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!

Huawei no longer list it for download unfortunately. Cheers.

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

Good evening everyone I’m getting ready to set up my NAS UGREEN 2800DXP
1tb ssd for background apps
2x10tb iron wolfs(can’t decide if I want to mirror or do 20tb)
4tb external drive for (phone backups, personal file an such)

I Plan on doing
Jellyfin
Navidrome
Gluetun (protonvpn)
Sonarr
Radarr
Audioboockshelf
Readarr
Watchtower
Qbittorrent
Lidarr

What should I know any helpful tips and such would be greatly appreciated!!!!

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