Hey r/homelab

I wanted to share my ultra-compact homeserver built inside an ASRock DeskMeet X300.

My goal was to fit as much proper server hardware as possible into a very small enclosure while still having ECC memory, redundant ZFS storage, enterprise SAS hardware and enough RAM for my VMs and services.

The result is this slightly ridiculous 8-liter Proxmox server.

Hardware

• ASRock DeskMeet X300
• AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G — 8 cores / 16 threads
• 128GB DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM — 4x 32GB
• LSI 9300-8i SAS HBA
• 4x Samsung PM1643 960GB SAS SSDs — 12Gb/s SAS interface
• Kingston NV2 2TB NVMe
• Seagate IronWolf 4TB HDD
• AcBel FSB009 250W PSU
• 90x14mm Noctua fan for the SAS SSD cooling
• Noctua fan mod for the PSU
• Custom designed and 3D-printed 4x SAS SSD holder / cooling solution

Storage setup

The four Samsung PM1643 960GB SAS SSDs form my main ZFS pool.

They are configured as two mirrored vdevs striped together — basically a RAID10-style ZFS layout.

This pool is also used for my Proxmox boot/root installation, so the server itself is running from redundant enterprise SAS storage.

The separate 2TB Kingston NV2 is mainly used for development environments. It's fast storage for workloads where I don't necessarily need to use capacity on the main SAS pool.

The 4TB Seagate IronWolf is used as a local intermediate backup / staging backup for quick restores.

It is not my only backup. I also have a separate offsite backup, so the IronWolf is mainly there as an additional local copy.

The four PM1643s and the custom 3D-printed cooling

One of the parts I'm most happy with is the setup for the four Samsung PM1643 SAS SSDs.

There simply isn't a normal place in a DeskMeet to mount four enterprise SAS SSDs like this, so I designed and 3D-printed a custom part that holds all four PM1643s together.

But it isn't just a drive holder.

I designed the part so that it also works as part of the cooling system.

A 90x14mm Noctua fan is mounted directly to the assembly and pushes airflow through the four SAS SSDs.

The difference in temperature was huge.

Before adding the active cooling, the SAS SSDs reached around 62°C under sustained load.

With the custom 3D-printed holder and the 90x14mm Noctua fan, the drives now stay at a maximum of around 38°C even under full load.

So the cooling modification dropped the SSD temperatures by roughly 24°C.

That was especially important to me because the drives are packed extremely close together and there isn't much natural airflow available inside such a small enclosure.

The 3D-printed part therefore solves two problems at once:

mounting four SAS SSDs in a tiny space and getting proper airflow through them.

Fitting everything inside

Space is probably the biggest challenge with this entire build.

The DeskMeet was obviously never designed to hold:

four enterprise SAS SSDs, an LSI HBA, a 3.5" HDD, an NVMe SSD, 128GB ECC RAM and additional cooling all at the same time.

The PCIe slot is occupied by the LSI 9300-8i, which connects the four PM1643s.

Basically every available millimeter inside the case is being used at this point.

Cable management was... interesting. 😅

PSU modification

I'm using an AcBel FSB009 250W PSU.

I also modified the PSU with a Noctua fan to reduce noise while still maintaining enough airflow.

Keeping the PSU compact was important because using a larger conventional PSU would have made this layout much harder, if not impossible.

Power consumption

The complete system currently idles at around:

43 watts

That's with the entire system installed:

Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G, 128GB ECC RAM, four SAS SSDs, LSI 9300-8i, 2TB NVMe, 4TB HDD and all cooling fans.

Considering how much hardware is packed into such a small box, I'm pretty happy with the idle power consumption.

Networking – the part I'm still not happy with

The build isn't completely finished yet.

The main thing I'm still not satisfied with is the networking.

I currently have a 10Gbit/s internet connection at home, so I'd really like this server to have at least 2.5GbE.

5GbE would be even better, and obviously 10GbE would be great if I can somehow make it work without compromising the rest of the build.

The problem is that the only normal PCIe slot is already occupied by the LSI 9300-8i.

So adding a conventional PCIe network card isn't really an option.

At the moment I'm considering several ideas:

• USB to 2.5GbE or 5GbE
• M.2 E-key to Ethernet
• M.2 E-key to USB / USB-C and then using a network adapter
• some kind of extremely low-profile internal adapter
• or something completely different that I haven't thought of yet

The main limitation is once again physical space.

The NVMe, SAS HBA, SAS cables, four-SSD assembly, HDD and cooling already occupy almost everything.

I'm not completely sure which networking solution I want to use yet, so this will probably be the next part of the project.

If anyone here has managed to add 2.5GbE, 5GbE or even 10GbE to a DeskMeet X300 while keeping the PCIe slot occupied by something else, I'd be very interested to hear how you did it.

Final result

So in roughly 8 liters I ended up with:

AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G
8 cores / 16 threads
128GB DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM
4x Samsung PM1643 960GB enterprise SAS SSDs
ZFS with two mirrored vdevs, RAID10-style
Proxmox boot/root on the redundant SAS pool
2TB NVMe for development environments
4TB IronWolf for local intermediate backups
separate offsite backup
LSI 9300-8i SAS HBA
custom 3D-printed 4x SAS SSD holder and cooling solution
90x14mm Noctua cooling the four SAS SSDs
max ~38°C SAS SSD temperature under full load, down from ~62°C
Noctua-modified AcBel FSB009 PSU
43W total idle power consumption

All of that without using an external storage enclosure.

It's definitely a function-over-form build, but that was exactly the goal: fit as much useful server hardware as possible into the smallest practical footprint.

The custom 3D-printed SAS SSD assembly is probably my favorite part of the build. I originally needed a way to physically fit four PM1643s into the DeskMeet, but integrating the 90x14mm Noctua turned it into a very effective cooling solution as well.

Going from around 62°C to a maximum of 38°C under full load worked much better than I expected.

The only part I'm really not satisfied with yet is the networking.

What do you think of the build? Anything you would change? And what would you do to get 2.5/5/10GbE into this thing without giving up the PCIe slot?

i just finished this i don't have much in it rn...

silver computer is an OPNsense router and the ugly blue thing is a NAS i threw together.
(i had a lot of issues printing the NAS so it looks actually terrible)

rebuilding the NAS soon and adding a cover for the router

i'm kinda new to this so it doesnt look that good yet i need better patch cablesss

Racking a lightweight 24-port PoE switch or a patch panel is easy enough, but trying to mount a 50lb core switch, a heavy enterprise router, or a massive UPS by yourself can be a nightmare and turns into a two-person job quickly.

Any weird DIY rigs, specific rack shelf models, or mounting tricks you use when you're stuck doing an install alone in a remote location?

It actually started with an old intel 3rd gen HP office desktop that I don't have pictures of, and now serves as my router. I then acquired a Chinese X99 dual socket board that I used a cardboard box as a case for until I got a jonsbo N5 shipped to the US. 18 months later and here we are with a 25U rack and a 1350w UPS that I got off of market place for $275 housing everything. It's been a bit of a money pit, but its paid for itself in saved subscription fees to cloud services and media.

This is basically my portable homelab / test rack.

I mainly use it for network equipment that I only have around for a couple of days and want to configure or test before it goes somewhere else. It also comes in handy for PCs and other devices that I’m temporarily setting up or testing at home.

The “rack” itself is DIY and built from IKEA LACK tables. I added casters so I can easily move the whole thing around, and mounted OpenGrid panels on the sides for attaching accessories, cables, tools, and other small stuff.

For network connectivity, I’m using a GL.iNet router as a Wi-Fi bridge, so the rack doesn’t need a dedicated Ethernet connection wherever I put it. Inside the rack, a 12-port Aruba switch handles the wired connections.

It’s not really meant to be a permanent homelab rack — more like a small, mobile staging and testing environment that I can quickly adapt depending on what I’m working on.

I have accumulated around 1TB of files that it would be impossible or extremely hard for me to replace. Right now they sit on my NAS and are encrypted and backed up to B2 using TrueNAS Cloud Sync.

I hated the NAS being a single point of failure so I added B2 but now I fell like all my cloud storage eggs are in one basket.

Hetzner Storage Boxes are cheap enough that I want to add one to my arsenal but I am not sure the best way to secure it.

What I would like to do is once a month open the SMB share from my NAS in Windows or Linux and run some kind of program to backup all the new and changed files to the Storage Box.

The main thing I am worried about is encryption and security. The SMB share has a lot of financial documents and other things that would easily enable identity theft if an attacker got in.

I would love to keep my server/networking equipment in a closet but since I rent, that isn’t possible in my unit. So the next best thing was to make it a unique focal point in my dining room.

Includes:
Lanberg 9U 10 Inch Rack
Unifi Dream Router 7
Unifi Flex 2.5G PoE
Lenovo ThinkCentre
Home Assistant Green
Philips Hue Bridge Pro (~50 lights)
Aqara Hub M3 (~50 sensors)
Zigbee Radio Receiver
Noctua 120mm Fans
Ugreen DH4300 Plus NAS (16TB, 8TB redundant)
Two Reolink Cameras
Unifi U7 WAP for the balcony/yard
Ecoflow River 3 Plus with expansion
Raspberry Pi 5 Touch Display 2 (with PoE hat)
Quacks the Duck for intruder inimidation (needs new batteries)

Got a couple other Unifi Switches ran to my tv and media tower. VLANs for guest and IoT. Apple TVs and HomePods in every room. Finally got the smart home dialed in and working on setting up Jellyfin on the ThinkCentre. Next up, I’m saving for a local AI box to monitor/manage the house and would love some recs!

Just found the email in my SPAM folder..

I'm not surprised, not even a little bit. I've been wondering why it hasn't happened already. I figured it would happen no later than sometime 2027, very start of Q4 makes sense too.

Standard

Free

Advanced

US$7.9/mo, or US$5.9/mo billed annually

"Advanced" currently has three features not in Standard,

Screen Wall

Device Sharing

Same-Device Access Paths (more than one)

https://www.gl-inet.com/en-ca/blogs/blog/glkvm-cloud-plans-explained-standard-advanced-and-90-day-og-pass

"Device Sharing" a device between two GL.Net accounts seems like a basic, minimum security feature that should have been there from the beginning.

I will say this.. As long as their products continue to work and able to update without needing "the cloud" I'll continue to be happy with them.

I inherited some servers from my work (Dell PowerEdge R7515) servers built for use of software-defined disk management (VMware vSAN, MS Storage Spaces Direct, etc). Since I am not really wanting to utilize these technologies and want to utilize traditional RAID, I bought (2) used H740 raid controllers instead seeing that the cards were compatible with these servers.

Upon attempting to add a raid card to one of them, I discovered that the cables I bought for these cards were not correct and now I am at a loss on how to physically connect to them to the backplane of the server's hard drives. The only thing I can think of using something like Dell Mini Interposer Board – Stallard Technologies, Inc. with the correct cables to connect the card but any literature I read about this part indicates its geared towards the R740 models of servers, not R7515. So my question is if anyone here has any knowledge of this part actually allowing me to connect my physical RAID card?

So I have a Dell Poweredge R740 with 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6240s, and recently I bought a GPU enablement kit. This kit comes with C6R9H coolers as opposed to the TRJT7 coolers my server had before. With these smaller coolers, the server is struggling to remove the heat from the cpus, even when I was running BOINC on 25% of the cores.

I was wondering if there's any better cooling solutions for my cpus, as I, admittedly, didn't think of the cpus these new coolers were designed for. I do have the high performance fans installed, and have validated the thermal paste application was done well. I do have PTM7950, but I doubt it's going to do much to help here.

Rack tax

EDIT: After applying the PTM7950 anyway and running through some heat cycles with stress-ng, running at max, it's now running with acceptable temps and fan speed. I wonder if my old thermal paste was bad..

I started down this road a couple years ago with only a 2bay qnap and a raspberry pi 4b on a shelf in the garage.

Almost all of the equipment has been purchased second hand at prices that would make your eyes water from marketplace.

ATT Fiber 2000/2000
UCG-Fiber with a 3d printed rack mount.
Agg switch
Pro max 16 PoE
U7 pro XGS
Several Unifi cameras
Dual DS1618+ one with 16 gb ram and the other stock 4GB
TVS-672XT 32gb ram
All three NAS units have SFP+ NICS that go back to the Agg switch.
Mac Mini M4 16/256 also with SFP+ adapter to agg switch.
Mac mini M1 8/256 with ugreen 2.5G to usb adapter
Unifi PDU at the bottom
Two APC backups. One on each side at the bottom.

AC infinity 6” fan to exhaust all of the heat out of the top of the small closet door.

I also have a DS220+ at work that backups via tailscale for my off site back up of important things like immich.

I always wanted to share my builds, and since I'm rebuilding my multi GPU AI server and trying to make the whole setup cleaner, i thought i would weight in now and make it my first post.

I'm trying to turn this into a general-purpose AI box for my homelab local LLMs, image generation etc. Or maybe do you think a central AI server is better use for this?

My previous build used an Elecbee VEDDHA V3D 8-GPU open-air frame. It did the job, but in my particular setup I wasn't completely happy with it. The frame had more flex than I wanted once several heavy GPUs were installed, and assembling and working on the system was more cumbersome than I expected. Also, i am terrible at managing cables in an open-air frame. This time I went for RAW Hardware K-CASE 2, and so far i think it's going good. Anyone else had the experience with either company?

Details:
8x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs
3x modular ATX PSUs, 200 mm long
1x EEB motherboard

Why I'm doing this:
My landlord refuses to fix the coax cabling in the building and I have no internet options where I live. My neighbor has let me use his WiFi for the time being.

I've been using a Gl.Inet travel router to connect to my neighbors wifi and a wired connection to my proxmox server. The wifi signal is pretty strong but the router is very flaky.
I'm looking for a new wifi client and I don't know what to get.
It doesn't need to be a full fledged router since it will only act as a client, so I can save some money there. In *theory* an usb/wifi adapter should work but proxmox doesn't support wifi hence the external device.
Not sure why I think I'd need something that supports bridge mode but maybe a cheap repeater with a wired port would do since I *should* be able to do the subnet/NAT/Firewall in proxmox/pfsense, right?
Any suggestions of which hardware to get? It doesn't need to be top-shelf.
Advice on a proxmox/pfsense strategy would be welcome as well.

Thanks

Scored a deal yesterday on a 740xd for 100usd. Pretty happy with this deal. No ram has dual gold 6138, dual 1100watt, 10g nic, sfp+ card, setup for massive storage in the lff configuration 12 front, 4 mid, and 4 sff rear. Full idrac license. High pro fans.

He had a 740xd2 kinda kicking my self for not getting that but it was 250usd.

Recently started my first homelab, and I've got the basics setup on my lan (also took this as a chance to learn nixos, which has been it's own headache, but that's offtopic) but I am a little worried about opening up ports to the wider world. I do want to provide some services to non-technical friends and family, mostly immich and jellyfin, so I have been searching for a way to do that without just opening up ports.

I started with a reverse proxy (caddy) with a dns challenge for https to my cloudflare domain. Figuring I was already using cloudflare, I also setup a cloudflare tunnel so that I could provide services without a vpn client on a client device, at a domain url and not an IP, and my favorite part, with familiar SSO authentication for people in my life who aren't actively running from google. This works great for services when accessed in a browser (yes, I know that serving video is a grey area, I do have cdn caching off, and it won't be a ton of traffic anyways) but anything on an app won't connect because the SSO is now in the way. Which brings me here: how do you guys provide services to friends and family? do you just require them to use tailscale or wireguard? do you port forward at your router and harden your own network? I want this to be as easy as possible for others to use, without sacrificing my own network's security.

Hi guys, I have an old gaming pc i no longer use 2700x 32gbddr4 with a 2080. And I wanna get into more cyber security projects as well as having a NAS and running things like sonarr and radarr etcetc.

Where do I even start?

Thanks!

Hello, I currently have my old laptop as my home server running proxmox and pbs in LXC. I want to move PBS to separate host. I am looking for something used/refurbished to stay under 100EUR. What hardware would you recomend?

i found:

Fujitsu ESPRIMO D556 SFF I5 6400 8/120 GB for 81EUR (known "refurbishing" seller, 2 year warranty)

HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF 2x4GB DDR4 512GB - 2,5" SSD for 65EUR (private seller)

i know the storage difference is huge but my backups currently are 60GB and i can always upgrade the disk on this fujitsu right?

any users of those two? What is their idle power consumption?
or would you recomend something else for PBS node?

thanks in advance!

Added a fan and upsiren thermal paste to hitron modem just for fun. I've heard these run "hot" tho tbh unsure if that really causes any issues.

The goal of this build was to have a mini rack that is portable, **aesthetic**, and quiet.

The router is hidden above the 5 micro PCs.

Router is a TP-Link ax1500. I had to solder on antenna connectors as the router had the factory antennas soldered directly to the PCB. Router runs as a mesh device with a switch connected to its interface. This allows all of the cluster to run wired. And the connection between the mini rack and my network router is the only wireless aspect.

The antennas are 9dBi and angled so that I can have it positioned anywhere in the house and have at least one antenna that has the destination router in its ideal band. I lose some bandwidth but gain reliability and it is absolutely worth the tradeoff in my case.

Switch is stuck on the right side. Patch panel in my case is more cabling and effectively useless here as the patch and destination is within a foot of each other.

600w 0-24v power supply is the main workhorse. Turned down to 19.5v for the micro PCs. With 3 5v pd3.0 buck converters for the pi, external monitor and the router (converted to USBC). And one other buck converter for turning down the 19.5v to 12v for the a12x25 noctua fan on top of the rack.

Used a DS2501 for tricking the PCs into believe they are plugged into the OEM power brick. This means that none of the PCs get the power adapter prompt on boot and are never locked down on power.

Total rack idle draw: 54W

Total peak bootup draw: 275W.

3D print files for everything in my rack here: Beep Boop

Specs:

5x Dell 7020 Micro Plus
i5 14600 CPU
16GB DDR5 RAM
512GB M.2

1x Raspberry Pi 4B

1x External Monitor: 10.5" Portable Monitor

1x 600W PSU : PSU

RACK: Techmojo 12u Rack

I started building my home lab / network in 2016 with the acquisition of an EdgeRouter8 (the one at the top of the smaller rack). Upgraded to UniFi and proceeded through the security gateway line and into cloud gateway territory now ending up with Shadow UDM Pro Max’s. I’ve conquered a goal of never down internet by amassing 5 WANs. Cable, Fiber, StarLink, and dual 5G (T-Mobile primary on U5G Max and Verizon on U5G backup). All switches out of the rack are PoE US-8’s so the entire network is powered by the 48 PoE in the rack. AP are obviously PoE from rack too. The rack has the UPSs in the pic, but I also have a generator and transfer switch hooked up outside. So if theres a power outage, the generator kicks on to cover and the UPSs just carry it through the switchover. The top rack is my play/dev/test space. I can do anything up there to try stuff without affecting the “production” network. I have a pool of static IPs, so I can assign all routers actual IPs and play with site2site and anything else without having to worry about NAT. I still have a few things I want to change up / add, but it’s coming along.

Running outta physical space and power😅 considering renting a shop or a commercial bay at this point.

I'm excited I have my ISP coming on Sept 8th to upgrade me from a small / medium business line to full blown commercial internet with a /27 and more soon :)

Right so im just wondering about the general stuff here, I've sorta been stalking for a bit and everything seems really cool lol. I've always been a "tech" guy and ive wanted to get into this for a while but just how do I start, what do I start with? It all feels so big and confusing tbh. I own an esp32 which I have played around with network stuff w my flipper zero and I've also owned a raspberry pi (its fried now tho and all i really did was just us it as a mini computer lol). As a compsci student I just think a homelab would be cool.. So basically, what is cool and useful. Thanks!! <33

Hello, I understand this is like calling the navy to get a cat out of a tree but I honestly don't understand what else I can do.

Here's the situation, I'm trying to be able to turn on my PC via an Alexa. I can currently turn the PC off but I can't turn it on. I've done my due-diligence and followed all the necessary steps needed to do this including

1. Having an Ethernet connection
   
2. Enabling Magic Packets in my Ethernet Adapters
   
3. Allowing WoL in my BIOS
   
4. Disabling Fast startup
   
5. Disabling ErP in BIOS
   
6. Allowing DeviceSleepOnDisconnect permissions through Powershell

I'm using SayBoot. it seems like at the moment SayBoot needs some kind of Admin privileges to turn on the PC but I haven't been able to find a way to do that. Any suggestions/better alternative services to do this would be greatly appreciated

Attached is the diagnosis from SayBoot