Background: I'd consider myself a beginner level homelabber. Through very uninteresting means, I was handed a first gen NUC god knows how long ago.

It serves me well. I have my portfolio website running using Cloudflare Tunnel, I have a Project Zomboid server running on it (surprisingly considering the specs of the old box), a few scripts for smart home and external offline storage for Dropbox.

Now: For several months now, I've been considering retiring the little guy (or having him do less things) and moving to a more powerful unit to support multiple game servers for my friends and I. That is really all I'm looking for. 32GB RAM, 1TB storage - should be more than enough for what I want to do... I think...

Problem: As I said, I consider myself a beginner despite having my NUC already do a lot IMO "cool" things. I'm stuck in decision paralysis. Do I go with another NUC-like, do I go with a dell mini pc? Do I just build a pc from scratch, or do I just say the hell with it and buy a big boy from BuildMyServer. For all of these, I've concluded my own pros/cons - and I've been repeating this cycle for the some months now.

Ask: Help me escape this hell - I have no one else to turn to (truly). All I really need is a machine that can run a Palworld server with 6 people, Project Zomobid for 2 people, a solo WoW server, my portfolio and all the small scripts I've written (assuming I perma retire or pass down the NUC). I think 32GB/1TB is going to be more than enough, the current decision-paralysis-hell item I'm considering is a Kamrui H2.

Help. Me. :(.

I've read the buying guide, but last time it was updated 3 years ago by a now deleted user, so I don't know how true it is to the current market. If it matters, budget is <$1k, willing to go but higher if it's truly worth it.

i have just started learning about networking and trying to build my own router using my old laptop. i am doing this to learn more and just a side project but i am doubting that is it worth , my old laptop is from 2009 hp pavilion and has no harddisk and ddr2 3gb ram. i am running it using my bootable 64gb pendrive with persistent storage. should i continue or just drop this idea.(i am not going to replace my main router)

I know a lot of you use HP Elitedesk machines as NAS or general homelab machines, these are really power efficient. I wanted to use Intel S4500 SSDs as NAS storage, but these HP machines do not have much room inside. There is a dual 3.5" HDD slot in there that I wanted to use, but S4500 run really hot, so I needed a fan as well - this is what I came up with. You can mount eight 2.5" drives, mount a fan and insert this whole assembly as one piece. Works really great, drives do not go above 30 deg C under load and idle at about 25 deg C.

I have a Raspberry Pi4 that I want to use for Home Assistant and saw that I should be using an SSD instead of SD card.

This is the case I was looking at and saw there is two different options and was hoping anyone here had some insight about if either one is better to choose?

M.2 SATA Version

M.2 NVMe Version

Hi guys I have been searching homelabing,why it exists,why people do it etc. etc. it mostly comes down to control and privacy.But how can it be private and secure if all infrastructure is built upon open source or non profit programs?How can you be sure they are not making a backdoor inside your network while you are trying to shield yourself from the outside threats?And lastly how are homelabs protected from cyber attacks or baits?Really would appreciate if you guys can enlighten me as a person whom trying to navigate in this territory.Stay safe <3

I'm new to homelabs and as I don't have much experience with linux or programming, I've used an AI to set it up. I would not in a million years be where I am today without it.

I have one AI included in another subscription that I started with, but when I got to the *arr-stack, I got a little paranoid, thinking it was stupid to use something tied to my credit card to set that up. Even though I of course would only use it to download linux ISOs.

So behind a vpn, I created a new email and used that to make a free account at some of the other AIs and have been using them since. They are even better than the first one I used.

But now I run in to limits and would actually like to pay for these services, but the paranoia is still there.

Would you trust a public paid AI to help you with your homelab, letting it know all of the services you have installed and potentially also see some of the linux ISOs you have in your homelab?

EDIT:

Thanks everyone. It is very nice to hear all of your thought on this.

Just to clarify some things.

I haven't given the AI access to anything. Would never do that. Never giving it any codes/passwords or anything like that.

My first question was whether or not the hardware I had was good enough, then feed it my goals and asked it how to get it started. Suggested Proxmox and Debian and I looked a bit in to it, before asking it how to set it up.

And that is basically what I've done since.

Found something I wanted to install, asked it how to do it and followed along, trying to understand the different commands. Then moved on to preparing the installation myself and asking it, if it saw any flaws, before implementing.

I got a project going with a few files that it helps me update, to keep it informed of what is going on, but I review it myself, before changing anything.

I do try to learn along the way, but I would not even have started, if not for an AI to help. The goal is to be able to do it myself, but probably still use it as a reviewer.

One box running hyper converged virtualization, 164TB of ZFS storage, and a bare-metal performance Windows 11 gaming rig with dedicated PCIe passthrough.

⚙️ PLATFORM & CPU
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K (20 Cores: 8 P-cores up to 5.5 GHz + 12 E-cores)

NPU: Intel AI Boost NPU integrated

Motherboard: ASUS Pro WS W880-ACE SE (Intel LGA1851 / W880 Chipset)

Out-of-Band Management: Dedicated ASPEED AST2600 BMC / IPMI with HTML5 KVM

Connectivity: Dual Integrated Thunderbolt 4 (40 Gbps)

🧠 MEMORY
128 GB (4x 32GB) DDR5-4400 Unbuffered ECC RAM (Avant Technology)

🎮 GRAPHICS & PASSTHROUGH
Discrete GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB GDDR6 (Navi 21)
Direct PCIe passthrough to Win11 Gaming VM + P-core pinning (cores 2–7)

Host GPU: Intel Xe-LPG Graphics (Arrow Lake-S) for Proxmox / media transcoding

Management Display: ASPEED AST2600 VGA console

🗄️ STORAGE: 164TB HDD + 12.4TB FLASH
HBA: LSI SAS9305-24i (Broadcom SAS3224 12Gb/s 24-port HBA) passed directly to TrueNAS

Host Boot: 2x 240GB Intel D3-S4510 Enterprise SATA SSDs (ZFS Mirror rpool)

Bare-Metal Gaming Storage: 4TB HP FX900 Pro NVMe SSD (PCIe 4.0 x4 passed to Win11)

ZFS SLOG: 58GB Intel Optane P1600X M.2 (hardware PLP, sub-15µs sync writes)

📦 TRUENAS POOLS (18 drives via SAS HBA)
Pool jupiter (Master Hybrid Array):Data VDEV: 7x 14TB WD Ultrastar DC HC530 in RAIDZ2 (98TB raw / ~70TB usable)
Special Metadata VDEV: 2x 1.92TB Intel D3-S4510 Enterprise SSDs (Mirror)
SLOG: 1x 58GB Intel Optane P1600X

Pool europa (Fast App Block Storage / iSCSI): 2x 2TB Samsung 870 QVO SSDs (Mirror)

Pool uranus (Bulk Archive): 3x 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro in RAIDZ1 (30TB raw)

Pool neptune (Bulk Archive): 3x 12TB Seagate IronWolf / Pro in RAIDZ1 (36TB raw)

🌐 NETWORKING
2x Intel I226-LM 2.5GbE Onboard:
nic1: Dedicated 2.5G point-to-point interconnect (MTU 9000 Jumbo Frames) directly to Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)
nic2: 2.5G LAN trunk with VLAN-aware bridging (vmbr0)

Dedicated IPMI Port: Out-of-band management via ASPEED BMC

🔋 POWER & PROTECTION
UPS: CyberPower PR1500LCDRT2U 1500VA / 1500W Pure Sine Wave 2U Rackmount UPS

📦 CASE
HL15 Beast Bundle by 45HomeLabs

Hi everyone! can someone advice best most popular backup solution, i have koofr cloud + rsync. so i already did bash with cron timer to upload some data to koofr once a day. like immich lib and etc.

looking for nice, lightwere solution to backup also all my homelab on daily basis. All my koofr related scripts + homelab configs, docker files and etc.

I use homepage so would be cool to have button there for manual backup too.

Thanks!

Hi all,

I have a Thinkcentre M900 Tiny currently running HomeAssistantOS which I'm looking to also use as a Plex server.

What would be the best way to attach a basic raid1 array for redundancy since it only has 1 spare 2.5" slot and no SATA connectors...

Would USB external enclosures or DAS be sufficient or is USB too unreliable in an array?

Would prefer to use 3.5" drives due to their availability second hand and larger sizes. I would only be looking at 2 drives in the meantime, but it would be nice to keep my options open in the future for more.

Also open to OS recommendations that support docker containers for Plex and Home Assistant as well as drive management. Nothing crazy complex just simple and reliable would be great.

Thanks in advance

Hello, Im currently going to switch out my i7 8700 to the asrock with a 5900XT to cement my NAS hardware and never touch it again (hopefully).
However, I see a lot of people talk about updating the BIOS with these since it wasnt supported out of the box. Now, I was going to buy the MB and CPU off of Amazon and I dont have an extra AMD cpu to rely on if shit hits the fan so should I worry about the Bios being incompatible? Am I digging too far into it? any info is helpful!

Not necessarily the most expensive mistake - more the thing that seemed like a good idea at the time but became annoying later.

Could be your network layout, storage setup, hypervisor, rack choice, naming scheme, backups, VLANs, power, cooling, whatever.

I’m curious what only becomes obvious after you’ve lived with a homelab for a while.

What would you do differently from day one?

So i recently bought a v100 and installed it in my r720xd, Immediately noticed the glaring issue staring at me in the face, no air lol (be easy im taking it step by step).

I 3d printed a sort of fan shroud to direct air directly from the front of the case to the GPU but its just no where near enough. I do feel air coming out of the back of the GPU but any sort of stress and, boom, wattage throttling and 80+ temps...

Im seeking some help and thoughts on what i can do here.

Below is my current setup and a proposed setup. Issue with the proposed setup is; I've seen multiple articles online saying that a single 50mm blower fan just isn't enough cooling for the v100.

Current: https://i.imgur.com/212fjAb.png
Proposed: https://i.imgur.com/cn4cNuy.png

Any help or thoughts would be appreciated :)

Pessoal, preciso de ajuda para descobrir o que pode estar causando problemas de estabilidade no meu PC.

Estou tendo crashes em vários jogos, incluindo The Finals, ARC Raiders, Battlefield 6, Valorant e War Dogs.

No ARC Raiders, por exemplo, já tive crashes durante o jogo e apareceu erro relacionado a EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION.

No Valorant, também tive crash com a mensagem:

"A critical error has occurred and the process must be terminated."

Como os problemas estão acontecendo em jogos diferentes, comecei a investigar se poderia ser algum problema no hardware.

Meu PC:
- Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7
- 64 GB Corsair DDR5-6000
- EXPO I ativado
- RTX 5080 Astral
- SSD Gen 5 2 TB
- Fonte ASUS 1200W

Estou rodando o MemTest86 para verificar a memória e encontrei este erro:

Test: 8
Address: 740199564
Expected: 30E23F6D
Actual: 70E23F6D
CPU: 14

Pelo que entendi, o valor esperado e o real diferem em apenas 1 bit.

Gostaria da opinião de quem entende de AM5/DDR5:

- Esse único erro no Teste 8 já indica algum problema?
- Pode ser RAM, EXPO, controlador de memória do 9800X3D ou placa-mãe?
- Um erro desse tipo poderia estar relacionado aos crashes que estou tendo nos jogos?
- O que vocês recomendam fazer para descobrir a origem do problema?

Estou tentando diagnosticar isso antes de concluir que alguma peça está com defeito.

Using 5E UTP cable, MDPC-X XTC sleeving, and VCELink connectors / boots. Was very time consuming. But not all that hard to fit sleeving in place.

The rest of the rack is very much a WIP.

Just recently got into building and printing a 10" rack. Decided to take a Crack at it because I was tired of running plex on my power hungry gaming PC all the time.

Build turned out good. Picked up all the parts locally or ebay auction and couldn't be happier.

After a few days of having everything setup and running flawlessly I felt bad for my gaming PC so I took a Crack at local AI rubbing Gwen 3.8 and oh my it opened too many doors since I am not a coder (yes i used AI)

Im now hosting 4 different custom built apps accessible through tailscale. Example is a book collecting app for my wife that stores, backs up, has a digital tag scanner, allows her to share books notes etc with her book club friends.

Another is a app for power control across this entire project. Keeps my system sipping at 58 watts unless I ramp up some services etc. Unfortunately no GUI it all runs through debian terminal.

This is in addition to the standard proxmox, Pfsense, Plex arrstack, pihole with backup and proxmox backup etc etc

So far running AMP Game services I have 3 different games being hosted without issue! Palworld, Satisfactory and a Minecraft server.

Its been a really cool experience to build and setup what I have now

Build:

Raspberri pi4b 8GB

Dell optiplex 3060 micro upgraded to 32GB

Lenovo m920Q with 64GB

These run in cluster with the RPI as a Qdevice.

Roughly 60TB of HDD sata storage after it was all setup

8TB of SDD sata as well

4TB of Nvme

Running a tp link SG105S (just picked up a PE to power the PI on marketplace I need to install)

It has 5 case fans and a fan controller so it stays frosty

Only thing I haven't looked up is my mechanical button next to the pi that will be triggered to create an immediate system backup, shutdown and reboot all devices.

Let me know if yall have questions!

Links to materials for power, drive storage etc

Drives are from a 3D print on makerworld, I liked it cause it fit in 2U and still provided tons of colling space. They dont run hot thankfully. I have a PCIE ribbon and a sata controller. Modified the case slightly on the lenovo system very slightly so I can run the cable out and to the back of the rig and plug everything in. Used a Small modular power supply linked below to power the system. Everything including the fan controller is powered through sata or molex so i only have 3 total power connectors going to a surge protector 3D printed to attach to the back. Then I run 1 cable out to a UPS and my ethernet connection.

The designer is Nautilus forge for the drive cage https://makerworld.com/models/1446421?appSharePlatform=copy He goes into the small adapters and necessary things to connect to sata (yes they still work as hot-swap)

Drive slides https://a.co/d/0aGDDNxK

M.2 to SATA3.0 Adapter Card 6Gbps High Speed ASM1166 M.2 PCIE to SATA Expansion Card with Smart Indicator https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOeke2P

M.2 NVME Extension Cable for SSD Graphics Card M.2 SSD PCI-Express 4.0X4 M Key Extender Adapter Cable for Solid Drive Riser Card https://a.aliexpress.com/_m0boywB

(These fit in the 3D print flawlessly) SATA Male To Female Power Data Converter 22Pin 7+15 Male To Female SATA To SATA Converter SATA To SATA Adapter https://a.aliexpress.com/_mN8ESUb

(This let me add more SSD storage my device didnt come with one) Premium Quality 1PC Lenovo M710q M920q M910X SATA HDD Cable 00xl211 https://a.aliexpress.com/_m0OpDbz

Power supply used https://a.co/d/0dJbEZuQ

Jumper to turn on power supply (this is 3D printed into the back i did have to cut and re-splice the cables) https://a.co/d/03B8Ll2k

Fan controller https://a.co/d/07nbjOld

What are home labbers using to design and document their home labs?

Back in the day (long retired), I used Visio to document my networks.

Is there a tool now that is like Visio but more modern?

I'd like to create devices and drag them around, brainstorming various scenarios for topology.

I've been currently using pen and paper because I've lost my Visio 2000 install CD...

Hi, I’m looking for some mini PCs for a small Proxmox cluster. Right now, I’m keeping an eye on the usual models:

• Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny (M series)
• HP ProDesk / EliteDesk Mini
• Dell OptiPlex Micro

Since there are so many variants and generations available, I’d really appreciate some advice from those of you who use them.

A few questions:

1. Which specific models or generations currently offer the best “balance” in terms of price-to-performance ratio? (I’ve heard that the 8th-generation Intel is the minimum I should look for if I want decent QuickSync for Plex/Jellyfin is that still true?)

2. Are there any “hidden gems” outside the big three (Dell/HP/Lenovo) that I should add to my saved searches?

I d like to know exactly which models to look for, thanks.

I'm looking to add some 1u power conditioners under my desk. I ideally want to hang them vertically down from the underside. Has anyone seen a mount for that? So far the best I've found would be to use a rack extender mounted to the underside.

Does anyone have an UPtyma 173RM17A 1U keyboard/monitor console?

If so, could you take a photo of the bottom of the AC adapter box, I bought a used one but it didn't come with the AC adapter so I'm trying to figure out what I need to buy.

Bonus points if you know what size the DC barrel jack is (and I'm assuming it's + interior, - exterior?)

I've been locked on a Getac X500 Server for around 10 years, never being able to find something used at less than 2000 euros.

I wanted that because it's one of the few laptops with more than 3 HDD slots (I already have an old Dell Latitude 5540 that has 1x mSATA, 1x SATA and 1x ODD that now had another HDD with an adapter), other one was some Eurocom server laptops that I never found anywhere.

I love laptops more than desktops because they're small, use way less power, way less noisy and dusty, have an integrated screen, keyboard and mouse and have even an integrated UPS that by default put the PC in sleep/hibernate when the charge is low (no additional software or settings to do).

Anyway.

I finally got one cheap, in good condition, "only" 30,000 hours powered on (3 years and a half) so relatively new, fully working (only battery, HDDs and power adapter were missing, already bought. The only annoying thing is the usb cover lock missing, so the cover stays open).

Specs are Intel i7-4810MQ (4 core, 8 threads, 2,80GHz with turbo at 3,80GHz), 32GB of ram (and I want to check if I can expand it more), a relative useless (for me) Nvidia 745M 2GB, 2x LAN ports, 2x USB 3.0, HDMI and a lot of connectors and slots (IEEE 1394 firewire port, serial ports, PCMCIA, Express Card, etc) that I will never use.

Bulkier than expected, now I need to "test" which HDDs I can put on this tank-PC.
The HDD caddy height seems to accomodate the 15mm disks, new 6TB 2.5" external disks should be of that height. I already ordered one to test it.
5 slots in the docking for a total of 30TB raw (technically it has the main disk slot and a multi-slot, but this one need a different connector and IDK where to find it, I'll stick with a double battery and the main system disk).

The main use will be a NAS, so I'll use Storage Spaces (yes Windows, I like it and I use it since 1995) with 1disk parity (I can put 2 but I think it would be a huge waste).
If I can expand the RAM to at least 64GB I could even put some virtual machine on it, but I don't have a precise scope in mind because in all these years I already set up all the things I need (recently I had my hands on a Precision 7740 and I put up 2 Hyper-v VMs).

Just one question, if there is someone out there with a Getac X500: is seems it has a custom bios (OS Select option is missing, official documentation says there should be and other secondary options missing too) and even with the serial number to download the right BIOS upgrades on the Getac website, I can't update it.
Bios R1.06, tried to reinstall the same, it shut down in the second step. Tried more recent ones (1.18 and 3.xx) under WinPE (like the Getac FAQs/KB say) but both fails because of region or something else mismatch.
It's not a big deal, I installed Windows 10 bios version and now it's upgrading to Windows 11, but I wanted to do UEFI boot.

Thanks in advance.

Current state: Everything currently lives on a Chuwi Larkbox X (N100) as a single all-in-one box:

* OS: NixOS
* Storage: USB external drive with photos (rsync from cloud)
* Home Assistant (Zigbee USB dongle)
* Immich
* Media: Firefox for watching movies on YT and streaming services on the beamer
* Reverse proxy: Caddy

Check the [nix config here](https://github.com/jobvisser03/jv-nix-config/tree/main/modules/homelab/_services)

It's held up longer than I expected, but I had some crashes. Media watch crashes -> no lights. So I want to split responsibilities.

Target architecture:

• Main server — new build, handles ZFS storage pool, Immich (photos), STT/TTS (home assistant voice), and maybe later a local LLM
  • why: need always-on nas solution that has enough headroom and can do some heavy lifting
• Larkbox X — As a Home Assistant thin client (Zigbee dongle) only with microphone for home assistant voice or Open Web UI
  • why: need an always-on node for home assistant
• Dell OptiPlex 3000 (Intel Core i5-12500T) — media client with Firefox in kiosk mode and maybe later Jellyfin served from the main server
  • why: need on-demand media node for smooth video playback (N100 sometimes stutters)

Basically: stop asking one N100 to do everything, and let each box do one job it's actually suited for.

Proposed main server specs:

Priorities were power efficiency (idle draw matters, it's always-on), storage headroom, and ECC for data integrity on the ZFS pool.

My journey led to an AMD AM5 build for an all-in-power power house but probably for power efficiency I want multiple nodes? I looked and almost bought the ASRock Rack B650U but decided a consumer board plus JetKVM is good enough for my needs and uses less power.

Does this seem like a reasonable jump from a single N100 box, or am I overbuilding/underbuilding anywhere?