I actually really feel this. Before I retired I had a homelab in the learning, testing, experimenting sense. I didn't run anything for home "production" on it because the downtime wasn't appreciated.
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
It is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
Yeah I've posted a few times here and there that selfhosting and homelabbing are different concepts with different goals. You might use the same hardware but what solutions you choose will differ based on your goals.
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
I'm in the homeprod camp. The lab is on the other side of the room with the scope etc. Although come to think of it most of the electronics I do these days is fixing things, so maybe that should be considered production too. argh.
A perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere. Does OP have nothing productive to say other than dunking on the term? Since when does "homelab" resemble to anything concrete?
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
I call it my "homeprod" - but then, what happens if your infra spans multiple sites, and the cloud? Then it's just "prod" at that point. Probably best to just call it your "personal infra / servers", or if you have a family, "family servers".
I present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
I call it my deprod, or home office nonproductivity suite. Or fire hazard. Or “those f**ing wires”. I’ll usually refer to just a piece of it, like “my computer”, “my weird ARM switch”, or “that engineering sample that a guy sold me at the Flea for $10 and still hasn’t died after 5 years of being on”.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
dont be such a sook. if you're not making money off it, its a homelab.
If its just infrastucure to run your house its then you wouldnt be blogging about it.
your about says:
Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadDoesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)?
There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See: https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
1. No fault tolerance or high availability
2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
I took from the article that the term homelab makes it sound like the use case is trite, hobbyist or not serious.
I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things.
It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need.
Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."
However in my case it definitely is a homelab, as I am always tinkering with it and the router/server ratio is way to high.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.