Submitted 5 months ago by paequ2@lemmy.today to selfhosted@lemmy.world
As I rely more on my home lab server, I’m starting to worry more about it getting stolen. If someone breaks into my home, I think the server will be a pretty attractive target.
Do y’all just stick it in a closet? That seems not great for cooling…
A smallish (6U) rack mount that you can bolt into the wall. Even if they rip it down it’ll weigh a ton and have locked doors (with ventilation obvi),
Haven’t seen anyone say this so I will: if your home isn’t Fort Knox or a billionaire bunker, then presume it will be broken into. If they don’t steal your shit, they might just smash it for funsies. If you’re running home lab, you probably don’t have the money to turn your home into Fort Knox, but even if you did you’d probably be better off removing the need:
Then you don’t have to worry about theft or damage or fire. Congrats, you’re doing better than probably 50% of businesses-grade setups.
locked in my basement. if the guard cats don’t stop them, the 9mm will.
Call an ambulance, but not for me.
Encrypt your data period. A burglar isn’t going to worry about your home lab unless it’s oozing money from the look of it.
Your family and friends will be the ones to snoop your data. So know that and prepare accordingly.
A thief is going to steal car wheels, weapons, tools, electronics that seem resellable, gold and jewelry, things of immediate value to sell or trade for most likely drugs. Quick cash.
In my room.
Once that’s broken into: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Once that’s broken into: encryption and backups, purchase new hardware and rebuild. Downtime sucks though.
Well sure.
But I don’t need encryption at rest because nothings that confidential.
My off-site backup is encrypted on a hard drive at work.
My on-site is unencrypted. If the thief get’s joy from looking at family photos and pirated stuff (confused shrug)
Install a floppy drive. No one gonna steal a computer with one of those.
Server equipment is not on any normal burglar’s list of items to nab. It’s such a low risk I think it’s completely not worth worrying about.
It’s incredibly unlikely they’ll know what they’re looking at in the first place, and won’t be assed to carry out heavy switches and PC gear “just in case” to look it up later. They want to get in, check rooms and closets, drawers, etc and GTFO before you come home or a neighbor notices. Computers aren’t as expensive as they used to be. Gaming laptops might look attractive, but other than that you’re fine.
They want jewelry, cash, guns, good tools, silver, modern game consoles, expensive bicycles, etc. These are all things that are easy to carry and pawn or sell well on the street. Nobody is selling switch gear at a pawn shop or to random people, so even if they know the value of what they’re looking at (extremely unlikely) they’ll leave it because it’s too hard to fence.
If you’re that worried about theft then set up good full disk encryption and have off-site backups of your data (should do that anyways) but you don’t need to worry about physical security at home, at least not specifically in regards to your home lab.
Businesses are at much higher risk for hardware theft, from employees or from others that are targeting the locations specifically because they DO understand the value and have a way to offload the gear, but those same people won’t be randomly breaking into people’s houses hoping they’ve got Cisco gear in a closet somewhere.
This is probably the best answer. I worked as a locksmith in a high value city (think started that ends with “A” and the city ends in “beach”)
You really have to think like a thief sometimes, and most times thieves don’t know shit about racks.
Mine is in the utility room, which is in the basement. There’s no way in or out of the basement except for the stairway from the living room on the main floor.
That room is where all of the CAT5 and coax cables from each room terminate (demarcation point?), and where the furnace and water heater live.
Considering I stole most my stuff from work it would be fair if someone else nicked my setup.
A confession in here is worth total forgiveness.
I’ll phone your boss and clear it for you…
That nvme drive just hanging out next to the power cords is giving me a type of anxiety I never knew I had, thanks.
Let me guess you don’t have cats
That M.2 is the first to break its neck
I say this with full sincerity as someone who worked security, this will absolutely get it ignored in the case of a break in.
Security by trashcurity, brilliant!
Take this with a grain of salt but long ago someone broke into my house and at the time I was futzing with something so had the skin off of my tower and they did not touch it. I think they figured it was broke. Knew a guy who made a server closet with bare boards on wood shelves.
I once put my homelab rack outside of my apartment, in the hall. Then used it to catch a bastard who kept stealing my bike light, and later tried to snatch the whole bike.
Actually you got me thinkng about some of my pieces.
But overall i agree with most of the thread here. Properly rack it, and secure the rack. Then basic locking does the rest (secure a rack door with a lock).
Security cameras system help police catch theives.
Encryption on data you care about and off site back ups meqns rebuilding is just getting the hardware again.
For mini pcs and laptops they have those security cables to at least attach them to a heavier thing (desk, cabinet, etc). (this is the thing i hadn’t thought about).
Finding obsure places to hide my nodes is practical matter for me, because space is always a premium, so over sizing cooling solutions (liquid cooling to big radiators) and then finding wierd places to tuck them away (i mean why cant a computer rack be a night stand, the raspberry pi is clustered anyway why not stick in a lamp, the crawl space is actually always dry there and nice and cool to boot!, etc, etc). That probally adds some* factor to it.
The consumer stuff i have is a more likly target then the SOC or server stuff though. At least for me.
I have 9 security cameras on my driveway, house, and office out building and own a 12 ga. I’ve got it covered.
Who’s gonna steal a loaded 90 disk enclosure xD
I got burglarized and they left a significant amount of cash in foreign currency that was sitting out in the open from a recent trip, because they had no idea what it was. Nobody is stealing rackmount equipment.
When was the last time you saw a headline: “Thieves steal home lab”?
How about “Thieves steal computers”?
I haven’t heard of that happening much outside of law enforcement raid.
Laptops, yeah. But stories of homes being broken into to steal servers?
I plan on rack mounting things on the second floor, but normally someone running in and ransacking a place isn’t going to bother with a server, especially if it’s loaded down with hard drives. Heck, my NAS is in a desktop case and I hate even having to turn it around 😹
I don’t.
If you’re stupid enough to carry out my stuff, good luck getting anything for it.
Its big enough that they will have to break back in to move it with a friend. Its built shitty enough that it will fall apart if they lift it. Its next to an attractive and less effort to steal TV.
TVs and game consoles also have much better fence value.
I live 40km away from the nearest civilization, in the middle of Swedish wilderness. No neighbors and biggest bear population in europe in the woods. So I feel safe :)
Just put a big sticker on it signifying it has a tracker inside.
Even if they would want to steal it, it might just make them doubt enough to leave it be.
Someone who’s in the business of stealing computers would just stick it in a faraday bag. I guess for an entire server you’d need a sizeable cage though.
Mine is primarily a 4u server, in a rack. That’s screwed to the wall (for added stability).
They’d need a couple guys to unrack it. It’s in the garage I rarely ever lock, behind the cars which are more valuable and easier to steal. Behind the much more valuable tools.
Garage does get warm in the summer and cold enough in the winter the fans do funny things.
Anything important gets replicated to another location as well as backed up to a cloud bucket. So if it got stolen it would suck, but not the end of the world.
Same way you protect anything else valuable in your house - by locking the door and potentially installing (selfhosting) security cameras.
What are they gonna do with that?
Steal it.
Who is gonna buy that from them?
People on eBay who buy used computer parts, like me.
What can they buy with that?
Money can buy many peanuts.
I always thought this was an argument for properly racking everything. If it takes more effort, more time to remove, maybe they won’t bother.
My understanding is that for most individuals, theft is mainly
I do have outside cameras but they’re not as useful as you’d think. Maybe they have some deterrent value but they’re not going to alert anyone fast enough unless they’re already in the house and you’re not going to identify anyone even if you catch a good shot of their face. If the do catch someone, perhaps the video is enough to say, yep
No need to worry about thieves. They mostly don’t even steal laptops of TVs. It’s just not worth the work and the risk.
Yes need to worry about floods or your house burning down. That’s the real way to lose a home server.
Thankfully, I don’t think there’s ever been a flood where I live. House burning down is way more likely. But, break-ins do happen in my town. Actually, what prompted me to think about this was that my neighbor recently had their house broken into.
There never used to be tornadoes in my area. Now there are. With climate change, anything’s possible!
Nothing any more than anything else in my house.
Anything confidential is encrypted with a password. Other stuff is replaceable. And would theoretically be covered by home insurance.
This gave me a chuckle, my server is about 4’ away from my cabinet, pretty sure the thief is prioritizing in that situation.
I had to scroll down too far to find something like this.
If you’re home the solution is simple. If you’re not home, then they’ll likely steal an inexpensive boomstick rather than your network gear.
Encryption and offsite backups. If someone nicks it then they don’t get any private information. And with backups it’s easy enough to just push the data onto a new device.
It would take hours to pull the servers from a mostly full full height rack. And then you’d get a bunch of heavy obsolete servers with zero resale value.
reminds me of the dude with a PDP 11 in his basement
Most vintage I have is a dual-socket 1U Sparc.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
The 42U rack in the basement will be… hard to steal.
I only use 3U of it for compute and all of it came from my university salvage for less than… $350 total (switch, rack, 2 servers).