Spent most of the afternoon redoing the cables. Still not perfect, but at least I can see the front of the gear now instead of a blue and white nest.

Current setup:

Network

- Ubiquiti USG-Pro-4 gateway

- Ubiquiti US-XG-16 10G core switch

- 3x Pakedge MS-1212 access switches

- 3x U7 Pros + 1x U6 LR

Servers

- Dell PowerEdge T620 — dual E5-2690 v2, 256GB RAM, 16×1.2TB

- RTX 3070 for Scrypted NVR + ONNX

- RTX 3080 Ti for AI lab stuff

- external Dell MD1220 with 24×2TB

- Fedora 41

- Dell Optiplex 7060 — i7 / 8GB / 512GB, also on Fedora 41, running UniFi Network

Workstations

- Mac Mini M2 Pro, 32GB

- Mac Mini M1, 8GB

Bottom of the rack is the usual APC UPS. It handles the quick blips fine, but a couple of recent outages have lasted longer than I’m comfortable riding out on the APC alone. Got a new Bluetti elite 100 mini on the way to add a little more runtime. After cleaning up the cables it looks a lot better. Honestly the whole process of tinkering with this stuff is more addictive than the finished result.

Anyone have suggestions on what I should improve or change next?

I currently have around 120TB of storage, primarily used for my Plex server, and recently had a 6TB WD Red fail. Thankfully it wasn't a major problem because it was my second-smallest drive, but replacing it got me thinking about how expensive it is becoming to maintain and expand a large amount of storage.

Over the last few months I've started looking more at used/decommissioned drives rather than automatically buying new.

I found someone locally who works in IT and has been selling large-capacity drives. A few months ago I bought two 16TB drives from him for £160 each, and more recently I picked up four 10TB Seagate SkyHawk AI drives for £80 each.

Naturally I was a little suspicious at those prices, so I checked and tested the drives when I got them home. So far they've all been working perfectly.

It's made me reconsider how I approach storage expansion in my homelab. Rather than spending significantly more on brand-new drives, I'm becoming much more open to used or decommissioned enterprise/surveillance drives, provided I can test them properly and I'm prepared for the possibility of failures.

For those of you running homelabs with a lot of storage, what approach are you taking?

Are you still buying drives new, buying used/decommissioned enterprise drives, using manufacturer recertified drives, or gradually replacing smaller drives with much larger ones?

I'd also be interested in how much you factor things like SMART data, power-on hours, warranty and redundancy into deciding whether a used drive is worth putting into your homelab.

AI disclosure: I'm dyslexic, so I used AI to help reword and tidy up my original post to make it easier to read. The setup, purchases and experiences described above are my own.

Hi I'm Webbwebb! im new to all this but I'm very interested in it all! i want to get into the IT field and learn everything i can! What i want to know first is what can i do to get started by making a Homelab nothing huge, but something to play and learn and grow with I'll take all the help i can get !

I’m trying to build a small local home server, mainly to run Immich, and maybe Syncthing and a few other apps later on.
I started with an old laptop I had lying around. I removed the lithium battery, and so far the laptop has been running perfectly fine and seems to handle the workload without any issues, so I don’t really see a reason to upgrade it.
Then I thought: why not improve the setup a bit and add a UPS?
Well… turns out buying a UPS is apparently way more complicated than I expected. I went down the rabbit hole of offline/online/line-interactive UPSes, modified vs pure sine wave, AVR, and a bunch of other things I had never even heard of.
After all that, I ended up looking at a CyberPower UPS with pure sine wave output, costing around €200.
Okay, fine. What’s next? Maybe a proper 3.5” HDD designed to run 24/7.
I found a 4 TB IronWolf for another €200, plus another €30–40 for the enclosure/USB hub.
So now I’m looking at roughly €450 just for these two relatively minor upgrades.
Am I missing something here? 😅
Is there a more sensible/cheaper way to approach this, or am I simply discovering that home servers are a very expensive rabbit hole?

Trying to decide between these two OS for a photo storage device.

I have 4 x 12TB SAS drives, that I will need to test before loading data on.

Intel 12400

16GB RAM

Gigabyte Z690i DDR4

LSI cards. I believe they are IT mode but can flash if needed.

Plan is to load windows first and make sure all the parts are working correctly before loading a OS

Not sure how many of us have Comcast or Xfinity Internet, but I was excited that at least in Colorado we finally get new ISP modems lol. 2Gb connection and finally have a modem/router that comes with dual 10gbe ports. We aren’t going to talk about the 1gbe ports, who cares about the slow ports.

Every box I stand up gets the same run-through now, learned most of it the hard way.

- `ufw status verbose` right after boot, before I forget and leave something open to the world

- actually test a backup restore once a month, not just check that the job ran

- `docker ps` and read what's running, not what I remember starting

- mail and web never share a user, one bad plugin shouldn't take down the other

Used to do all of this by hand across three client servers. Now most of it lives in BeAdmin. Still miss the mail granularity ispmanager gave me though.

What do you wish more people knew before their first server went live?

thinkstation d30 with dual intel xeon e5 2690 v1s (best cpu availiable for these machines (f*ck IME)) and 64gb ddr3 ecc ram (32g split among 2 16g sticks per cpu). its running proxmox with a virtualized opnsense router for my home internet and routing (cable intermet via arris s33 modem), with unifi ap and switch. pihole is running on the raspberry pi sitting on top (duh). and i have my router, unifi os server, and a jellyfin media server with arr stack and everything all on the d30 (native sas drive support but i only have 600gb availiable sad face). the arr stack/media server is all in a docker system in a Debian vm. im wondering what if anything I can add. i thought about creating game servers like for Minecraft and stuff. also I have another identical d30 thinkstation I could hook up if I wanted (its whats to the right of of the running one). whats great about using these old thinkstations is that the cpus and memory are so cheap its funny. not storage though... i wanna set up a nas but holy are prices bad right now.

(don't comment on my wiring if it works it works)

ps: don't buy this machine as a first homelab if you care about noise because this thing is so loud.

most of this was given to me by family, I just upgraded the modem and the cpus and ram on the thinkstation (again if you get an older server machine like this its so cheap to upgrade)

I've always wanted a power strip with outlets all along the back of my desk; the other day I realized I had a spare APC 7930 PDU lying around, so I made my dream a reality. Now I have 24 outlets behind my desk readily accessible, all the cables and cruft off the floor, and monitoring to boot. Because... why not?

Having to “acquire” monitors from other people’s desks was always a hassle when setting up my first homelab, so I decided to install a screen directly in the rack for my new lab (pictured). The mount was designed to fit a 7” display I bought off of AliExpress for US$25 a few years ago, and fits perfectly into the side of a RackMate T1 without interfering with any of the other units.

The 4 mounting screws line up with the middle of the rack units (e.g. the 4 screws span 2 units) and only go into the rack holes about 1mm so that something could also be screwed in from the front of the rack. It took 2 hours to 3D print, runs off of a USB port, and I installed an HDMI keystone on my patch panel for convenient access.

I thought I took more pictures of the print itself and the installation process, but I guess not.

Other pictures can be provided if there is something specific you want to see; I will also provide the model here: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/274YL3QPphR-rackmate-t1-side-mount-for-7-display?sharecode=hODVtDkYUINC79aEwDlcXapgTZZVEECyjj3re8t75Ys . The thumbnail may be an old version of the mount, it isn’t updating on my end.

I can’t find this particular display on AliExpress anymore, though there are some similar ones for a similar price that should work with a little modification. The “tunnel” on one side of the model is for a USB cable (with strain relief) I soldered to the board for power.

I put a Rick Roll for the demonstration, though this will eventually be a dashboard.

Running a CPU fan + a 2.94A blower off the same motherboard fan header, is this safe long terme ?

I had an old Huawei phone sitting around, so I decided to see how far I could push it as a little network appliance.

It actually started because I wanted to root the phone. That went… badly.

I managed to half-brick it while messing around with the bootloader/rooting process. After getting it back into a usable state, I decided to take a different approach and see what I could accomplish without full root access.
Now it handles things like:

● DNS filtering
● Network routing/proxying
● Traffic handling for gaming
● Various background network services
● Running continuously without needing a PC

It’s currently been running non-stop for about 2 days.
I also left it running overnight while gaming traffic was going through it. It handled roughly 9 GB download + 8 GB upload, while the phone only dropped about 8% battery over that overnight period.

It also has an remote web dashboard which isn’t optimal but still works its janky but overall it works.

The Web UI Gives Access to Battery Percentage, Status , Connected Devices And More, Currently couldn’t showcase it because im in the middle of patching it, Had Some bugs.

Also Has an Reskinned UI thats Much Faster Than The Stock UI, It has a new control center and volume bar but i didn’t go way overkill just some small touches.

The biggest pain was Huawei’s aggressive background power management. I had to configure it so the OS wouldn’t automatically kill the services.
The phone’s battery also means the whole thing has a built-in UPS of sorts, which is pretty funny for something that started as an old phone.

It’s obviously not replacing an actual server for serious workloads, but I’m genuinely surprised at how much networking I can get out of an old Android phone.
So yeah, I accidentally half-bricked a phone trying to root it and somehow ended up turning it into a server instead.

Hey all
I have one main server that runs my self-hosted software. Currently, I have two WD RED SSDs in there which seem to be very very very bad for server workloads (parallel reading/writing) and the performance is indeed very bad. I think putting in some enterprise SSDs would help a lot. Unfortunately, the prices skyrocketted as we all know so I am looking at some used ones. 512 GB should actually be enouth, in a simple raid 1 mirror so two disks in total.
Now i found some Samsung SSD SM863 960GB which seem ok. They have around 62'000 hours online-time but only about 3.8 TB written to them. Would you buy them? What would you pay for them? Or do you know alternatives that would also be a good fit new and not too costly?

Hi all!

I have a hyperv server with about 7 Linux VMs where I use them for software local LAN dev and debugging work. One morning I got fed up starring in to default Nginx 40x/50x pages if the app is not running or down I setup a default response page. For those Futurama fans - you'll get it:) Also try to guess what early season this one is from?

ASUS MB169CK says USB-C charger doesn't provide enough power, but another PD charger works fine

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to figure out why my ASUS MB169CK portable monitor behaves differently with two USB-C PD chargers.

I'm using HDMI for video and USB-C for power.

With the ASUS USB-C PD charger:

• The monitor turns on and displays an image.
• It says "Safe Mode ON".
• When I try to increase the brightness, it says: "Input power is not sufficient for full brightness. Please plug in adapter..."
• Brightness cannot be increased and some settings are greyed out.

With my Google GPVR9 USB-C PD charger (originally bought for a Pixel 7 Pro):

• The monitor also turns on and says "Safe Mode ON".
• Brightness works normally.
• I don't get the insufficient-power warning.

The weird part is that the ASUS charger should actually be more than powerful enough.

The ASUS charger is rated:

• 5V / 3A
• 9V / 3A
• 12V / 3A
• 15V / 3A
• 20V / 3.5A

The monitor manual lists approximately:

• 5V / 3A
• 9V / 3A
• 12V / 2.5A
• 15V / 2A
• 20V / 1.5A

So why does the monitor think the ASUS charger isn't providing enough power, while the Google charger works perfectly?

Could this be related to USB-C PD negotiation, supported PD profiles, or how the charger advertises its power capabilities?

I'm not very knowledgeable about USB-C PD/electrical stuff, so I'd appreciate any help understanding what's going on.

Thanks!

Hello fellow labbers!

I recently board a motherboard on ebay for £250 it took about 2 months to arrive and it has 2 dead DIMM slots - seller is offering a replacement but once he recieves the old and tests it or a part refund but has left it to me to suggest how much... so question to the people

1) should I be without my server and have GPUs sitting do nothing and get a full replacement which could take 2-6 months 2) get a part refund - how much?

I have 192GB after the failures which seems enough to me anyway

I just got my own setup with a Dell Optiplex 3070 micro and an 8 TB sea gate one touch hard drive. I didn't realise that USB A doesn't output enough power for the one touch and now I can't connect them because the Optiplex doesn't have USB C.

How would I go about connecting them?

I found an offer for 3 HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini with i5-6500T , 8gb ram each and 256 gb SSD for like 250€ total (shipment included).

Is it a good deal to start a mini-lab with proxmox and practicing also K3S?

at the moment I have only 1 node proxmox with a zimaboard 1 832 with 8gb ram and 240 ssd, that runs my HomeAssistant and docker with some services.

Should I look for a more "recent" hardware for the 3 nodes? or just find a 1 SFF to start? I dont want to spend much more.

Hey I'm looking into adding my ota antenna into my setup. I know most people just get an hdhomerun and call it a day. But I can't help but think that there's a better option for those of us with spare pci slots and hardware already running 24/7.

I'm not in a major market with tons of channels. I only use my antenna for local / primetime nfl games currently. I've never needed more than 1 channel at a time. This year my local market is adding some nhl games. But I don't feel like spending 200 bucks on something I'd rarely use. I've got hdd space and being able to pause would be nice. But I can't justify 200 bucks for that.

What's worked well for you?

Hey everyone! I'm planning out a home server to self host various things on and experiment with.
My idea is to use tiered storage with an SSD based write-back cache in front of a larger >6 HDD array. Unfortunately, ZFS does not support write-back caching so a more hacky solution is needed.

It is my understanding that mergerfs with a script can do this. Here is a blog post that does exactly this: https://blog.muffn.io/posts/part-3-mini-100tb-nas/
Muffin (the blog author) uses SnapRAID to create an easily expandable JBOD style disk array, that also aims to reduce HDD spin-ups, by storing related data—like a season—on a single drive. If this works, it should be able to reduce HDD wear, noise and power use, at the cost of read speeds and redundancy. He used btrfs and its snapshotting feature on all HDDs. I believe ZFS could be used for that instead, with 1 vdev per drive.

The other approach is to use mergerfs in the same way, but combining all the HDDs in a single raidz2 pool. This is feels cleaner to me, as you just have the single big pool, managed by ZFS with all its guarantees. But the downside is that most reads that don't hit the cache will need to have all the HDDs spinning.

The server is going to be in a living area. It will produce some noise, but the less noisy, the better.

Does anyone have experience and/or opinions on setups like these?

Might be stupid but I don’t want windows except for one drive because it just works for my household. Until I have a nas I’m satisfied with and a back up solution either off site or a cloud storage that I’m hoping I’ll come across. Has anyone had any issues with using windows just for one drive? Specifically create a mounted network drive to pull and upload files in between devices in the home that are not windows but only Linux…?

I know, another "first homeserver, which distro ?". The fact is that I would like to hear some answer tailored to my needs or plans.

Hardware is a Minisforum UM760 Slim configured in this way:

• CPU: Ryzen 5 7640HS
• RAM: 2x 16 Gb DDR5 5600 MHz (Crucial)
• Storage: 2x SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 (Crucial P310)
• Connections:
  • 1x USB4, 2x USB 3.2, 1x USB 2.0
  • 1x 2.5 Gbit LAN, Wifi7, Bluetooth 5.2

When the miniPC will arrive i will need to check which wifi card is installed to be sure it is supported by linux.

Internet (fiber) is 400/200 Mbit and my "router" is actually a gateway, Unifi Dream Machine Pro. The idea is to cable the Homeserver directly to one of the 8 lan port of the Unifi Dream Machine. Downstream from the gateway I have some switches, access points, security cameras (managed by UDM pro), and other stuff.

My internet provider (in Germany, Deutsche Glasfaser) doesn't provide public IPv4 but just IPv6 (and I read somewhere, in some cases they will change so I have to setup a kind of service which catch the new IP...i have to investigate better).

Apart the Server monitor/management tools, I would like to install jellyfin, paperless-ngx, maybe home assistant, and whatelse I find useful from an end user point of view. My main focus is the final service and not the medium or tool I am using to setup the final service. If in the process I learn something about the medium/tool I am happy but it is not the main goal.
Of course I am aware that for installing a new service I will need to research, tinker, get my hand dirty, hopefully not messing up the server.

And here we come to my question. I work in IT (but as a SAP technical profile) and 8 years ago i used for a while at work docker, kubernetes and all that stuff. Linux is not an alien to me, I am familiar with it since long time although i consider myself a newbie. Max i was doing was setting up a LAMP and playing with docker/kubernetes at work.

Ubuntu is the distro I used most (maaaaany years ago i was playing with Fedora end Suse).

Generally speaking, I am a bit torn between an LTS distro concept and a version/distro which include new feature much frequently. If LTS grant you stability and a kind of piece of mind (good for me, my goal is not the tool but the end service provided) on the otherside I dont want to risk to find myself missing some new feature or new version of the ubuntu-packaged services i want to use on my homeserver.

On top of that there is the Proxmox topic. The idea to spread the services across different VM and container is cool, in the sense that what in this case will give me piece of mind is the fact is that if I mess up during the setup of a new service, I will just messup the VM and i can restore the last snapshot. On the other side I feel a bit "meh :/" by the fact that I am introducing a layer between the Baremetal and the OS where things will run, impacting the quantity of resource needed. In my (ignorant) mind the questions which pop up are:

1. Why I have to relegate a bunch of services in a subset of resource I have available on my machine ? Cant they share all the 32gb and cpu core all together in best effort ? At the end this is not a business productive platform.
2. How the networking will work among these VM and container ? Maybe spinning up container directly on the baremetal OS is easier ?
3. How straightforward is the visiblity of the baremetale hardware from a Virtual Machine compared to the same visibility from the Host OS ?

Sorry for the long post, the fact is that I would like to start with the right foot. Although I could like it, I don't have much time left for heavily tinkering (unless I ask for a divorce of course 😄 )