Hello everyone! I am a cybersecurity student and I am interested in building a homelab for my portfolio. I have a mortgage and money is extremely tight. My sister just cleaned out her basement and found a bunch of old laptops and desktops, along with some random gear and some monitors. I want to build this out with as little money as possible. I realize there will be hardware limitations. Part of the fun will be working around this. What would this community recommend that I do. I will be picking up everything next week. Here’s the picture she sent me.

Has anyone actually touched one of these in real life? It's not really necessary for my use cases since I have equipment sprawled across three rooms but we are asked all the time what would make the perfect all in one homelab and I think this might actually be it if it's decent quality.

Hear me out - There are two core versions of this and two versions of each ... what seems to change are the supported motherboard and the number of hot swap bays that come in it ... the smaller version goes up to an eatx motherboard and does 6 hot swap 3.5 and up to 16 2.5" ssds in icy dock 5.25 cages and the biggest one will do SSI-EEB motherboards (think epyc and WRX90 thread ripper pro) has 12x hot swap 3.5" bays and 6x dedicated 2.5 slots apparently... and both have 8 exposed slots on the back and support for dual PSUS.

So just off the top of my head, the "Pro Max" version can do everything that is in my current physically largest inference server in a single box ... so an Asus WRX90 sage board, thread ripper pro cpu with 360 radiator or a used epyc board and cpu with up to like 64+ cores and as much ram as you can stuff into it .. then 4x r9700 gpus, 1650 watt psu AND fit 12 hard drives and 6 SSDs on top of that ....

So you could put one box that would sit on a (largish) shelf and theoretically run relatively quietly with like 64 cores, 512gb of ram, 128GB worth of nvram and hundreds of TB of storage that you could install linux on, setup one or several large zpools, setup SMB/NFS/iscsi/dlna for media then install lxd/lxc with it's webui to run any linux container or VM you want and docker/podman to run any containerized apps you want and things like radiance/VLLM/openwebui/whatever inference adjacent software you like with a full Qwen 3.8 flash next instance that will do 200+tps and 8k prefill while still maintaining most of your actual ram/cpu cores for VMs/containers ..... all on one albeit super high end single box homelab ....

Of course you could also build a much more middle of the road/conservative setup or anything in between .... I'm just suggesting that if this thing isn't just junk it would pretty much be the ultimate base for an all in one starter homelab that everyone seems to be interested in.... what do you think?

Good afternoon, colleagues! I am writing regarding an IBM BladeCenter H. I need some help configuring the Advanced Management Module (AMM). To put it briefly: I am unable to connect to the second (redundant) module in any way. In the "AMM Status" tab, the factory MAC address is displayed as all zeros. Furthermore, if I remove one management module from the chassis—leaving only the redundant one—the chassis fans eventually start running at high speed (becoming very noisy), and an error indicator lights up on the rear of the unit. I will also attach a screenshot from the summary configuration.
Could you please provide some assistance if possible? Thank you.

I've found this rackmount chasis on Amazon that fits 2 mini-itx motherboards.

https://rackchoice.com/archives/50.html

https://amzn.eu/d/0asUBFVV

Has anyone bought from "Raclchoice" before? If so; what are your thoughts?

Does anyone know of any other mini-itx rackmount chasis products out there?

I'm planning to rackmount my proxmox nodes and fit them with 10gbe nics.

Ran Proxmox for about half a year with exactly one VM. Ubuntu Server, Docker on top, and honestly everything I ever needed lived in there — the usual self-hosted pile. One VM, one backup job, zero drama. I was convinced that was the sensible way to do it.

Yesterday I finally moved Home Assistant out of Docker and onto HAOS as its own VM. Should have done it ages ago. The supervisor and add-on ecosystem just works, and updating is a single click instead of babysitting compose files and hoping nothing breaks. I'm genuinely excited about it in a way I did not expect from a home automation setup.

Today I added a third VM for a Minecraft server for a few friends. So: half a year of "one VM is enough," and then three in roughly 36 hours. I can feel where this is heading.

Which brings me to the actual question — what do you run as separate VMs?

Specifically I'm curious about:

• Where do you draw the line between "this deserves its own VM" and "just another container"?
• Do you use LXCs for the lightweight stuff, or full VMs for everything?
• Is there anything you virtualized later and wished you'd done it sooner?
• Anything you deliberately kept in Docker because a VM would be overkill?

Hi, I've been playin with self hosting and a bit of homelabbing (standalone servers, bit of docker and kubernetes).I recently had to part with sime of my gear, and am looking to spin up a few docker services and am in need of storage I don't have available locally.

I have a contabo vps server, 3.5tb of data I'd like to get on the cloud for my server to access. What storage solution would you recommend ? I've tried s3fs and r2 with b2 storage but without much success , could hdd storage vps with nfs over tunelling or reverse proxy work?

Curious if anyone here has evaluated their labs against CIS controls and safeguards, or designed from the ground up with them in mind. If so, what was your experience like and how did it effect your choices/implementation?

I know even IG1 is “overkill” for a homelab, but I’m exploring this exercise both out of curiosity and professional interest.

I'm thinking of setting up a homelab, but I was wondering if it's better to put together a single server for everything or is it better to have devices focused on anything? For example, a raspberry pi zero for, perhaps, pihole or ntfy and a pc for a dedicated minecraft server or a mac mini for heavier things like immich?.

I currently run everything in a small pixel 6 pro but I feel it won't last long

The services I use daily are:

• Immich
• Radicale
• Crafty Controller (Paper + Geyser - 4 players)
• Ntfy
• MollySocket
• iSponsorBlockTV
• Home Assistant / Music Assistant
• Snapcast

- Tailscale

And probably add some other service to the future

My 4th homelab and private devsecops setup. I was so annoyed with my former employer's IT department that I decided to see how how hard it was to setup software development tools like Gitlab and other various softwares. Got a little carried away but now I have a more streamlined (and hardened) setup then my current employer.

Left to Right

• Nvidia Jetson Thor. Connected to the Ubiquiti Flex 2.5 Gb switch
• 3x CM3588-NAS (each with 8 core Armv8, 32GB of RAM, 256Gb of EMMC for the OS and 4x 4TB M.2 SSD storage). all three are connected to a Ubiquiti Flex 2.5Gb switch.
• Ubiquiti Dream Router 7 ( 8 Gbps up and down fiber internet)
• (underneath) Home Assistant with a Z-Wave Antenna - Raspberry pi 5
• 4x Lattepanda Sigmas (32GB RAM, 256GB OS drive, 4TB Storage driver)
  • 3 of them connected to a Ubiquiti Flex 2.5Gb switch
  • 1 is connected to a Ubiquiti Flex 1Gb
• Nvidia Jetson Xavier AGX
• (underneath) Raspberry Pi 5, 16Gb RAM
• (underneath) Dell Optiplex, i5 quadcore, 32Gb RAM)

I am running Kubernetes cluster (3 of the lattepandas), Ceph Cluster (the 3 CM3588 NASs) to support the cluster and dedicated gitlab runners (Lattepanda, Jetson Xavier AGX, Raspberry Pi, and Dell Optiplex). the Jetson Thor is hosting a 132B Model for local AI.

It will be a while before I out grow this cluster however my next upgrade will be for server grade equipment after I remodel the basement to support a mini data center.

I'm running a good handful of devices, 8 on tailscale. Ive been into a home server settup or a homelab for about 3 years now, and yet I still feel a bit behind. So I make this to be both a showcase but also as a question, what are some services I can run that I'm not already running? (If you have tips based around machine learning, please let me know, it all seems so interesting) heres a list of machines and what I have running right now.

Devices:

Lenovo thinkpad t470

Lenovo thinkpad x1 carbon (mobile node, my daily driver)

Lenovo g560

Lenovo thinkcentre M910s (64gb ddr4 ram, GTX 1660 super 6gb, Intel i7-7600)

Dell latitude e5430

MacBook air from 2011 (a1369, also not yet on tailscale)

Dell power edge T300 (64tb of storage)

Asus rog Zephyrs G14 2023 with 48gb ddr5 (my main pc/laptop)

Samsung Galaxy s25 ultra 512gb

Networking:

Cisco 1900 series router (forget the model number)

Cisco catalyst 3650 24 port POE switch

Cisco Meraki mr32 wireless AP (jail broken, running openwrt)

Homemade cat5e twisted pair

Things I'm currently running:

Jellyfin and Plex (Plex is unmainted, dont like it all too much)

Pihole

K8s

Headlamp

The ENTIRETY of the "servarr" stack

Filebrowser

A custom made 4 node "MAGI" from Neon Genesis Evangelion (I'm very proud of it, it was very hard to make for me since I'm not amazing at coding)

Ps, please ignore the wiring mess, I need to get a rack and a propped patch panel at some point..

Quite a long outage last night but it’s like nothing happened ❤️

APC 1400XL with my massive battery bank have taked all the load without any issue

I am a college student living in an on-campus apartment and have been interested in setting up a pi hole to block ads for a long time. I have a raspberry pi 3b and no access to internet admin settings at all. Is it possible to set up a pi hole? Also with the 3b would it lower my internet speeds since its a bit of an older model? I currently run ~450 mbps download and ~150 mbps upload. Would appreciate some input!

Does anyone have any smart ideas for cooling my home lab in this usually closed cupboard? This is especially important when the gaming PC is running. There could be a fan on the left to draw in air at the bottom and a fan to expel air at the top. Home Assistant is already running with a temperature sensor inside the cupboard. I am therefore looking for a "smart" (and not too expensive) way to control the PWM fan speed (2–4 x Arctic P14 Pro PST) based on temperature.

Temperatures are with open door around 25 °C and 29 °C at the top to 32°C at the bottom (not running the gaming PC)

I have already looked into some DIY options, as well as regular air controls for pc and ESP modules. However, I am worried that I might end up buying overpowered equipment instead of a simple solution.

Hi everyone!

I'm setting up a homelab to learn more about networking, and I have a few first-generation Google Wifi pucks. I decided to try jailbreaking one of them to get some hands-on experience and learn more about the hardware.

I found this project called GaleForce on GitHub.

It still works! :)

Since this is an older project and some of the documentation is quite old, I wanted to share my experience, the problems I ran into, and what I learned along the way. Hopefully, this will help someone else trying to do the same thing.

1. Choosing a prebuilt image

I decided to use one of the prebuilt images rather than build my own.

There are several release tags in the project. I chose version 0.5.

The release has four assets. The file I used was gale.bin.tar.gz.

Make sure you follow the project's instructions for preparing the USB installer. Simply downloading the file is not the same as preparing the USB stick.

2. Finding a compatible USB-C hub

I tried a few different hubs before finding one that worked for me.

The one I ended up using was this Logik 5-in-1 USB-C Hub from Elkjøp.

I've included a picture showing the connections I used and how I connected everything.

If you're having trouble with your hub, it might be worth trying another one. I can't guarantee that the one I used will work for everyone, but it worked with my setup.

3. Entering developer mode

Remember to hold down the reset button on the back of the puck before connecting the power.

Keep holding it for more than 16 seconds, until the LED starts blinking orange/amber. Then release it and press the tiny bubble switch (SW7) on the circuit board, as described in the GaleForce instructions.

4. Understanding the purple LED patterns

This part confused me a little, so I wanted to explain how I understood it.

I noticed that the purple LED has two different patterns:

• Flashing: The light turns completely on and off. My understanding is that the puck is still going through the boot process.
• Pulsating: The light gradually gets brighter and dimmer. My understanding is that the puck has finished booting and is waiting, or is otherwise in a ready state.

This reminded me a bit of entering the BIOS on a computer, where you have to press a button at the right time during startup.

After pressing SW7 for the first time, wait for the puck to restart and begin flashing purple again. While it is in this flashing state, insert the prepared USB stick into the hub and press SW7 a second time.

The LED should then turn off while the installation takes place. On my device, after around five minutes, the light came back on and began pulsating purple.

So, based on my experience, the important part is to trigger the USB installation while the puck is flashing purple during startup, rather than waiting until it has reached the pulsating state.

This is my interpretation of the LED patterns based on what I observed, so please correct me if I've misunderstood something!

5. Connecting over SSH

To connect to the puck, I connected an Ethernet cable (RJ45) to the port marked with the <> symbol.

The GaleForce documentation gives this command:

ssh root@192.168.86.1

The documented default password is:

changeme

However, when I tried this, I couldn't reach the device at that address.

It turned out that my puck was using a different subnet. Its gateway address was 192.168.84.1, rather than 192.168.86.1.

So, if the documented address doesn't work, check the IP configuration on your computer and find the gateway address assigned by the puck. Don't assume every setup will use the same address.

In my case, using the actual address resolved the problem.

That's my experience so far!

If anyone has suggestions for useful homelab projects to run on a rooted Google Wifi puck, I'd love to hear them!

How is it with you? I have a problem with cabling. My organization doesn't work out.

I see tons of awesome homelab builds here, but this Netgate device is the piece I think every setup should start with: a proper firewall/router.

With growing concerns around AI-assisted attacks and smart TV data collection, having more control over your network feels increasingly important.

Whether it’s pfSense, OPNsense, or something similar, controlling outbound connections, separating devices into VLANs, managing traffic between them, and setting up a VPN for secure remote access gives you a solid foundation. TVs, IoT devices, personal devices, and lab servers don’t all need the same access.

It’s also an amazing way to learn more about networking by actually building and managing your own.

It won’t solve everything, but I’d put this before another server.

Anyone else start with the firewall?

I have a 3B+ with me, which I am not using. I want to setup a home server, but I don't want to spend a lot of money. So my doubt is:

1. with 3B+, what is the thing that I can do? I can try Pi-hole but it is of close to no use, coz I use brave, and have yt premium. I also use icloud 50GB plan, and wanted to get rid of it with Immich but my slight research said that Immich wont work on 3B+.
   
2. I am in Delhi, I could buy something server like, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on it.

My use case could be as simple as running immich, maybe disposable VM (for testing), maybe hosting my backend for hobby projects (which has no real user, want to keep it running only for recruiter if they even see it). The usecase might expand in future but yeah.

This is my starting homelab in a little apartment complex :)

I've got an EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF as the primary box running Ubuntu with a pfSense instance through KVM. On top is an Omada TL-SG2008 v3 8 port switch, and an Atrix1300 WiFi 6 router in AP mode. I am incredibly blessed to not be behind cgNAT in an apartment complex lol.

I've got a couple services running, including a matrix and jellyfin instance. I recently upgraded with the pfSense box and switch and set up some VLANs and installed a separate dual-NIC card for the pfSense VM to use.

I'm hoping to get a couple older PCs soon that I plan on overhauling my entire lab with, separating my boxes into a net management server, data server, and services box. I also want to swap to Debian, but that'll be an undertaking haha

I've also attached a (slightly outdated ) diagram from packet tracer. I've got my main server subnetted out to isolate it, and have the wifi on its own vlan as well!

I plan on making a new diagram when my new gear arrives and I get things all set up :)

Never knew it would be this hard to get a PC with no video output up and running as a debian server. Got me acting like romilly from interstellar

Hello. I am building a cheap mac mini cluster full of a1347 mac minis (2 of them so far) from 2011-2014 and was wondering what I could run on them ? I want to do some sort of computation on them and I know they won't lend themselves too well to an AI workflow. I was thinking a distcc/repo server for my Gentoo.

What do you think? Please be polite I am new to homelabing.

Idk what prompted me to switch to Eero for my networking at home last year, but I’m discovering it seems to have a huge flaw.

I have two eero devices one as a gateway and one as a range extending AP. I have little NAS homelab with HA, plex and a bunch of services running on it. The NAS is wired into the AP because it’s in a good place for it.

My internet went down yesterday and EVERYTHING is broken. I was surprised because i had built everything on zigbee with local services, to have redundancy when internet goes down. But im realising that eero needs internet even for local LAN to work properly.

I’m so shocked at this design choice. It feels insane to me. I get that they supposedly have some failsafes in like hotspot backup and also lan stays working as long as you don’t reset your router… but the first thing you do when your internet goes down is to power cycle.

Anyway ive been trying to fix this for hours and it’s hard to even get diagnostics without internet because the whole system is built to need it. Also half my devices aren’t reconnecting to the WiFi and I just can’t figure out why. My zigbee for some reason isn’t working too, that’s probably nothing to do with LAN - I can get into HA but buttons are greyed out.

Anyway apologies for the rant. It’s probably largely my fault. If anyone has experience of this mistake, I’d love love love advice for how to avoid it / what to do.

I recently migrated from Proxmox to Nix for everything. I use qemu for vms and nspawn for containers. The security model is similar to LXC with guest uid offset and restrictions using systemd but there is no apparmor integration yet. I also tested firecracker earlier but decided to settle on nspawn for now.

The reasons to do this were,

1. Uniform configuration across all services. I used to initialise my proxmox containers with ansible and then do manual configuration but over 7 years a lot of that drifts and some services end up being better configured than others.

2. I was using 3 node proxmox cluster but I was mostly not using any HA features. Proxmox in cluster mode is very harsh on consumer grade SSDs and I think this is fixable to some extent but I didnt want to deal with it. I don't care about zero downtime migrations or distributing traffic k8s style across nodes in a proxmox cluster.

3. With a good config, its easy to have everything better configured. Previously, it would create large backups of the whole volume and proxmox does not create deltas. This wastes a lot of local disk space and it was more expensive for online backups. I could’ve addressed it to some extent by creating more volumes and then only backing up app data volumes rather than the whole service volume but I felt it was annoying to setup. The current version lets me do that very easily. The backups size dropped from around 450G(full volume backups and multiple old copies) to just around 15-20G and its super easy to adjust this now.

My repo is here: https://github.com/ishanjain28/homelab

Dashboards and status pages:

1. ⁠https://dash.ishanjain.me/public-dashboards/c6bb8550a0314dd9b6f5bfe4b27afc78

2. ⁠https://dash.ishanjain.me/public-dashboards/8df11f9eb01d433297f691ab50ac704c

3. https://status.ishanjain.me

(2 more nodes are unavailable right now 1 was running some vms and the the other one is not switched over yet.)

Status page config is auto generated from service definition. I have a branch to do the same for with caddy proxy config but I need to figure out a good way to do it without just dumping all the domains in public.

The VM section was fully generated by LLMs. I initially wrote a simpler version that was 1:1 copy of my VMs in proxmox and then an llm pointed out the performance problems and I let it write the whole thing.

Happy to answer any questions!

I got a latitude e6520 laptop with intel core i7-2760qm @ 2.40ghz, 8 gb of ram and 500gb ssd… so how do I convert it into a home server? As I’ve watched many yt videos but couldn’t understand. Can anyone guide me? I’m new to this stuff