Heh, I'm actually more interested in the "garage" piece of the blog which is barely touched on. I also run a home lab, but from my climate-controlled relatively clean basement. I've thought about moving it to the garage, but I'm worried about temperature and dust/dirt ingress. Do you have a sealed cabinet or air filters or any other environmental controls around the servers? Or are you using industrial machines rated for dusty locations? Otherwise a garage actually doesn't seem like a great place to put servers.
(Author here) I’m kind of cruel to my hardware lol (they’re all frankenservers hacked together with random parts from eBay). I’m not doing anything fancy to protect from dust and whatnot, but it’s pretty much always chilly in the garage (and I’m using low power parts) so heating hasn’t been an issue.
I have seen production servers run for ten years upstairs a dirty bus repair shop. The room is never cleaned so there's a few millimeters of black dust on everything.
In fact you know the age of a server depending on the amount of dust on it.
There's a defective A/C unit that sometimes throw some water all around.
There's power cut 2 or 3 times a year, the batteries are old so the servers get their hard reboot.
As far as reliability is concerned, sometimes a disk fail, but that's about it.
Now if you think I'm describing something from the third world, you're wrong. It's in France and I'm not exaggerating about it.
So what I'm saying is that for a homelab, don't fret over cleanliness or optimal conditions.
Yes, I've run an enterprise server stack on an old closet, with a home air conditioner venting into the warehouse. Even when the A/C unit died for three days one summer (we had to keep the door open and run several fans), the servers, ranging from 3-7 years old, kept running. Far from optimal, but the systems stay up and the company stays in business.
I spent some time with a computer refurber back in the day. He used to buy old computers from mining operations these things were literally filled to the brim with dust and weird shit.
Computers are amazingly resilient if you don't need them for much more than office work.
This sparked a memory of an internship I had where I was given an air compressor and had to go blow out machines in various school computer labs for a few weeks. In hindsight I should have worn an N95, they were nasty. They all worked, though.
I live in the Southern US and it's extremely humid and hot in the summers.
Only certain systems are fine with being in the garage. For instance, a Supermicro chassis I put out there began rusting in a few spots after a few months, but my custom system that I built was perfectly fine. I suspect the metals Supermicro uses are treated in some way and then cut, but the edges aren't re-treated, allowing rust to form on all of the edges of the chassis.
I never put spinners out there, only SSDs. My bulk storage lives inside my house.
I have an HP Sandy Bridge Xeon box that lives out there and it's always super quiet, but I don't push it hard either. Raspberry pis are super okay with being outside. I'd say if you can make a small Pi cluster, it's a good fit.
I use an open air rack next to my water heater. I don't do any woodworking or anything, so the dust isn't too bad.
There was a talk from comma.ai with a part on what they did to prevent corrosion running a datacenter in their garage to avoid the nvidia datacenter tax or something:
My "datacenter" is on the top shelf of a closed closet. This is in an apartment and the ceiling that is just above the server is heated (heating of the neighbor above me). There is a fiber ONT, switch, router, a raspberry and tower computer ("the server")
The ambient temperature is 32-35°C
The temperature of the disks is 38°C (ssd) to 49°C (hdd), the CPU cores are 27 to 34°C (not sure why there is a difference, it is one CPU).
When I put the computer and other equipment there, I was concerned that the temperature would be unbearable. I am positively surprised.
It's not too difficult or costly to frame+finish a corner closet if you have the garage space to spare, especially if the garage interior isn't already finished.
