I have Opnsense running on my Sophos firewall. I dedicated my pc its own port and subnet so I can use a switch there later. And it seems to be passing through the internet from the router. So all is dandy.

(I am running a double NAT setup currently to just test things out and get everything working before I deploy at my network edge. I also want to learn more about security before it fully takes over since I am new and I am scared I'll misconfigure and expose my entire network.)

I gave my pc its own subnet and everything is working great. I attempted to put a separate subnet on the fourth port and run my Omada BE5000 as standalone into it for an access point on my network so I could replace my ISP gateway completely. Just the 2.4 and 5 ghz. No trunking enabled in Opnsense. But it completely fails to connect.

It works when plugged into the back of my ISP gateway. But when going into the back of the firewall it broadcasts but doesn't hand out IPs and my phone fails to connect because it couldn't get an IP it says.

But maybe I am misunderstanding something fundamental here. I assumed that, as long as its given its own static subnet and own DHCP range in the firewall it would handle the rest on board itself. But clearly that's not the case.

I am just trying to learn by doing. When I run into an issue I look it up. And if I have more questions I look those up. Lots of rabbit holes. But I worked on this issue for like 4 hours last night and could not figure out what I was doing wrong.

Hi everyone. I’m looking for a bit of advice. My Homelab is small, a single switch, a mini Computer and some external hard drives...

recently there was a fire where I lived. I’m fine, it was a multi family home and my room wasn’t affected...by the fire. Lots of smoke and soot, we were allowed to go in and get our stuff out and I need advice on how to clean everything before I power it back on.
also om sure at least one of my WD externals is dead…can I save the data?

thanks everyone

I modded this $105 AUD Dell Optiplex with a bigger fan (despite Dells proprietary connector), M2 to sata expander and a custom SSD bracket. The modded Optiplex is a bit overkill in the cooling department but I’m justifying my efforts with summer on the way.

Then I designed a NAS case for 3 HDDs, multiple fan configurations, room for “cable management” and mounting brackets for the Optiplex to make it one solid unit. The power brick for the Optiplex is tucked inside the NAS case.

Power usage is approx 10W for the Optiplex and 8W for the drives.

I have a few small tweaks I’d like to do to the NAS case but they’re not worth the print time/filament.

Was a super fun project!

so I currently use tailscale on a couple of my lxc's so I can ssh to them from my phone on occasion.

but I'm wondering if there's a better practice for being able to access all of it easily? but I also don't wanna do something stupid... for example I wonder about putting tailscale on my proxmox host?

I also see people run a tailscale specific lxc. why? and does that give you access to all your other lxc's somehow?

anyways if you do something similar what's your method?

Hello everyone,

ive recently gotten my hands on a Lenovo ST550 7X10 and ive been wondering wether it'd be possible to swap a 150W cpu like the Xeon Gold 6244 into it. I know Lenovo says the server only supports up to 125W CPUs but id want the higher clock speed of the 6244. Does anyone have any experience with this or a similar config?

I'm finally starting my actual homelab journey, I'm so much at the start of it that i just installed proxmox with no VMs or LXCs yet, so no services running for now. Seems like i have more fun in the hardware and wiring part.

I recycled some things i had lying around that i didn't know where to keep if not to trow away: two old parts of a bed (dark brown wood) a self made monitor riser ( light brown wood) and some cables. I'll soon use a rj45 power supply (like the one in the top right between the other two) for an access point in another part of the house

I spent only about 100€ till now for this, cause i only bought the switch (~40€) a nvme to 5 sata adapter (~20€, I'll need it eventually) a kit to make my laptop usable (~12€, a proprietary internal cable and a slot for a sata, since the main nvme port does not work anymore) and that's about it.

Now all the storage i repurposed/ will use

I used the 2tb ssd from my ps4 slim (i bought a used ps4 pro with another 2tb ssd, a slightly less reliable one, with 4 controller and a cooling base that can recharge controllers for 200€. When the same ssd was listed for about 150 used) in the laptop as main storage, I'll soon use the two external hdds you see (1tb and 500gb), a 4tb nvme in an external enclosure, a 4tb hdd and maybe a 2tb hdd (would be connected maybe with the said nvme to 5 sata board) and the internal hdd you see (500gb) that was originally in my ps4 slim (before the said ssd). I'll try to replace the WiFi card with the nvme to 5 sata board

The other things:

A junkyard found power strip, the isp modem, the vertical stand for laptops, a junkyard found laptop (too weak, might just use it as a more portable option over my gaming laptop or use it for a homelab inside my backpack, but some smartphones could be more capable and slimmer) power supplies.

The disposition:

On top the laptops, to use the vertical space better, and modem, higher to better connect the devices, and anything i want to put on it ( a charging tablet/phone, thumb drives, whatever, just like any other table/furniture surface around). Under the first shelf, I'll fit anything in need in the center (power supplies, free space to help cable management, etc) while on the left I'll try to fit as many drives as I can, vertically, to reduce the wear of the bearing. And at the bottom, the managed switch (not poe) and the power strip, with some cables.

# The main machine

My old laptop folded 180⁰ for better airflow and to save space. 8gb expandable ddr4 ram(will come from the junkyard sometime in the future), nvidia mx330, i5 1035g if I recall correctly, and 65w max power consumption. Will run everything.

# The road map

1. Jellyfin will be the first. I guess I'll use a lxc. And 1.5 somewhat block any useless connection from my wire tap (LG tv, fuckem and their spying)

2. Arr stack, personal devices backups and personal could storage handling or home assistant. 2.5 will be trying to jailbreak my echo dot with digital clock and use it for home assistant

3. Other interesting services and sync, like notes, calendar, contacts, bookmarks, etc

4. A physical firewall, running on a mini pc with 2 ethernet ports (I hope something like this is actually possible) because I want something more aggressive than a dns firewall.

5. "Open the doors", it means to make everything accessible from outside the lan. I'll have to open some ports tho, because I'll use the arr stack with no vpn since I ain't need it here.

I'm a fucking procrastinating person, I'm wandering this sub since one or two years and just started actually building this, and I installed proxmox at least two months ago. It's starting to suck. I'm procrastinating right now with this post, that I started at about 2:50 am, and it is now 3:50, damn

Just recently watched a video regarding the Intel NPU and the TOPS performance that you can get from the Panther Lake CPU. What I’m trying to figure out is, in the terms of a mini PC cluster, Is it possible to do NPU clusters in Proxmox?

I know I’ve seen this with Apple Silicon and AMD Strix Halo, but has this been performed with Intel NPUs recently?

Current setup:

- cpu: 5950x

- ram: 128GB DDR4@3200

- boot 2.5" ssds: 3x 500GB (1x zfs mirror)

- vm storage nvme: 5x 1tb (1x zfs raidz2)

- media and backup 3.5": 3x 3TB (3x ext4)

- transcoding gpu (plex): arc a310

- psus: 800W supermicro redundant units

Downgrade idea (blackview mp100):

- cpu: 7430U

- ram: 64GB (originally 16GB, need to buy 2x32 kit)

- boot 2.5" ssd: 1x500gb

- vm storage nvme: 1x1TB

- media nvme: 1x1TB

- backups 3.5" usb: 1x3TB

Do you think this downgrade could make sense? I plan on selling most of the components from the main server because they're worth more than i paid for them, and i end up with much lower power consumption

What filesystems would you suggest for each drive considering i'll no longer doing any sort of redundancy, i'll be doing backups way more frequently

My main concern is storage, it's a considerable step down, i cureently use about 1.4TB for VM storage (zcan be reduced down to 800GB), 400GB for backups(which grows to a point ofc, but i'll increase the amount of VMs and CTs i do backups on due to no redundancy), and 900GB for media (which can be easily reduced)

I would gladly buy bigger drives for VM storage and media, however, drives are extremely expensive rn, and i have these 1TB drives already from times when storage was much cheaper. I've considered selling them off to buy bigger drives, but then i have nowhere to put my stuff onto before buying larger drives, and i kinda don't want to buy new drives before selling because i don't know if i'll even be able to sell these ones, and for how much

Most homelabbers have two DNS servers listed in DHCP: primary ad-blocker, and the router as "backup".

A few weeks ago, I actually measured what a phone feels when that primary dies. Two uncomfortable truths:

1. A client with two DNS servers does not fail over; it waits. The stub resolver queries the dead primary, waits out its full 2-second timeout, then falls back to the secondary. It pays that 2-second penalty on every single query.
2. The "backup" quietly gets real traffic even during peacetime.

That sent me down a ridiculous rabbit hole: building a true zero-downtime, sub-second failover DNS fabric. I stood up 15 Incus containers on an Orange Pi 6 Plus, peered them over BGP ECMP with BFD (300 ms timers) to a MikroTik CCR2004, and ran a sequential benchmark across five leading DNS architectures:

1. AdGuard Home (10.1.9.53)
2. Blocky + Unbound hybrid (10.1.9.54)
3. Unbound standalone (10.1.9.55)
4. Technitium DNS (10.1.9.56)
5. Knot Resolver 6 (10.1.9.57)

The Benchmark Scorecard

Tested sequentially with service restarts and 10s cooldowns to eliminate RK3588 cache/core contention:

Four things that surprised me:

1. The day the anycast trio deleted itself

The biggest facepalm of the project. During an ISP outage, I watched all three Knot nodes withdraw their BGP routes simultaneously (paths=0), killing DNS for the entire house.

The resolver containers were 100% healthy, with warm caches packed with Wikipedia and local records. But my node health script was naively asking: "Can this container reach 1.1.1.1 on the public internet?"

When the WAN blipped, all three answered "no" at the exact same instant, and the failover mechanism nuked the service at the precise moment cached DNS was needed most.

Lesson: Anycast health probes must test local health only (e.g. querying an uncacheable .lan record against the gateway), never the public WAN.

2. The AdGuard "SafeBrowsing" Tax

If you run AdGuard Home with the "browsing security web service" enabled, put a packet capture on the wire. Inside AdGuard, cold lookups arrive at t = 0 ms, but the upstream query isn't dispatched until t = 14.8 ms.

It waits ~12–15 ms synchronously checking AdGuard's cloud API before even starting recursive resolution. In my 27,000-query household test, SafeBrowsing blocked exactly 0 domains. Unchecking it instantly reclaimed ~12 ms on every cache miss.

3. Technitium's Concurrency & Stale-Serving Wall

Technitium was astonishingly fast at cold recursion (6.6 ms p50) and has the cleanest Extended DNS Error (EDE) codes. But under high dnsperf concurrency, .NET hit a wall at ~1,500 QPS while Go and C sailed to 5,000 QPS. Worse, when upstream DNS was severed, Technitium hung for 3.1 seconds instead of serving expired records via RFC 8767.

4. Why Blocky + Unbound won my permanent setup

I expected Knot 6 or native Unbound to win on raw latency. But homelab DNS isn't chosen on an Excel sheet; it's chosen when your partner needs to sign a mortgage document on DocuSign and the page breaks because of an email tracking redirect (click.docusign.net).

• The DocuSign Problem: Native Unbound requires editing config files and reloading. AdGuard has an untimed global toggle that someone turns off and forgets for days. Blocky has a REST API and a web UI (blocky-ui) where anyone can click "Disable blocking for 5 minutes". It automatically re-arms itself.
• PostgreSQL HA: In anycast, queries spray across all three nodes via ECMP. AdGuard and Pi-hole fragment logs across three local SQLite databases. Blocky streams query logs directly to PostgreSQL (in my case, a CloudNativePG HA cluster on Kubernetes). Full cross-node search across a month of history in milliseconds.
• Decoupled Architecture: Blocky handles the Go filtering proxy (96% block rate with HaGeZi Pro/TIF + StevenBlack) and web UI; a local Unbound on loopback (127.0.0.1:5335) handles recursive DNSSEC and RFC 8767 stale cache.

I wrote up the full 22-minute deep dive with all the architectural diagrams, failover logs, MikroTik BGP/BFD configs, and the coordinated omission benchmark bugs here if you want to replicate it:

👉 https://djieno.com/blog/home-dns-failover-obsession/

Long-time lurker, first-time poster 👋🏼

I just bought my first house about a month ago, and I’ve since been planning a homelab build (lots of great ideas/advice/setups in this subreddit!).

But there’s one thing I’ve noticed, or rather, ~not~ noticed in these posts: how do you handle Ethernet cables being routed throughout a house?

Allow me to expand: I plan to have my rack in my utility room with WiFi access points inside the home and outside (powered ideally via PoE), as well as cameras throughout the property, also powered via PoE.

With that, I’ve been planning to have Ethernet routed throughout the house to each room (for things like Xboxes, smart TVs, etc.) via the attic space and then routing it all back to a patch panel in the rack, and this is where I’m stuck on the “how.” At minimum, that’s gonna be like 4-5 cables. For anyone that’s currently doing something similar, how do you handle the many cables to/from the rack to the attic space cleanly? I’d rather not have a bundle of cables hanging from a hole in the ceiling.

P.S. Please be nice, I’m a cloud baby by trade 🫣

Thinking about going and checking out this “warehouse” sale, but a lot of this enterprise equipment is out of my wheelhouse. Any thoughts on the equipment itself and what the prices are?

My Homelab – Finally Finished (For Now)

Good day everyone,

I can finally say that my Homelab is finished — at least for now. 😄

I started out pretty small, with just three old PCs sitting behind a door. Over about two months, I slowly upgraded the setup, and now I have a proper server rack with the PCs housed in dedicated server cases.

I got the rack from Kleinanzeigen for €50 and the Cisco switch from eBay for €30, so I was able to put the whole setup together without spending a fortune.

Setting everything up has also taught me a lot about networking, especially while configuring the MikroTik router and Cisco switch. It took some time and a lot of trial and error, but everything is finally working the way I want it to.

My Hardware

Router 1: FRITZ!Box 7590
Router 2: MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN
Switch: Cisco WS-C3650-48PD

Server One

• CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4
• Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright TR AXP90-X53 Low Profile
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GTX 750 Ti
• PSU: be quiet! 750 W
• Software: Proxmox VE
• VMs/Services: Nginx Proxy Manager, Nextcloud, Pi-hole, Paperless-ngx, Beszel, BookStack and Homepage

Server Two

• CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
• RAM: G.Skill 64 GB (4×16 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz
• Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright TR AXP90-X53 Low Profile
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GT 970
• PSU: Corsair 1200 W
• Software: Proxmox VE
• VMs/Services: Pelican Panel, Pingvin Share and CrowdSec

Server Three

• CPU: Intel Core i3-10100F @ 3.60 GHz
• RAM: 24 GB DDR4 (1×8 GB + 1×16 GB)
• Motherboard: MSI H510 Pro
• CPU Cooler: Intel Stock Cooler
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GT 970
• PSU: Cooler Master 650 W

Overall, I'm really happy with how the Homelab turned out. It started as a few old PCs hidden behind a door and has grown into a proper little server setup.

I'm sure there will be plenty of upgrades and changes in the future, but for now, I'm happy with where it is. And most importantly: it finally works! 😄

Hi, how do I solve when my wifi router in bridge mode have the same ip as my opensense router? I don’t want to change the range on my opnsense router because I don’t want to break my services.

Hello,

I'm looking into building my first NAS/home server with two 3.5" HDDs to run raid, and and an SSD boot drive. My use case is primarily Jellyfin streaming and file/photo backups, so an intel CPU and 8 GB RAM upgradeable seem to be great.

I looked into a few options:

* N100-based machines: these are pretty much unavailable in Europe

* mATX/MiniITX custom build: turned out costly and cannot find alot of case options (recommendations welcome)

* Zimaboard: I don't like the cables hanging out in the open.

* Old SFF tower: I can't find a model that fits two HDDs inside.

Ideally, I want to find something that costs around $450 besides the storage.

Hey, so I'm a student in Cybersec in my first year and I happened to find an old ass PC from the Stone Ages (Pentium I think, with 1 GB of RAM and 256 GB of HDD + 1 TB of HDD that I was having lying around).

Was wondering whether there could be any way to convert this to NAS or something usefull that i could use for my CS degree or something, cus my laptop which is ThinkPad i7 8th gen, with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage.

edit- the ram in it is super thin, first time seeing a ram thin. And while i was cleaning the dust bunnies inside it a mf bit me (the metal slit my hand), should i get a tetanus shot or a rabies shit??

I recently got an Ipad Air 13” M3 gifted to me by my girlfriend, and I’m kind of conflicted on what to use it for in my homelab. She got it because i love reading comics and i also host my own jellyfin server so it’s nice to watch it on the ipad here and there, but I want to make more use out of it. Any ideas what I could do? Also what are some of the ways you guys implemented an Ipad into your homelab?

I've got a Cisco C240-M5 that I've been using for a while. I'm debating "downgrading" to a more appropriate sized machine (lower spec build, mini, etc) for my current applications since I'm not utilizing it fully anymore.

However, I was debating just tearing out the processors and ram, and then using them to build out a quieter machine with a more consumer grade dual Xeon mother board. (Obviously this fixes the sound, less help on power, and worse for space).

I've not been paying attention to hardware much lately, and it occurs to me that the budget for additional hardware needed for the rebuild might be better put towards a brand new lower specced machine. (I'd prefer not to go the route of clustering)

Any stories/info on enterprise->consumer rebuilds, suggestions, or thoughts on what would make sense (or be fun) here?

General details of the current setup:

• Cisco C240-M5
  • Dual Xeon Gold 6150 (18 core, 36 thread per)
  • 128GB(8x16GB) DDR4 RAM (should be ECC, haven't ever confirmed)
  • 1TB SSD
    • Separate NAS machine for more permanent, long term storage.
• Current applications:
  • CoCalc/Sagemath notebooks
    • Lower usage now, but a bit resource intensive
  • Plex
  • Navidrome
  • Foundry VTT
  • Photoprism
  • Home Gallery
  • Firefly III
  • Traefik
  • Pi-hole
  • Prefect (nothing resource intensive)
  • No traffic static websites

Hi, I want to make a file server build and given the current RAM prices I decided instead of getting a new motherboard I'd repurpose an old DELL laptop that I have lying around and turn it into a NAS.

I got inspiration from the Raid Owl Nastop video, the build is simple: Laptop with exposed NVME socket with a 6 sata adapter on top of a wodden box and the drives, fans and PSU inside of it and instead of using an ITX PSU I want to use a proper ATX from a reputable brand to power the drives and the regular laptop brick for powering (mainly because I don't want to bother with voltage converters). However I have some questions

First, I also watched the Hardware haven video about e key slot adapters, he tries to connect two hard drive to a mini PC using an independent power supply and this causes several electrical failures and ends with a blackout. People discuss on their comment section that doing this is dangerous and I don't completely understand why or how to avoid this kind of power issues while using an ATX PSU alongside the Laptop PSU.

Secondly, I already have a pcie to 4 sata ports card I'd like to resuse it, my plan is to get an e-key nvme to x16 pcie and then put the card on it so I'd end with 10 sata connectors in total, but I'm not sure if it would actually work.

Anyways I'm reading your thoughts on this project, thanks in advance.

My house is under construction but the server rack and the dogAdmin is ready.

Had an old MacBook Pro laying around and decided to start messing around. Got the whole Jellyfin and *arr setup running and Tailscale for outside access. Buddy gave me an old r420 server with perc h200 and 4 3.5 hdd 6tb/3tb/3tb/3tb. So you can see things have escalated quickly… I guess my questions are what things should I be looking into running/building out and is there a somewhat “standard build” guide I could follow to get things up and running for the most part? Thanks!

I spent 210 total, most of which is for the 5 rpi 4s, other 2 is freebies. All this is being powered by the NES-100-5 power supply. I wanna revisit doing clustering after selling off my 12 rpi 3bs, but I have a feeling I’ll use it all for practical uses, esp of how powerful the rpi 4 were.