You know… You can’t just say “I liked that keyboard a lot but had to give it away.”

This was my first keyboard with old school 5pin DIN and everything. I liked it a lot but ended up having to give it away. You see, it was my freshman year of college and had finally made some friends. My roommate however had not. I had suspected there was foul play taking place with my PC because of some things that had gotten moved, so one night I did the surprise pop-in… Quietly walked up to the dorm room for with my keys ready: popped then into the key hole and quickly opened the door… Yes, caught him in the act. It was towards the end of the semester and we did not speak of it again. I didn’t use my computer for the rest of the term and left my old keyboard leaning against a wall in the dorm hallway. A freebie of sorts.

Clickety clack, motherfucker!

Oh good, I wouldn’t want to escape the barrage of ads, ever.

I use one of those coax/Ethernet converters in my house. It’s a 2-story place and running Ethernet was going to be too daunting for a room.

Overall it works very well (I had bad experiences with using network over electrical power). The only thing that will be a downer is the gigabit coax converters seem to be expensive. Since I just had 1 client in an isolated network, 100mbps was fine for me but would hamper your NAS throughout. You’d also need to buy 2 sets of converters for your use case, so that’s potentially not cheap if you’re wanting gigabit from end to end.

Some of the newer wireless standards are very quick, but you’d also need to ensure all NICs are compatible and a newer AP wouldn’t be free.

Perhaps talk to the landlord about splitting the cost of getting Ethernet professionally run in all rooms. It may be the most cost effective solution, but the drawback is you walk away with nothing. The landlord would be able to advertise Ethernet ready infra, so there is some benefit for them to do it.

That is one busy BBC. I’m wondering what the man attached to it is into.

Yep, I’m speaking in generalities. Overall, my point is that a homelab doesn’t need something expensive because it may not be heavily used, so most of those features are not necessary. If the guy had mentioned running a business or customers, that’d be a different story.

You even had to qualify your own statement that one has to modify hard drive power consumption to achieve acceptable noise levels.

I had a SIEM running on a mini-pc like a champ. It cost me fifteen bucks and taught me a lot. Build to requirement, not title.

Bear in mind, a system that is built to be a dedicated server will be meant to crunch data. That means 2 things:

• loud fans

• heavy electricity use

If you just want a lab, I suggest getting a desktop PC and loading a server OS on it. Practical hardware experience isn’t too valuable because platforms change and they usually make them super simple to maintenance with lots of online support. Getting a desktop will also save you some bread on initial investment.

Exactly. The use-case dictates requirements, then you build according to that. Will this work for a camera system? With the right drive(s) added, sure. Would this run something graphics intensive very well? Not particularly.