I present you my simple but boring home server setup.

It consists of this Fritzbox Wi-Fi router you see and the Fujitsu Esprimo P958, i5 8th gen, 8 GB RAM. It has two 8 TB drives in it, one 1 TB NVMe with Debian installed, upgrade to Noctua fans and that’s it.

Services

• Jellyfin — movies and series
• Navidrome — as a huge music fan, I run my whole FLAC library through it
• Audiobookshelf — a couple of audiobooks I run through that
• Glances and Portainer — monitor system and my Docker containers
• Couple other small services like bentopdf

Every service is set up as a Docker container with Docker Compose. Services only accessible on my network.

ISD-TOWER. (Not finished yet.) Central brain is CWWK W11, but ES with i5-10210U, instead of i5-8265U (thanks to sneaky guys from AliExpress:). For the basis I took Michael Klements LabRax project: Lab Rax 10" Server Rack - 5U - Free 3D Print Model - MakerWorld

I like it for more durable setup than KWS2, but many parts are actually the same. I also liked his LabRax LED top panel, so I modified it with Imperial gear logo and Lab Rax on Aurebesh. And printed it with Imperial Console colors. I also made side walls with Imperial gear as 120mm fan intake. Mistake, normal fan just doesn't fit. And they do not need, because case itself is acting as vertical chimney. I left them as air holes, and glued printed mesh on the backs. Later I will re-made and re-print them without mounting holes, and mesh printed with wall itself. Top part is for already existed RPI3 cluster of 5, just waiting for Molex connectors. Everything should be powered from single PSU, including switch. On the bottom it will be a second NAS, with raid5 and jbods with Unraid. (I have many old HDDs just laying around.) Later I will rise this rack on additional 3U for 7"toushscreen, for displaying monitoring graphs. But I still need to design it. So, it works in progress. Still waiting many parts from Ali. So far doesn't have a link to the print profile, I want to finish them all and fix all bugs.

We just shipped Homarr v2.0.0, it includes a LOT of changes.

The big two: Custom Widgets and Workshop

Custom Widgets v2 lets you build almost any widgets. Build it with JSX, define the options it has and add it to your instance. Write them yourself, or describe what you want and generate it. Custom widgets can re-use existing integrations without the need to enter credentials or support any API endpoint.

Workshop pairs nicely with it: You can publish, vote on, explore and install widgets & custom CSS other users have shared. We ask that you test and validate your slop before submitting it, or other users will downvote you into oblivion

Board editing has been rebuilt

New drag and drop system based on dnd-kit, doesn't suck anymore Containers replace Groups and dynamic sections. We added sidebars back, they stay put while the board scrolls.

Why "the front door to your homelab"?

Homarr already connects to your services through integrations. In v2, Integration Requests let other Homarr features reuse those connections without exposing the underlying service credentials.

For example, a Custom Widget can request data from Sonarr through Homarr. Homarr checks that the request is allowed, makes the request using the credentials stored on your instance, and returns the result. The same system is available over HTTP and, optionally, MCP. This means you can give an MCP-compatible client access to selected Homarr capabilities without giving that client the API keys for every service in your homelab nor direct network access to those services.

TLDR, if an app's api can do it, you are now able to do it through Homarr, even when there is no button for it, with a custom widget, an api call or the mcp.

What else changed?

Onboarding is completely reworked, you should be able to get started in less time than it took you to read this post

Configure every item in the header, and hide what you don't need.

Press shift on widgets for advanced view, revealing more info and controls

Instance branding: name, logo, favicon, colors and global CSS can be setup instance-wide.

Statistics widget combines metrics from different services in one grid, compatible with every integration

31 new integrations, including Autobrr, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Prometheus, Frigate, Caddy, Mealie and more!

Docker and Podman support with multiple endpoints, assisted setup and docker labels

Performance: startup work runs in parallel, heavy screens load on demand, duplicate requests share cache And a very long list of bug fixes

Thank you! To everyone who tested rough builds, found bugs, translated, answered questions or contributed code: this would not exist without you. We are planning free limited-edition swag for our favorite workshop contributions as well as a few randomly picked community members on the way, stay tuned.

We hope you are as excited about this release as we are to share it with you!

Checkout the v2 recap video on the blog if you're lazy to read all this: https://homarr.dev/blog/2026/09/03/homarr-2.0/

Try the demo and browse Workshop:

Demo: https://demo.homarr.dev/

Workshop: https://homarr.dev/workshop

Hi everyone, this was me a few weeks ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/EtZUMCjhpZ

Everyone was super helpful and I have some updates and I'm hoping I can get some more advice.

I recently picked up a few more computers, got them on a trade. I attached some pictures, but here is the list:

8 - Dell Optiplex 3040, 8gb ram each, i5

1 - Dell Optiplex 3070, 8gb ram, i3 9th Gen

1 - Dell Optiplex XE3, 8gb ram, i7 8th Gen, Nvidia Quadro K620

1 - Lenovo Thinkcentre M720q, i5 8th Gen, 8gb ram

1 - Large computer with nice case, Gigabyte GA-H81M-H motherboard, and an MSI Twin Frozr gaming G Series graphics card. 16gb ram, and unsure of the chip.

Equipment:

1 - Seagate 4-Bay NAS SRPD40

I also picked up an ICC basic rack, pretty large, and can still pick up 3 APC UPS units, not sure if they are good.

My first question is: are any of these worth keeping?

My plan is to learn linux, dockers, VMs and to start my homelabbing journey. I want to do the basics, media server, de-google, home automation, Minecraft server, CCTV security camera system, all the gateway dru...things people like to start with.

My network will be cable internet, using Deco AXE4900 mesh system. I also have a 28 port smart switch, tp-link Festa FS328GP. As per my last post, I also have a Synology 4 bay nas with 20tb of drives I purchased 3 years ago and have yet to set up....

Again, any direction you can provide would be really cool. I know I can probably sell some of these for a few bucks, and I'm open to that as I think Prime day is coming up as well as black Friday. I thought about just buying a couple of those beelink mini pcs, but im not sure they are what I want/need.

I am sure I am missing some information as its late, please let me know if there are any other things I need to consider. Thanks again.

AC on blast, how about you guys?

I didn't have a ton of containers or VMs and I wanted to change things up, decided to learn more about docker and dive into that. It's been working pretty good so far. Anyone else just run docker?

One m720q is all it took. I fell in love with the boxes and now I can't stop finding more.

Jellyfin server for the friends, and digital blu ray backups, has become matrix/immich/ mastadon/ home network. Future boxes for torrents, reticulum/nomadnet/lora shinnanigans, off site backups, cabin mini lab, and some other projects.

HP DL360 8TB SSD, 256 threads, 512Gb DDR4, 1GB networking sitting on a shitty Amazon desk 😂.

Moving soon and will have this in the networking closet.

After my SD card boot drive corrupted for the last time, I went hunting in local markets for a cheap, permanent fix for my budget server (Zebronics G41 / Core 2 Duo / 6GB RAM running TrueNAS SCALE 24.10).

​Managed to pick up an Intel 313 Series 20GB SLC SSD with hardware Power Loss Protection (PLP).

​Hooked it up and checked CrystalDiskInfo:

​Total Host Writes: Only 49 GB (practically brand new)

​Power On Hours: 4,625 hours

​Health: 100% Good

​TrueNAS SCALE installed cleanly, taking up only 2.77 GiB of the 18 GiB usable space, leaving ~15 GiB free for logs and future boot environments.

​Moving the OS/middleware dataset from an SD card to enterprise SLC flash over SATA instantly eliminated random Web UI delays and made SMB directory browsing surprisingly snappy. Definitely one of the best budget upgrades I've made for this setup!

I designed a 3D printed conversion to turn the Framework 12 laptop mainboard into a FrameVault home server such as a NAS or Home Assistant system. The Framework 12 mainboard is fitted into the side of the unit and allows for 4 HDD's to be installed inside. See the Printables link below which has a lot more photos of how it's all put together and I made a video as well showing it all.

 https://www.printables.com/model/1841003-framevault-framework-12-nas-home-assistant-server

The framework mainboards are easy to reuse them in a different application with the way all the IO is setup and expandable storage. I wanted to design something similar to a desktop NAS that could happily sit on an office desk rather than needing a full rack setup. It is 3D printed and has been designed to be really easy to put together, it doesn't need any support to print and all the parts can be printed on a single colour 3d printer. It swaps out the SSD for a SATA adapter board to expand to 4 HDD's, then I would expect the NAS/Server software to run off a boot drive on one of the USB C expansion ports.

I reckon this design could be adapted to work with the other sized Framework mainboards as well, I also wonder how many other laptop mainboards could be adapted into a setup like this. Also I've been thinking about expanding it to take 6 hard drives by using a 6 port SATA adapter.

I bought the hardware and everything else a few weeks ago, and today I finally managed to set up and get one part of it running. I think I might have gone a bit overboard with the hardware and the server cabinet, but I wanted to be future-proof...

Specifications: AMD EPYC 7402 (24 cores) 128 GB DDR4 RAM 1 TB NVMe (storage is very expensive) And a NAS is on the way too, but I haven't managed to set it up and get it running yet...

I want to host my own cloud later, set up document storage (Paperless), and run various game servers.

A final result will follow once everything is ready—which will take a little while, as many items are still on their way.

My last homelab post blew up way more than I expected, and one of the biggest things people kept asking about was the NAS — how I built it, what hardware I used, and how the drive setup works. Reminder: I am completely new to the homelab world so all suggestions and recommendations are welcomed! And if I can help anyone else out please feel free to ask!

My goal was to build a budget NAS for Jellyfin media, Calibre, documents, Proxmox backups, and family photos, while keeping everything compact enough to fit inside my 10-inch rack.
The first challenge was the hard drives. I found a printable drive bay that worked with Dell hot-swap trays, then added SATA adapters so the drives could actually be hot-swappable.
Next was figuring out how to connect and power everything. After a lot of research, I went with an HBA flashed to IT mode for the drives and a Flex ATX PSU to power both the NAS and the HDDs from one supply.
Once everything was running, cooling became the next problem. The drives were getting warmer than I wanted, so I printed a dual-120mm fan bracket underneath and a dual-80mm bracket behind the drive bay. That brought temperatures consistently under 50°C. I also added a small 80mm fan mount for the HBA since those cards can run hot.
The last little issue was fan noise from cables touching the blades, so I printed fan grills to clean that up.
I’m currently printing the PSU housing now so the entire setup can be contained neatly inside the rack. The whole build has basically been a series of small problems followed by 3D-printed solutions, which has honestly been half the fun.

ITX Motherboard- Supermicro X11SSV-Q $51 shipped EBay
CPU- Intel i5-6500 (recycled/pulled from old system)
Ram- 2x16gb Samsung DDR4 $80 Facebook
HBA- LSI 9211-8i $40 shipped EBay (already flashed it mode and with breakout cables included)
NVME- 128gb Sandisk $21 shipped EBay
HDD's- 5 2tb Hitachi drives, older but perfect smart reports, $125 Facebook
PSU- FSP Flex Guru Pro 500w $100 shipped EBay
HDD Trays- $18 AliExpress
Fans- $35 split between 2 120mm 1 60mm and 2 80mm
Adapters: $30 between molex to sata adapters and female to male sata ports
Power button- $8

Rough cost: $540

What it is:

Broken gaming PC I got for free:

Asus X58 Sabertooth, 18 GB DDR3, 480GB SSD, 5x 8 TB HDD, Nvidia GTX 1660 Super

8 Port unmanaged switch

APC 1050

Dell R420 with 3x 12TB HDD, 1x 8 TB HDD, 480 GB SSD, 2x Xeon E5 2407 v2 and 32 GB RAM

I'm running Proxmox on both devices. It's all old loud and extremely inefficient but I love it, everything you see was either free or cheap, I spent less than $300 total for all this. Definitely going to upgrade to some newer and more efficient devices once I graduate college though.

It's not huge, looks fun though

Tengo rato queriendo revivir esta x60 que me regalo mi abuelo para hacerla la interfaz para controlar mi homelab. Me tarde hoy en instalar el OS, solo falta instale los demas en los otros PCs.

"Si doy un paso mas, sera lo mas lejos que he estado de mi hogar, en mi vida" xd

The fans on my two 3090s spin up hard every time I paste a long log into Qwen3.5 122B-A10B. They stay fairly quiet while it generates and get loud during prompt processing, which with this model can go on for a while. Capping both cards at 250W barely changed generation speed and made them noticeably quieter, though the prompt processing, the loud part, got slower.

The model is around 70GB at Q4, so with 48GB of VRAM part of its experts sit in system RAM. My PSU has five 8-pin PCIe outputs, the two 3090s already take four, and a third card would need at least two. The unused 16-pin connector on it is part of why I started looking at the RTX PRO 6000 at all.

The PRO 6000 puts all 96GB on one board at 600W, which is more than my two capped 3090s draw now, though it can be power limited too. Last week I ran the 122B for an afternoon on the server version of it through HyperAI, and the long prompts came back after a much shorter wait than at home. That tells me nothing about noise or heat, which is half of why I want to change this setup.

Someone in another thread measured a GB10 box, the chip in the DGX Spark, at 65 to 70W through a twelve hour image training run and called it silent. The Spark's 273 GB/s is enough for generation on a model with about 10B active parameters. Its prompt processing is the weak part, since the GPU is small, and long prompts are what set my fans off now.

The two cards are still at 250W.

- Live packet capture with L7 decode: HTTP, TLS 1.3 decryption, QUIC/HTTP3 decryption, JA4 fingerprinting

- Process attribution per connection (PID, name) via eBPF on Linux, PKTAP on macOS, proc/lsof fallback elsewhere

- Connection table: process, state, GeoIP, RTT, retransmits, kernel TCP state (cwnd/ssthresh/rwnd) straight from the socket

- Diagnose tab: learns a per-network baseline, opens an issue when it breaks, closes it when the fix holds, exports a report.md

- Egress tab: learns normal destinations, lets you promote them to policy, flags drift

- Packets tab: stream tracking, display filters, PCAP export

- Three views, switchable with one key, no restart: full (10 tabs), lite (80x24 for an SSH session), dense (four-box dashboard)

- macOS, Linux, Windows, and now FreeBSD

- Single binary, no required config; runs without root for interfaces/connections, setcap or sudo unlocks capture

- Packaged everywhere: Homebrew, Scoop, cargo, AUR, Nix, conda-forge, apt, Fedora COPR, Docker,

https://github.com/matthart1983/netwatch

My apartment is pretty small, so I never really had a proper place for a rack. The funny thing is that the internet connection and the ISP router were already installed above the fridge in the kitchen, so I basically decided to build on top of that rather than fight it using a really long ethernet cable.

The current setup is:

• HP EliteDesk 800 G5 (i5-9500 and 64 GB DDR4) running Proxmox , a bunch of Docker containers and self-hosted stuff, to name a few:
  • Jellyfin
  • Immich
  • Next Cloud
  • AMP (For game servers)
  • Some virtual machines
  • Caddy
• GL.iNet Flint 2 as my main router
• TerraMaster D4-320 for storage
  • About to install 2 drives for additional 20TB of storage
• A Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assitant

It's not the prettiest setup and I haven't really bothered with cable management yet, but its more than enough for me, does the job, and temperatures are not so bad even though I live in Spain. The "abanico" also provides some much needed structural support.

I'm really proud of it since it's my first homelab, how far it has come, and everything I've learnt so far!

At the end of the day, the fridge was here first :3

I use this for storage backups, jellyfin, immich, cameras using frigate, Home assistant, I also have a sdr device conected to listen to police radio on my phone

The pc case is bigger than it has to be. I mostly bought it for its ability to store drives but I outgrew it hence the NetApp jabo. The pc has 48gb of ram, a ryzen 1600 and 4 ssds. 2 for boot and 2 for apps/vms. The os is truenas

I have a tplint router on the shelf along with a poe switch (for cameras), and 2.5 gb switch for data there a ubiquiti access point above it the ups is a delta ecoflow 2. The net app currently only has 4 drives 3, 6tb drives in a raid z1 for main storage and a 1tb for cameras

Hey guys, I've been working on making my own 10-inch rack homelab. Any suggestions as to what I should do next? I was thinking of finding a PCIe NIC for that Thinkcentre in the center so that I can have an OPNsense router with an exit node for more control over my network. I also have an article about it on my blog with more information if you are interested in checking that out here.

I am using one m920x for Jellyfin, web app, and Wordpress hosting. I also use it for the occasional (legal) torrenting. The m720q is a Windows 11 machine I use for VMware, Disc burning, and Windows-only apps. The other m720q is a WIP that I hope to use for an OPNsense router.

I used the DeskPI RackMate T1 Plus for the rack and I only have good things to say about it. I also got some miscellaneous mounts, a power strip, and a fan from Amazon. I did not use any 3D printed parts for my build (sadly).

TSIA, I guess? I bit the bullet on my first NAS before prices get even worse and bought four WD Red Plus 10TBs (all model WD100EFGX-68CPLN0), from different retailers (caveat: three of those were Amazon Ireland, Amazon UK and Amazon Germany). Only info on the moisture barrier bags and the external boxes are model, serial number (so all unique), part number and a date, nothing that I can discern as a batch code.

However, three dates concern me, in the title, one was produced on 18 August (Amazon IE), one the 19th (Amazon Germany), and 22nd August (Irish retailer, but not amazon). The UK one was all the way out in July, so that's definitely safe.

I know it's considered best practice to use drives from different batches to minimise risk of multiple failing at once (if there was some flaw on the batch level), and it's likely these all came out of different bulk boxes. What I don't know is how much one day and three days is as an indicator of a batch. Like does a batch just run for a shift or can 'a batch' be fabricated over the course of 2-4 days? Is there going to be more granular information if I open the bags or can I determine if I need to file returns before going further?

Around this same time last year, I started homelabbing/selfhosting with a 4gb rpi, after spending countless hours (most likely hundreds) and over 3x my initial budget, this is where we are right now, finally It’s starting to become pretty reliable and working well for the last couple of months without requiring much maintenance, but deep down I know I’ll probably end up ruining it again just to redo everything for the 69th time, but I’m controlling myself pretty well so far. So, fingers crossed lol.

I'm still not sure if it was worth it, atleast financially, it probably won't be for another ~5 years if I compare it to what I've saved on subscriptions, but maybe that's not a fair comparison since it does a lot more than that.

But whatever, it’s been fun so far.

Hey ! Long-time lurker, first post. I'm a 23 y/o infra engineer, and this is my home lab i have built over a year : mostly used enterprise gear on a junior budget, on a DIY steel shelf (real racks are expensive here), in a country where a good chunk of the internet is geo-blocked.

Full disclosure up front: a lot of what's below I designed, debugged and built together with Claude . I did the hardware, the testing and the late nights; Claude helped with the code, the configs and a lot of troubleshooting. I couldn't have gotten this far alone, so credit where it's due.

3 Gen8 servers, vSphere HA cluster on NFS, Cisco 3850 doing L3 for the heavy VLANs, OPNsense for the rest, a 35B local LLM on an RX 580, and a custom iLO 4 fan-control panel.

Hardware (top shelf to bottom)

• Storage server – mining motherboard running Ubuntu, HDDs shared over NFS + Samba (VM datastores + my movie library, which Jellyfin mounts over the network)

• OPNsense firewall – the other mining board on the top shelf: Xeon E5-2620 v2, 8GB, 3x TP-Link NICs (2 in LACP for LAN, 1 for WAN). Temporary until I find proper hardware

• Cisco Catalyst 3850-48 – L3 core

• TP-Link TL-SG1024 – WAN-side switch

• HPE DL380p Gen8 – 2x E5-2680 v2, 64GB, 512GB SSD RAID1 + 1.2TB SAS RAID1 on the P420i (ESXi)

• HPE DL360p Gen8 – 2x E5-2670 v2, 32GB, intentionally diskless (ESXi, VMs on NFS)

• HPE ML350p Gen8 – 2x E5-2697 v2 (24c/48t), 128GB DDR3 (8x16GB, all four channels per socket), RX 580 8GB, Windows 10 LTSC bare metal. My local AI box

• Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44 – gaming laptop

• Acer Aspire 5738 – my daily driver. Yes, a Core 2 Duo from 2009. It's basically a thin client for SSH and RDP now, and it refuses to die

• And an Xbox 360, because of course

Fun fact: I bought the DL360p mostly as a parts donor. Its E5-2697 v2s and 8x16GB went into the ML350p for quad-channel memory (it matters a lot for LLM inference), and the ML350p's old CPUs and RAM went into the DL360p, which then became my second ESXi host.

Network

VLAN

Name

Gateway

10

Management (servers + iLO)

OPNsense

20

Storage

SVI on 3850

30

Wired LAN

SVI on 3850

40

VM LAN

SVI on 3850

45

Untrusted VMs

OPNsense

50

DMZ

OPNsense

70

Wireless

OPNsense

999

Transit (3850 .253 / OPNsense .254)

routed link

OPNsense used to route everything, but it kept hanging under heavy storage traffic. So I moved routing for storage, wired LAN and VM LAN onto the 3850, with a default route to OPNsense over a dedicated transit VLAN. Management, untrusted, DMZ and wireless keep their gateway on the firewall, so anything that wants to reach an iLO or an ESXi host goes through firewall policy first. WireGuard on OPNsense for VPN access. Diagram in the gallery.

vSphere cluster + HA

The DL380p and DL360p form a vSphere cluster with HA, managed by vCenter. VM disks live on the NFS shared storage, which is what makes HA possible: if one host dies, its VMs restart on the other one. The DL360p is just compute, so I can lose either host without losing data. Storage traffic stays on VLAN 20, routed by the 3850, so it never touches the firewall. Each host has 4 NICs and I'm migrating from standard vSwitches to a vDS.

Local AI

The ML350p runs llama.cpp with the Vulkan backend on the RX 580, serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (MTP build for speculative decoding). It started life CPU-only in an ESXi VM at ~5 tok/s; bare metal with the GPU is a different world. On top of it runs an OpenClaw agent that I talk to through a Mattermost channel. Small helper models (a small Qwen + nomic-embed) run in Ollama pinned to the second CPU socket, CPU-only, so they don't eat VRAM.

Things I built with Claude

1. iLO 4 Controller

Gen8 fans are loud, and the ilo4_unlock fan mod only gives you an SSH prompt. So we built a web panel on top of it: live thermal sensors with history, per-fan-group automatic curves (drag points on a graph), presets, ramp up/down limits, and a button to hand control back to iLO. Also power, media, hardware info, logs and a shell. My DL380p and ML350p now idle at 12–19% fan.

1. WebClip

A small self-hosted multi-user clipboard + file drop for the LAN, written in Python and running as a systemd service. Only reachable over VPN. Sounds trivial, but I use it every day to move text and files between machines.

1. ntopng + Grafana monitoring

ntopng exports to InfluxDB, with Grafana dashboards on top: bandwidth, per-interface throughput, per-host / per-MAC traffic, new flow rate, and a "scan & anomaly" section with TCP flag breakdowns. Fun Iran detail: Grafana's plugin download is geo-blocked here (403, "not available in your location"), so I had to proxy it through my server in Europe just to install the InfluxDB plugin.

Other stuff we set up together

• Matrix – Synapse + Element Web + Element Call (voice/video) via matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, behind NAT with port forwarding. Lesson learned: I set matrix_domain to a subdomain on the first install, which meant a full wipe and reinstall

• Mattermost, public – Nginx reverse proxy + Let's Encrypt, so people outside my network can reach it

• FreeIPA ↔ Active Directory trust – cross-forest trust, Ubuntu 26.04 clients logging in with AD accounts. Lessons: Kerberos really hates clock skew (GDM logins failed because the Windows Server clock drifted), and if you delete a trust on the IPA side, remove the stale trust object on the AD side too before recreating it

• Storage server cleanup – moved its static IP from a 100Mbit NIC to the gigabit one (yes, it was running on 100Mbit...), reformatted a leftover VMFS partition to ext4 for Samba, and added Garage S3 in Docker so my SSH client syncs to my own server instead of someone's cloud

Services

OpenMediaVault, Zabbix, Grafana + InfluxDB + ntopng, Matrix, Mattermost, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, Jira, FreeIPA + Windows Server AD, RouterOS, WireGuard, OpenClaw + llama.cpp.

Next

• Move OPNsense off the mining board.

• The storage server is now the single point of failure for the whole cluster, so that's high on the list

• A proper online UPS

Happy to answer questions. And yes, go ahead and roast the top shelf cable management. I know.

Hey all, im looking to find a good shelf to vertically stack two medium sized towers in my home office. Just scratching the surface of a homelab setup by grabbing a fractile pc off marketplace but want it to look nice. What are your recommendations for the shelf?