My Perfect Home Lab — An Antithesis

After reading about the new home lab subspace on BBS, it’s time to write a little about my ideas of the perfect home lab, which I wanted to do for a long time.

The first post in the s/homelab subspace on BBS

My perfect home lab is to not have a home lab or even any kind of wired or wireless network at home, but just good LTE/5G reception and infrastructure.

My devices don’t need to directly interact with each other, and for the few cases where they do, Bluetooth works fine. This also includes audio streaming. Obviously, I don’t transfer much data between them.

I’ve had this situation for three years, but then needed to have a wired Internet connection for remote work during and after COVID-19 to improve latency. While my connection is now much better than before, my LTE Internet speed was okay for ordinary web browsing and the occasional download and cloud sync.

In the last 20 years before that, I’ve always owned a second computer as a backup computer and server at home. For a couple of years I’ve connected an external RAID 5 to my server. In the last years before cancelling my wired Internet connection, I only owned a NAS, which had a single SSD installed to avoid any noise, and I did online backups. My DSL connection was always the fastest available and I always got the maximum connection rate.

My Ideal Homelab on Wireless Internet

I switched back to a main laptop only with directly attached USB-C SSD storage, because I don’t have to share this data. I also use direct SSD storage for backups after using wireless local backups and storage for almost a decade. This allows for sturdier and faster backups to multiple storage devices. I’m also able to backup to one device while on the road, while the other stays safely at home. In case of loss or theft, I still have a data backup at home.

I also use cloud sync to store less than 50 GiB in the cloud, which can be accessed by all my computing devices and also serves as a semi-backup. This consist of my main data. My local storage needs are 4 TiB for non-essential data.

My current backup computer is my smartphone.

As you can tell, I’ve really come to like unassuming low-power devices, which only consume power when they are connected and used. My wireless router with built-in VDSL modem consumes 5.9 W/h, and I try to limit my data consumption. Unsuccessfully, because of video streaming, but I never watch anything at more than FullHD, even though my screens have way more than two megapixels.

My Ideal Homelab on Wired Internet

If I need to keep the wired Internet connection because of remote work, my ideal home lab would consist of a low-power wireless router with attached or included low-cost eMMC or SSD storage, which would serve most of my cloud computing services and hosting while providing a place to backup my data. The data-saving non-cloud solution. Maximum agency and data savings, but brittle because of accidents or theft.

Unfortunately, there are no low-powered wireless routers with decent FOSS hosting capabilities. While I am aware that I could connect a SBC with storage to the router, it’s not ideal and would consume more power than an integrated solution. A router with an upgradeable ARM or RISC-V compute module and one or two M.2 slots would be great.

But then I would have to have a small UPS as well.

Whichever way I would choose, it would be a low-consumption power and data solution for all possible devices. And as few devices as possible.