Chris: This is the Great Holiday Home Lab special, Linux Unplugged, episode 646.
Chris: Welcome in to Linux Unplugged's Great Holiday Home Lab. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, we've gone through hundreds of submissions,
Chris: spent hours making our list and checking them twice.
Chris: And this week, we're going to give you the winners for the best overall home
Chris: lab, the most overkill budget blowout, the tiny Titan that does the most with the least.
Chris: And of course, the sipping sage, the most energy efficient build,
Chris: a bunch of other categories.
Chris: And we will get some final winners. We were blown away by the results.
Chris: I mean, really, they were incredible. But before we get into all of that,
Chris: we got to say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Chris: Hello. Hello to all of you. Hello up there in the quiet listening.
Chris: Of course, everybody listening on the live stream, too.
Chris: Appreciate you joining us on a special holiday episode. And a big happy holidays
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Chris: Okay, so before we start, guys, I don't want to get too cheesy or anything like
Chris: this, but I did not expect this to be a bit of a holiday treat for us.
Wes: No, me either.
Chris: I was surprised. I mean, it was a task, but it was also really,
Chris: really humbling, awesome, impressive, all of the above to see everybody's various home labs.
Chris: I mean, you had just absolute scrappy budget builds to total barn burner budgets, you know.
Wes: I mean, you know, stuff with all kinds of, like, multi-state replication and,
Wes: I mean, every scale of setup.
Wes: And it was, you know, kind of, you got a little view and window into all of
Wes: these different setups.
Wes: And it's almost like, you know, we finally get to see a bit of their side.
Wes: We're always showing all of our stuff off. It's great.
Chris: That's true. Yeah.
Brent: I really appreciated a lot of the energy that went into these submissions.
Brent: Like some people wrote some like really interesting observations as to why they're
Brent: even self-hosting, what their mission is, a ton of like photos.
Brent: We even received some videos, tours of home labs. Like it was super impressive.
Brent: So thanks to everyone for taking that time.
Brent: I just had a lot of fun. It's better than TV.
Chris: That's for sure. And some of them included some very kind notes that I shared
Chris: with the wife or Easter eggs in the pictures, which made us smile.
Chris: We were messing each other back and forth. Did you see this? Did you catch that?
Chris: Some of you clearly have budgets, and some of you have been able to get by with
Chris: just an unbelievable setup.
Chris: I mean, I'm talking, you know, multi-GPU, tens and tens of terabytes to machine
Chris: rescued from the dumpster, and that's the home lab. I mean, it really,
Chris: and everything in between.
Chris: It was awesome. Some of you are very, very clever out there at sourcing discounted
Chris: or free slash used gear. I was very impressed.
Wes: I've got a few things over the years, but nothing like this.
Chris: No, very, very scrappy.
Brent: It was, it was very surprising to see the trend that, um, many people who got
Brent: free stuff is just from their employer.
Brent: So it's like, oh yeah, you know, every year we throw out a bunch of stuff and
Brent: yet it doesn't get thrown out. It just goes until their employees own labs.
Chris: Oh yeah. Or a lot of people are good at sourcing companies that are getting rid of gear.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's certainly something. Uh, so we have lots of categories that we do want to cover.
Chris: I mentioned some of them at the beginning of the show. Uh, but we're going to
Chris: start with a category that doesn't necessarily have an award,
Chris: but we still think is very impressive.
Chris: And that's going to be the most self-hosted setup, the mostest, right?
Chris: And so that's where we'll start our holiday home lab special.
Chris: All right, Wes Payne, let's start with Dark Owl, who just has a massive self-hosted
Chris: setup. So we put this in the most self-hosted category.
Chris: And you pulled ahead Dark Owl.
Wes: Yeah, okay, so start off here, take a look at the pictures. We've got just a
Wes: nice little rack setup, nothing obscene or crazy, but...
Chris: It's clean and tidy, I like that.
Wes: Clean and tidy.
Chris: Looks like a master power switch down there at the bottom.
Chris: and telco gear and he's got a nice switch there and some clean patches just
Chris: the right cable lengths you know i mean could be slightly tidier but honestly
Chris: my mess would would be worse than that so i can't critique.
Wes: And we've got plenty of b-links going on we got a b-link ser5 for
Wes: a dev portainer setup so we've got dev and prod going on here we'll hear more
Wes: about that in a sec another b-link with 32 gigs of ram uh set up as like a micro
Wes: pc um we've got a prod portainer setup we've got two orange pi zero threes for
Wes: pihole i assume that's redundant pihole so you gotta have that you.
Chris: Gotta ever done a pihole.
Wes: There's also a six bay nas mini itx going on with
Wes: um two four terabyte hard drives to
Wes: two terabyte hard drives and a one terabyte ssd and 32 gigs
Wes: of ram and a synology that's aging off which makes sense you got to do transition
Wes: right but what stood out to me here is the clever part i do like the mission
Wes: which is simple to the point host videos stores paperwork and allows me to play
Wes: which isn't that i mean isn't that when we come down to it often that's sometimes
Wes: it's like you know real work sometimes it's it's a mix a.
Chris: Little bit of both yeah.
Wes: Okay so the clever part of darko set up i have my own certificate authority
Wes: my entire network runs off of the domain home.darkowl.org which i do not buy
Wes: certificates for and does not exist outside my home lab using step c a,
Wes: And I thought if you're going to be an off-grid operator, having your own certificate
Wes: authorities, you don't have to bother with trusting anybody else out there.
Wes: It's got to get you in the contention.
Chris: I like that he was too afraid to tell us how much power it. He didn't want to check.
Wes: No.
Chris: He didn't want to check.
Wes: Dark Owl is also doing some custom stuff, which I like to see.
Wes: A custom node app that will stitch together Docker configuration files.
Wes: So, for example, when Dark Owl adds a paperless NGX container,
Wes: it'll add the port forwarding to HA proxy and add an entry on my Dashie dashboard,
Wes: board which sounds pretty nice.
Chris: So he technically has two nazes two orange pies running redundant pie hole and
Chris: one of his nazes is massive i mean that's a big just in size that's a big unit
Chris: and it's running open media vault uh huh you know i wonder how he likes that b-link sre 5 max that's,
Chris: that's a nice unit i bet he likes that a lot.
Wes: I can see it in your eyes.
Chris: Yeah yeah and.
Wes: Then we did get a fun little oops moment.
Chris: Yeah tell us about that.
Wes: When i decided to add a new production port which we just talked about.
Wes: I copied my original production server configuration so everything looked the same.
Wes: I was then planning on deleting the configurations and starting production from
Wes: scratch, then switch over when everything was up and running.
Wes: However, I messed up the URL and I ended up deleting all the containers off
Wes: my only Portainer server and had to start from scratch.
Wes: Thankfully, all my configurations were in Git and the files back in the Docker
Wes: containers were on my file server.
Chris: Well done. Well, that's not so bad. I bet the heart rate was going, though.
Wes: No kidding. And it's a backup test, I guess.
Chris: Oh, wow. Well, very well done. All right. While we're looking at the self-hosted
Chris: setups with the Mostis, Captain Reginald also came up.
Chris: He's got a Colorado lab, easy for me to say, a Colorado lab that's remote,
Chris: and he's all in on the Ubiquiti Edge router stuff. And this came up a couple of times, actually.
Chris: But he splits inbound traffic from his modem, he routes it to his parents' home
Chris: router, and he forwards all the ports to a hardware SonicWall firewall.
Wes: Oh, fun.
Chris: So Ubiquiti Edge Router X, then to a SonicWall firewall. I haven't looked at
Chris: a SonicWall in about 200 years.
Wes: And then we've also got an old Dell 24-port gigabit switch in the mix.
Chris: I love those old dell 24 if it's the one i'm thinking of from the era i'm thinking
Chris: of they were sleepers they were really good um then of course he's got a true
Chris: nas with an amd phenom in it.
Wes: We're gonna see a plenty of true nas today that was interesting to see.
Chris: 28 gigs in that free nas and he's got three 500 gigabyte hard drives he says
Chris: they're cheap to replace it's sort of motherboard limited though and a gtx 560
Chris: in that thing i wonder if that's useful for anything Yeah.
Wes: Be curious.
Chris: Ubuntu server running a VM for Nextcloud. He's got some other things in there,
Chris: like Music Sync and Password.
Chris: He's got another Ubuntu VM for tinkering and dev work.
Chris: Got to have all his nano configs in one spot.
Wes: I find it interesting to see kind of how people break out. Like,
Wes: do you segment? What do you segment?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, interesting. Like, to have like a central nano config and
Chris: project files VM that is sort of like a state, right?
Wes: It's just ready to go. You kind of pop in and start working.
Chris: I don't think I ever would have thought of using a VM for that, but I kind of like it.
Chris: All right, let me run through some of the services he's self-hosting,
Chris: because this is one of the things that pushed it over on my list here.
Chris: Minecraft server, no IP DNS updater for dynamic DNS, Nextcloud,
Chris: Melee, Audiobookshelf, Jellyfin, Pinchflat, MeTube, Firefly 3,
Chris: SyncThing, Dozel, TSD proxy for tail scale container integration.
Chris: And he's also running PyHole with a backup Tailnet subrouter on there.
Chris: And then he has... yeah.
Brent: On a 1b i didn't think those were still useful that's impressive that is impressive.
Chris: That puts in a low power category for that one but it also looks like and we
Chris: all know how this goes i've got one of these he's got a broken server sitting
Chris: around i like that he included this it was a true nes scale third gen intel i7 so it's an older box,
Chris: It was running image and server backup, but the SATA controller failed.
Wes: That's rough. Those sound like important roles. Dang.
Chris: So we're not done yet because he's got a lab in New Mexico on 5G where he's
Chris: got a local laptop running as a server over there running several Docker services
Chris: like Lublogger, SyncThing,
Chris: Uptime Kuma, again, TSD Proxy, and Melee, where he also has a Raspberry Pi 3B running on there.
Wes: Yeah. Come on, Brett.
Chris: And then he's got a kitty of projects, 20 terabytes of loose hard drives and
Chris: SSDs he wants to work on and numerous Windows and Mac OS and old laptops. I know that one.
Chris: Big on the mesh net with tail scale for everything. He says,
Chris: my home lab provides benefits including offsite backups in a different state,
Chris: saving money by not paying for commercial services,
Chris: staying private by keeping my data local, and being a great educational tool for learning Linux.
Wes: Ain't that the truth.
Chris: Mm-hmm. It's great having two lab locations. I love that.
Chris: He says, my best trick is to fix computers for your friends and family.
Chris: And then when they upgrade down the road, they sometimes give you their old
Chris: gear so you can basically run an entire home lab and have backup PCs if one
Chris: goes down off of hardware that you got for free.
Wes: That's what stood out also here. It's a very impressive array of services being
Wes: offered in what seems like a nice setup from a diverse array of stuff.
Chris: And Brent, isn't this a great example of, again, the ingenuity of getting second-hand
Chris: hardware that's still perfectly usable?
Brent: I have 100% done this. It works very well. And most people have old hardware
Brent: that is completely up to this task, just not for their everyday use, right? So why not?
Chris: He did have an oops moment he shared with us. He says, several years ago,
Chris: I was tinkering around trying to figure out how to fully reformat drives in
Chris: the command line on Windows, and I managed to completely brick at least one of them.
Chris: I was also trying to get an ancient NAS from 10 plus years ago to accept some very large drives.
Chris: And while in the deep of the CLI, I managed to also completely brick that.
Chris: So it wouldn't even turn on anymore. That's impressive.
Wes: It's like a firmware brick.
Chris: Well, the Windows command line is powerful. That's what the lesson is.
Wes: Luckily, no data was compromised. Okay.
Chris: Yeah. Wow. How about that? He says he found the show through self-hosted.
Chris: Sad, it's gone, but loves it when we do the Home Lab content.
Wes: Well, thank you for helping.
Chris: Well, there you go. I think, you know, that is an example of a setup that we
Chris: went through that I kind of envy in the sense that he has the two locations.
Chris: I have the studio and I have Joops, but Joops isn't like a fixed thing,
Chris: right? It's more like a mobile thing.
Wes: It's a little sketchy on its own.
Chris: Yeah, the studio is kind of like it's support base in a way,
Chris: right? So it's not really a fair offsite.
Brent: There's plenty of sketch at the studio.
Brent: Let's be honest with ourselves.
Wes: It's fake as we'll hear you.
Chris: Yeah, dude. Jeez, getting by. But then the other thing that I really liked about
Chris: Captain Reginald's setup here, as you notice this, Brent, is he's got some old pies.
Chris: He's got a 1B in production still and a PI 3B still getting used and being used
Chris: for useful stuff like a simple tail scale exit node. That makes a lot of sense.
Chris: I love that. Or a temporary web server. He also uses one of them just as a USB
Chris: power source for a Mesh-tastic node.
Chris: It's just great use of old hardware, which will be relevant,
Chris: I think, in the predictions episode. I'm not giving it away.
Wes: You've been doing your homework.
Chris: I've started a little bit.
Wes: I hate that.
Chris: You boys better get ready because I'm going to.
Brent: When you can't sleep, you start dreaming of predictions.
Chris: I'm going to try to bring the predictions game this year. All right.
Chris: So those were just some of the kind of honorable, not so honorable mentions.
Chris: We also have an honorable mentions category, so don't call it that.
Chris: The not so honorable. No, those are just the big.
Wes: There's plenty of honor involved.
Chris: Yeah. Those are just some of the ones we wanted to pull forward.
Chris: But now we're going to get into the categories.
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware.
Chris: Check out Unraid. They really go from strength to strength. And when I was going
Chris: through our home lab holiday submissions, so many awesome setups using Unraid.
Chris: And it just makes sense. You hear us talk about a cool project here on the show.
Chris: You can get right to it with Unraid because they have just such an impressive
Chris: catalog of apps that have been submitted by their community.
Chris: And really, those are getting better, too, with Unraid's new official API.
Chris: That was part of the new 7.20 release that came out just a little bit ago.
Chris: Some ZFS work went in there and TFS support went in there. So you can get grandpa's
Chris: photos off your old hard drive.
Chris: But I think, you know, I mean, also the responsive UI. I mean,
Chris: there's so many things I could talk about, but what just keeps blowing me away
Chris: is the way the community is building around this new open source Unraid API.
Chris: It just unlocks so much custom new dashboards, new ways of automation.
Chris: I really it's scripting home assistant. I mean, I'm just like,
Chris: oh, wow. It's like one. I mean, I know it wasn't a little thing. Right.
Chris: But that one thing just unlocked a whole world. It's so, so great what's going on over there.
Chris: Really just giving you more power, more flexibility. You can start with what
Chris: you have in the closet right now, and it will grow with you if you want to go
Chris: just even further and further.
Chris: And with expanded ZFS support, you can migrate from some of your older systems.
Chris: Like if you had like an Ubuntu system running ZFS, and you want to move it over
Chris: to a proper Unraid setup, well, they make that really simple now.
Chris: It's so great. If you're a home lab enthusiast or if you're just getting started,
Chris: maybe you're a small business that needs some infrastructure for your team.
Chris: Unraid 7.2 gives you the tools to build and scale the way you want.
Chris: There's already well over 25,000 people, that's the last time I checked,
Chris: that are using Unraid 7.2. It's just been a banger release.
Chris: So go download a free 30-day trial at unraid.net slash unplugged,
Chris: see why everybody's loving it, and support the show.
Chris: That's unraid.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Okay, here's where things get a little tough. This is the showdown where we
Chris: have to advocate for category winners.
Chris: We have picked our contenders who we think deserve winners to different categories.
Chris: And Brent, you are going to kick us off with your pitch for who should win the
Chris: Glorious Disaster Award.
Brent: I am this one i particularly felt
Brent: very you know when you go through one of these
Brent: and then you get an instant strong pang feeling
Brent: where you're like wow this fits that category yeah
Brent: well that fit for me when i saw the last photo in their submission and uh so
Brent: i'd nominate for this category distro stew uh distro stews setup seems pretty
Brent: great one of the photos though my goodness it looks,
Brent: i mean i've i've done slightly better than this and that's not saying much expect this,
Brent: actually i.
Chris: Did not expect you throwing distro stew under.
Brent: The bus well i did i did.
Wes: Note the note from distro stew about the fan uh-huh that stood out to me maybe
Wes: i should have picked up on the signal yeah.
Chris: Okay what was the note about the fan do you have it there.
Wes: Yeah the clever part see that hanging fan on the top uh i put it there a while
Wes: back to cool my overheating 24 port data center switch that switch is long gone
Wes: but i kept the fan around who knows what would happen if i remove it.
Brent: And like, to be fair, it's like he has a mini rack with some devices in it and that all looks good.
Brent: And the cables and stuff look fairly organized.
Brent: The angling fan got me to kind of think, oh, what's going on here?
Brent: There's some ingenuity here, at least.
Brent: Then reading that note and knowing it's doing exactly nothing just got me to
Brent: think, this is so perfect.
Brent: But I got to tell you, that last photo of just like, if I had to describe it,
Brent: it's basically looks like a pile of half taken apart computers.
Brent: Many of them seem like their innards have just been sort of taken out of their respective computers.
Brent: And yet there are like LEDs on of each of these pieces and they're plugged into cables.
Brent: So they must be doing something right. And it's, I think,
Brent: also just the perspective of the photo just makes it look like someone threw
Brent: a bunch of computers into a pile and then plugged them all together,
Brent: and somehow that's running part of Homelab. So I really love that.
Chris: All right, you're making a good case for Distress 2 to be the Glorious Disaster.
Chris: Wes, do you have a pick for a Glorious Disaster?
Wes: I do, I do. I would like to nominate the one, the only Magnolia Mayhem.
Wes: uh-oh okay um let's
Wes: say let's a little quick blurb here chaotic free bsd
Wes: nix os hybrid from recycled school hardware uh no backup services run honest
Wes: and alive that was my short description that i wrote down but mayhem himself
Wes: just says almost all recycled parts a bsd machine came from a school recycling
Wes: pile for 20 dollars network sweats from an old shipping container isp setup yes,
Wes: the mission even is self-descriptive which I love it's not really a home lab
Wes: so much as it is a cry for help.
Chris: Well, that tells you.
Wes: There's personal trackers. There's LubeLogger. There's Pinchflat.
Wes: Three instances, no less. PodCash, love it. Image.
Chris: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Three instances of Pinchflat?
Wes: I mean, that's what Mayhem says.
Chris: That's a bit of a disaster. Boy, you're making a good case, too.
Chris: I mean, especially because he says it's a cry for help.
Wes: That's a category opt-in if I've ever heard one.
Chris: All right. Well, that's a good
Chris: contender. So we got distro stew and you're putting mayhem under the bus.
Chris: This one's the school bus.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Mayhem was listening live. This next one's tricky, too,
Chris: because Haleas is also listening live.
Chris: I have to put Haleas up as a contender for the glorious disaster just because
Chris: they have a completely deserted rack with what is classically a to do pile of
Chris: drives on the table, like an NVR located somewhere like in the roof.
Chris: it's kind of wild it's kind of chaotic and I also I identify with it you know
Chris: what I mean like identify with it so I had to kind of put Halea up there,
Chris: I mean the cry for help is a good one Brent I think I actually think it's I
Chris: mean my boy after hearing your guys I think this.
Wes: Is why it was hard.
Chris: I think it comes down for glorious disaster contenders between distro stew and
Chris: mayhem Brent do you want to make a case for distro stew over mayhem just real
Chris: quick just like a anything because i mean that cry for help from me,
Chris: that's a bad home like.
Brent: Distro stew also has a 10 gig switch that is not in use yet he just says.
Chris: It's quite loud and.
Brent: It's just sitting there.
Chris: Oh he has a powered on uh-huh.
Brent: He's also got a a daisy chained uh set of power strips and he says an honest
Brent: spaghetti cable management style.
Chris: Yeah so So there's.
Brent: You know, at least some might.
Chris: Yeah, you can respond.
Wes: Okay, here's Mayhem's oops moment. Collected several one terabyte drives in
Wes: a Z2 raid. Bad things happened.
Wes: Tried to re-silver, which killed the spare. No backups.
Wes: Inadvertently deleted nearly my entire laptop.
Wes: so does that get some sympathy.
Chris: Maybe yeah yeah i feel like we could do the most probably for mayhem over a
Chris: call but i'm not sure right what do you think that's kind of my because whoever
Chris: wins the glorious disaster award and.
Wes: Maybe we'll get to see distros too if.
Chris: That's true goes.
Wes: To planet nix again or scale don't know.
Chris: Which one do you think we could make a bigger impact if we.
Brent: So there's you know potential there to help with uh indoctrination.
Wes: Right we said don't.
Brent: Say that on the show.
Chris: I'm sorry damn it all right i i could i could give it to distro stew you want
Chris: to give it to distro let's give it to stew all right distro stew you congratulations
Chris: are our winner of the glorious disaster,
Chris: We will have to get in touch and schedule a call, perhaps maybe next 28th on the Sunday.
Chris: We'll just do it in the pre-show and do a little consulting with DistroStu.
Chris: All right. So the disaster goes to DistroStu. Congratulations.
Brent: I think it's disaster, Stu.
Wes: Thank you for being willing to submit your home lab and to throw yourself under the bus.
Chris: That's very true. We had fun. All right. So that moves us now on to something a little more positive.
Chris: The setup with the most potential. The one to watch that could get somewhere.
Chris: Brantley, do you have a contender for the category with the most potential?
Brent: I do. I have one contender for this category.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: This is Pixie. So I chose Pixie's submission here because I felt like they were in transition.
Brent: So from one style of HomeLab to another.
Brent: And so he basically says here, let me give you the mission. HomeLab contains
Brent: one TrueNess CE machine. That's a community edition featuring Jellyfin,
Brent: the R, Stack, Tailscale, Handbrake, SyncThing, Calibre, and more.
Brent: The machine is now a production media server for friends.
Brent: The majority of the content is ripped DVDs and Blu-rays that are owned.
Brent: Jellyfin now replaces all the streaming services that we used to use.
Brent: That's the collective of friends.
Chris: Okay, give me their name again.
Brent: This is Pixie, P-I-X-I-E.
Chris: You are winning me over with the media stuff, okay?
Brent: Mm-hmm. The aim is to expand these services when three new 20-terabyte refurbished
Brent: Iron Wolf drives arrive soon to add paperless,
Brent: NG image, and more, or basically whatever you guys keep recommending on the show.
Brent: It says the hardware may look extreme, but it's my old gaming PC replaced by the Steam Deck.
Brent: So basically, they don't need that gaming PC anymore. They got a Steam Deck.
Chris: That's great.
Brent: Got a couple of Raspberry Pis that run a home assistant. Enough said there.
Brent: And the network runs off a stock ISP router and a little Netgear.
Brent: And he says here, I have dreams of bigger and shinier machines, read Unify.
Brent: The extra four terabyte higher drives will get moved to become the in-house
Brent: backups for docs, images.
Brent: And I really would like recommendations for privacy conscious VPSs for those backups.
Chris: I would too. All right. Pixie, that's a strong contender. Wes,
Chris: do you have a contender for the most potential?
Wes: Yes, I do. I would like to nominate Abe.
Chris: Oh, yes. I remember Abe's, all right, give it to me. Why would you nominate Abe for most potential?
Wes: Yeah, well, just to start, you got to check out this sweet 3D printed LabRax
Wes: 10U unit going on here because it's just beautiful.
Chris: Abe.
Wes: But then also, okay, so part of, here's the mission statement.
Wes: Part of my home lab is an actual lab where I'm running my mini-me project,
Wes: inspired by the Bobiverse.
Wes: The rest of it are just servers providing services to friends and family,
Wes: but that's books, movies, and shows, password managers, OIDC,
Wes: IRCBots, AGAs, C2M, HA, backups, etc.
Chris: I just got to book two of the Bobverse.
Wes: So then maybe you get what's going on here. Because, inspired by that,
Wes: the project aims to create persistent, autonomous AI agents called ABES that
Wes: manage and optimize a home lab environment.
Chris: So
Wes: Shouldn't you be watching that we gotta watch that.
Chris: Wow hey the ab-verse yeah so.
Wes: Yeah there you go.
Chris: That's strong that's strong thankfully i'm
Chris: very confident in mine mine is very strong too i do
Chris: have a couple of contenders in this one but uh
Chris: i'm gonna have to give it to mega i want to i want
Chris: to submit mega to the most potential here mega is
Chris: 16 years old they're building custom python downloaders and
Chris: running home assistant in proxmox they've built the entire thing on rescued
Chris: machines and they are quickly learning sysadmin skills and providing home hosting
Chris: to various members and i think when you talk about potential here and one to watch,
Chris: mega at 16 years old it's really incredible i mean that's really something so
Chris: i don't know how we make a choice here we have pixie abe and mega i've.
Brent: Basically been trying to do this for 16 years i've gotten nowhere close to what
Brent: what they're doing so i feel like that's worth watching.
Chris: Okay so do you you want to get on board with mega are you switching i'm gonna i'm.
Brent: Gonna yeah i'm gonna switch sorry pixie love you but uh i think i'm gonna switch to a mega vote.
Chris: West do you want to try to make a fighting response for Abe?
Wes: Well, you just, I mean, we're in the era of AI, and when you have AI bots that
Wes: are going to improve your home lab, the potential is seemingly endless.
Chris: Okay, it's a good argument. That's a good argument.
Brent: I think these two should get together and do a collaboration.
Brent: That way, we have the best.
Chris: Can we do a dual winner? A tie between Abe and Mega?
Wes: This is the first year, so we're setting precedent.
Chris: I feel like we should because the Babaverse appeal is so strong and I am so
Chris: impressed with what Mega has gotten done.
Wes: Yes, definitely.
Chris: All right. I think we're going to call it. It's a strong double win for the
Chris: most potential. It goes to Abe and Mega. Congratulations.
Chris: You've really built something pretty special.
Chris: All right. So now we get to a category that I find personally very interesting.
Brent: Maybe that's why it's in here.
Wes: Yeah.
Brent: Who made these categories?
Wes: There's a couple of those.
Chris: The Sip and Sage.
Wes: I don't remember getting a review document.
Chris: So this is the labs with the best energy efficiency.
Chris: And this is always really interesting because it's fun to figure out how people do this.
Chris: And, Brentley, I'd like to start with you. So who do you have for your contender
Chris: or contenders for best energy efficient sipping sage home lab?
Brent: I have two contenders here. I'm curious if any of ours overlap.
Brent: So I chose Hen Bagel and also Dares 19.
Brent: Do either of you have either of those?
Chris: No, I do not.
Brent: Okay. Well, I chose these because they, well, were clearly sippers,
Brent: but they're both a little bit different.
Brent: So Henbagel here has a Lenovo ThinkCenter M720S. Sound familiar, Chris?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: It's got 64 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes, SSD for storage, running Proxmox,
Brent: a mix of LXCs, Debian VMs.
Brent: There's a media server also, Raspberry Pi 5.
Chris: Nice.
Brent: It's got one of those MVME hats, so it's running Raspbian.
Brent: There's also a bunch of Docker Compose stacks in there.
Brent: There's another Raspberry Pi 3B. It's basically e-waste from work,
Brent: which is a theme we've seen a lot in here.
Brent: It's currently running Fedora IoT for learning and experimentation.
Brent: There's a free router from Facebook Marketplace running extremely old version of DWRT.
Brent: I've never done that before.
Brent: It's basically pulling triple duty as a router, an access point, and a switch.
Chris: As you do when you're doing energy efficiency.
Brent: There's a mobile home internet gateway in the lab. Yay, triple net.
Brent: And basically backups from a UPS device.
Brent: Pro 1500, and there's also a gaming PC in there, which is not part of the sipping
Brent: part, but he gives some stats on there.
Brent: It says, basically, my Pi 5 is for general infrastructure, running things such
Brent: as Pi Holes, NetServer, ReverseProxy for the home lab.
Brent: Additionally, the Pi 5 runs services like Paperless, Vault Warden,
Brent: LubeLogger, FreshRSS, Melee, and data is backed up to BlackBlaze.
Brent: The Lenovo Tower is my media server, running Jellyfin and a pile of R's.
Brent: I also use it to test distributions and other software stacks and VMs.
Brent: I value simplicity and documentation.
Brent: Short-term goals are drastically increasing my usage of Ansible and other infrastructure
Brent: as code tools, potentially using a self-hosted Forgeo and switching maybe to Podman as well.
Brent: So the clever part here, my pile of interconnected shell scripts that stop all.
Brent: My containers, individually back up all of their data using Restic and start
Brent: all the containers again.
Brent: Each container has its own script detailing which directories it will back up
Brent: and if or how to get the data out of it.
Brent: So basically, there's a restore script for every single service. And they're tested.
Chris: I like that. This is the energy efficient category. Give me the name again just
Chris: so I can make sure I have it.
Brent: This is Hen Bagel.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: H-E-N.
Chris: Hen Bagel is going to be featured in our outro song.
Brent: Okay. You ready for the number that actually matters?
Chris: Yeah, I am.
Brent: Here's the idle use. Yep. 32 watts.
Chris: That is pretty great.
Brent: That does not include the gaming PC. Okay. They had a little note here.
Brent: My home lab is on wheels, so I can clean the cat hair out from behind it.
Chris: I love that. That was like, that made me laugh.
Brent: There have been numerous cat-inflicted service outages.
Chris: All right, Hen Bagel. That's pretty great. 32 watts is pretty competitive.
Chris: Wes Payne, do you have a contender for the sipping sage?
Wes: Yeah, let's go with the cane CTL, cane control.
Chris: Cane CTL, all right.
Wes: Yeah, okay, so we got some gear here, an Intel Pentium silver board N6005 with six SATA ports.
Chris: Ooh, what? Really?
Wes: Yeah, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte SSD for the main storage,
Wes: four terabyte NVMe for fast storage, 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 18 terabytes for Blu-ray rips. Nice.
Wes: Jellyfin videos, music, and stuff like that's on the fast storage, which is great.
Chris: Yep.
Wes: And it's a backup target. I avoid spinning up hard drives as much as possible
Wes: to minimize power usage.
Chris: Oh, okay. Right there. That's,
Chris: When I see a couple of these people are doing dynamic things to spin things
Chris: up only when they're needed. Yeah, that's commitment. That's sipping.
Wes: Okay, the mission, started as a learning platform, still is,
Wes: three years ago with the main focus to learn more about NixOS,
Wes: self-hosting, and system administration.
Chris: I see why you picked this one.
Wes: Learning to love System D and NixOS. This server now runs my smart home,
Wes: media server, Jellyfin and Navidrome, backup services, document management, and many more.
Chris: Do we have a wattage? Do we have a bottom line number there?
Chris: I know sometimes people included that. That's a pretty impressive setup.
Wes: Yes. I think we've got about 21 watts idle.
Wes: Also, there's some BcacheFS involved here. Yep, idle is 21 watts.
Chris: Come on. BcacheFS too? All right, Kane.
Brent: I think this is a made-up home lab just to hit all our boxes.
Wes: Yeah, here we go. Extra notes. I always wanted to have my own NAS,
Wes: and when I got my first disposable income, I looked for an interesting NAS-fitting
Wes: Linux distributions. I read about NixOS a few years ago, looked for a podcast
Wes: covering the topic, and learned about Linux Unplugged.
Wes: Now it's a NAS Jellyfin server home assistant running BcacheFS and uses a custom kernel.
Chris: Oh, God.
Brent: Chris, did you submit this one?
Chris: I know, that's right. It's speaking to my heart. And I got to play rough because
Chris: I was going to submit DMK USA or Dan because he's got a great setup,
Chris: an entire stack, switches included, Pi, Wi-Fi, everything.
Chris: He says, I don't sacrifice any utility, and he gets it for 34 watts.
Chris: But the problem is, is Hen Bagel's coming in at 32 watts, and Kane's coming
Chris: in at 21 watts, so I need to be competitive here.
Chris: So I'm going to go with my most competitive pick, and that is Kepler.
Chris: Kepler has gone crazy.
Chris: My dream route. Everything is directly DC powered.
Chris: There's no AC to DC conversion happening in Kepler setup. And they have designed
Chris: the ultimate off-road expedition truck.
Chris: Every single watt has been scrutinized as you have to do. Get this.
Chris: 15.8 watts at idle.
Brent: Come on.
Chris: That's even when, actually, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 15.8 watts idle for a full media server.
Chris: He's very, very, he went through the details. And I have to say,
Chris: Kepler has, he has designed this entire home lab from a watts first principle.
Chris: And he manages a 15.8. I can't even imagine.
Chris: Mine right now has got to be closer to 70.
Chris: I mean, it's really gotten out of control. And to get the full stack that he's
Chris: achieved for 15.8 watts, I wouldn't have thought possible.
Chris: So I'm putting Kepler down as my contender for the sipping sage.
Chris: Does anybody want to argue 15.8 watts?
Brent: I would like to add to this submission, if you'll allow me to.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, please.
Brent: I had Kepler as my choice, top choice for the Tiny Titan as well.
Chris: It's a tricky overlap between some of those. There is some overlap there.
Chris: But I think that could be argument for winning this particular segment.
Brent: I think that, yes, I'm going to also suggest that. I will also say Kepler had
Brent: the photograph of their home lab that made me the most jealous of any of the home lab photographs.
Brent: mostly because the background is a bunch of like really super sweet car projects
Brent: that are in the loft that they're in they.
Chris: Have this really cool looking pc that's like an open case design.
Brent: That one right yeah.
Chris: That was very cool.
Brent: Basically he says the background shows my workshop and loft i currently live
Brent: in with some motorcycles a honda cb 550 cafe racer and a car a toyota land cruiser
Brent: hj 60 and a fiat panda 141 a as projects what a setup,
Brent: I admit I got entranced by the background and forgot to look at the home lab.
Brent: And then I was like, wait, why am I here?
Brent: I loved Kepler's setup for their home lighting and definitely saw that as the
Brent: potential for what my own home lab could be in the future.
Brent: So I'm going to give a strong vote to Kepler for this one.
Chris: So you're getting on board with the Chris train. I like that. I mean, 15.
Brent: Yep.
Chris: Wes Payne, can you argue with 15.8 watts even? Can you even attempt to argue that?
Wes: Well, see, I do want to, but then I have one that I want to use for Tiny Titan, so...
Chris: You're going to give it to Kepler?
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Congratulations, Kepler. You are our sipping sage.
Chris: All right, now let's get to that Tiny Titan category. We need to just knock this out right now.
Chris: The idea of this category is they do the most with the least hardware.
Chris: Brent, do you have a contender for our Tiny Titan?
Brent: I am going to nominate Dares19, who I thought I was as a sipping sage,
Brent: but really they're using twice as much as calories.
Brent: But what stood out here for me was that this is a pies only setup.
Brent: There are only Pis in this home lab.
Chris: I love that.
Brent: There are many Pis in this home lab. There are six Raspberry Pis,
Brent: and they all are doing something a little different.
Brent: So here we go. One of them is called the Londro Pie. It's in the laundry room.
Brent: It's a Raspberry Pi 4. It's got an NVMe on it as well. There's another Raspberry
Brent: Pi here. It's basically a compute module 4.
Brent: The other Pi, number 3, is a Pi 5 with 8 gigs of RAM and NVMe also on there.
Brent: number i don't know what is this for i
Brent: ran out is a raspberry pi 4 with one
Brent: of those poe hats on it nice and uh
Brent: the second to last pi here is another pi
Brent: 4 4 gig and the last one is another
Brent: pi 4 4 gig so here's the mission all
Brent: pies run one or two docker compose files
Brent: the home lab is centered around home assistant which lives on pi
Brent: number one along with an nginx proxy linked
Brent: doing a bunch of fancy network stuff that i don't really get
Brent: the second pi is only running pi hole for dns and points to the internal domains
Brent: to pi number one pi number three is the home lab work that runs 20 containers
Brent: such as mealy audiobook shelf music assistant jelly fin and some others.
Brent: Another pi here is uh basically not in
Brent: the laundry room which i think is where their main home lab is but is
Brent: in a central position in the house running zig b mqtt and a little mqtt on there
Brent: okay there's another pie here in his in their parents house in another country
Brent: running tail scale as an exit node and the last pie currently at their sister's
Brent: house and will also be a tail exit node.
Chris: Wow.
Wes: A nice little tail scale setup too.
Chris: That's a strong setup. That's a really strong contender for the Tiny Titan.
Brent: There's some extra highlights here that you'll appreciate, Chris,
Brent: if you'll allow me to just give a little bit more.
Brent: Not necessarily part of the pies, but all of my lights and light switches are smart.
Brent: However, they still work in case the Zigbee controller is down and home assistant
Brent: is down and Wi-Fi is down.
Brent: This is because the Zigbee bindings from switches to lights and because I flashed
Brent: some Shelleys with ESP Home.
Brent: So the home approval factor is through the roof, except during their biggest oops.
Chris: That is something we should talk more about is Zigbee, Z-Wave, and a couple others.
Chris: They do offer the ability to essentially create control groups.
Chris: I'm probably getting this wrong, but control groups where the logic actually
Chris: happens on the devices themselves. And so you don't need a controller operational.
Chris: That is an extremely, extremely strong contender, I think, for the Tiny Titan.
Chris: And Wes Payne, you have yourself quite the task.
Wes: I do. I do. But I think our dear Brentley may have misread the brief because
Wes: it's actually trying to do the most with the least.
Wes: So I would like to submit Tom Chuggler the gear.
Wes: A lonely Raspberry Pi 400 with a 2 terabyte USB SSD.
Wes: But the mission, the mission is broad.
Wes: Cody Media Center with additional services running in Docker.
Wes: Like we got the OS is LibreElec.
Wes: We have things like Samba, PyHole, Transmission, you know, for downloading those
Wes: Linux distributions and Shinobi home security monitoring.
Chris: Ah, that's great.
Wes: Also using GPIO and some Python to add IR remote control.
Wes: Now you've also got to factor in here. I know my idle power. It's three watts.
Chris: Shut up.
Wes: Three watts.
Chris: Tom, how is that?
Wes: And then extra notes. Docker is amazing. At various times, our media center
Wes: has had a web-based game emulator, Minecraft server, and much more.
Wes: The main thing, though, is Piehole keeping the internet clean for the kid.
Wes: Cody doesn't do YouTube that well, so we do have a separate Raspberry Pi OS
Wes: SD card with FreeTube on it for that.
Chris: But he's not doing a different machine. He's just swapping. Same thing.
Wes: And the media center is also a retro game emulator, SD card with retro Pi,
Wes: and a couple of PS2 controllers, plug-in, and play.
Chris: So, like, depending on what they want to do, you swap in SD cards?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Huh. So is that two systems total that I counted there?
Wes: No, it's just the one. It's a single Raspberry Pi 400.
Chris: Oh.
Brent: But it's just multi-purpose.
Wes: Yeah, a couple different SD card OSes.
Brent: That's brilliant.
Chris: Swap it. Wow. That's tough.
Wes: So, you know, if you're thinking doing the most with the least,
Wes: I think it's a strong contender.
Chris: That's a strong... Damn, Wes. Well done. All right. Well, my Tiny Titan,
Chris: I do have, see, I have DARS-19 as my runner-up, so I'll give a plus one to DARS-19.
Chris: I will just also mention that I thought the Tiny Titan maybe should go to Simon.
Chris: Simon has a itsy-bitsy rack stack of N100s, and he's done 3D printed enclosures for them.
Brent: Ooh.
Wes: You know, we aren't giving- It's small.
Chris: It's modern.
Wes: We aren't giving hardware awards, but the N100 might have earned itself on with
Wes: just the submissions that we got.
Chris: For real I just thought it was dense powerful and modular but I'm having a hard
Chris: time my only thing is I think I think I want to throw behind oh boy I'm having a,
Chris: I think I'm going to throw behind Tom. I thought I was going to do DIRS 19,
Chris: but if you go by the spirit of the category, Tom is doing the most with the least there.
Chris: Brantley, how do you feel about that? Could you give it to Tom in the spirit of?
Brent: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Chris: Getting the mileage out of that Pi 400? Yeah.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: That's impressive.
Brent: What would you do with another Pi? That was a question I would want to forward.
Chris: Yeah. I almost want to send him one just to find out.
Wes: Yeah, we'd like to do some Pi redistribution here. There's just something's not right.
Chris: Congratulations, Tom. You are our tiny Titan.
Chris: All right, so now it's a pretty fun category. It's the most overkill budget blowout build.
Chris: I mean, you know, people, they have hobbies. They spend a lot of money on those hobbies.
Chris: Sometimes home labbing is one of them. And, Brentley, who is your contender
Chris: for the most overkill budget?
Brent: There were some super impressive builds with some equally jealous making photos
Brent: accompanying those builds throughout.
Brent: I didn't think a home lab could be so large, but I do have someone who stood out for me.
Brent: Surf Rock 66 stood out for me.
Brent: They built a custom bookshelf that basically hides the entire home lab.
Brent: And if you know how to open the bookshelf, then the bookshelf opens and you
Brent: gain access to the entire home lab,
Brent: which also has built in cooling, has exterior access so you can get to it from
Brent: like outside the building as well.
Brent: And like, there's a heck of a lot of stuff behind that bookshelf.
Brent: And they even submitted a, like a video walkthrough of the entire build and
Brent: what's going to happen in the future to make it even more impressive.
Brent: This was just blew me away. This submission. So I, that's gotta be my choice.
Brent: Surf rock. You blew me away.
Chris: Well, I'll go ahead and reveal right now. Surf rock was my runner up.
Wes: I also had SurfRock in contention for something else, not this one.
Chris: Really?
Wes: But SurfRock definitely stood out.
Chris: You know, what I liked about SurfRock setup, what spoke to me deeply and personally,
Chris: is that they have a custom open LDAP schema just to manage central authentication
Chris: across everything, like their Wi-Fi and everything.
Chris: And that speaks to me because if I had all the energy in the world and time,
Chris: there'd be a lot of things I'd do before I get to setting up a central open LDAP server.
Chris: but it would be one of the things i would get to and i dream about it so i also
Chris: i had surf rock 66 as my runner-up for the most overkill budget and i also i
Chris: do love those uh r740xd's those are uh yeah that's.
Brent: Yeah it doesn't i guess it makes sense to go through the hardware in this.
Chris: Particular category i think it does yeah yeah okay.
Brent: So here's the list of the gear that was at least included in the submission.
Brent: Three PowerEdge R740XDs. So those are two U servers.
Brent: They both run Proxmox and they're wasted from work. Lucky duck.
Brent: A Supermicro 4U 36 Bay TrueNAS got 44 terabytes of spinning,
Brent: seven terabytes of SSDs, basically for VMs and such.
Brent: there are two desktop class pcs running as public minecraft servers two apc
Brent: ups's and extended run cabinets those are also e-wasted from work uh there's
Brent: a brocade icx 6610 l3 switch,
Brent: has 10 gig fiber there's an aruba 2930f 48
Brent: port switch that's also e-wasted from
Brent: work i see a theme here uh so here's
Brent: the mission hidden in a closet behind a custom bookshelf with its own
Brent: external ac so a dedicated server uh
Brent: air conditioning which is very fancy three dedicated power circuits uh 30 plus
Brent: vms and two minecraft servers that they essentially have uh the internet on
Brent: land so they can operate fully offline with those minecraft servers some services
Brent: jellyfin Home Assistant,
Brent: some internal DHCP and file servers.
Brent: QWix, which is with Wikipedia and the Khan Academy, so they can use those being
Brent: personally indexed, Nextcloud, Audiobookshelf, two piles with different upstreams for adults and kids,
Brent: a certificate authority, asterisk PBX for an HTML5 SIP client they developed,
Brent: Vault Warden Fresh RSS, Pinchflat to keep the kids off real YouTube,
Brent: Shinobi nvr apache guacamole for remote access open ldap with a custom schema
Brent: they built plus simple saml php to service oidc and saml wow okay zabbix for
Brent: monitoring those minecraft servers with mumble integration and a bunch of small
Brent: web apps they've developed or deployed.
Chris: I feel like Sir Frog should come run our infrastructure Wow okay Wes Can you Try to beat that?
Wes: I have a contender Sir Mysterion I.
Chris: Love the name.
Wes: Yeah okay so we have An Intel NUC running It's got 16 gigs of RAM running Proxmox
Wes: We have a desktop Ryzen 64 gigs of RAM Proxmox gaming pass through We have a
Wes: Super Micro CS This is Super Micro 1,
Wes: 2X E5s, Xeons I assume in there,
Wes: 192 gigs of RAM, I guess that's offline has some offline discs and stuff,
Wes: JBOD and second Supermicro 2X E5 2690 V4s another 192 gigs of RAM this is for
Wes: Proxbox and then Supermicro 3 that's 8X E5 2630 V3s,
Wes: that's got 256 gigs of RAM that's hci hyperconverged proxmox uh plus drdb a.
Chris: Lot of proxmox.
Wes: Uh we've got 10 terabytes of ssd storage usable
Wes: and 38 terabytes of hard drive storage usable the
Wes: mission everything and anything sandbox for work
Wes: sometimes advanced networking ipv6 only when
Wes: i can jellyfin image next cloud home assistant for
Wes: the family cited network ad blocking clusters hyperconverged
Wes: proxmox advanced routing BGP and OSPF starting
Wes: to look into EVPN and VXLAN IAC deployed VMs in NixOS config minimal windows
Wes: unless I have to test something built my own 3D printer for anything else I
Wes: need printed also host some services for a friend such as BeerTube and Mastodon
Wes: that's great some Kubernetes added some Olama and cheap Tesla P4 oh,
Wes: clever parts got also got a NixOS daily driver laptop with full description nice um,
Wes: I think this helps. So I didn't submit it for the sipper because the HomeLab idle is 980 watts.
Chris: That's a baller budget just on the power right there. That's the sip? That's just the sip?
Brent: Oh, man.
Chris: Oh, wow. So when it's cranking like on an old llama job or something,
Chris: it's higher than that. Okay.
Wes: The oops moment. I added enough servers that the breaker kept tripping.
Chris: I bet.
Wes: Had to upgrade to 20 amp circuit.
Chris: My man. All right.
Wes: And the extra notes. Do you know how hard it is to saturate a 40 gig network card?
Wes: Well, I don't know either. Something about multi-core iPerf tests required.
Wes: Don't have the disk bandwidth to make use of it either.
Chris: Yeah, isn't that tricky?
Wes: So, there you go.
Chris: Okay. All right.
Wes: And it's a very, if you look at the picture, it's a very nice little rack set up, and it looks nice.
Chris: Pretty good. Serer Mysterion is pretty good.
Brent: Just a slight point to add to my submission. Surf Rock's idle is 1,500 watts.
Chris: Surf Rock. Wow. All right.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: That's pretty good. I mean, it's cute that you guys are measuring by power,
Chris: but this was supposed to be the budget blowout.
Chris: So my contender is Optic Tiger.
Chris: And the reason why is we have a dollar figure on just one of the rigs in Optic
Chris: Tiger's setup. It's not $3,000.
Chris: It's not a $6,000 server. It is not an $8,000 server.
Chris: It is not a $12,000 server. No, is it a $14,000 or $15,000 server?
Chris: No, it's not even an $18,000 server. It is a $20,000 custom Epic server with
Chris: an A6000 GPU and 100 terabytes of enterprise SSD storage.
Brent: What?
Chris: He's essentially built himself a tier three data center disguised as a home server.
Chris: I mean, this thing is high end. That's incredible.
Chris: So, now I don't know what his power run rate is, but I know that his entry rate
Chris: for that server is 20 grand plus all the networking equipment, the rack, all of it.
Chris: So, it's a tough call because these are all really good. These are all very good.
Brent: I think you would call that a budget blowout. Yeah.
Chris: I feel like with this with the dollar amount on there kind of gives it,
Chris: I mean, one box is 20 grand.
Brent: Right? What are they doing with it?
Chris: Well probably high performance thought simulating.
Wes: What else do you do.
Chris: So okay anybody I mean can you beat that can you beat 20 grand can you be it,
Chris: going once anybody you want to make a case otherwise I think it could be a contender here it's.
Brent: Very strong I mean custom it just I mean it didn't specifically say monetary
Brent: budget so I'm going to say building a custom bookshelf with your woodworking
Brent: skills is it takes a lot of time.
Chris: Oh my god you know design dedication.
Brent: And and uh therefore you know it's an impressive set of.
Chris: Multi-skills to pull it off but all these home labs are a large time investment,
Chris: so true i think we can go by the budget i tried west pain you got any arguments i.
Wes: Think i have to give it.
Chris: All right i.
Wes: Think i'm in i can't.
Chris: Tiger i think we give it to you for that one $20,000 custom Epic server with
Chris: an A6000 GPU and 100 terabytes of enterprise SSD storage housed in a home lab
Chris: disguised as a tier three data center.
Chris: You, sir, are our most overkill budget blowout for the holiday home lab special.
Chris: Now we get to our final category, gentlemen, and that is the best overall home lab.
Chris: Now, this was so...
Brent: Basically impossible to choose.
Chris: Right? It was impossible. This was so impossible that we realized next year
Chris: what we would like to do if we do this again is do community ranking for some of these.
Chris: Because it was... There are so many good submissions.
Chris: There are so many. And it took us all hours to go through them.
Chris: Like then when I whittled it down to my, to my top list, that was still 30 ish
Chris: picks that I then had to whittle it down from even further.
Chris: Absolutely amazing. The submissions we got from all different ends of the spectrum,
Chris: but we do have to pick one overall winner.
Chris: And so Brent, do you have the best overall home lab contender?
Brent: I found this the most difficult thing to choose.
Wes: Well, yeah. Yeah.
Brent: No, but like emotionally, because I feel like everybody has a different purpose
Brent: for their home lab. And like, who am I to say what the best one is?
Brent: Because I don't know what I'm doing. So I am going to go with the one I fell in love with.
Brent: So I'm going to say Kepler, your little tiny machine that was a 15 watt sipper
Brent: and did a ton of stuff and you're moving it into your off-road expedition truck
Brent: with your sweet loft project,
Brent: you know, car projects that won me over.
Brent: I'm, uh, I'm saying you got a sweet rig there and that's a, that's,
Brent: that's the best home overall home lab I saw.
Chris: I like that. Kepler is a good contender. That's a good one.
Chris: Okay, Wes Payne.
Wes: I would like to submit Dan from Down Under.
Chris: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Wes: Yeah. A sweet rack on wheels.
Wes: I just, I love it. It came in handy for Dan, which we'll talk about.
Wes: And then just a nice little from the top, we've got a patch panel,
Wes: custom rack mount from Things in Rack, POE switch, netgate 1100 router with
Wes: PFSense on there, Raspberry Pi 4,
Wes: some extra stuff for 2U power draws, 2x
Wes: dell wise thin clients and 3d printed rack mount intel
Wes: j 5005 with 4 gigs of ram 512 gig
Wes: sata m2 for you server on
Wes: rails pi kvm inside the case uh there's
Wes: just so much going on here uh there's another azrok going on
Wes: in here but check out the mission various self-hosted
Wes: apps including image nextcloud paperless piehole audio
Wes: bookshelf jellyfin bitcoin node the r suite monitoring grafana
Wes: prometheus scrutiny ghost folio which is investment tracking wow
Wes: grist and node red link warden miniflux tandoor sterling
Wes: pdf beaver habits getia duplicati rustic server
Wes: kubernetes zfs with mirrors used for everything
Wes: there's a fast pool and a slow pool sanoid making hourly snapshots of most volumes
Wes: shared postgres between all services to make good backups easier uh there's
Wes: also of course um so one of the wisest is doing home assistant running haos
Wes: another one is off but It might be the Bitcoin node.
Wes: The Raspberry Pi was doing Zigbee to MQTT.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: There's also, and this is stuff we do, there's a Linode VPS named Outpost,
Wes: which I think is a classy name.
Wes: Synapse Matrix server with a WhatsApp and Signal Bridge. Traffic and Tailscale
Wes: used to provide access to some of the stuff.
Wes: Uptime Kuma, Rally, Nostra Relay, Mumble. Backups with Autorestick to the home
Wes: server. All managed with Terraform.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: So there's a 3D printed rack mounts for non-rack mountable gear.
Wes: It's a really nice little touch.
Wes: idle for all this is like 100 watts, which is,
Wes: That's, you know, being pretty conservative, I think.
Brent: The entire rack?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Extra notes. We just moved apartments, and the rack and server were carefully
Wes: transported the day before the move by me to keep it safe.
Wes: It was the first piece of furniture in the new apartment.
Wes: We were on the fifth floor without an elevator, so carrying it was tough.
Wes: The new apartment is just one floor up, so much more manageable.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. That's a good one. The name again, that was Dan from?
Wes: Down Under.
Chris: Down from Down Under. You also were my runner-up for the best home lab.
Chris: Dan from Down Under was my runner-up. So I will say that. I agree.
Chris: I will plus one everything you said.
Chris: I'm going to give a pitch for Firefighting Dad.
Chris: Firefighting Dad, I think, nails the gold standard for a beautiful home lab.
Chris: Because it's not overdone on the hardware.
Chris: It's about a clearly defined mission.
Chris: And he's really striving for digital sovereignty for his entire family.
Chris: and providing a service to the community and one of the things he's done that's
Chris: really cool is he has an open bsd system where he auto has he has scripts that
Chris: auto provision different resources for friends and family so he can just hit
Chris: a button and then provision them what he needs when.
Wes: I saw that it's so cool it was all five fire diet was my runner-up.
Chris: Really yeah we were thinking.
Wes: We're on the same well done gents.
Chris: I decided also to apply the scoring system and we didn't do this a lot but,
Chris: If you total it up, if you go by our scoring system, he got a 54 out of 60.
Chris: He scored a 10 on functionality because he solves routing, storage,
Chris: automation, and education to friends, family, like literally his community.
Chris: Great design, clean, SFF cluster, well organized.
Chris: He's got Tasmoda he's using, really nice. But also the ingenuity around his
Chris: OpenBSD auto provisioning scripts to set up friends and family access to his stuff.
Chris: He's got quite a bit of stuff he's providing for multiple different sets of people.
Chris: and he's doing it all at 450 watts. Yes, that's high, but he's doing a massive
Chris: amount of work at 450 watts.
Chris: And he also gives special attention to documentation, very clear explanation
Chris: of why and how for his end users.
Chris: And then he really focused on digital sovereignty and teaching those lessons
Chris: to his kids in a way that's really classy and it's not overbearing.
Chris: And so I gave him a 10 on that too.
Chris: So it gave him a total 54 out of 60. So firefighting dad, I just was really
Chris: impressed because it nailed that sweet spot, but also it was making an improvement
Chris: on the people around his lives. So that's a great one.
Brent: Firefighting Dad also has a little note here. Every Christmas,
Brent: I make a donation to the open source software that I used for the entire year.
Brent: That list gets longer every year, but that's one way I try to pay it forward.
Chris: That's pretty freaking great. Right?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Right?
Brent: Yeah. Hit me in the feels.
Wes: These are all so good.
Chris: They were. They were all so good, but we can only give it to one this year.
Chris: I think it's Dan from Down Under and Firefighting Dad.
Chris: Those are our two top right there, if we give it to both. But I think I kind
Chris: of want to give the edge to Firefighting Dad just because of his impact overall.
Chris: Because it's not just for himself, the family, but his community too.
Wes: Yeah, that's noble. I respect that.
Chris: Right? How do you feel about that, Brantley?
Brent: I said, let's do it.
Chris: Oh, wow. I can't believe we got to consensus. I thought we'd be fighting on
Chris: this forever. So there you go.
Chris: Firefighting Dad, you are the Great Holiday Home Lab, best overall home lab. Congratulations.
Chris: but really sincerely thank you everyone who took the
Chris: time to whoa that's way
Chris: too much in the studio way too much we cannot have whoa
Chris: thank you everybody who took the time to fill out the survey and
Chris: you know really that's your time is your most precious asset
Chris: and we really do appreciate you actually getting involved with
Chris: all these crazy shenanigans it was a real holiday treat
Chris: for us and um combined with the notes and
Chris: the easter eggs in there or just reading everybody's setup and being so freaking impressed
Chris: with what you do with what you've got it was
Chris: really great for us so just again for for me and all the boys thank you thank
Chris: you very much and uh we have ways to make this even better potentially next
Chris: year if we do this again that hasn't necessarily been decided but we'd love
Chris: to hear your feedback on that segment and ways you would make it even better
Chris: We'd take that feedback too. Boost that right in.
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Brent: Now, one thing that became very clear to us as we were going through these together
Brent: is that we made some categories and there were many home labs that did not fit
Brent: at all into any of these categories.
Brent: So we decided to pull a few of these out as honorable mentions,
Brent: but they're mostly just home labs that blew us away for reasons we couldn't predict.
Brent: And I have a list. Wes, you have a list. And Chris, you have a list,
Brent: too. I feel like we probably have some that overlap.
Chris: Maybe.
Brent: I know I've got a couple that are just like blew me away.
Chris: All right, start us off with one.
Brent: This was a very impressive setup by Barry KK7JXG.
Wes: Oh, Barry was a runner-up I had earlier, so I'm very glad we're featuring Barry.
Brent: And Barry blew me away. They basically said, I got a home lab,
Brent: everybody's going to have a home lab, but I'm going to show you my ham cluster.
Brent: Oh, right. And this was impressive to me for so many reasons.
Brent: One was that it's being used for a competition that's coming up,
Brent: basically a ham competition, and they go into details about that, which I'll read in a sec.
Brent: But also they did some like really nice electronics work to have the entire
Brent: tiny ham rack be powered by only one power supply. And it was splitting the
Brent: power to a bunch of different things.
Brent: Well, basically a bunch of different little one-liter PCs that are doing all this work.
Brent: This thing blew me away. So ham cluster, yes, we don't have a category for that,
Brent: but it was very impressive.
Wes: I guess we might need one.
Brent: Here's the mission. I mean, Homelab is a bit meh, so I thought I'd submit this.
Brent: Basically, they're Ham Radio Club's field network consisting of a three-node
Brent: Proxmox cluster, which will be deployed semi-off-grid in the field.
Brent: Its core purpose is to host a virtual desktop infrastructure for contact logging.
Brent: Logging is the process of recording details of a ham radio contact.
Brent: So call signs, time, frequency, and signal report.
Brent: This January is Winterfield Day, which is one of the largest ham radio field events of the year.
Brent: And my club will have a multi-operator station, which will be supported by this field network.
Brent: Since our logging software is Windows only, I'm using Apache Guacamole to provide
Brent: browser-based cross-platform access to each of the dedicated ResourceLite Tiny10-based VMs.
Brent: Last year's guys groaned when I told them they needed a Windows laptop,
Brent: so I thought they'd get a kick out of logging on with their iPads this year.
Brent: For data protection, the logging databases reside on a CephFS-backed Samba share.
Brent: This setup isolates database transactions from the Wi-Fi network.
Brent: So if radio interference occurs, which is possible around a lot of high-powered
Brent: ham radios, it might temporarily disrupt an RDP session, but it won't corrupt
Brent: the centralized database. At least, that's the plan.
Chris: That is so great. I love that. That's great.
Chris: Very well done. Great suggestion, Brentley. All right. Do you want to hear my honorable mention?
Chris: I loved Master Reboot because, and I quote, I didn't spend a single dollar on my setup, he writes.
Chris: I worked at two companies with three-year hardware refresh cycles,
Chris: and when it was time to recycle the equipment, I first picked up everything coming out of rotation.
Chris: He says, my home lab, though, is a space heater. It runs at 352 watts idle.
Chris: But about six months ago, he swapped video cards. I don't think he loves it.
Chris: But I just, I love the story he gave us about trying to set things up.
Chris: Wasn't the best situation. Kind of dark. He had to forcefully plug in a port.
Chris: And he was kind of given a shove. He's like, why isn't this going in right?
Chris: And turns out he was trying to stick a USB stick into a display port and wrecked his display port.
Wes: And did stick it in that point.
Chris: Yeah, he got it.
Chris: also he just had this great story uh where
Chris: he was talking about trying to uh flash a hard
Chris: drive and i think
Chris: i can find it here he says it's so good i tried to flash a usb stick and i put
Chris: it in my fedora machine and it said nope not our problem so finally i grabbed
Chris: my macbook in desperation i found the usb creator tool for mac i hit one button
Chris: and bam it worked i swear that Mac looked at me and said, amateurs.
Chris: He says, but what would have taken me one hour ended up taking seven hours.
Chris: That's not tech support. That's a hostage situation.
Chris: He says, before I touch anything, too, I send out a telegram message to the wife.
Chris: They say, I pretend like it's Patch Tuesday at Amazon with a big notice.
Chris: Expected downtime imminent. Prepare snacks, alert the teenagers,
Chris: we may lose Wi-Fi for up to 15 minutes. Godspeed.
Chris: That's the message he sends out to the wife via telegram. He included a couple
Chris: of diagrams that he created with draw.io, too.
Brent: They were nice.
Chris: Yeah. So I had to give the honorable mention to Master Reboot.
Chris: Love that story. And not spending a single dollar on the setup.
Wes: Amazing.
Chris: Wes Pano, do you have an honorable mention?
Wes: I do. Let's go with the dude abides.
Chris: Oh, very good.
Brent: Ooh.
Wes: Yeah. I like the dude abides because there's just a suite rack, a huge array of apps,
Wes: lightning nodes in there we can kind of get into some of the
Wes: details there's uh let's see it's a
Wes: 15 new star tech rack cabinet enclosed and
Wes: locked a nice ups hp gen 8
Wes: micro server with some xeons 16 gigs of ecc
Wes: 4 by 16 terabyte zfs mirror two and a half gig neck jet kvm involved there's
Wes: also lenovo m720q oh that's got a 10 gig sfp plus a whole bunch of nice looking
Wes: unify gear nice a home assistant blue with a zigbee antenna there's some cameras oh.
Chris: Yeah did he include a picture.
Wes: Uh yes yeah i saw a gallery actually yep.
Chris: I saw that.
Wes: With an adorable photo of his daughter hanging out next to the wreck.
Chris: Yeah i saw that too that did speak to me.
Wes: Uh-huh yeah i was really like that also isp modem but i guess there's some double
Wes: nat issues because he's getting eight gigs symmetric from his isp.
Chris: Oh, my goodness.
Wes: But with the double NAT, it's kind of in the four gigs.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: So, you know, really limping along.
Chris: That's probably fixable, though. You know, maybe not totally solvable,
Chris: but probably pretty solvable.
Wes: The Home Assistant sounds like it's up your alley. 159 devices,
Wes: 12 add-ons, zero-tier influx, Grafana, Samba, code server, NextCloud backup,
Wes: Tailscale, ESP Homes in there, Mosquito, Music Assistant, Uptime Kuma.
Chris: Oh, good.
Wes: There's a TrueNAS involved on that microserver for daily photo backup to Backblaze.
Wes: Of course, Proxmox is going on that Lenovo box. A bunch of LXCs on top of that,
Wes: including a backup server.
Wes: And there's like the R stack there, plus a Bitcoin node with Umbral is going on.
Chris: Nice.
Wes: Yeah, I just thought kind of the whole thing looked like a classic Homelab Plus.
Chris: Well done, dude.
Wes: You'll like the clever part. The latest thing I'm proud of is the addition of
Wes: some Zigbee relays to the radiators we have around the house so that I can control
Wes: them via Home Assistant. it.
Wes: We don't have central heating and being able to do this was really cool.
Wes: And all of that at an idle of 183 watts.
Chris: Oh, not bad.
Wes: Not too bad.
Chris: I want to give just a quick shout out to PJ. Producer Jeff sent in his setup
Chris: and we've seen this setup and it's impressive.
Chris: And I bet a lot of you out there do this is he has a home theater PC NAS custom
Chris: desktop hooked up to his TV that It also runs image and next cloud.
Chris: So it's his media center box. And also it does a lot of his hosting there. It's pretty great.
Chris: So there's so many good submissions that what we're going to do is some of them
Chris: that didn't make it into today's show, just because we're already running long
Chris: is we'll probably read some of them in a future bootleg feed too,
Chris: because there's too many not to get into, but we have one more treat for everybody.
Chris: And this one is something that's pretty fantastic friends.
Chris: It's time for the boosties.
Chris: And this is just a moment where we can just acknowledge and thank people who
Chris: have supported the show directly with a boost throughout the individual productions.
Chris: And, of course, we have to first start by thanking everybody who's a member.
Chris: That is our ongoing support, and we really appreciate that. This is to acknowledge
Chris: those who also contribute above and beyond each individual production.
Chris: And, as always, I'll butcher some of these pronunciations.
Brent: Please do.
Wes: But because of how the way this works, you've probably already heard him do it before.
Chris: It'll be...
Wes: Will it be the same? We don't know, but...
Chris: Yeah. And so the folks that supported the show with the most sats for 2025,
Chris: Devator comes in at an even 600,000 sats.
Wes: So neat.
Chris: I wonder if they... Did they plan that? That's so perfect.
Wes: That would be impressive.
Chris: Adversary 17, not surprised at all to see them on the list. They come in with 622,839 stats.
Chris: Thank you very much. Now, I know, you know, I know a lot of that.
Chris: I think I recall a lot of that came in during our Texas road trip.
Wes: Yes, definitely.
Brent: Well, huge shout out to adversaries for having me there, too. That's another V4V.
Brent: It's not counted in these stats, but it sure is memorable. So thank you for having me.
Wes: Yeah. Weren't you supposed to boost in, Brandon? Sort of part of that?
Brent: Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot.
Wes: Well, coming in at number three, we have our buddy, Our Podcast,
Wes: Always Generous, with 902,345 sats.
Chris: Fantastic. Thank you, Our Podcast.
Brent: Second from the top here, we've got Blackhost, 957,624 Satoshis.
Chris: Whoa.
Wes: Just under a million. That's wild.
Chris: Heavy lift. And that is something that goes back to the entire community, right?
Chris: It's really, thank you so much, Blackhost. And our number one booster for 2025
Chris: is at 1,066,632 sats, the dude abides.
Wes: Wow.
Chris: Yes, thank you very much. We have an extra batch of fireworks just for you, the dude.
Chris: We really do appreciate that. That is a significant contribution to this show's run in 2025.
Chris: These are some of the folks, along with our members, that made 2025 possible
Chris: and the reason why we had an episode every single week for you. Thank you very much.
Brent: We have also a special little gift for the DudaBides.
Brent: Hybrid Sarcasm, if you remember from last year, suggested that the one who won
Brent: the Boosties would get a free Jupiter Broadcasting Party membership,
Brent: either to use for yourself or to give away maybe to another community member
Brent: or someone you know who would love the show. That is so great.
Wes: Congrats.
Brent: That's amazing. That is community to community gifts. And, Hybrid,
Brent: thank you for doing that.
Chris: Yes, plus one to that. Thank you, Hybrid.
Wes: Yeah, we did not prompt that. Hybrid just stepped up.
Chris: All right. Let's give thanks to the folks who sent us the most boosts in total.
Chris: Are you ready for this category, gentlemen?
Wes: Yeah, coming up, number five is Tomato with 19 boosts.
Chris: All right. Thank you, Tomato, 19 boosts. Tomato, tomato.
Chris: Not surprisingly, the DudaBides comes in next on the list at 20 boosts.
Wes: Number three is none other than turd ferguson with a handsome 23 boost thank.
Chris: You turd appreciate that.
Brent: Number two we've got adversaries 17.
Wes: 25 total.
Chris: Boosts very nicely done,
Chris: And our number one sender for the most boosts, ladies and gentlemen,
Chris: goes to the one, the only, Gene Bean.
Chris: With 54 boosts.
Wes: Wow.
Brent: Do you notice how that's more than twice as much as the number two person?
Chris: You know what? I love the engagement. I love it. Thank you, Gene Bean.
Wes: Gene keeps in touch, and it's great.
Chris: And when you see his boost come in, you're always like, oh, good,
Chris: it's a Gene boost, right?
Brent: I always see his smiling face whenever we get that pew from Gene.
Chris: I agree. I agree. All right. Our next category is those of you who set those
Chris: sats on streaming, and you just send the sats as you listen, minute by minute.
Chris: And we really do appreciate that. Brentley, will you kick off the number one,
Chris: or it's not number one, but the first entry.
Chris: Number five. I guess it'd be the number five entry, yes. Will you kick off number five, Brentley?
Brent: The number five most stream sats to the network came from undead fable with
Brent: 90 460 sats streamed in total all right.
Chris: Thank you, Undead. Thank you very much. Our good buddy, Odyssey Wester,
Chris: has been around for a long time.
Chris: He sent in, just via streaming while he listened to the show,
Chris: supporting minute by minute, 93,817 sats.
Brent: Nice. Impressive.
Chris: Thank you, Odyssey. Appreciate that.
Wes: And, well, you already know that Gene Bean boosts a lot, but it turns out Gene
Wes: Bean streams a lot in at number three with 116,934 stream sats.
Chris: Thank you, Gene.
Wes: That's on top of the boosts.
Chris: Yes, that's on top of the boost, Gene. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
Brent: We've got our number two here, Biggles. Biggles is number two with 120,950 stream sets.
Chris: Very, very impressive.
Wes: And this is kind of why I like just taking a peek in here sometimes,
Wes: because, you know, we don't see necessarily a lot of boosts from Biggles, but.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Out there streaming. That's great.
Chris: That's a great observation, Wes. Thank you, Biggles.
Chris: And our number one most stream sats listener goes to Squared Triangle, 276,500 sats.
Chris: That's the, that's, thank you very much.
Chris: Thank you, everyone. If you have a membership at linuxunplugged.com slash membership
Chris: or the Jupyter Party, or you stream or send those sats, thank you for making 2025 possible.
Chris: We really appreciate you. Honestly, I wasn't ever sure if it happened. We were sure.
Chris: In 2024 at this time, we're like, will we make it? Will we make it?
Chris: And the audience made sure we made it. Thank you, everyone out there.
Chris: Is there any other categories that we need? Because I see, so we have the stream
Chris: sats and then we have the most streams. That's a different category.
Wes: Yeah, I don't know if it's super meaningful.
Chris: Well, we can give it a quick mention.
Wes: Yeah, definitely. Just people out there who are doing a lot of streaming,
Wes: including Forward Humor, number five, 2.5K streams.
Chris: Very nice.
Wes: Moon and Night, also 2.5K streams.
Chris: Hey, Moon and Night.
Wes: Odyssey Westra, 2.6K.
Chris: There he is again.
Wes: Undead Fable, 2.9K.
Chris: Good to see you again.
Wes: And Dano Selti at 3,120 streams.
Chris: Thank you, Dano. Appreciate you very much.
Wes: Yeah, let's see. Our total number of boosters was something like 238.
Chris: Individuals?
Wes: Yeah. Total number of boosts was 746.
Chris: Wow.
Wes: We had a total number of streamers was 189 and we had 50K streams.
Chris: Thank you, everyone.
Brent: Unbelievable.
Chris: Thank you for, you know, every time we go through this, it really feels like
Chris: we are proving out a model here where a niche that couldn't have been successful
Chris: in magazine and in other mediums because what we talk about and the demographic that we appeal to,
Chris: who prefers free stuff in a lot of cases, It's like we're making it actually
Chris: possible where some of our greatest community resources for media,
Chris: like the Linux magazines,
Chris: weren't able to make a long run of it. I mean, we're doing it.
Chris: We're proving it right here.
Chris: And so much gratitude goes to our members and everybody who supports us with the boost.
Chris: Thank you. Thank you very much. And a round of applause also to anybody who's
Chris: contributed to the show in the community, who has told the show to something
Chris: like a friend because word of mouth is the number one way to spread a podcast
Chris: or spent a little time with your time, talent or treasure, any of those.
Chris: Thank you so much for making 2025 possible. We will have one more episode.
Chris: One more episode. We will be back after the holidays on December 28th, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern, for our predictions.
Wes: Uh-oh.
Chris: You know what also that means?
Wes: Review.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So we have some homework to do.
Chris: We do. You can join us December 28th.
Wes: Boost in those predictions, too, please.
Chris: Get your predictions in. You still have time. And we'll be reviewing the boost
Chris: that you sent in the last week into the show. Thank you very much.
Chris: And we'll see you next week.