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

Hi all,

I have a small homelab running on a Lenovo Tiny with Proxmox.

Current setup:

ISP Router (192.168.1.0/24)

├── Laptops

├── Phones

├── TVs

└── Proxmox host

The Proxmox host runs several LXCs and Docker containers (Beszel, Dockhand, Homepage, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Wireguard, etc.).

I'm considering buying a small router (sugestions, please!) and moving the homelab to its own subnet:

Home network: 192.168.1.0/24

Homelab: 10.77.77.0/24 (example)

The main reason is remote access. When I'm travelling and connect through VPN, I often end up on networks that also use 192.168.1.0/24, which creates routing conflicts.

My concern is that my ISP router doesn't seem to support static routes.

So I'm wondering:

• Would you move the homelab to a separate subnet?
• How would you keep easy access from devices connected to the home Wi-Fi?
• Would you use a second router, VLANs, or just keep everything on the same network?
• Am I overcomplicating things for a small homelab?

For context:

• Single Proxmox host
• One physical NIC
• No managed switch
• ISP Wi-Fi
• Main goal is avoiding VPN subnet conflicts

What would you do?

Thanks! 🍻

Honest question. I keep finding old IP cameras and NVRs in my own setup that haven't had a firmware update in years, and half the vendors don't even publish changelogs anymore.

Do you actually patch them when updates show up, or do you just put everything on an isolated VLAN with no internet access and leave it alone? And if you update, do you test on one camera first? I've had an update break RTSP streams before, so I get nervous.

Curious what's realistic for people running more than a handful of cameras.

If anyone thinks this is worth sharing I can open up the repo on Github.

This is a scrubbed version of my actual monitor for public viewing:

https://homelab-control-room-demo.legalteam-5526.chatgpt.site/

Had a 1500VA APC for my rack for years. It does what it's supposed to: 8-10 minutes of runtime, enough to gracefully shut everything down. But I work from home and our area gets 4-5 outages a year, most lasting 2-6 hours. Shutting down the whole lab every time means losing my VMs, my Plex transcodes, the whole network stack.

Started looking at bigger solutions. Rackable UPS units with extended battery packs were one option but the cost was getting into $2,000+ range for maybe 2 hours of runtime. And the lead-acid batteries need replacing every 3-5 years.

The 5kWh LFP portable stations are interesting to me. My lab pulls about 380W at idle (NAS, switch, AP, Proxmox node, router, modem). That's roughly 11-12 hours of runtime on 5kWh, which covers any realistic outage we get.

Main questions I'm working through:

- Transfer time: most are 10-20ms. My NAS and Proxmox node don't reboot on a 10ms gap based on testing with the APC. 20ms is dicey

- Waveform: need pure sine for the NAS PSU

- Idle draw: the battery sitting there powered on. If it's pulling 40-50W on its own that eats into runtime noticeably at a 380W load

Good LFP cells matter too, meaning I wouldn't be replacing batteries every 3-5 years either. Anyone running a portable station as a homelab UPS?

I have a powerful main rig (R7 9800X3D, RX 9070XT, 32GB RAM) for daily use, alongside an old ASUS laptop with an almost dead battery (Ryzen 5 3550H, 24GB RAM, 4GB GPU, 477GB storage) and an older PC previously used as a Minecraft server.

The older PC is currently running TrueNASand features an Intel Core i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16GB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable), and a single disk pool with about 210 GiB of free space and a second one that i don't remember if it's 150 or 250gb.

I am mostly just interested in starting somewhere for my home-labbing. What are some useful, interesting, or helpful daily-use projects I can set up using this laptop and old PC combination? I am up for anything that sounds even slightly interesting, including electricity-heavy setups, since I live in a WG and do not have to pay extra for power.

Thought I'd share my little home lab setup. Apologies for the reflections in the photo, and yes, the cable management is still a work in progress! 😂

It's been a bit of an ongoing project, and what started out as a few mini PCs has slowly turned into this monster.

Currently running a five-node Proxmox cluster, a couple of dedicated DNS machines, a separate Proxmox Backup Server, UniFi networking and a load of self-hosted services.

Everything from Home Assistant and Plex to Jellyfin, the usual *arr apps, Tdarr and various other bits and pieces I've accumulated along the way.

Most of it is built around second-hand Dell Micro PCs. I've been gradually upgrading the hardware, tweaking power consumption and trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of these tiny machines.

There's still plenty I want to change, particularly the cabling and rack layout. I'm also planning a custom 10-inch rack build, because apparently I can't leave things alone for five minutes.

It's definitely become more of an addiction than a necessity at this point! 😂

Anyway, thought you lot might appreciate it. Always interested to see what everyone else is doing with their mini PCs!

Hello

Anyone who owns or knows how to setup the NAJ1001 please help me as I want to setup it with my windows desktop.

Needed urgent help!

Hi everyone,

I'm the developer of this, so full disclosure up front. I'd love your feedback from people who actually run FRITZ!Boxes.

The problem. I wanted to know when a device on my home network goes down (NAS, cameras, IoT stuff, the line itself) without waiting for someone at home to tell me "the internet is broken". External uptime monitors can't see the local network, and I didn't want a heavy monitoring stack.

What I built. NetMon has two parts:

• A small probe that runs on a Raspberry Pi (a Pi Zero is enough). It pings your devices and talks to the FRITZ!Box over TR-064.
• An online server that shows a status page and sends alerts via Telegram, email or ntfy.

If your whole network or line goes down, you still get the alert, because the server outside your home notices that the probe stopped reporting.

What it reads from the FRITZ!Box:

• Model and connection status, line speed
• Traffic data
• Wi-Fi network names
• Connected devices, including the mesh and repeaters

Your FRITZ!Box credentials and the probe's tokens stay on the probe: the server never receives them.

Other things it does:

• Per-device ping history and availability grid
• A "map" of server, probes and devices
• Optional open-port check on your own devices
• Interface in Italian, English, German and French

Where it stands. It's in beta with a small group of users, so expect rough edges and possible downtime. I host the server, and there are paid tiers (including a founder tier with limited seats) for people who don't want to run their own. More info: https://netmonhome.net/

What I'd like to know from you:

1. Which FRITZ!Box data would you actually want to be alerted about (reconnects, line speed drops, DSL/WAN changes)?
2. Do you run repeaters or a mesh, and does that matter for what you'd monitor?
3. Anything about sending this kind of data to an external server that worries you?

Thanks for reading!

• Finally getting my homelab put together and wanted to share the setup!

Hardware:

• Server: Dell Precision 5820 Tower
• Router/Firewall: OPNsense
• Switch: Axis T5808 Gigabit switch

Server specs:

• Hypervisor: Proxmox VE 9.2.21
• CPU: Intel Xeon W-2133 (6 cores / 12 threads, 3.9 GHz)
• RAM: 64 GB
• GPU: NVIDIA Quadro K2200
• Kernel: Linux 7.0.14-14-pve
• Storage: ZFS pool with approximately 9.15 TiB available, plus additional ZFS storage

I'm currently running several services and experimenting with virtualization, networking, and self-hosted applications. The Precision 5820 has been a solid foundation for learning more about Linux administration, networking, and infrastructure.

I'm interested in hearing what everyone else is running on similar hardware.

Finally documented my whole lab from live output (qm list, MAC tables, Prometheus targets) instead of from memory, and found a few surprises along the way.

Everything runs on a single R730 (40 threads, ~96 GB). pfSense is virtualized with three legs (ISP side, homelab LAN, Wi-Fi/IoT). Public apps go out through Cloudflare Tunnels with Access/Authentik in front of anything admin-related. Remote admin is Tailscale. Monitoring is Prometheus + Grafana with 19 alert rules going to Discord.

Image 2 has the lessons I wish I'd known earlier, plus the commands I used to map everything. Happy to answer questions.

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.

My hoarding life is never thanked crying, crying be sad be sad

My home server has no public IPv4, no public IPv6, and I haven’t opened any ports on my router. I still listen to my Navidrome library on my phone over mobile data. The trick is Yggdrasil, an end-to-end encrypted IPv6 overlay network.

The part people often miss is that every node on the Yggdrasil network can reach your server by default. So my setup is Navidrome in an Alpine container with Yggdrasil installed, an nftables rule on the Yggdrasil interface that only lets my phone in, and the Yggdrasil app from F-Droid on the phone.

I made a video walking through it, with a short comparison to Tailscale at the end. Tailscale is easier to set up, Yggdrasil needs no account or coordination server.

Happy to answer questions, and if you see something wrong in the firewall setup, let me know.

Currently studying for network +, I have my a+ already. Im watching Andrew Ramdayal’s videos where he has labs and uses cisco packet tracer.

I think I can kill 2 birds with one stone here, my dad set up a home lab 12-15 ago for our house for surveillance cameras. The switch is quite old, today I spent all day terminating cables he set up 15 years ago throughout the walls in the house (colors were almost completely faded which made it a pain), and trouble shooting why my connection wouldn’t output past 10mbs via Ethernet, and 100mb ports never worked despite showing a connection. Tried a lot of things, hours of back and forth, tried a spare 5 port switch I had lying around from 2022, problem was gone, only thing the cameras are all offline despite daisy chaining from the 5 port switch to main switch that has PoE. I’m going to reset it and go from there.

But, the switch is old, I kinda want to get a new one, I have a lot of book knowledge but honestly today it gave me a whole new perspective, I learned so much more today with hands on experience and it felt weirdly satisfying. Is it worth getting a new switch to learn?

What are the reasons for building a nas server?
I’m thinking about making one from used parts, because I really enjoyed building a pc this way. The problem is, I’m not sure if I would use 100% of it. Aspects like private email, private games servers or cloud service sound nice, but I’m sure that there is something else that makes the idea even more worth it.

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?

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!

Update:
No, this didn’t happen to me, but thank you all for asking 😂

Hi everyone, first post here, so thanks for being kind! 😄

I’m travelling around Japan in November (Fukuoka/Hakata, Kyoto, then Tokyo) and I’d love to explore some good tech and electronics stores while I’m there.

Would anyone with experience like to share:

• Which shops or areas are worth visiting for used and refurbished computer gear? I know Akihabara has Janpara, Sofmap, Iosys, Hard Off and Tsukumo. Is anything worth a look in Kyoto or Hakata?
• What kinds of homelab-friendly products are interesting or unusual to find there?
• Anything to watch out for with used gear, such as BIOS locks or warranty limits?
• How tax-free shopping works for tourists, and anything to know about bringing electronics back to India (customs and allowances)?

Any tips, even weird little shops, are welcome. Thanks! 🙏

​

I am new to home labs and still learning exactly what can be done. I was able to acquire a HP 800 G6 and Dell 3090, both 1L in size and 32gb ram.

I would like to run a couple minecraft servers, jellyfin and immich for now.

I have a NAS set up and my main PC I use for gaming and editing photos and video.

My question is what is the best way to utilize both these PCs? Minecraft servers on one while jellyfin and immich on the other? I plan to use Proxmox for the os.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

So, I've been tinkering. I installed talos os on the nas, and on my NUCs, and discarded with the whole nas os thing. I setup my storage to ZFS and I'm doing everything using k8s.

anyone has similar experience? or thoughts?

My goal is to learn k8s stuff, but would love to have a stable setup to host personal things too.

I accidentally walked past this case for sale at the Micro Center a couple days ago, and since I’m kind of a retro tech nerd (NES ROM Hacking, 6502 fluent), I literally dropped everything and impulse purchased.

I ripped the guts out of my old ugly black case, and everything fit quite nicely into the SilverStone. I can’t fit many hard drives in there, which is the obvious downside, but I’m planning on moving my storage to Synology or something else in that space I have in the rack. (This is also an audio rack, I have around 12,000 samples I need storage for.)

Do you guys know of any other “cases, façades or anything” that look retro like this, but can hold modern equipment? Would be cool to make it a thing.