 Welcome to the Home Lab Show, Episode 58, your Home Lab Rack and Server. I'm joined by Jay. How are you doing, Jay? I am well. How are you? I'm doing great. This is a topic that comes up. We've talked a little bit about this before, and it's worth bringing up again because there's more things. A lot of people have questions about building your Home Lab hardware. Obviously, when we say the word server, I'll mention it at the beginning. It's anything you make your server. It can be a laptop that the screen has been destroyed, but it makes a great server because it has a built-in battery backup. So we're going to loosely use the term server when we talk about Home Lab, but we are going to talk about real server hardware and used enterprise hardware in a show as well. We're going to cover like a wide variety of things for getting this set up. These questions come up all the time. They're really good questions and there's a lot to talk about regarding this. Yep. And I can't wait to get started. Yes. Before we get started, if you don't want to have your server hardware in your lab physically, which I understand there's reasons you may not want that. Maybe you're working on development and you'd like to have something public-facing in the cloud, we will start with a sponsor to show Linode, where you can do just that. Linode has been a sponsor to show since the beginning. If you are listening to this on whatever your favorite podcasting app is or you download it directly for a website, it was pulled from Linode's servers. Jay maintains the infrastructure in the WordPress site all on Linode. So we don't just promote them because they're paying us to say nice things. They're also someone we already use. And they've been a great sponsor to show. They've been great for a lot of people want to get started with understanding some of the projects we talk about and having a place to host all of it. Or if something is just better suited to be public-facing because that's where it needs to be, your virtual private server in the cloud can be hosted over at Linode. We have an offer code to get you started, which is linode.com slash homelab show. Use that, it'll get you started with Linode and we thank them for sponsoring the show. We appreciate it. Yeah, they've been great. I don't think we should tell them this, but we'd probably keep running the infrastructure on Linode, even if they didn't pay us. But then we'd have to go back and paying them. You know, I remember when I first started with Linode and back then Linode and DigitalOcean were so neck and neck, like I felt like I could practically just flip a coin and use either one, but Linode, the tiebreaker back then was they were just so much more Linux focused. It's not like DigitalOcean isn't, but Linode is just so entrenched into that. Then they started building additional features on top of it and then their interface, which used to be hard. I mean, it used to be, but how it's just so easy and so good, like their interface is just so easy to use, I love it. Yeah, it's definitely a great place to host things. Where do we start? Should we start with those ones that serve the home head, the little fanless devices? Should we talk about those first? Or do you want to start? No, we can probably start with that. I do want to mention one thing. I joke around and call this an ad read, which it really isn't. And I mentioned this last time, my new book that's coming out, which I submitted the final chapter drafts for. And at this point, like the editing process is pretty quick. It's the fourth edition of Mastering Ubuntu Server. And you reminded me of this because I actually built a new site for it on Linode to kind of have a landing page. UbuntuServerBook.com was like a redirect URL that would just redirect people to Amazon, which is okay. But I wanted to mention this because I thought maybe someone might find this interesting. I used Hugo to create this site. Oh, cool. Now I want to warn everybody, like you could go to UbuntuServerBook.com. Yes, it's a landing page. There's links on there where you could pre-order the book. That's all well and good. But not one person that visits that site will have the opinion that Jay is a really good web developer and he can create a beautiful site. I don't feel like a single person is going to say that when they look at it, but considering that it's the very first thing that I've ever done in Hugo and I'm still kind of tweaking it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. If nothing else, I just thought I would plug Hugo real quick because Hugo is one of those things where you can, it's a static site generator. So if you want to create a web page in your home lab or have it publicly available, wherever you want to put it, it's kind of neat to not have a database to maintain as well. So if your database crashes on your WordPress server, that's a big problem, but there's no database server. It just generates the pages and they're static pages. That's what a static web generator actually is and what it does. And I think I'm really liking that simplicity because maybe home lab people might like this too because it's just one less thing to maintain. You just maintain in a Git repository, your markdown, which is what it uses and then it generates a web page out of it. And I think there's something to be said about not having that overhead. So I just wanted to plug that real quick that that was not really supposed to be part of this, but I thought I'd mention this for anyone that just wants to check out Hugo, maybe it's not going to make a whole episode, but you can see my pathetic attempt at a Hugo page at UbuntuServerBook.com. Yeah, check out UbuntuServerBook.com. That's what I think you're trying to say here. I think for me, most of it is Hugo because there's something that I wanted to talk about for a while, but I just don't really think we could make a full episode out of it because it's, there's a lot of, like we were talking about last night, some things just don't make a podcast because some things are visual. You want to walk people through it. You want to see the commands. We can't really do that with Hugo on a podcast, but I could plug it. So yeah, as far as where to start, I would like to start with one comment and then we're going to maybe consider bringing that back and talking about it more because the first one moment. Gohugo.io, because if you search Hugo, you won't find it, but the website is gohugo, all one word.io to get to, if you're interested in Hugo, just, I want to make sure you don't run, I know someone will probably ask, so I made sure we've got that in there. All right, so I continue. Yeah, no, that's a good thing. I should have mentioned that myself because I don't know what's out there on the web and what people are going to find if they type in a term or something. I think that's probably innocent, but you never know. So I think it's good to be explicit with where to send people. So I was thinking we could start with a comment that I'm about to make and then we can elaborate more. So the first thing is where do you put your homelab hardware, right? Now some people, and this is kind of what inspired this episode, will say, yeah, a server rack, of course, but as we were talking, you may not have room for that. You may be in an apartment, that may not be an option. So we're gonna talk about the server rack component of it, but the answer right now is, maybe you don't want a server rack, maybe you want something small on a bookshelf, maybe that's your only place to put these types of things and having a stack of loud servers is not an option for you. So we're gonna kind of start with small things that you don't have to put in a rack at all, and then we could transition and talk about the rack and hardware that would be rackable later in the episode. I think this is the perfect segue, the protectively, I think it's called devices, we could maybe start with that because they're kind of small. So here's the fun part. They're gonna go under a lot of different names, serve the home had an article and it was called the King Novi, K-I-N-G-N-O-V-Y, we ordered some called CO-TOM, Q-O-T-O-M that seemed to be identical to the King Novi ones that serve the home had. And there's also, as Jay mentioned, the protectively, they are, the protectives slightly different because they seem to be an importer here in the United States. And I don't know, maybe they have a European location as well. But these are all these very similarly industrial-designed solid-state, passively cool, I say solid-state because it's kind of like everything in it's, because there's no hard drive in them, they're all solid-state drive, passively cool. The whole top of it is one giant heat sink. These are actually really good to build different things on, such as clustering, such as your, you can build, I think XCPNG had a demo they did with them as well. I thought about contacting protectively or one of these companies in building, see if they want to sponsor, if not maybe I'll just order a few of them and build a cluster out of them. And they're now coming with, a lot of them are shipping with two and a half gig nicks on them. And they have between four and six ports of network, depending on the ones you buy, so you're able to bond the couple of those together. I haven't seen any of them yet. And maybe they'll have them in the near future that have 10 gig connectivity. That would actually be really cool if they can get these things in that budget. But when I say budget, you can find these and I'm looking at the KOTOM ones that we have that have a, they have the J, the Celeron J4125 at 2.7 gigahertz, eight gigs of DDR RAM, a 32 gig SSD. So this is, you know, more firewall less than building it for a clustering server because not a lot of memory in it. But that's like $200 on Amazon right now, $201. That's what we paid for it. And that was actually, they're impressive. They get a lot done for a couple of hundred bucks and there's no noise. Then the passively cooled and the low wattage. So you're not going to take a hit on your power bill. You're not going to get a ton of, you know, you're not going to do massive computational things on here, but from a learning and home lab standpoint and from the getting things done standpoint, especially when you want to dive in and learn this at a reasonable budget and to have something that's not going to just make a bunch of noise and racket, especially if you're maybe one of the younger homelabbers and your parents don't allow you to have too many things in your room. And you just, you don't want to deal with the heat. I think these are a really cool choice. There's more and more of them out there. Be patient and do read through and serve the home has lots of articles on these devices. They just the latest ones they did, if you search for the King Novi ones, that's the ones they reviewed just the other day. They're actually really, I really think they're a slick option. I think Jay, you have one for your firewall right now. Yeah, I was just about to mention that. So I bought mine because, you know, I thought I can't remember what my PF sense hardware was before this, but this was before I went on my own and, you know, my company is my only thing now. Yay, but I was doing a lot of zoom calls during my day job at the time and, you know, the voices were stuttering and things were just bad. Like one zoom call, I'm the only person home at the time. And eventually I found out like the CPU on whatever hardware I was using was maxed out at 100% from one zoom call, just wasn't keeping up. So I switched over to one of these devices that we're talking about. However, I don't really recommend people go overkill like I did because mine was around $500. I don't know if that's a COVID price or the retail price. I mean, do we really know anymore? I don't even know what a retail price is anymore. It's all over the place right now. I mentioned the price being so cheap right now. That's as today is June 1st, 2022. I was shocked to see how little we paid for it because we did order some. Now, all things considered, the one I bought has a Core i7. Okay, you do not need a Core i7 for PF sense. You just don't. That is just way beyond what you need. Like I looked at the CPU usage like as we're talking and I saw it hit 3%. And I've never seen it hit 3% or anything above 2% since I bought it because it's that much overkill. But that being said, it's so good. Like mine is a Core i7. I'm looking at it right now. The model is i7-7500U. So that's an Ultrabook processor, 7 being 7th generation i-series. So it's older. It's not the latest and greatest. It's not whatever. I don't even know what the new one is. But it doesn't have to be. And I don't know if this is common. Maybe you can answer that. I feel like some of the CPUs are older generations, but I don't think that matters because the use cases you would use these for, I don't feel like which generation processor you have even matters at all personally. So I've never been impacted by having a 7th generation i7 rather than what's newer, especially considering I can't even get past 3% CPU usage. So yeah, it doesn't take that much processor around a firewall. And the price savings is the fact that due to the supply they have available when they're at manufacturing needs, it may not be the absolute latest generation processors on these. That's kind of a trade-off, because you wanted to hit a certain budget so you're not gonna get the processor that was released immediately. And that's what drives that whole manufacturing cost down because a lot of people, especially are looking for the most up-to-date and of course companies like Dell or your large OEM integrators are generally using the latest and greatest processors that they're building something right now. So these older ones are more available for these smaller outfits that are putting them together in China to do some assembly on there. I've seen someone mention something that's worth noting. The firmware, the Protecteli is one exception that makes them a little bit different is they offer Corbut on theirs. And they seem to- I didn't know that. Yes, that does make them stand out from some of the other ones. So the other integrators, when you're buying them, you're buying them from some random place that you may not know. Protecteli, as I said, brings them here, but they also seem to have an inside track on knowledge regarding the firmware because when you buy some of the other random ones, you may never get a firmware update. Sorry, that's just how it's gonna go. So is there a, I hope there's no flaw found in the firmware that requires you to update it also because it's kind of a generic rocks. And as I mentioned in the beginning, it may go by several names, locating the exact firmware that belongs to that that will load and not brick it. Yes, that's, that could definitely be a risk factor. And one of the reasons that you may or may not want to use these in a higher security production environment because you can't validate that they've been up to date. It's not that there's any known flaws specifically, it's just a security concern you may want to think about on there. Protecteli having core boot, hey, that's a pretty cool feature. I'm actually glad you mentioned the firmware because that was a, I think that was also a big reason why originally I moved to PF Sense. I had a, again, I don't remember, like some other thing, it wasn't PF Sense. It was like something you buy and it's all one unit. I never got a firmware update and I can't remember what it was, but there was like a pretty big bug, like a security flaw in a lot of routers at the time. I didn't get an update and I didn't really feel like I ever would. So PF Sense, they keep PF Sense updated and when you run your own box, so to speak, I mean, you can install PF Sense on a big computer tower if you wanted to do that, if you have the number of ports, if you have something in your closet, you could totally do that. But the beauty of it is you'll get updates and when we say firmware updates in regards to PF Sense, it's not quite the same conversation as firmware updates on a D-Link, for example, because usually that's gonna be not just the firmware, but also the operating system, the applications, the entirety of the software stack that that box runs. But when you run something like PF Sense, there's a separation between like the actual firmware and the OS and the applications, which I like because PF Sense can just release an update. I don't have to worry about, I mean, yeah, you still worry about BIOS updates. You still need them. You don't need them as much because you have PF Sense giving you updates, but mine was updated in 2019, which I'm sure is way beyond what, you know, seventh generation i7 would have had. So at some point I must have released or received a firmware update. I think that's a good reason to use something like PF Sense, because if you go and buy something like a router, it might be awesome, but you also might not ever get an update. And I personally, I feel like if you know or are comfortable with setting up something like PF Sense, Open Sense, you really should do that because until the manufacturers make some kind of a promise in writing that they're going to keep this updated, it's really hard for me to trust those things. I mean, it's cool. It is a little bit of a challenge and this goes back to you as well. If you buy a piece of NETGATE hardware, you're gonna get a piece of hardware that comes with, there's even a NETGATE firmware update tool that loads on the NETGATE hardware to be able to maintain it. So you get the software updates from PF Sense for the operating system slash firewall, and then you also can get firmware updates. So those are all valid concerns on running your firewall. Stuff to think about. Stuff to think about. Yeah, stuff to think about on there. All right, what's the next step? The next step that I wanna mention really quick, I'm gonna try not to spend so much time on this one, even though I'm super excited about this stuff. Raspberry Pi, I don't, I mean, you can run a router on a Pi. I'm not gonna get into how to do it because I don't really quite recommend it. I mean, it would probably work fine, but I'm not gonna go there. So this is like after your firewall, router, wireless, and all that other infrastructure hardware that you might have, you wanna server to run something on. Maybe you wanna run NextCloud, you could run a NAS off of a Pi. You have to understand IO is gonna be a problem. It's not gonna be as fast as x86 from an IO standpoint. Now, if you're someone like Jeff Gearing, you're not trying to hear that. You're gonna get some performance out of those PIs. And if someone tells you that there's an IO problem or a speed problem, like he's gonna see that as a challenge, right? And in some ways I do too, but he's got like, by the way, check out his content because oh my gosh, he has some of the, if not the greatest content on Raspberry Pi. But really- Yeah, Jeff's got the Raspberry Pi project, the petabyte Pi. So if you wanna know the limits of Raspberry Pi and IO performance, Jeff is rating drivers as we speak to push those limits further. We're working- The Raspberry Pi Powered Delorean Video. Yeah. But for the rest of us, and by the way, yeah, you could totally do the projects. He gives you all the details and things if you wanna reproduce it yourself, but keeping in mind some constraints and COVID aside, because the prices have shot up on Raspberry Pi. So it used to be the case, you could somewhere between $30, $50, depending on the model you go with, you could actually, if the price goes down, have a bunch of them, each doing a different thing for the cost of one server, you could have like a bunch of pies assuming the price goes down. So they're absolutely great at running various things like a Kubernetes cluster, absolutely. We have linuxerver.io, which makes sure that ARM compatible images are there for you to use if you wanted to do that. If nothing else, you could just set up a website on one, they're great. So totally recommend that. If you have access to one compute modules, I wanted to kind of take a moment to mention because I love compute modules, but those are a little bit more advanced than a standard Raspberry Pi because a compute module has no video port, you will not plug a monitor into one of these, okay? They don't have USB ports either, they don't have a network port. You could get them with wireless, but okay, why are you recommending something that is clearly inferior? Well, actually they could be faster and they have EMMC memory on them. And the idea here is that a compute module by itself is useless, but it's what you plug it into that makes the whole solution. Now, if you could plug it into a board that takes a single compute module and that's fine, it gives you all the ports, HDMI, ethernet, whatever you need and gives you the complete solution, or there's things like the turning pi if you could get one that will basically allow you to have a cluster of compute modules in one box, which is really cool. Now that's the step above. So I'm gonna stop that compute module discussion, but just wanted to let you guys know what the difference is. If nothing else, if you have access to a Raspberry Pi, if money is constrained, which it probably is for most of us right now, just consider that as an option as if that's something that you want to use. But now we're at a situation where we are starting to get bigger because we talked about protectively Raspberry Pi with their small devices. I think it's time to talk about the bigger things that you might be running in your home lab and transition into that. Absolutely. Getting the larger servers. Now, should we probably start with where to put them in? It says, getting a rack. And this is actually, there's not an easy answer. There's definitely places you can find it. And those places you can find it are gonna be your recyclers and things like that, Craigslist. You can get some really good deals on there. The problem is it's inconsistent. And it also is, if you're sitting in the middle of a very rural area, maybe impractical for you. It could be a road trip to go get said rack. But if you keep an eye out between different listings, I know Facebook's blasphemous to use amongst the circles of people that listen to us. But if you head over to Facebook Marketplace and wade through these scammers, you can sometimes even find people giving them away just at places. What happens is a lot of buildings, they always seem to tear out and throw away the racks so they can buy a brand new one. I've always been a little puzzled by that, but it leads for opportunities for really good deals on older equipment. Racks have been pretty much, not very changing over the years. So even one that's 10 or 15 years old in bonus, you may get a handful of hardware. I've seen a lot of times where they just will leave the switches and stuff inside them. And they're like, well, we're just gonna throw it out. You wanna give us 20 bucks for it type thing? Come get it. It's not of a lot of value to them, but it may be a lot of value to you as the homeland person. I have several people who, my hardware hacking friends who, man, one of them's got like two racks of old stuff, but he loves the old stuff and he's got it all working in his cabinets. It's actually pretty cool. I remember there's a YouTube channel where a guy's rebuilding a bunch of old telco stuff in a rack, which is also kind of novel because he's going through the testing of all the old equipment and it's kind of, I don't know, I have fun. If you're wondering what content Tom watches on YouTube at night, that's the stuff. Yeah, those are all really great points. I get asked a lot on the YouTube channel, my background has changed and I've rearranged things. At one point I had like a whole rack behind me. Now that's why the desk is a little uneven because you don't really wanna do that. I thought it looked cool and I thought it could, yeah, it'll sustain, it didn't. But people ask me which one to buy, right? And I never have an answer because I can't recommend the ones that people see in my videos. That's why I'm really protective over letting people know what models they are because I don't recommend them. The first one was very flimsy. It was expensive but flimsy. I was not impressed with build quality at all. The second one, I even did some research on this and it had some decent reviews and then I get it and I'm like, really? This is like, it cost me $500 and it's fragile and I'm afraid to ding it and it has been dinged several times because it's like I'm super careful around it. I can't recommend that to everyone. And then what I realized is that people are really trying to get rid of these. They're not hard to find. I walked into a computer store one time and they didn't even know who I was. It wasn't like, yeah, of course you had this offer because you're the YouTube guy. They didn't even recognize me, right? So I just mentioned, I was looking for something for a server and then as soon as I mentioned that, they're like, we have a rack. Do you want it? Like all of a sudden, and then they showed me this and I was so sad, it was such a beautiful rack. It was very tall, very sturdy. It was actually blue, like around the edges. It looked like a neon blue. How cool would that look in the studio? Oh my gosh, that'd be great. But how do I get it down the stairs? That's the only reason why I didn't take it but I realized that this is common. Like, people are virtualizing things now, hardware's becoming smaller and I've seen lots of companies out there that get rid of racks not because they're downsizing but because the components are shrinking at this point and they're finding themselves be commissioning servers and then they might have like three racks and then they're down to two. What are they gonna do with the third one? Well, the first person to ask for it, you might be the lucky person. You might be able to take it home or maybe just check your local classifies but as much as I would love to review a bunch of server racks, like how do you have time to do that and then find one to recommend and then get a kickback from a referral code? No, just get one for free. It's better, it's better for everyone. It's also better for the environment as well because you're preventing one more thing from hitting a landfill. So I think it's a win for everyone. Upcycle it. Yeah, there's a lot of them available. I'm lucky enough that we actually have a recycler within a matter of miles of here. I think it's about, it's actually between me and UJ. Me and UJ both live in Michigan. It's in between us. It's over in Ypsilanti. I think that one's still there. There's another one. The University of Michigan has their own recycling program as well. I haven't checked it out in a little while but they recycle all kinds of computer equipment and things like that. So check your local universities because my understanding is a lot of them have that as an option. They often have to get rid of some of the surplus things they have and sometimes things are donated to university. So they have a lot of surplus things. Now another thing that you might consider is avoiding a rack altogether. And what I mean by that is when you're getting into HomeLab you should, in my opinion, make a decision as far as whether you want to have rackable servers or standalone desktop tower servers, okay? Because you could just avoid the rack thing altogether. I don't feel like, I mean, if you're looking for appearance, if you do any streaming or anything and you want something cool in the background, a stack of towers doesn't look nearly as cool as a rack but for some people that's fine and some of those tower servers are quieter than rackable servers anyway. So it's really kind of awkward if you start out with towers and then later decide, yeah, I wish I would have gone with rackable servers. At that point, you have to make a transition, buy new, sell what you had. That's, it's better just to make that decision and think about that upfront. And then you might decide just to go with tower servers instead of the rackable servers but just make that decision and think about it before you actually start buying things. Yeah. And I do have a video outlining all the parts in it and showing how they go together. If you do want to build your rack because when you build a rack, if you do go that route, you will want shelves in it because there's no guarantee as you, as we get to the server part we'll talk about, you may or may not get the proper rails for servers. More frequently, not getting the rails with the servers is going to be a thing. Not that you can't find them, not you can't order them. They may be a little pricey. They may not fit the way you want. They may have really bad bearings and are busted up when you get them. So setting the servers on different shelving within there, perfectly acceptable. Matter of fact, just because we actually are still at my office because it's been the same way for, since I started my business in 2003, we've had the same old telco rack and it doesn't accept rails properly. So we've had shelves in mind forever. So It might not be a bad idea altogether because I mean, that just makes more sense to me. It's not like it's, I mean, you get like a certain finesse when it comes to racking servers because you get used to how to hold it. It's like you can't really explain it. Like I don't know how to, like, you know, the rails kind of, they're a little bendable, they're all like that. It's normal. So you have to make sure they kind of stay in place and then the grooves are in the right place and then whatever you call the things that fit into the grooves are in the right place. And it's so easy to miss one. And then those, the rails can cost, I think I've seen them like average what $30 but the shelves are like $10 or $15 and a lot less hassle. Honestly, yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah. I see people talking about building one out of wood. Hey, go for it. And I've seen, by the way, take a minute to Google Ikea rack hack and you will find that people have figured out the right combination of Ikea stuff that happens to match three dimensions to hold servers. There's like a coffee table someone made into a mini server rack to hold a couple of things. So there's absolutely no variety of ideas and they're all acceptable. I mean, I've seen people make them look really nice and it's impressive. I've seen people create those tabletop arcade games out of Ikea coffee tables. Like at this point, I used to always wonder like why do people laugh when they say Ikea and then I start seeing some of the really awesome things that people have done with them. Like, oh, that's so cool. Like my video game center in my office is made from Ikea. Like it worked well for all the game systems. So yeah, totally, absolutely. Definitely Google that. There's a lot of different options there. And I'll give a shout out because we've reviewed them before and we actually have bought a lot of them, which is the NAVE point, N-A-V-E-P-O-I-N-T. You can find those on Amazon. They work really well for some of your smaller enclosures. Make sure you're watching the depth when you order because make sure what you have will fit within the depth. The same thing with the StarTech.com racks, we've bought a lot of those from Amazon as well. And if you're really looking for something a little expensive, but let's say price doesn't matter as much, they do make soundproof racks that reduce the sound of the servers in there and they have their own enclosure with sound deadening and air circulation to get the air in and out quieter but keep the noise and these servers are going to air inside. Yep. So, I think, so at this point, what server do you buy? I already mentioned tower servers and rackable servers. I think we've both pretty much agreed on not buying HP without watching Jeff's videos. I mean, at this point- Jeff is racking, has a great video on the problems with buying HP servers. The challenge is some, because if you ask the question and the answer is some of the HPs do have firmware updates behind paywalls, which ones? Well, that's a little bit more complicated because HP does not have the clearest policy on it, which is why just video on the topic is a little longer than you may think that would be because it's not an easily answered question. So that's, yeah, definitely something to consider on there. My partial has always been towards Dell for their overall ease of acquiring servers and finding parts for them. Yep. And I second that as well. That's kind of where I go with that is just look at the Dells. Now, if noise is an issue for you, like if obviously you will not have silence around a server rack at all, but you can have more silence than you might have with, depending on the hardware, I understanding, and I think you might know more about this than me is just my experience. It seems like the one you servers are the loudest usually. Yes. So if noise is a factor, I wouldn't consider one you in my opinion. I have read other people with the same experience and you just agreed anyway. So if noise is an issue, have a look at the two you servers because you might have more clearance for the fans, it might make less noise, not guaranteed, right? Well, if you go a step further to a for you and like let's Supermicro is not a great choice, it comes down to the fan size. You have to move a certain volume of air to take a small fan and this is why desktops are generally, or towers are going to be quieter. To move that volume of air to cool that processor, a small fan has to spin faster than a large fan to move the same amount of CFM. So you have naturally as you spin the fan faster, it impacts the sound quite a bit. There's a lot more noise made out of them. So it's kind of the same, you know, just it's a physics problem is what it comes down to. So go with the larger ones, provided they have bigger fans, like the Supermicro has some, I think they're three you or four you that have almost like full-size fans in them. But once you go one you, you almost always get those really small fans which of course have to spin fast and make lots of noise. Another thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is that in my experience, even if you bought a four you server, it's going to be super loud all the time and everyone's going to hear it. And usually the reason is because whoever had the server before you, they cranked everything up. They crank the fan to max, they crank the CPU to max, they might have disabled the CPU's ability to throttle. You know, if it's a virtualized solution, maybe they kind of want the CPU always running at full power. So already it's wasting electricity and it's loud. Just do yourself a favor, go into the BIOS, take a look at the fan settings, the CPU scaling settings and have a look at that because while it might be important for an enterprise to have the CPU constantly cranked to the max, I don't feel like any homelab person would be benefited by that at all. So, I mean, obviously you're just one user or maybe if everybody in your family uses it like it's a Plex server. I mean, unless you have hundreds of people living in your house, I just don't really see a benefit there. So just assume probably crank the fan and the CPU to the max and just dial that down to allow it, maybe auto would be better. There's other power saving modes you can choose. So definitely do that. And the other thing I'll mention before you install an OS on any device, that's used especially run memtest86 on it before you actually install anything. You wanna make sure the memory is good and you might not discover that it's bad until later. So definitely check the memory. Yeah, absolutely. Running some of those tests is very helpful. So when it comes to hardware, I mean, the bigger the hardware, it's not necessarily the case that the bigger the hardware, the more power it can be. Have a look at the L-series theons, especially if you are in an area where the power is expensive. I'm kind of in an area that's somewhat like that long story. It can be the L-series CPUs L stands for low power. Now what I've found is that it's kind of rare for a Dell server to be on eBay with this already, but you can get an L-series theon for pretty cheap and just replace it yourself and it will use less power. That's why it's the L-series theon. So you could get additional power savings. If you keep that in mind, so that could just be one more avenue you could lower the power usage down to, but if power is a big concern for you, then I might argue that a server like that in general might not be a good idea. Yeah, the power concerns are definitely there and it's a sacrifice of your home lab when you start going, well, I wanna buy this server or if you find a really good deal on an old what was the Dell's 29 series, the really old ones, those things matter of fact, this is something we noticed today cause we have some more servers that just came in and we're testing the 720, the seven, I'm sorry, the 20 series. So in the Dell, like they have a 720, 740, 620, 640, but the two series older server that we have that we're getting ready to retire is substantially using it slower but uses more wattage. We can tell that by looking it up, but also when you are touching the backs of the servers, you notice some of those are hotter. And of course, how does all of this extra energy get wasted? Well, as in heat. So you have a dissipation, the money you save, and this is your own math calculation, I have to go, I can get this other processor which is an older generation Dell server for just to use Dell as an example, but it's gonna use X amount of watts at idle and it'll cost you more of my power bill, but it's a upfront cost that's less or is it better to go with the newer generation that has that? That can always be something you'll scratch your head about. You'll waffle back and forth between a few different options and yes, it's definitely a challenge. So then the question might be, well, all right, can I just build my own rackable server? And the answer is yes, you absolutely can. Now, one piece of advice I will give because I learned everything the hard way and that's one of the reasons why I have a YouTube channel. I'm trying to prevent other people from having to deal with learning some things the hard way. And one of the things that I will mention is if you decide to buy a server, a rackable chassis to build your own server, that's awesome, first of all. Second of all, make sure you get one that comes with the power supply. They are not the same, okay? Some of them do offer standard ATX power supplies, but you really have a lot of issues working against you here because you're racking these servers, which means you might have a server underneath the one on top. How is a standard power supply going to vent air when it's venting up or down? There's a server down and the server up. It has to vent out the back. And it's not even that simple either because yeah, you can find a power supply that has air that goes, air flow goes to the back, but the alignment of the screws are not the same. Even ones that I found that advertise that they are ATX, they are except for the power supply. And then if you want to buy the power supply, which I've had to do separately when I learned this lesson the hard way, guess what? They're not on Amazon, probably not eBay, although you can get lucky. They're hard to find. You go on the manufacturer's website, mail order, they'll charge about nearly $200 and it'll take two to three weeks to show up at your door. It's a hassle. It's better just to buy it with the power supply built in that comes with it. That way you won't have that headache. So just keep that in mind. If you were to go that direction, the power supplies are most often not the same as a desktop power supply. Yeah. Of note though, and just so kind of why I mentioned Dell's good versus Supermicro, the ease of which you can find parts for them on eBay. So if you look on eBay, and eBay is just like a great spare parts place to find lots of different things like the power supplies for Dell's and things like that. Now, on a professional note, we do buy them from Tech Supply Direct. I've got a offer code I'll throw down in there for people that want a discount. You can find it on my website. But Tech Supply Direct is if you want somewhere to have them professional and gone over and come with a warranty. Alternatively, I've got no problem, especially when you're from at home lab stuff for getting them off eBay. In matter of fact, sometimes because of the supply chain shortages, as we mentioned a couple of times during the show, we've had to buy and they have some 640s, which are pretty current on Tech Supply Direct. And we've had to get these for customers as the only option if there's a long lead time to buying a new server for Dell right now. So it's not just used in the home lab, it's something you can use professionally. But back to that, like Jason about finding power supplies and matching everything up, that's where you can pop a Dell service tag number in any Dell you find. If you found one at a flea market, you can look up the service tag real quick on your phone and understand all the parts that went into that Dell or time of manufacture. It also easy to figure out compatible parts that would slide right into it. For example, power supplies. Yep, yep. And also power supplies for Dell servers. When I mentioned that the custom built ones are different. They're not even that either. They're not even like server power supplies, they're custom for the case. So I just wanted to mention at that level. But yeah, you are right. I've had to buy like a bunch of parts for, you know, power edge servers and things like that and eBay's the best place. If you are planning on using TrueNAS, if you already know where I'm going with this, you should, if you're buying a server on eBay for that purpose, you should also buy a RAID card that's been flashed for that purpose. You will have problems if you don't do this. So the default card that comes with the server, the firmware, long story mature, I think you could probably explain it better anyway. Yeah, it's just not gonna work well. If you search for TrueNAS in eBay, you will find out that it's flashed, right? You'll probably find a lot of things if you start searching for TrueNAS, you're gonna find a lot of super micros, which are really good choices for TrueNAS because with the Dell, there's a person who's dead, who's as a YouTube channel on this as well, but if you type in like how to set up the, they call it IT mode, essentially it's HBA your pass-through mode. There's people who modify the firmware and have modified firmware Dell units or Dell units that offer pass-through of the drives. This is not a guarantee every Dell you will encounter will have this or have the ability to do this. So it's not necessarily for the faint of heart. Don't guarantee that any Dell will just load TrueNAS and not have problems. Swing it back over to super micro and someone says, do you like super micro? And yes, super micro frequently are going to ship with the LSI cards in there. And those LSI cards are essentially pass-through. They're not controlling the RAID. As I said, eBay is a great place to find these and you can find them with a lot of SAS drives in them. And this is pulled out of the enterprise, still has some life left in it, a good super micro systems. As a matter of fact, Jay has one of my old ones right now because we retired it. They're great for setting up TrueNAS on. They come, like I said, already ready to go. Sometimes you can, I think some places may ship them with TrueNAS. Please reload it yourself. Don't trust anything that was just shipped to you with TrueNAS on it. Reload it fresh, build out the pool and you've got a great storage server. Now, if you buy them with the drives already populated, one of the things you can do is they're going to be populated with used drives. Well, that's great. Slide that drive out. Look at what model it is and go find a handful of more spares that you can order. And even though all the ones should be tested and good that when you receive your server, it's good to keep those spares and just order them ahead of time. That way you're never waiting in case one of them goes out and you'll find frequently the drives that you have a surplus of that they suck in these machines. There's also a surplus of and we did this in the past when we had that server. We bought some extra drives and just said, yeah, if any of these go bad, and one of them did. So we popped it out and replaced it and we already had it without having to wait. Yeah, you don't want to be like me recently with a failed drive that I replaced and I didn't have a spare. So I'm just waiting for one to arrive and I'm like nervous. But I mean, I have backups. So it's not like it could be that. And I couldn't remember the name of the channel but someone posted it. It's called the art of server YouTube channel. And I believe they have an accompanying eBay store. But yeah, they talk about that. So if you're looking to build a NAS, I mentioned true NAS, but this doesn't exclusively mean true NAS. Those of you that are interested in other NAS software, you may want to run on there. Most NAS software, true NAS very much does. And I mentioned many other NAS software does wants to talk to the drive. So yeah, but the art of server has a breakdown of those different cards. So you can dive into some learning if you're curious about them. If you're not curious and just want to get the job done, punch true NAS or free NAS, because they still call it free NAS and some of the ads on a Unix surplus is a popular supplier of a lot of those. The last thing that I want to mention on my end is the eventual question that resurfaces like fairly often. Can I just run everything including my firewall, the storage server, everything off of one server and just only have one server? Yes, you absolutely can do that, but please don't. And if you do, I understand, it's expensive to have like a separate firewall, storage server and virtual server, like I get it. It's more expensive. So if you can't afford to separate those things then there is a way that you could do this, but I would only suggest you do this for however long it takes you to save up the money to separate them. It might work well for a while. There's going to be some weird problems. It's a single point of failure for everything in one shot. I just don't like it, but I also understand that it's not like people have an infinite income and they could just go buy whatever, multiple servers. I totally understand that. It might just be a means to an end when you first start out, but please separate those things when you can do so. Yeah, especially your firewall, the biggest reason I tell people so often to separate the firewall as out of your virtualization stack is that way when you have to patch or troubleshoot a problem with your virtualization stack, the internet's not down because I mean, granted you can just Google things from your phone, but that's not as convenient as looking them up and having access to the internet while you're doing so because certainly I have, well, because I'm always experimenting, broke my virtualization stack in an interesting way. And well, if it's down then so would my internet. So that's one of the reasons and with firewalls generally speaking, relatively inexpensive, it's definitely just keep the firewall separate. Now, those of you that watch any of my videos and my demos, you'll almost see me constantly doing these demos inside of a virtualized firewall. That's exactly a wonderful place to do all of your demos and everything else because as you break the firewall, you can just snapshot it and revert it back immediately to the prior to broken state that it was. So it's not that you should never virtualize a firewall for experimenting purposes. You'll also run into occasional performance bottlenecks when you virtualize the firewall that you may not expect it handles VLANs differently as you will learn through the process of setting it up. You're adding an entire extra layer between you and your firewall. So you're just gonna have some unexpected results. And that's where you'll bang your head on troubleshooting when you virtualize these things. I've seen someone mention they had their TrueDance virtualized. Not saying you can't, I've seen because we do consulting, more people lose data that way because it causes unusual and unexpected behaviors. It's not that you can't do it. It's not that you may not find the right combination of hardware that works fine. There's just less information out there of what exactly the perfect combination of hardware that you don't end up with a bunch of weird CRC errors even though you passed the entire HBA through that turned out to be a bug that did get fixed in a kernel version of Zen. So. Yeah, there's just so many things you'll run into. And I feel like this plays out the exact same way for everybody and few things in life play out the exact same way for every single person. But I'll use myself as an example because I think it mirrors the entire experience. Like I did this at one time when I first had a home lab and same reason, I didn't really have money for a bunch of things either. So I had everything under one server. And I remember thinking, why is everybody telling me not to do this? It's fine. It's working fine. Like they're crazy. It's great. I saved a bunch of money and everything is fine. And then I go to do some maintenance and then I'm like, oh, well that's certainly gonna be a lot harder than it would have been normally. And then this other thing, oh yeah, that's gonna be tough. And then by the time some months passed, I'm like, yeah, this is horrible and I'm never doing this ever again. Like I wish I wrote down every problem that you don't really think about until you get into the situation. It could be as simple as your server needs a firmware update and maybe it's a kind of server that's newer and it downloads a firmware update over ethernet, which is great, but your router is a VM inside the server that's not running. There's no route. And yeah, you can direct attach your cable modem and through some kung fu and trickery, get that to work because cable modems are kind of finicky, which you'll also realize when you do this. And then yeah, you'll get through that. You feel good. And then, oh, this other problem. And then it's just a never ending, oh that and it just keeps going. You'll know what I mean if you go down this path, but if you can avoid it, I would avoid it. Yeah. Next thing or final thing I should say would be, do we mention a few switches? We can. I think for me, I use Unify, which is kind of controversial. I don't mind. I think it's great. It's the only thing that works for me and my situation that I've used. And we've talked about Unify before. So unfortunately, I don't think I could recommend much outside of that because when I switched to it, it works so great. I didn't even need to try anything else, but you try a lot of them out though. Yes. And that's what I wanted to mention. I have a whole, I've been working on a video and it's been behind and getting it out of showing how VLANs are handled across numerous different switches. And you know, before this video is out already tell you the secret of it, they're all different. Some of them have three menus you have to jump through to enable a VLAN. And I'm not sure why they do it this way. They could have done it in one menu like Unify did, but they chose to do it in three. And this causes much of the confusion. One of my big recommendations when it comes to why do I recommend a lot of Unify is unless you plan to get more into network engineering and learn some of those different ways VLANs are implemented across different switches, then you go, I don't have time for that. Well, then use Unify. They took the time to do VLAN implementation in one of the easiest ways, hands down to I've ever seen it done. Also, they've done it, the only people to copy them really has been TP-Link. And TP-Link is kind of, TP-Link I think is fine for your lab. I don't guarantee that they'll have long-term support over time for their firmware. TP-Link makes things when they can find a product niche that they know they can sell a lot of like they want to make a cheaper version of Unify. So they did. How long will they support the firmware and updates for that line? Not really clear, which becomes a potential challenge. Other options on the list, Mikrotik, everyone wants to know about Mikrotik. Mikrotik, you will pay with your time. They are a little bit trickier to configure but they're not terrible but there's still some learning curve to them. But they do have their router OS and their Switch OS. If you use them as a switching device, Switch OS is easier. It has less features than the router OS but it has the features you generally need to get networking set up and VLAN set up and tagging set up for them. So I do recommend any of their models that support Switch OS. I've covered how to set up a VLAN and how did the tagging inside of that. You can find, it's one of the few Mikrotik videos I've done. Mikrotik also makes some really inexpensive 10 gig switches that have SFP on them, SFP plus specifically on them that are in the $130 range. So they make some really inexpensive switches for doing things like storage. And matter of fact, because they work without VLANs out of the box and if you're building a storage network that you just need a 10 gig to talk to your hypervisor to talk to your storage targets, then yeah, that's actually a really cheap way to go. And some of the cabling on it which would be a lot to dive into, I have a video that is easily, that does dive into this is called, why you need DAC in your rack. So if you search my channel for why you need DAC, DAC in your rack, then you will get a better understanding. I cover all the different interconnects between the switches and the cables and what the different modes mean on them and which ones you can mix and match. Yep, that's pretty clever naming. Yeah, I should have been because there's always a lot of questions and confusion about how to get the DAC set up on there. And should you use DAC cables direct attached copper, the answer generally is yes, use those in your rack over fiber. It'll save you some money. They're a little bit lower wattage and not everything needs to be used over RJ45 once you start having a bunch of DAC stuff. And by the way, unifies even got some 10 gig switches that are really, they've dropped in price a lot. They've got a handful of them now that are kind of targeting the homelab but they're all DAC based because you can get DAC cards really cheap. You can get DAC cables really cheap. Then you can get DAC switches cheap. It's cheaper to run things from a wattage standpoint and from any manufacturing standpoint when you have the direct attached copper. And there's no downside to using it other than, well, you're not going to fabricate your cables. You have to buy them to length, right? But in the scheme of things, you'll save money. And granted a DAC cable does cost more than RJ45 cable, but the 10 gig RJ45 ports are a whole lot more money. And so are the cards compared to the DAC cable. So you in the aggregate of the project you will save a lot of money. It's kind of funny that we say things like save a little bit of money when it comes to a homelab audience because when, I think when people hear save money they hear save money towards another server. I'm gonna save $100 that I'm going to now put towards my next server instead of like other people they just, oh, I'll just put that back in the bank. But a homelab person's like, yeah, I'm gonna buy more stuff. I can buy more stuff with the money. But I think that's kind of a great thing about it because getting more of your money is the whole point. Having multiple things is sometimes more fun. And if you can save money on one to justify buying another, that's even better. But don't listen to me. I'm kind of like an enabler, I guess. Yeah, a little bit, you know, it's, and it's all that. And I know, you know, no one asked about it oddly is I see people home at Mikrotik now. The switch, one of the switches I'm also, it's, I've been reviewing it for a little while because I don't just unbox and review I actually set it up for a little while as one of the ingenious switches. And they once again proved that VLANs can be complicated for no reason by putting it on two menus to get the VLANs set up for some reason. And having documentation that doesn't say how to set up the VLANs. So my knowledge of how the VLANs work on other switches I was able to figure out how to make them work but reading your documentation, I pointed out, they fixed their documentation by the way. So if you have had trouble previously with an ingenious switch, they've actually I believe updated the documentation based on my telling them what's missing in their documentation. So this is one of those things that a lot of these companies just have a, it's a challenge and it doesn't have to be. It's really one of those weird things that like just put it together guys but they don't and that's why Unify is where they are with doing it. Like you could make it one menu. You could, you didn't. So I feel like I'm reviewing it. Like, why do I have to go to two places to find the same thing twice? Yeah, you could have done the right thing, but you didn't. Too many, I don't know why you did this. So you didn't have any documentation in two menus, but I don't know. That's one of the reasons I guess they come back to our recommendation for a lot of the Unify stuff because it makes your life a little easier. And yeah, even one of my staff yesterday who is really good at networking got stuck on the way the Aruba implements some of their VLAN stuff. It wouldn't propagate properly. We got it solved. I don't know what he had to do. There was an extra button that had to be checked that was unclear at the beginning. Wow. Well, there you go. Yeah. So hopefully this covers getting started, putting your hardware together and happy hunting for all this stuff because it's out there. It's all kinds of deals you can find. Check out Reddit, our home lab. There's lots of people talking about it and there's lots of places you can spider around from that where people talk about where you can find deals on things. I seen someone mention MSU has things. I think a lot of college universities have that. It's a great place to get involved or go and get a lot of hardware that they may have there. Surplus hardware that you're dumping and getting rid of. Yep. Absolutely. Oh, some people said about QNAP. I don't have an opinion on QNAP switches. So I'm not a big fan of the QNAP hardware but I don't have an opinion on QNAP switches. So I'll leave you guys with that. I have ranted about the security problems to QNAP. They eventually get to their security problems after a very long time. So I don't know if I really recommend them. Just Google QNAP and we all have security problems. It's how we address them. And QNAP has not done the best job of addressing them. So those are my thoughts on QNAP. Very unfortunate, yeah. Very unfortunate. All right, well thank you for joining us for this show and see you next time. See you later.