More random home lab things I've recently learned

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Homelab Scale and Hardware Choices

  • Many readers see the author’s setup (dual Xeon rack servers, lots of disks, Pi, etc.) as closer to a small-business environment than a typical home.
  • Some prefer repurposed small business desktops/mini PCs (e.g., Lenovo M910q, 8th‑gen tiny PCs) for their balance of cost, performance, and very low idle power.
  • DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are reported as “comically expensive”; people consider switching platforms to use RDIMMs or newer AM5 instead.
  • Storage-heavy builds (many SATA + NVMe drives) push some toward full-size servers rather than mini PCs.

Raspberry Pi vs x86 Mini PCs

  • Strong disagreement on Pi usefulness in homelabs:
    • Pro-Pi: very low power, small form factor, good for extra nodes not tied to a hypervisor, and useful as a stress/efficiency check for setups.
    • Anti-Pi: no longer cheap, SD card fragility, awkward storage, and poor value vs thin clients or N100/N95 mini PCs.
  • For GPIO / hardware projects, some prefer ESP32 or Arduino over Pi.
  • Pi 4/5 NVMe support and netboot are noted, but also power-delivery quirks (5V/5A requirements).

Proxmox, VMs, and Containers

  • Proxmox is praised as an accessible clustered hypervisor with a good UI, easy backups (especially with Proxmox Backup Server), ZFS, and hardware passthrough.
  • Debate: “Why VMs when you have Docker/Kubernetes?”
    • Pro-VM arguments: stronger isolation than containers, simpler whole-system backups and migration, better for USB/PCI passthrough, non-Linux OSes, and critical services that shouldn’t be tied to K8s health.
    • Skeptics argue much of this could be done with systemd/containers and that adding Proxmox is extra complexity.
  • K8s on Raspberry Pis is widely discouraged as resource-heavy; others defend homelab K8s as a great learning tool despite being overkill.

What Counts as a Homelab

  • Some thought “homelab” implied specific stacks (Proxmox, K8s); others insist it’s any home server experimentation.
  • There’s visible gatekeeping vs “LARPing as sysadmin” rhetoric, countered by people emphasizing hobbyist freedom and learning.
  • Distinction surfaces between “self-hosting for utility” and “homelab for tinkering,” with lots of overlap.

Apps and Related Tools

  • Mealie gets enthusiastic endorsements as a self-hosted recipe manager/meal planner.
  • Alternatives to Pi-hole mentioned: AdGuard Home, Technitium DNS.
  • CasaOS, Jellyfin/Jellyseerr, Home Assistant, and offsite backups with PBS + B2/Synology are cited as worthwhile.

Power, UPS, and Reliability

  • Rising electricity costs push people toward low‑watt mini PCs and carefully idling systems.
  • Rack UPS network cards are valued in business settings but considered too expensive for many homelabs; USB + NUT is a common alternative.
  • Several report abandoning Pis for old PCs due to fewer SD/network issues and more predictable behavior.