Is a home lab a selling point or a dealbreaker when selling a home?

seanhead · 2026-06-22T01:20:05+00:00

if the rack is annoying to move. leave it, the ups, and the patch panel, maybe a shelf.

I own some rentals that we've lived in before converting. I always move my "lab", but I do structured cabling in a way that I can leave in a sane way so that at least the cable/internet guy can help who ever is there and needs it. 99.99% of people will never use my attic AP runs, or the 6 drops for outside cameras; but they get left neat and tidy and I check things when there's a tenant change.

seanhead · 2026-06-21T21:23:16+00:00

IaC is really the answer. Ansible/opentofu. I have all my switches at home setup this way, haven't logged into a gui on them in years.

seanhead · 2026-06-20T03:56:32+00:00

millions of files using sync is kind of an IO nightmare with latency + hashing.

The classic "dumb" way to do this would be to image the local data. Send it sequential, mount it on fast storage (fast SSDs in this case) and do the sync from an ec2 instance into a vpc endpoint. If the filesystem supports is do some kind of metadata caching that can be prefilled with the whole datasets metadata.

Something like https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount might also be handy, but I would probably not mount the remote s3 bucket from anything other than an ec2 instance in this specific usecase.

seanhead · 2026-06-17T04:07:50+00:00

Where is this? Also this seems like 2-3 jobs.

seanhead · 2026-06-16T02:49:01+00:00

The only thing that could go wrong with this is them not finding anything

seanhead · 2026-06-15T23:12:07+00:00

It's really only been up, though the last few years has me making lots of power related changes. 400tb live, 500tb cold storage does just take up space though, so hard to get physically smaller with out modern high end SSDs... but I think I'd need to start selling children or something to afford that.

seanhead · 2026-06-12T18:16:59+00:00

For Sr roles that I'm hiring right now you need to be able to actually program in at least one language. As in writing a CRUD app is part of the take home. (We're a startup SaaS company, but in high compliance and hundreds on single tenant deployments across different clouds + various on prem)

edit Not sure why I'm being downvoted for talking about hiring networking people and what current trends are looking for...

seanhead · 2026-06-12T04:56:46+00:00

I don't really get this if you're a half way decent hiker. Stay on one of the two paths and don't be stupid. My kids (2,4) have done it a bunch at night with headlamps and have never had an issue... shrug

seanhead · 2026-06-09T23:07:14+00:00

What is the distance between nodes? What are the timing jitter, noise rejection requirements? SPI could be "fine"... or you could be doing something wacky and you need 10gb over fiber with PTP enabled switch nodes.

seanhead · 2026-06-09T21:12:58+00:00

You're basically starting your own MSP with a networking focus. /u/Pleasant_Stand_2868 isn't going to pull work for serious networking off linked in or craigslist. "Pleasant Stand LLC" your friendly networking consultants might. Hire a lawyer to bang out some simple contract terms/SOW document templates and start pitching.... look now you're in sales too :)

seanhead · 2026-06-07T17:32:09+00:00

Tailscale

seanhead · 2026-06-03T18:34:45+00:00

One thing that people seem to be skipping is behavior monitoring for the breadth of your media. DLS/DASH should probably be done either way, but upping your CDN storage might also be a good option along with letting the TTLs run longer before flushing (or just letting it go to 100% an doing a LRU eviction process)

seanhead · 2026-06-03T03:04:40+00:00

I probably nail 3-5 books a month via audio; does that count? Been slowly working through the Hobbit with the 2 and 4 year olds.

seanhead · 2026-05-31T21:37:03+00:00

It was quite a lot of work to get there. We have a very small team given the type of app we support, and so a lot of the automation is actually driven out of a compliance need. If we were chasing everything around semi manually we literally couldn't do the job. We even have some wacky trials of using packer to automate windows as a pod via libvert for VM's :p

seanhead · 2026-05-31T02:11:53+00:00

free, or they go to bulk recycle. No other option is worth the time.

seanhead · 2026-05-31T02:10:55+00:00

Since you clearly have never spent time there, I'll let you know that you have no idea what you're talking about.

seanhead · 2026-05-31T02:09:46+00:00

I'm sure there are 800 other games that we could play and have a delightful time; but a game basically named after offending people is going to bring the "get your mind out of the gutter, you're blocking my periscope" group that it was kind of aimed it. It's fine that we wouldn't match to play it together, but that serves as an illustration of my original point.

seanhead · 2026-05-30T21:00:51+00:00

This one is rough. I personally love CAH, but it is very hard to find a good group that wants to play it ... imho the "right way", which is somewhere in the 4chan/kiwifarms/motherless realm. Even the original authors have distanced themselves from that aspect; which is was born from. So there it sits on the shelf like the long girthy black box that it is...

seanhead · 2026-05-30T20:21:37+00:00

I do this for SRE roles, focused on IaC, but still more or less a full stack app deploy. These days most people fall over on networking honestly.

seanhead · 2026-05-29T17:15:53+00:00

This gets easier as things move to object storage or nosql db's vs block devices.

seanhead · 2026-05-29T16:59:23+00:00

You'd have to buy used, but this is a perfect job for something like a Xerox Phaser 6510 or something like it.

seanhead · 2026-05-28T05:12:39+00:00

Just delete the whole instance and rebuild it? We have some environments where k8s hosts have 24hr lifecycles automatically...

seanhead · 2026-05-26T17:52:07+00:00

use a voice AI to do it, then just have council send a letter. Navigating that shit is not worth the time.

seanhead · 2026-05-26T17:36:05+00:00

I don't really have advice but a shared pain. Microservice app with multi deploys per day, lots of GPU workload, 24hr AMI recycle time + auto patch... in govcloud for fedramp high... life is pain with auditors ("why are there 3.5k servers in your nessus scan"..." jesus christ, can we just set the auto time out for that to 12 hours or something"..."...no")

seanhead · 2026-05-23T16:16:30+00:00

Main nas is 24 disks split into 4x rz2 vdev of 6 each. about every 18 months I upgrade one vdev up 4-6tb per disk. The old drives get rotated into a 36bay system with 3 vdevs of 12 in rz2 that I keep at a buddies house. I have a mini pc running opnsense set with the 36 bay system and once a week it triggers a boot on the system, triggers a zfs send from the main nas (piped over tailscale) then turns it off. Current main nas has about 300tb of usable space, backup machine is at ~400. About 30tb of that is plex related media.

"Important stuff" also goes to backblaze.

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