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#cloud#still#media#internet#going#proxmox#don#home#homelab#more
Discussion (40 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
You never go full cloud.
I guess I'm just old though.
My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.
But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.
A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.
I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.
All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.
If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.
My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.
We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.
You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.
Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years
Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.
This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.
Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)
Hope this helps.
Fuck the Cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 - Dec 2015 (219 comments)
Fuck the cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)
Fuck the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885 - Jan 2009 (23 comments)
Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this:
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
Or if they had a ton of viable competition.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.
I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
The main exception would be Google Photos pictures that have been uploaded from my phone but which I haven't curated and downloaded yet.
I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.
> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.
Hold up, is this OR or XOR? Why is "non-archival" media important?
The virtue is having a copy under my own control which has some protection from bit-rot.
That isn't voided simply because one has an off-site back up against catastrophic loss. That copy being in "the cloud" isn't meaningfully different than when it was going to a singular Linux machine that someone else owned.