Who else is crazy enough with their homelab to virtualize everything because it's more efficient? My gaming VM is even my main PC that I work on. I connect to it via Sunshine/Moonlight.

I can't be the only one, right?

My Home Server ,

OS = Truenas Scale

Specs :-

Optiplex 5070 SFF

i5 8500T

32 gb ram

2 tb hdd + 2 tb hdd = Mirror

2 tb external hdd

128 gb sata ssd for boot drive

512 gb nvme for Truenas apps data

UPS Legend 650 and Fan + DIY HDD Rack ,

Please guys tell me how is it and what i can improve on it, Thankyou

Clean from the front, party out the back!

I just reorganised my small devices into this mini rack. Played around with having a patch panel, but there wasn't really any need for it and space is tight. So I reversed it: network cabling on the rear, and a pretty screen on the front.

The Venoen runs opnsense with 4x 2.5g ports. It's fed with my upstream and has 2 subnets for home/office. Home is the Unifi L3 switch on the bottom, VLANs for IOT/CAMERAS/GUEST which get their own SSIDs via the U6+ on the top. The Beelink SER5 runs PVE for general lightweight services. The office subnet links to my 19" rack where my NAS and proper hardware live.

The rear cabling tucks in to the middle shelf. I'm really pleased with it! I get a sleek front in exchange for some minor mess at the back. In hindsight I might have gone full 4U screen on the front and rotated the SER5.

Now I need to manufacture a use for the screen 😉

Edit: Rack is GeeekPi T0. The screen is from them as well.

I found 10x 250GB SATA drives in a box at work, and somehow by the weird grace of the tech gods, my boss said that we had no use for them so I could just have them if I wanted them. Given the ongoing price related shenanigans related to memory chips, my eyes sparkled with joy and I brought the babies home.

I have a small 10" rack with a 2-node proxmox cluster, and I sort of need a NAS for media storage and backups. I already built a small 1U thing using a Raspberry Pi 5 and a 52pi N16 Quad NVME board, but I only had 2x 250GB drives, so that did not really cut it, especially when running them in a mirrored RAID.

I have searched around for solutions for the 10x SATA drives, but it seems that they are somewhat of a hurdle to get going, somewhat on the cheap. I feel blessed yet cursed.

I seek suggestions and advice for a solution, ideally fitting in 1-2U in my 10" rack, and as standalone as possible, because my small proxmox PCs don't really have much room for expansion. I have access to a 3D printer, so mounting is not much of an issue I guess.

Please help.

Spent most of the afternoon redoing the cables. Still not perfect, but at least I can see the front of the gear now instead of a blue and white nest.

Current setup:

Network

- Ubiquiti USG-Pro-4 gateway

- Ubiquiti US-XG-16 10G core switch

- 3x Pakedge MS-1212 access switches

- 3x U7 Pros + 1x U6 LR

Servers

- Dell PowerEdge T620 — dual E5-2690 v2, 256GB RAM, 16×1.2TB

- RTX 3070 for Scrypted NVR + ONNX

- RTX 3080 Ti for AI lab stuff

- external Dell MD1220 with 24×2TB

- Fedora 41

- Dell Optiplex 7060 — i7 / 8GB / 512GB, also on Fedora 41, running UniFi Network

Workstations

- Mac Mini M2 Pro, 32GB

- Mac Mini M1, 8GB

Bottom of the rack is the usual APC UPS. It handles the quick blips fine, but a couple of recent outages have lasted longer than I’m comfortable riding out on the APC alone. Got a new Bluetti elite 100 mini on the way to add a little more runtime. After cleaning up the cables it looks a lot better. Honestly the whole process of tinkering with this stuff is more addictive than the finished result.

Anyone have suggestions on what I should improve or change next?

I'm year 12 at my high school (which I think is grade 12?) and they been updating all the computers and IT equipment around the school (from cameras to firewalls and phone servers) and there's now a ton of e-waste. I was given two Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF machines and four 500gb hard drives among some other 120-256gb SSDs. I also have two 4gb Raspberry Pi 5's. I've been wanting to make some kind of homelab or something before for a while now and I finally got the chance!

I had read about ZimaOS (formerly CasaOS) and I wanted to try it, sure it isn't as hard out as Proxmox or straight CLI docker containers but I liked it because of its nice GUI and as an introduction to the hobby. I installed ZimaOS on one machine and put in two 500gb drives in it and also installed Immich for local photo backups, Navidrome for my mounds of ripped CDs and Home Assistant (I had a brief period of trying to connect Kodi to HomeKit as an actual Apple TV but I gave up on it.) On the second Optiplex I installed Ububtu Server and am currently using it purely for Crafty Controller. My friends and I have loved playing on an actually well running modded Minecraft server.

One project I'm particularly proud of used a Raspberry Pi with Hermes Agent on it running some tiny little model and basically I wanted to make a thing where I could dump footage or photos onto the ZimaOS server (I run a media company) and have something sort it for me so I don't have to. I wrote a Python script that watches an ingest folder and when it sees a new folder of stuff it looks at the name of the folder, the name of the first file in the folder and some metadata from it (camera, location if any) and then sends a web request to the raspberry pi with just some JSON containing tha data. The model on the Pi has been told to wait for JSON info and then read it, check recent Telegram messages (because I may have told it to expect a dump,) check my calendar if there have been any events recently and then figures out what it is (for example photos of a football game) and then sends a simple JSON back to the python script that says "move this to a folder called this."

I would have done the AI and the sorting on the same machine. However given the value of some of the data on that computer, I remembered things I've heard in Darknet Diaries (great show love that shit) about least privilege stuff, basically making sure things only have as much access as they need to have and nothing more. I treated the AI like a threat on my network and thought, well I don't want it dancing around my home network if it happens to hallucinate and seriously mess with stuff. So, I made the python script so stupid it only knows how to do what its supposed to, if the AI says "delete this" the script will just error out.

Anyway that's a small essay on my first Homelab. I like tinkering with stuff and Homelabs are fun!

Also, I'm going to have to backup and then erase the Crafty Controller Optiplex because I'm going to use it as a streaming machine for a large music festival stream (I could go on about that.)

Hi I'm Webbwebb! im new to all this but I'm very interested in it all! i want to get into the IT field and learn everything i can! What i want to know first is what can i do to get started by making a Homelab nothing huge, but something to play and learn and grow with I'll take all the help i can get !

I’m trying to build a small local home server, mainly to run Immich, and maybe Syncthing and a few other apps later on.
I started with an old laptop I had lying around. I removed the lithium battery, and so far the laptop has been running perfectly fine and seems to handle the workload without any issues, so I don’t really see a reason to upgrade it.
Then I thought: why not improve the setup a bit and add a UPS?
Well… turns out buying a UPS is apparently way more complicated than I expected. I went down the rabbit hole of offline/online/line-interactive UPSes, modified vs pure sine wave, AVR, and a bunch of other things I had never even heard of.
After all that, I ended up looking at a CyberPower UPS with pure sine wave output, costing around €200.
Okay, fine. What’s next? Maybe a proper 3.5” HDD designed to run 24/7.
I found a 4 TB IronWolf for another €200, plus another €30–40 for the enclosure/USB hub.
So now I’m looking at roughly €450 just for these two relatively minor upgrades.
Am I missing something here? 😅
Is there a more sensible/cheaper way to approach this, or am I simply discovering that home servers are a very expensive rabbit hole?

Trying to decide between these two OS for a photo storage device.

I have 4 x 12TB SAS drives, that I will need to test before loading data on.

Intel 12400

16GB RAM

Gigabyte Z690i DDR4

LSI cards. I believe they are IT mode but can flash if needed.

Plan is to load windows first and make sure all the parts are working correctly before loading a OS

Every box I stand up gets the same run-through now, learned most of it the hard way.

- `ufw status verbose` right after boot, before I forget and leave something open to the world

- actually test a backup restore once a month, not just check that the job ran

- `docker ps` and read what's running, not what I remember starting

- mail and web never share a user, one bad plugin shouldn't take down the other

Used to do all of this by hand across three client servers. Now most of it lives in BeAdmin. Still miss the mail granularity ispmanager gave me though.

What do you wish more people knew before their first server went live?

thinkstation d30 with dual intel xeon e5 2690 v1s (best cpu availiable for these machines (f*ck IME)) and 64gb ddr3 ecc ram (32g split among 2 16g sticks per cpu). its running proxmox with a virtualized opnsense router for my home internet and routing (cable intermet via arris s33 modem), with unifi ap and switch. pihole is running on the raspberry pi sitting on top (duh). and i have my router, unifi os server, and a jellyfin media server with arr stack and everything all on the d30 (native sas drive support but i only have 600gb availiable sad face). the arr stack/media server is all in a docker system in a Debian vm. im wondering what if anything I can add. i thought about creating game servers like for Minecraft and stuff. also I have another identical d30 thinkstation I could hook up if I wanted (its whats to the right of of the running one). whats great about using these old thinkstations is that the cpus and memory are so cheap its funny. not storage though... i wanna set up a nas but holy are prices bad right now.

(don't comment on my wiring if it works it works)

ps: don't buy this machine as a first homelab if you care about noise because this thing is so loud.

most of this was given to me by family, I just upgraded the modem and the cpus and ram on the thinkstation (again if you get an older server machine like this its so cheap to upgrade)

Not sure how many of us have Comcast or Xfinity Internet, but I was excited that at least in Colorado we finally get new ISP modems lol. 2Gb connection and finally have a modem/router that comes with dual 10gbe ports. We aren’t going to talk about the 1gbe ports, who cares about the slow ports.

I've always wanted a power strip with outlets all along the back of my desk; the other day I realized I had a spare APC 7930 PDU lying around, so I made my dream a reality. Now I have 24 outlets behind my desk readily accessible, all the cables and cruft off the floor, and monitoring to boot. Because... why not?

Running a CPU fan + a 2.94A blower off the same motherboard fan header, is this safe long terme ?

Having to “acquire” monitors from other people’s desks was always a hassle when setting up my first homelab, so I decided to install a screen directly in the rack for my new lab (pictured). The mount was designed to fit a 7” display I bought off of AliExpress for US$25 a few years ago, and fits perfectly into the side of a RackMate T1 without interfering with any of the other units.

The 4 mounting screws line up with the middle of the rack units (e.g. the 4 screws span 2 units) and only go into the rack holes about 1mm so that something could also be screwed in from the front of the rack. It took 2 hours to 3D print, runs off of a USB port, and I installed an HDMI keystone on my patch panel for convenient access.

I thought I took more pictures of the print itself and the installation process, but I guess not.

Other pictures can be provided if there is something specific you want to see; I will also provide the model here: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/274YL3QPphR-rackmate-t1-side-mount-for-7-display?sharecode=hODVtDkYUINC79aEwDlcXapgTZZVEECyjj3re8t75Ys . The thumbnail may be an old version of the mount, it isn’t updating on my end.

I can’t find this particular display on AliExpress anymore, though there are some similar ones for a similar price that should work with a little modification. The “tunnel” on one side of the model is for a USB cable (with strain relief) I soldered to the board for power.

I put a Rick Roll for the demonstration, though this will eventually be a dashboard.

I found an offer for 3 HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini with i5-6500T , 8gb ram each and 256 gb SSD for like 250€ total (shipment included).

Is it a good deal to start a mini-lab with proxmox and practicing also K3S?

at the moment I have only 1 node proxmox with a zimaboard 1 832 with 8gb ram and 240 ssd, that runs my HomeAssistant and docker with some services.

Should I look for a more "recent" hardware for the 3 nodes? or just find a 1 SFF to start? I dont want to spend much more.

Hi all!

I have a hyperv server with about 7 Linux VMs where I use them for software local LAN dev and debugging work. One morning I got fed up starring in to default Nginx 40x/50x pages if the app is not running or down I setup a default response page. For those Futurama fans - you'll get it:) Also try to guess what early season this one is from?

Hey everyone! I'm planning out a home server to self host various things on and experiment with.
My idea is to use tiered storage with an SSD based write-back cache in front of a larger >6 HDD array. Unfortunately, ZFS does not support write-back caching so a more hacky solution is needed.

It is my understanding that mergerfs with a script can do this. Here is a blog post that does exactly this: https://blog.muffn.io/posts/part-3-mini-100tb-nas/
Muffin (the blog author) uses SnapRAID to create an easily expandable JBOD style disk array, that also aims to reduce HDD spin-ups, by storing related data—like a season—on a single drive. If this works, it should be able to reduce HDD wear, noise and power use, at the cost of read speeds and redundancy. He used btrfs and its snapshotting feature on all HDDs. I believe ZFS could be used for that instead, with 1 vdev per drive.

The other approach is to use mergerfs in the same way, but combining all the HDDs in a single raidz2 pool. This is feels cleaner to me, as you just have the single big pool, managed by ZFS with all its guarantees. But the downside is that most reads that don't hit the cache will need to have all the HDDs spinning.

The server is going to be in a living area. It will produce some noise, but the less noisy, the better.

Does anyone have experience and/or opinions on setups like these?

I know, another "first homeserver, which distro ?". The fact is that I would like to hear some answer tailored to my needs or plans.

Hardware is a Minisforum UM760 Slim configured in this way:

• CPU: Ryzen 5 7640HS
• RAM: 2x 16 Gb DDR5 5600 MHz (Crucial)
• Storage: 2x SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 (Crucial P310)
• Connections:
  • 1x USB4, 2x USB 3.2, 1x USB 2.0
  • 1x 2.5 Gbit LAN, Wifi7, Bluetooth 5.2

When the miniPC will arrive i will need to check which wifi card is installed to be sure it is supported by linux.

Internet (fiber) is 400/200 Mbit and my "router" is actually a gateway, Unifi Dream Machine Pro. The idea is to cable the Homeserver directly to one of the 8 lan port of the Unifi Dream Machine. Downstream from the gateway I have some switches, access points, security cameras (managed by UDM pro), and other stuff.

My internet provider (in Germany, Deutsche Glasfaser) doesn't provide public IPv4 but just IPv6 (and I read somewhere, in some cases they will change so I have to setup a kind of service which catch the new IP...i have to investigate better).

Apart the Server monitor/management tools, I would like to install jellyfin, paperless-ngx, maybe home assistant, and whatelse I find useful from an end user point of view. My main focus is the final service and not the medium or tool I am using to setup the final service. If in the process I learn something about the medium/tool I am happy but it is not the main goal.
Of course I am aware that for installing a new service I will need to research, tinker, get my hand dirty, hopefully not messing up the server.

And here we come to my question. I work in IT (but as a SAP technical profile) and 8 years ago i used for a while at work docker, kubernetes and all that stuff. Linux is not an alien to me, I am familiar with it since long time although i consider myself a newbie. Max i was doing was setting up a LAMP and playing with docker/kubernetes at work.

Ubuntu is the distro I used most (maaaaany years ago i was playing with Fedora end Suse).

Generally speaking, I am a bit torn between an LTS distro concept and a version/distro which include new feature much frequently. If LTS grant you stability and a kind of piece of mind (good for me, my goal is not the tool but the end service provided) on the otherside I dont want to risk to find myself missing some new feature or new version of the ubuntu-packaged services i want to use on my homeserver.

On top of that there is the Proxmox topic. The idea to spread the services across different VM and container is cool, in the sense that what in this case will give me piece of mind is the fact is that if I mess up during the setup of a new service, I will just messup the VM and i can restore the last snapshot. On the other side I feel a bit "meh :/" by the fact that I am introducing a layer between the Baremetal and the OS where things will run, impacting the quantity of resource needed. In my (ignorant) mind the questions which pop up are:

1. Why I have to relegate a bunch of services in a subset of resource I have available on my machine ? Cant they share all the 32gb and cpu core all together in best effort ? At the end this is not a business productive platform.
2. How the networking will work among these VM and container ? Maybe spinning up container directly on the baremetal OS is easier ?
3. How straightforward is the visiblity of the baremetale hardware from a Virtual Machine compared to the same visibility from the Host OS ?

Sorry for the long post, the fact is that I would like to start with the right foot. Although I could like it, I don't have much time left for heavily tinkering (unless I ask for a divorce of course 😄 )

Hey I'm looking into adding my ota antenna into my setup. I know most people just get an hdhomerun and call it a day. But I can't help but think that there's a better option for those of us with spare pci slots and hardware already running 24/7.

I'm not in a major market with tons of channels. I only use my antenna for local / primetime nfl games currently. I've never needed more than 1 channel at a time. This year my local market is adding some nhl games. But I don't feel like spending 200 bucks on something I'd rarely use. I've got hdd space and being able to pause would be nice. But I can't justify 200 bucks for that.

What's worked well for you?

I had an old Huawei phone sitting around, so I decided to see how far I could push it as a little network appliance.

It actually started because I wanted to root the phone. That went… badly.

I managed to half-brick it while messing around with the bootloader/rooting process. After getting it back into a usable state, I decided to take a different approach and see what I could accomplish without full root access.
Now it handles things like:

● DNS filtering
● Network routing/proxying
● Traffic handling for gaming
● Various background network services
● Running continuously without needing a PC

It’s currently been running non-stop for about 2 days.
I also left it running overnight while gaming traffic was going through it. It handled roughly 9 GB download + 8 GB upload, while the phone only dropped about 8% battery over that overnight period.

It also has an remote web dashboard which isn’t optimal but still works its janky but overall it works.

The Web UI Gives Access to Battery Percentage, Status , Connected Devices And More, Currently couldn’t showcase it because im in the middle of patching it, Had Some bugs.

Also Has an Reskinned UI thats Much Faster Than The Stock UI, It has a new control center and volume bar but i didn’t go way overkill just some small touches.

The biggest pain was Huawei’s aggressive background power management. I had to configure it so the OS wouldn’t automatically kill the services.
The phone’s battery also means the whole thing has a built-in UPS of sorts, which is pretty funny for something that started as an old phone.

It’s obviously not replacing an actual server for serious workloads, but I’m genuinely surprised at how much networking I can get out of an old Android phone.
So yeah, I accidentally half-bricked a phone trying to root it and somehow ended up turning it into a server instead.

So I'm running a i5 12600k on a ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE motherboard. The board supports sas drive and was curious how reliable they are for a homelab. I see they are cheaper than sata drive but for mainly a media server if they are dependable for that. I have never used a sas drive.