Abstract

I gave this talk to around 25 people at the hackerspace the week after I finished the rack. It was mostly Q&A by the end. The premise: you can buy three used Dell R630s on eBay for less than a decent mid-range laptop, but if you put them in your living room with stock fans you will not be married much longer. This is what I swapped, what I measured, and what I got wrong.

Outline

  1. Why a homelab at all (jobs-to-be-done, not “I like servers”)
  2. The hardware: R630, R730xd, and a whitebox Ryzen
  3. Noise: Noctua replacements, IPMI fan curves, and the two hacks
  4. Heat: where it went, and the cheap infrared thermometer that embarrassed me
  5. Power: kill-a-watt measurements, idle vs load, my actual bill delta
  6. What I run on it: Proxmox + ZFS + a few LXC containers
  7. Q&A

What I learned giving it

The questions I got were almost entirely about power, not noise. I had over-prepared on decibel charts and under-prepared on wall-watt measurements. Next time I would start with the power bill and work backwards into the hardware.

One audience member pointed out that my ZFS ARC config was probably over-sized for the amount of random IO my workloads actually did. He was right. That became /posts/proxmox-zfs-arc-tuning/ a few months later.

What I’d change

  • Cut the first ten minutes of backstory. The audience wanted numbers.
  • Include a single slide with total cost broken down by part, including the things I bought twice because I got the first one wrong.
  • Be honest about the failure rate of used enterprise gear. Two of my first three drives died inside a year.

Related posts: /posts/power-efficiency-homelab-rack/, /posts/ups-load-sizing-quiet-rack/, /posts/proxmox-cluster-of-two/.

Not recorded. There’s a text writeup I shared on the hackerspace mailing list afterwards, happy to email it if you ask.