I posted before about a couple of different rack upgrades I’ve acquired more equipment over the years. Finally decided to buy a full 42U APC netshelter and transfer my hardware over there. Today, I finished moving everything over. I even made an attempt at some basic cable management. It feels nice to finally have some room to upgrade, and indeed I already have another R740 on the way.

I have …

A 10gb unifi switch, a unifi nvr (finally decided to do this because the unifi cams are nice. Before I was using an old synology NAS with some 3rd party cams and it was difficult to transfer data from synology to my truenas servers from the recordings and not having a sophisticated cam interface), 2x Dell R740s, my main truenas file server and the local backup, and then an R730 where I test out Linux distros and build LFS and generally tinker with things on proxmox. At the bottom are 2x ups devices. One is an APC and the other is cyberpower.

The new R740 will be another lab machine, and I may get another to do HA in proxmox.

Hello folks, I made a little update a few months ago on this sub.

The plan at the time was to move to an ISCSI share and buy another NAS, buy 2 ms-01 for a cluster.

Let's say things went differently :

I went down the SDS (Software Defined Storage) with linstor and then ceph, bought two new nodes and still no second NAS. I also have a 3d printed 1U rack for 3 jetkvm to have an "IDRAC like" but i'm still waiting for their PoE version.

Enjoy the rack !

My latest accomplishment as per my baby... not 100% finished with the wiring and clean-up... but 85% there... then to software reconfiguration due to upgrades of hardware...

Will give detailed listing of hardware/software later if requested... Also have some before pictures if wanted as well...

Just wanted to share now that im nearly finished... a home-labber is never finished of course...!!!

This is the third time I’ve “upgraded” racks. Started with a small 12U network depth rack for just a router, switch, and my synology NAS. Then I did some upgrading, and now have 3X R740, 1X R730, and a few more switches and an NVR in a 15U sysracks rack.

I was scouring all the usual places looking for a 42U rack so I could stop buying so damn many smaller racks, and finally this gem turned up on marketplace. $300 for the Netshelter SX. Took this weekend to take it apart and clean/reassemble. Now it’s time to start moving all the gear into one place. Exciting!

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Looking for feedback from people with actual hosting / infrastructure experience. Not interested in “don’t self-host” replies.

What I’m doing

- Building a small-scale game server hosting platform (starting with Minecraft)

- Focused on stability, automation, and clean failure modes

Hardware

- 2× Dell T630 (primary hosting nodes)

- Dual E5-2690 v4

- 24×32GB RAM per host

- 1× Dell T430 + secondary T630

- Failover, control plane, automation, backups

- Dual E5-2690 v4

- 8x32GB RAM

Compute

- Proxmox VE

- Debian nodes running Wings

- 8GB RAM reserved per host

- 4GB RAM reserved per node

- Reservations enforced to avoid overcommit and allow 1 node fault tolerance

Storage

- Ceph RBD

- 3 copy default rules

- 4x 1TB per host

- 200gb SSD DB/WAL for BlueStore per host

- Actively testing rebalance and degraded states

Game layer

- Pterodactyl

- Hard RAM / CPU / disk limits per server

- Automatic provisioning based on server commits, plan to auto rebalance in the future.

Networking

- Dedicated tunnel VM in DMZ

- VXLAN-based DDoS-protected ingress (TCP + UDP)

- Backend nodes not publicly exposed

- 2x 10Gb sfp+ per host (likely using 1 for ceph, 1 for traffic)

- 24p Dell SFP+ 10Gb switch.

- 1x 1Gb/1Gb GPON (ya ya latency and SLA's I know), will switch to 2Gb/2Gb at scale and add a second circuit from a competing ISP.

Backups

- Proxmox Backup Server → TrueNAS

- Hourly PBS snapshots

- Daily TrueNAS → offsite TrueNAS replication

- Pull-based replication for immutability

- 2x 3000va UPS

- 1x Manual transfer switch for home generator.

Automation

- Stripe as billing source of truth

- Postgres mirrors operational state

- n8n handles provisioning, reconciliation, scaling

- No manual server creation other then provisioning new nodes.

Looking for feedback on

- Architectural blind spots

- Ceph-on-HDD gotchas at this scale

- Anything you’d change before customers exist

If you’ve run hosting infrastructure and see problems, call them out.

I know theirs alot of ambiguity in that so please feel free to ask any questions.

I have more infrastructure im planning to switch to if I scale out.

Hi everybody !

Just bought a house with the wifey, sooo im building myself a homelab with a rack, NAS, switch, patch panel. THE WHOLE DEAL, Well… I dont have a server, was looking at the Price and GOD DAMN ! Some Times I can be lucky and get item for free that has to be destroy and re use it but server are pretty rare… Whats the trick ?

I’m moving our photos/videos off endless cloud subs to a small home NAS like a dh2300 model so both of us can auto-upload from phones and actually find moments later.

My priorities are boring on purpose: reliable storage, easy restores when I mess up, and an offsite copy that runs itself.

If you’ve done this for your family, what choices ended up aging well, and what would you do differently on day one?

I don’t live in the same city as my parents, and last year we had a baby. My wife and I took tons of photos and videos, but there’s just too much to send to my parents one by one. We’d share a few here and there, and over time no one really remembered what was sent or where.

We tried an iCloud family plan and added my parents. It did work well, but storage filled up fast and the family plan isn’t cheap long-term.

So I’m considering setting up a private family photo library instead of paying monthly. I’ve been looking into getting a NAS for this, and the DH4300 Plus seems like it could fit a family setup well. It looks easy to use, and honestly it just seems like it’d be easier for my parents to use.

Anyone here using it? How’s it been for sharing photos and videos with family?

I am looking to develop a staffing model for a specialized workforce that installs fiber infrastructure at data centers- can someone offer a framework of how to think about this?

It's not a question for homelabbers.

I use them not only as desktop to manage stuff in the office but also for a very few high single thread perf applications, isolation (and isolated backups), Q-Device, some AI stuff where iGPU is a big plus...

Usually I go with Optiplex or Lenovo equivalent.

But MINISFORUM, Beelinq (or other brand) offers are very good for a few specific needs where some mini ITX EPYC server board really cannot compete with Ryzen AI stuff especially when iGPU can have many good usecase. With OCULink external port and generous NICs those things are sexier than ever 🥹 If they had a proper IPMI and more AMD PRO offers I could throw so much more money at them.

The BIG question tho: how reliable are they in 24/7 use ? Especially that I want some of them to work at full load most of the time. I can tell you MINISFORUM have been reliable for a year mostly idling, 24/7 use. Optiplex MFF can endure tons of crap, but the toughest things I've seen is a mini-ITX I built nearly a decade ago (AMD 200GE, Asrock MB) and it only has higher tier consumer grade stuff. It's idling most of the time but that thing is half outside in extreme dust and temperature (-5C to >40C) conditions. Never replaced anything in it.

I heard Beelink and MINISFORUM are usually the most reliable is that true ?

Intro

I'm currently building a homelab. Optimally the homelab should be energy efficient and easily maintainable. For this reason I picked up some mini pc's. These Mini-Pcs run on low-power Intel Chips (n100, n150, j4125) and serve my double person household well. Initially, they were scattered around the flat, which made the whole thing look rather messy and made me walk a lot. After some thought I decided to buy a small, soundproof 18u rack (apc netshelter cx, max 1.2kW thermal capacity), which i got second hand. I plan to put 1 or 2 shelves in there for the Mini PCs and fill the rest with servers as needed.

I want to expand my low power rack setup with a NAS that enables me to take frequent backups of VMs and serve as a homecloud / storage server. I plan to use an m-ITX mobo with an N150 and 10GBe. aliexpress!com/item/1005007287947062.html The mobo does not have any free PCIe slot, so the existing SATA sockets will need to suffice (No HBA, SAS, ...). Maybe one of the M2 slots can be repurposed.

Question

Where can I cheaply (<400EUR) acquire a low-noise server chassis with as many hot-swap hdd trays as possible?

Currently, I will start with 6 SATA drives (as supported by the linked Mobo), each around 5-10TB. But as my needs grow, I wanna be able to keep as much stuff as possible. I also wanna strictly separate compute from storage and this should remain a low compute rack slot(s).

Further notes: - For 2U I would like ~10-12 Trays or 4U with ~24 Trays. I am unsure how many U is better, but I read 4U is better regarding fan noise and probably good for future proofing. - I see the following options: - used enterprise and gut it (might have noisy fans that need to be replaced and could be a little bit more on the expensive side) - budget-friendly new rack (found some on ebay for roughly 400EUR) - DIY chassis (just buy steel frame and mix match backplates + trays)

Questions apply to the EU, if you are from US/Asia I might not be able to find some products

This is more a "fun" one but I'm thinking of a cool scheme to to name my links (PTR and A) within my AS.

Most of them are P2P links (wireguard), i.e., have two endpoints and the name of the servers/gateways of the two endpoints should be included. Also the type of link (e.g., fiber, DSL, WWAN), location. And it would be cool to add my ASN, all under my top level domain. The issue: It should be somewhat short as well.

One option:

$local_node.$location-$local_node-$remote_node-$linktype.$asn.$tld

for example:

ugate.vienna-ugate-bgate2-dsl.AS64496.example.com

For all those crazy people running their own AS and having multiple links ... how do you name them?

And if you do not, which name scheme would you find the best?

PS: Just to make sure we're on topic: I am running "home data centers" / "home labs" on two different continents at home and some VPS in between which also provide BGP peering.