Not to be critical, but the homelabs I find truly impressive are the objectively unpretty ones. Those that resemble the OpenBSD build system - a menagerie of servers haphazardly racked in a basement, Ethernet cables strewn about, and a questionable UPS setup that might get a second glance from the fire marshal. It's a lab, not a museum piece. Even Apple's labs look more like any other thrown-together engineering lab than something for public consumption.
Looking badass but hear me out. You don't need any of these unless you just want to spend $2-3k+. A simple Sonicwall router + 2-3 wired devices are more than enough setup. For wifi, a cheap TP-Link mesh works well which only costs $30 to upgrade per room.
For commercial clients, we use the Unifi series and are very happy with it. I won't use Unifi for home because its strength is too high and I am very paranoid when it comes to signals blasting and penetrating more than a drywall. Wifi shouldn't be strong enough to be picked up outside of my house and I accomplish it with weak tplink per room mesh units.
I don't remember using more than 350 mbit data transfer over my ethernet since my internet speed is capped at 350 mbit. My NAS is connected to my SonicWall directly and can reach maximum read/write speeds (for cloud backups).
I'd invest that money in the stock market and make money instead. But I get it. A hobby is a hobby.
Well written, and timely for me to get inspiration from. I have been going back and forth between doing off-the-shelf vs using opnsense/pfsense in a rackmount router. Haven't made mind on it yet.
I will subscribe to 10gbps sonic fiber soon, that's what prompted me to look into this. Unifi seems to cap wifi 7 at 2.5Gbps, however.
Stumbled on his other article[1] on HN recently and I forgot to subscribe (RSS). I love the writings. Reading this article (Homelab Setup), I was thinking, that this is way overdone. Then, I quickly browsed around and love this guy’s life — Fatih has good taste. I'm inspired by the Homelab setup.
Ten years ago Ubiquiti offered commercial grade hardware at consumer prices. Now I understand it’s the inverse.
At least according to the disgruntled former employees that left sometime between the lifelogging wearable camera acquisition and the forced cloud/updates and the “massive” data breach.
What would be the 2024 version of how great UI was in 2014? Or what are your fellow hacker setups? Ideally something that does local first management, connection bonding, 10gbs, tailscale level of simplicity? I have the same setup as the author and uncomfortable with the Apple-ification of the product to something that looks pretty without meaningful root privileges.
Ubiquity sure does make some pretty gear, but I will never trust them with my firewall. Makes me sad that so many homelabbers do. Can't quite put my finger on why that saddens me.
OP here: Thanks for all the comments. The Rack is inside a small attic, where I also have my 3D printers and various other tools: https://imgur.com/a/pxSXvQH
I just called it homelab, because I've seen people use the names interchangeable.
Happy to answer any questions not explained in the blog post.
> I knew my concrete home would be a big challenge if I didn't deploy multiple APs to every floor or room. Concrete walls cut out Wi-Fi signals more than dry walls.
We're building a house, moving from an apartment. I ensured that we get a fiber line to each room, and 2 to open spaces where I might want to extend wifi networks. Then CAT 6 cables to where cameras will be. I have a Nest wifi with 2 router extensions and a wireless one, so I've prioritised where I'll place those (and their eventual replacements).
My setup will be simpler, because I'm not really building a home lab (I agree with other comments that this isn't really a homelab). I just want to move noisy devices like a NAS and switches to the garage. My home office has space for a long rack if I desire one, but I think I'm going to make it a hybrid glass-door display cabinet that also houses the desktop so I don't hear fan noises.
This is a good write-up still because it's giving me ideas of what I might need for networking.
My home wifi setup is one AP in the ceiling.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510422
Let me get this straight, you spent a bunch of time and money on a 12U rack, a bunch of Unifi switches, and a bunch of cameras, and you're just now realizing that you need to set up VLANs and firewall rules? That's not a "homelab project", that's just a bunch of stuff you bought and now you're trying to figure out how to make it work.
And what's with the obsession with aesthetics? You spent a bunch of money on fancy cable management and patch panels, but you're still using a bunch of ugly, exposed cables. It's like you're trying to make a statement about how much money you have, rather than actually building a functional network.
And don't even get me started on the DNS settings. You're using a custom domain name for your Synology NAS, but you're still using DHCP to assign IP addresses. What's the point of having a custom domain name if you're just going to use a dynamic IP address?
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, but this post just reeks of "I have a lot of money and I want to show it off". If you're actually interested in building a functional home lab, I'd be happy to offer some advice. But if you're just looking for a way to justify buying a bunch of expensive networking gear, then maybe you should just stick to playing with your toys.
Love my Ubiquity setup. Nice post OP showing people at of the possible. Have fun learning the setup!
The first rule about your home network is…
Isn't this more of a home network rather than home lab ? Lab would be where you can run software and hardware to actually experiment with things. Within a closed setup like Unifi you are hardly experimenting with anything if at all.
Cool setup no doubt because unifi does make some good bang for your buck hardware that is low maintenance if you want to mostly just set it and forget it. And this looks like one of those set it and forget it control from a panel things.
But this is less lab and more network imo.