Homelabs. Sweeeeeet.

[rlyons]

I've been considering a "personal" jumpcloud account for my homelab. Much easier to test new things on a non-mission critical VM at home than screwing it up at work. Anyone else do this?

What have you tied it in with? I've personally been curious about using JC on TrueNAS SCALE for my user auth.

[BenGarrison]

I use a free version for all my devices. Computers, iphone, gaming server. I even SSO into Bitwarden, O365 and anything else that will allow me on a personal/free account lol. 

[steven]

So I thought the JC free tier only accepted max 10 users and max 10 devices. Do you not have more than 10 devices??

[BenGarrison]

I do not. I think I am at 5

[steven]

Those are noob numbers... gotta bump them up!

[BScott]

@steven You got me counting. I think we're at 7 devices between me & my kids. Really 8 with the extra laptop that's waiting for me to swap out eventually. But like @RyanBailey it would have to take time & energy after the kids go to bed. And since I have a teen & tween, there are no early bedtimes anymore. I miss those 2-3 hours that I had of quiet to myself!

[BenGarrison]

I enjoy the smell of grass and fresh air. I hate technology lol

[rlyons]

Fresh air? That's what the vent options on the A/C is for.
Outdoor air should smell like burning carcinogens and sizzled proteins. (a.k.a. Charcoal and MEAT. I'll accept a good tofu, for where applicable).

[rlyons]

I thought it was 10 users, not devices. Although, I mean, I ain't gonna argue either way. It's quite generous as is.

[NVergin]

I think it might have been changed at some point.  (recently?)   I too thought it was simply a 10-user limit with no mention of devices but that is based upon me spinning up accounts a few years ago.  More recently I seem to recall someone at JumpCloud indicating that they assumed each user had 3-4 devices (or something like that) during a discussion around Patch Management having a per-user add-on fee on paid accounts and explaining their pricing model for it.  I could be wrong though and agree that either way it's going to work for most home use and small office applications, at least initially.  So not complaining.

[steven]

OH, You're right. It's 3 users / device limit (at least on paid plans) - We're dangerously close to our limit so I was just talking to our Account Manager about this haha

[AndyH]

I'd be interested in knowing more about how you're managing devices - specifically what's getting you dangerously close to the 3 systems per device limit (ephemeral devices in an ASG, for example).  We're thinking about ways we can help better here.

[steven]

Each employee has 1 laptop (some have more; CEO has 2, I have 3 (don't ask lol)). On top of that, we manage all of our servers with JumpCloud to manage access control on a per team & per division basis. All of our servers and computers combined, (before the 10 employees we just hired / are hiring this month) we were at roughly 85 - 90% utilization.

We've come so close that I've had to figure out what we're going to do if we take hit the limit. Initially we planned on just creating 'dummy' accounts not linked to our Google Workspace org so we could artificially increase our device limit, but after talking with our AM, we're just going to pay the overage since each device over is 33% of one user.

[AndyH]

Got it, thanks for the info!  Yep, for sure dummy accounts is not the way to go as that would be the more expensive option.  We are thinking of some other agent options - particularly for servers, that could help reduce cost or possibly free up those systems so they are not counted towards the user / system limit.  Thanks again! 

[RyanBailey]

I need to bite the bullet here and get something off the ground! Really diving into orchestration, containerization, etc. and need somewhere to tinker. Have the spare hardware kicking around so really its just finding the time (and energy) after the kids go to bed to start!

Anyone have good resources on minimum hardware/specs for designing a home lab?

[rlyons]

Depends on the rabbit hole you want and performance. If you want the whole shebang (IPMI, multi NIC, etc.) and have the space, power, cooling; something like an HP DL380p Gen8 or 9 / Dell Poweredge R720/730 are reasonably cheap.

Really though, any old PC can do the job. I ran a bunch of VMs over XCP-NG on my old HP EliteBook Workstation 8760w laptop. That was a SandyBridge era i7, 32GB RAM, and a 1TB HDD w/120 GB SSD (it had two drive bays). It still hauled like nobody's business.

I really like using HP T730 thin clients. Decent AMD CPUs, can run hypervisors, and has a low profile PCIe slot that you can add more NICs into. The T620plus is similar; slower, older, but cheaper.

TL:DR - Don't get anything older than an IvyBridge era CPU.

[NVergin]

I've got my personal JumpCloud account tied into my home Ubiquiti equipment for WiFi Radius.  It was definitely helpful in testing those configurations prior to deploying them on our work production network.

I'm also using it for authentication into my primary computers and performing some software and policy management on them.  Unfortunately, it's difficult to provide a truly mirrored environment from what I have set up for work, at least on the Mac side of things, since things like ABM/ADE/VPP are not really doable for a personal home lab.   I really, really wish that was possible though as I would love to be able to manage my mac software directly through VPP.   Or as an alternative, it would be awesome if JumpCloud could be tied into a personal Apple ID account and leverage the purchased software through that instead of Apple Business Manager.

[rlyons]

---

@NVergin wrote:

it would be awesome if JumpCloud could be tied into a personal Apple ID account and leverage the purchased software through that instead of Apple Business Manager.

---

Don't quote me 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure that is all on Apple to allow/implement. I wouldn't count on it.

[NVergin]

No, I'm sure you're right and that's on Apple.  That's always been my assumption as well since I am not aware of any other MDM being able to do that.  Regardless, I just want JumpCloud to work some sort of magic to make it work.   LOL

[daemoch]

I just tried something along that line last month for a client and Apple politely (but firmly) told me where to stick it.  You either have to be a registered company in Apples good graces or "get off the lawn"!   So its the long path for my client.  *sigh*

[jptechnical]

I bought a Dunder Mifflin domain, and I have a complete 9 user The Office replica network in JumpCloud. I also maintain a 2 user tenant on Google Workspace, Office 365, and the rest of my tech stack. I also have an Intel NUC with a hypervisor and half a dozen windows desktops plus a replica set of AD if I need to test it. All testing is done as Dwight Schrute, all videos are done the same way. I figure it costs me about $60/mo, but I have zero friction for testing of documentation. Totally Worth It!

[BlakeRichardson]

I have 7 excluding devices. But I am not using JC at home yet, looking to set up in the future but it's a matter of finding time. I do run a Cisco Meraki full stack ( MX, MR, MS, MV and SM) which makes network and device management easy. 

802.1x auth on my wifi is the next thing.

[daemoch]

I knew about the 10 user limit, but I'd forgotten about the 10 device limit and had it in my head it was unlimited devices.  Thats gonna be rough as my home lab currently includes Clusters (Proxmox and Rocks), various types of VM type tools, and anywhere from 3 to 500+ dummy users (depending on the sample DB I fire up).  Now I wasn't expecting the user limit to be an issue, as the only REAL users are me, my fiancé, and one joint user account (for things like Netflix), but I'll blow right past that device limit without batting an eye!  😞  It's a good thing I hadn't rolled it out into my general home or lab use yet.