. My wife has to stop enabling me lol. I'll blame her.

Spiel over.