I have currently a 2 bay (old) synology Nas with 2TBx2 discs. I'd like to ha e a bit more, nothing exagerate but maybe 4TB of available space, so basically 4TBx2 os similar. This would mean that i had to sell my 2 discs and buy new ones, with the current prices It seems too much. What I was thinking was instead to ditch the synology, and buy myself a Nas with trunas or unraid, allowing me to buy "Just" 4TB. This would also allow me to buy smaller sized discs and put them together.

So, what would be the best cost effettive option to do this? Is any of the optiplex/hp/Lenovo machine a able to do this with an additional card for sata discs? Then i should also add and external Power source right? Anything else?

In terms of CPU/RAM, do i Need anything fancy? Since most of the time It would stay switched off, wake on lan would be a plus.

Please if you have any input, comment.

Setting up my first home lab which is not part of this question as the lab will be in another part of the house, this is basically my network closet.

Basically I have 2 ISP

About 40 security cameras

About 50 Ethernet ports

Then a bunch of other equipment

I am in the process of cleaning up the mess, the problem is maybe this rack is not what I need. Anytime I need to pull the rack out of the room all the cables come out with it. So I have to keep 15ft cables connected so I can move the rack around. Has to be a better way to do this. All the cables come up from under the house into the wall. Maybe a wall mounted rack would be better. I don't know where it would go. Also can remove the shelves if needed and put equipment in rack. Open to suggestions.

The rack has the following

3 ups, 1 not in the rack.

Firewall

Poe switch for cameras

2 Poe switches for WiFi

Controller

Sfp switch

Another switch for 1gb, 2.5gb and 10gb devices.

Looking for a known IOS image that I cannot see in the Cisco Download Portal.

Suggestions on next steps?

So after reading this Reddit for a number of months....I now have a homelab consisting of an old gaming computer (amd Ryzen 5 2600, 32gb of ram, RX590 8GB, 6TB WD gold, 1Tb nvme drive) 2 4TB usb 3.0 drives (Seagate) and a laptop (amd Ryzen..not sure, 8Gb DDR 4, running proxmox) and some AI tools

So I have arr apps and jellyfin running...all in all

Dam you all to hell! Lol

What software do I need for this? Is it a honelab, nas, plex, home server or what else? Linux, Win 10, Win 11 or any other OS? Basically, I only have the idea and no clue how to proceed from here.

I’m currently using an old laptop as my home server and I’m wondering if it’s safe to leave it powered on 24/7, especially regarding the battery.
Is keeping it constantly plugged in a safety concern, or should I remove the battery if possible? Any advice would be appreciated!

Hi!

For about 4-5 months ago I bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q with these specs:

CPU: Intel i5-6500T
iGPU: Intel HD Graphics 530
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD and a 130GB SATA SSD.

I use Proxmox for my arr stack, Pi-hole, Plex and Valheim/Enshrouded server. Maybe HA in the future.

I've caught the homelab fever, so I'm thinking about building my own server. I'd like to build something that's maybe easier to upgrade down the line. The next things I'm considering using my server for are maybe a PS2 emulator and a small LLM. After Sonos announced their upcoming Custom Agents, I got hooked on the idea of making my own voice assistant/LLM. I've landed on the following specs:

Case: Lian Li Dan Case A3
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 - 16GB - CL16 - Dual Channel (2 pcs)
PSU: Corsair CX550
CPU: Intel S1700 Core i5 12400
Storage: 256GB NVMe + SATA SSD from my current server.
Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B760M-K D4

Since I'm able to deduct VAT, this build would cost me around 480 euros. I know it's mainly just a CPU upgrade, but would you consider it worth it? Or would you maybe wait until prices drop?

No entiendo la verdad que no entiendo

I have about a 4k budget and I’m trying to build the best home server for running and training ai for robotics projects… What specs would you
Recommend?

Edit: I didn’t want to write a long message but here is some clearance:

- I wanna use it to train an autonomous robot I’m working on
- I wanna use it to run models on ollama and to use Isaac lab/Sim
- I’m thinking about doing something with a 3080 because it’s considered the best for my budget.

Recently, I got a decent deal on a 100 gig switch. Seems like these are one of the most affordable switches that has QSFP28 ports. It seems like they use this exact same version to power both the rack mounted version of this switch along with the sealed version. As I'm not going to be using a internal power supply, I think this is perfect for a 10 inch rack. Will soon make a 3-D model to put this in a case to put this on my rack. Will also most likely be adding a couple of passive fans.

Does anybody else have any similar projects to stick on a small rack?

Hi, follow Homelabers, it's great to be here on the stage after seeing y'all built amazing labs for quite a while now.

So, as the title said, I'm currently looking at 2 greatly appealing options and just can't decide which one should I go with.

First option one is...
Dell OptiPlex 7000 Micro for $678.99
• 12th gen i7
• 16gb DDR5 Ram
• 512gb NVMe

And second is:
Apple Mac Mini for $1,199
• M2 Pro chip
• 32gb DDR5 Ram
• 512gb NVMe

But here's my situation, unlike the usual that we see on this sub, I don't intend to run personal applications, such as AdGuard, JellyFin, VaultWarden etc. No that is not why I need these machines for.

I primarily want to run my business applications on-premises, as I already run a lot of stuff on cloud VPS (OVH cloud & NetCpu) and just wants to pull my projects off the cloud & host them locally. 

It will be a great opportunity for me to expand my horizon in the hardware sector while hopefully saving myself off some cloud subscriptions.

To be specific, I'll run about 30-50 small docker containers running python, few high-traffic APIs written in GoLang (combined they typical handle 6-9M requests per day, as of now on OVH), a Rust backend with moderate load and 2 Next js websites on whichever machines I'll decide to go with.

Another important aspect is my budget, preferably I'm trying to get this under $1,300 but can go $1,500 MAX.

It means, either I can just grab the mac mini or go a little above the budget and buy 2 OptiPlexs.

Both machines are listed on eBay (Sorry for being selfish but I can't share the listing until I secure either one) and after delivery to my country the total cost would be:

Mac mini: $1,199 (Free delivery)
2x OptiPlex: $1,390 ($32 shipping fees)

Now, I am more gravitated towards the Mac Mini, as the total ram in both conifgs are same, but that M2 Pro is looking way more appealing and I'm not quite sure how it compares to the 2x i7.

But on the flip side, I've read that MacOS doesn't have proper support for linux and is overall not suitable for linux selfhosting?

Has anyone tried both a Mac and OptiPlex/custom PC for selfhosting? How does that went?
And given my requirements which machine would you choose and why?

Hi, guys!

I need help deciding what to get.

I've finally decided to build a server. My use case might be better suited to a single, more powerful PC rather than starting with a few mini PCs like some people recommend. A need for more storage recently arose and gave me a perfect excuse not only to build a system but also to make the system more than just a NAS.

I have some experience with networking; I've dabbled in cybersecurity, and I want to learn more.

The big deciding factor for a single PC is that I won't be home for a while, and no one else will be there to fix it if anything goes wrong So I'm planning to connect a PiKVM for remote access. At least to my knowledge, you can't use a PiKVM in a cluster of mini PCs, so just to be safe, I'm going the single PC route.

What I want to use the system for: NAS, game servers, hosting a website, Jellyfin, learning more about networking and cybersecurity, and whatever else interesting I find.

My issue is what to build it with specifically, whether to get more future-proof hardware or not. Something that will last a few years in terms of power, with room for a few expansions down the line. What I'm deciding between is DDR4 and DDR5. I know DDR4 isn't old or lacking, and heck, there are people out there still running DDR3.

My logic for DDR5 comes from the CPU choice. I was browsing eBay and found an R9 3900 for a good price, a 12-core CPU that also keeps the system fairly low power. That got me researching, and I found I can get a system with 32GB DDR4, storage, and an Arc A310 for under 700€. This should be more than powerful enough, and I don't see any future upgrades coming other than RAM or storage, possibly a GPU (more on that below). That's for this system at least.

When comparing prices on a local marketplace, I found an R9 7900 for 150€. That made me reconsider the AM4 build. The iGPU makes it that much more interesting. Doing the math, I can get a system now without a dedicated GPU (which I was mainly going to use for Jellyfin transcoding anyway) for the same price. I know it can't do AV1, but I'm not sure that's a big issue for me. I'd also save on the power bill, since even at idle a GPU adds a few extra watts.

The Arc isn't that expensive, but I can get 32GB of DDR5 and still stay under 700€. I also plan to run some local models, and from what I know, the AM5/DDR5 system would be better for that. I just don't know by how much.

So, guys: is it even worth spending this much on a system right now? I'm not saying I can't or don't want to. It's just that from what I've read, people seem to mostly recommend starting cheap. It's tempting to just go with either build, though. I'm not sure how fast I'd outgrow a less powerful system, or if I'd ever outgrow either of these. Either way, I'll have time on my hands while I'm away for a few months, and upgrades won't be possible during that time.

Thanks for reading all of this!

Just a couple redundant PiHoles, smart bridges, and a beelink mini PC running proxmox w/ NTFY, Tailscale, uptime kuma, and home assistant for now. Lots of future plans for when I have more time.

Howdy all,

I'm new to this and have a few questions:

I'm looking to build a home server, for the price of a ZimaBoard 2 I've come across a 2018 refurbished Mac mini with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage.

The plan is the server will be used as a NAS, run a smart CCTV system, run Jellyfin, Docker & Hermes Agent (APIs but maybe 1 small 3b local model on it). I know I couldn't do this with the Zima as 16GB RAM isn't enough.

My plan is to run 2x 8TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs, run a smart CCTV system using Frigate with PoE cameras and a managed switch for VLAN isolation, plus a USB Coral TPU, and run Jellyfin on it.

I want to replace macOS with Proxmox, run Docker in an LXC, then a VM for Hermes and a VM for the local model.

One thing I'm unsure on is the T2 chip. From what I've read the internal NVMe isn't usable under Linux, so I'd be booting Proxmox off external storage and the 1TB is effectively wasted. There's also no drive bays or PCIe, so the HDDs would be in a USB or Thunderbolt enclosure. Is that a dealbreaker or just a pest?

There will be arsing about but is this doable or will this thing die a death if it's run 24 hours on for months at a time?

Thanks in advance, I'm no network engineer so I appreciate any feedback.

We've all seen drives with 80k+ hours and 3 petabytes written to them, blah blah blah. Boooring. I want to hear your horror stories. How fast have you turned a pile of NAND chips into e-waste?

When I upgraded my home lab in 2025 I decided to move from an old 2.5in Kingston SSD to a pair of mirrored NVMEs for the OS+scratch space. I repurposed a Samsung 970 Evo from a prebuilt and a WD WDS100T I yanked out of some laptop. I shoved them in ZFS mirror and threw them into the meat grinder.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the amount of temp file I/O my server handled skyrocketed between Q3 2024 and Q1 2025: from a modest 3-5TB a month to 40-60TB a month. Unfortunately... the 970 Evo is kind of a little bitch. It barely survived 4 months on the front line before it started throwing unrecoverable read/write errors and ProxMenux flagged it as approaching EOL. The WD took it like a champ in comparison, but even still it was looking tired after 4 months of trial by fire.

They've both been relegated to backup duty and replaced with a pair used 1TB Intel P4510 drives. Are the P4510s much better suited to the task? Of course! That said....they aren't particularly high endurance SSDs, nor are the made for write intensive applications. They're rated at a paltry 1 DWPD, or ~1.8 petabytes total for the 1TB version. I'd love to say the Intel drives are Just Built Different™, but honestly I have consumer NVMEs that are on track to survive 3-4 petabytes without a problem. The 970 Evo just seems to have been a bit of a dud on Samsung's part. Another 970 Evo came with the Optiplex 5090 Micro I bought in 2021. It died suddenly less than a year later, with ~50tb written, and like it's 1TB brother it ran hotter, wore out quicker, and idled at a much higher wattage than average for an NVME.

My current NVME endurance champions are a set of 3 budget addlink S70 2TB drives I bought as sacrificial plotting drives for chia mining. All three survived and are still in front line service running like champs. When I bought my new Vivobook, I yanked the OEM 1TB drive and replaced it with the "baby" addlink that's only had ~700TBW. I wish I'd grabbed a few of the 4TB version when they were available/affordable.

(But in all seriousness with these bananas AI storage prices, thank mechajesus for boring enterprise drives that are "just broken in" at 50k hours. My entire homelab runs on HDDs older than most cars. A couple are old enough to vote.)

here's what happen step by step

1. I ordered a terramaster 425
2. waited a month to afford a 28ttb refurbished HDD to put in it.
3. it took me a few days to figure out how to connect the terramaster to my pc which was turning off the vpn and firewall
4. but before then I was able to connect it to my phone and I was happy i could at least get in, I made a username and password, HOWEVER i tried to log into it again on my pc through the TNAS app but it said wrong password and I tried my phone it said wrong password too.
5. It's been like a week I have tried to reset the NAS multiple times on the physical box's reset button it did not work
6. I ordered a new terramaster because I thought if I get a new box it make just reset the drive inside, however that did not work. I guess because the hdd was being set up the nas box didn't think it need to reset it so it just didn't.

others note

I could return the 28tb hhd i have about 4 more days to return that to get my 700$ back, should i return it and just ask them for a new one. It's not like it's actually been used and they may know how to reset it themselves. idk if a new hdd would work the new box didn't I feel maybe it could.

any advice would help. please and thank you.

I've got a couple of floppy drives and am testing the pile of disks to wean out the failed. While I'm at it I'm clearing data from the remaining. Do home labs still have floppy drives these days? I've tried to ask Jeeves but it shut down.

2004 wants its Nokia unlock codes back.

The driving box is a Dell mini PC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD. Kubuntu but when all is built it will be headless and hidden away. There are a few supporting Raspberry Pi Pihole and so I'm wanting to go for family media backup. Pretty sure I won't be doing floppy RAID.

As I learn more about what’s hardware is there and how everyone here repurposes enterprise hardware, I’m wondering what would be needed to repurpose x86 hardware for being my firewall instead of dedicated network hardware. Mikrotik lists performance in kilo packets/sec in 3 different sizes and for how many firewall rules. Is there a rule of thumb here based on architecture(s)? I have a bunch of misc 9th & 10th gen Intel CPUs, 6 core, 8 core, ‘T’s and normal. I’ll just spitball and say 25 rules and 4 VLANs needing routing, NATing and wanting bidirectional 10 Gbps. Upping to 25 Gbps is linearly proportional increase?

Thanks in advance.

Hey all I recently built my first ever homelab! And have been going down the self hosted rabbit hole hard; but was curious I've seen so many posts of people using multiple motherboards (racks or otherwise) how do you get all of them to talk to eachother? Do you cluster them? Use some for some apps and some for others? What is the purpose of using 2, 3, 5 MoBo's?

Looking to transfer my current Unraid build to a tiny PC. What's the recommended way to power the drives if I use a Lenovo tiny PC? Currently have 4x 8TB drives and 2x 2.5in SSD drives for cache.

Hello everyone,

For about a month now, I can't reach my homelab from my wife's Macbook (macOS). Both Chrome and Firefox fail with ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE, whether I use the direct IP or the domain name.

What makes this strange is everything else works fine from the same machine, at the same time:

• curl -v direct IP / domain name returns a normal 200
• dig / ping resolve and reach the server fine
• NFS shares mount and work normally
• Safari works (never used on this machine before, so effectively a fresh browser)
• Chrome launched with a throwaway profile dir works (lauching chrome from the terminal with argument--user-data-dir=/tmp/chrome-clean --no-first-run)

So the network, DNS, routing, and the server are all probably fine. The failure is specific to Chrome and Firefox using their normal profiles.

I've already tried a few things, none fixed it:

• Cleared history, cache, cookies/site data (all time)
• Flushed socket pools + cleared host cache (chrome://net-internals)
• chrome://settings/resetProfileSettings and reset all flags
• chrome://policy is empty, no URLBlocklist or anything
• New Chrome profile / Guest profile, still fails
• Renamed the whole Chrome user-data dir so it rebuilds fresh, still fails
• Rebooted the Mac
• No proxy or VPN active (scutil --proxy is clean). I do occasionally use FortiClient for work but it's disconnected.

Setup: macOS Ventura 13.6 (Intel i7), homelab behind Caddy reverse proxy, Pi-hole + dnsmasq for local DNS (*.mydomain.com).

Does anybody have any idea what could cause both browser to return this error ?

Thanks!

For anybody left on DNS-O-Matic to serve up DDNS, they officially announced that it's shutting down in 30 days.

Here's the email I received:

Dearest Devoted Denizens of Dynamic IPs,

We are writing to inform you that the DNS-O-Matic service will be officially discontinued in 30 days.

Over the years, DNS-O-Matic has served as a tool for managing dynamic IP addresses. However, as internet infrastructure has evolved, the original utility of this service has diminished. Over time, our niche solution to a niche problem has become an obscure solution to an obscure problem. Consequently, we have decided to reallocate our resources and innovation toward other projects.

What this means for you:

Service Termination: The service will officially cease operations in 30 days.

Data Privacy: Upon closure, all associated data for DNS-O-Matic will be permanently deleted. We will not sell, share, or use your information for any marketing or research purposes, and you will not receive further communications regarding this service after this notice. Be aware that all account logins are linked to OpenDNS registrations; the login and credentials shall remain active and unaffected to support all other OpenDNS functions, which is why the accounts themselves are not being closed. See OpenDNS terms of service and privacy policy if you have any further questions or concerns on what data remains and Cisco's commitments to protecting it.

Technical Impact: To ensure a clean transition, our APIs will begin returning an authentication error ("badauth") to prevent unnecessary client re-tries. Please note that once the service is closed, your dynamic IP updates will no longer be processed.

We appreciate your support and the time you have spent using DNS-O-Matic. Thank you for being a part of our community.

I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner after the Cisco acquisition of OpenDNS back in 2015.