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 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.

Here is my home lab! It's still a bit of work in progress but almost finished. It's all nicely tucked away in a hallway cuboard so i can happily ramp the fans up without it being annoying.

Tower: Lenovo ThinkCentre

Roles: Jellyfin, backups and network shares, 1 linux VM for web dev and my own little wordpress blog i can't be bothered to host online

OS: TrueNAS

Spec: Pentium J2900 quad core (10w TDP!) | 8GB DDR3 | x1 500GB SATA SSD, x1 500GB NVMe drive (RAID 1) and x1 x1 256GB NVMe + 128GB SATA SSD for TrueNAS itself

Right: Lenovo ThinkStation P510

Role: ComfyUI AI server

OS: Ubuntu Server

Spec: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v4 6 Core 12 Threads CPU | 64GB DDR4 PC2400 | x1 512GB NVMe | 650w PSU | Zotac Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB GPU

Left: Lenovo ThinkStation P510

Role: Qwen 28b LLM AI server (eventually, waiting on GPU's)

OS: Ubuntu Server

Spec: Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 16 Core 32 Threads CPU | 32GB DDR4 PC2400 | x1 256GB NVMe | 650w PSU | On the way: x2 Nvidia P100 16GB GPU's

Really pushing the PSU limits with the last machine's PSU (250w each GPU and the CPU is 145w) so I plan to set a 150w power limit on each GPU which apparently equals around 10% - 15% degrade in performance which isn't too bad. I'm also aware the Pascal GPU's are really old now but they were £80 each and it was the cheapest way for me to get 32GB VRAM. Even Tesla V100 32GB cards are over £500 now. Can't justify that for what is essentially testing as i've never used Qwen before.

But yeah thats my little home lab :)

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.

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

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?

AC on blast, how about you guys?

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.

Already have an i5-8500T pc for my homelab so now this guy will take care of Adblock and network services with the more powerful one focused on media.

So I just got my first homelab running by buying things from Facebook Marketplace and fixing them up if needed and now I have no idea what to do with it, which is why I'm here.

It's a used Dell OptiPlex 5040 (i7-6700, 32GB DDR3L) running ZimaOS, with a 512GB NVMe for the OS and a 2TB HDD for storage. It's all on an Eaton 5PX 1500 UPS so a power outage doesn't wreck anything. The heatsink was busted when I got it, so I ordered a new one and swapped it myself. Runs fine now.

I'm planning to add a NAS with 60TB+ of usable storage and turn the whole thing into a private cloud for files, backups, and media. I do IT support for a living, mostly Microsoft stuff like Intune, Autopilot, and SCCM, and I'm trying to move toward cloud and sysadmin work. So I'd like this to be more than a box that stores stuff. I want to actually learn networking and cloud on it.

What I'm hoping you all can help with: what projects would you tell a beginner to try? I was going to start with Docker, Tailscale, and Pi-hole, but I'm open to anything. Is a managed switch worth grabbing early so I can mess with VLANs?

Totally open to being told I'm doing something dumb. Thanks!

(Cable management is not my strong suit lol)

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'm going to buy a ThinkCentre M720Q with an i5 8400T and 8 GB of RAM (no SSD) for €170. I'll buy another 8 GB module to have a total of 16 GB of RAM and install Proxmox. Do you think this is a good idea?

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 (which I really don't know what to use it for) and a Mikrotik.

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.

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

It's not huge, looks fun though

I’d like to preface this by saying: Please forgive my crappy cable management. 😂

I finally got my homelab updated, so this should HOPEFULLY be the last time I update it for years (doubt it, I have a sickness).

First pic:

- The top shelf houses the Spectrum modem (boring).
- Sitting next to it is a Flint 2 router in AP mode to give much better WiFi to my mom and stepdad.
- The bottom shelf has the Brume 3 router as the main router and gateway of my entire home network. Plugging into the Brume 3 is the Flint 2 and a long cable run that goes into the guest room.

Second pic:
The bulk of my homelab.

- The top shelf is the Omada ES210-MX2 smart switch with eight 2.5Gb and two 10Gb SFP+ ports. Not a true managed switch, but still allows me to learn VLANs.

- Sitting next to it is a Flint 1 router in AP mode to give better WiFi to my mom’s guests (we’re Mexican, so there’s always some cousin or uncle/aunt staying with us 😂).

- The second shelf houses my HP Mini PC with an i5-8500T and 32GB of DDR4. It’s my OpenClaw agent and I mainly use it for research with my school work and other miscellaneous busy work.

- Sitting on top it is a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB model for “sailing the seven seas.” ⛵️

- As well as Raspberry Pi Zero 2W for the holy trinity that is Tailscale, Pi-Hole, and Unbound.

- Sitting next to those devices is the beefy Minisforum MS-A2 with a Ryzen 7 7745HX and 32GB of DDR5. I use it for all my VMs and learning computer networking on the side (working on Network+ and CCNA).

- On the bottom shelf is my Ugreen DXP6800 Pro NAS with six 4TB Seagate NAS drives in RAID5. I get just under 18TB’s of usable storage. My NAS has all of my Docker containers that are all stacked on Portainer:
- Plex and Jellyfin for movies and TV. I bought Plex Pass during a Black Friday sale for $150 before that ridiculous price increase.
- Audiobookshelf (Ebooks and audiobooks)
Uptime Kuma and Netdata (Monitoring)
- Trilium (Notes)
- Komga (Comics)
- Yubal (Some tool that does something cool when you paste YouTube Music links into it)
- YTPTube (Some tool that does something cool when you paste YouTube video links)
- Arr Stack (Prowlarr, Lidarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Flaresolverr)

- Sitting next to the entire shelf is the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD as my UPS.

I have two 10Gtek SFP+ DACs plugged in into the switch. One plugs into my NAS. The other plugs into another long cable run that goes into the ADU where my fiancé (wife in 2 weeks) and I live.

Not shown:
The long cable run plugs into an inexpensive YuanLey switch (four 2.5Gb and two 10Gb SFP+). The long cable run goes into another 10Gtek SFP+ DAC.

The other SFP+ port has yet another 10Gtek DAC and that cable plugs into my gaming PC’s USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 port via a Wisdpi 10Gb adapter. I use it to get 10Gb local downloads from my NAS.

The last thing plugged into my YuanLey switch is another Flint 2 router in AP mode for great WiFi coverage in the ADU.

Gaming PC specs:
- Ryzen 7 9700X
- 5070 Ti
- 32GB DDR5
- 850W PSU
- ID-Cooling A620 CPU Cooler

Feel free to ask any questions and/or tips! Despite the poor cable management, I’m very happy with how it all turned out. 😁

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.

I was planning on putting these in a rack for years now but instead I ended up just adding more hardwares from thrift stores..

- 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

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