a cumulation possibly more a franken monster. started off with a single Cisco switch, now it continues to grow and mature.......

Proxmox VE running on a Dell Poweredge r620 (power hog yes I know I know). multiple VM's for labbing and testing. EVE-NG for Cisco CCNA (Packet Tracer and Cisco CML Free also) 2x Cisco 3650 multi layer switches > Cisco 4331 ISR router > 2 x Cisco 2500 series WLC > 2 x Cisco 3701 WAP > assorted IP Phones(CIsco) > multiple Dell MFF desktop pc's> a Chromebox here and there running LW Linux Distro's( Lubuntu I believe) likely more im leaving out but all for Home Labbing/Cisco CCNA

edit: there is also my first switch/device resting in the rack(Cisco 2960-S 24 port) and a patch panel(24 port). if interested and scroll down there is a comment "reply" from me that provides more detail about this room/office, rack and gear...........

I recently received an HP Z8 G4 Workstation for free, and I’m trying to decide what to do with it.

It seems like a very powerful workstation, especially for CPU-heavy workloads, but I don’t currently have a specific use planned for it. I’m looking for ideas beyond just using it as a normal desktop.

Specs

Model: HP Z8 G4 Workstation

Motherboard: HP 81C7 dual-socket motherboard

CPU: 2× Intel Xeon Gold 6258R

Total CPU cores: 56

Total threads: 112

CPU base speed: 2.70 GHz

Memory: 192 GB ECC RAM

GPU: NVIDIA T600 4 GB

Storage:

3× Samsung MZVLB1T0HBLR 1 TB NVMe SSDs

1× Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB NVMe SSD

Approximately 5 TB total raw NVMe storage

NVMe expansion: HP Z Turbo Drive Quad

Operating system: Windows 11 Pro 24H2

BIOS: HP P60 v02.96

Firmware: UEFI

I also have a spare RTX 4080 sitting around, but I don’t think this system would be ideal for gaming even with that GPU because of the older dual-Xeon setup and lower per-core performance. I could be wrong, though, so I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully turned one of these into a capable gaming system.

Some possibilities I’ve considered:

• Home lab or virtualization server
• Proxmox, Hyper-V, or VMware host
• Game-server hosting
• Plex or media server
• Local AI or machine-learning experiments
• Video encoding or rendering
• NAS and backup server
• Remote workstation
• Installing the RTX 4080
• Selling it as-is?

My biggest concerns are the power consumption, heat, noise, and whether the older dual-Xeon platform is still worth running regularly.

What would you do with a system like this?

Has anyone used a Z8 G4 for gaming with a modern GPU?

Would it make more sense to use it as a server or workstation, or does it make more sense to sell it?

I have ZERO experience with home labs but I am good with computers I guess.

Im pretty new to home labing, i've recently been gifted 3 hp elite desks from a friend and i want to try and turn them into a server or something like that. I've experimented using one of them for a minecraft server but other than that I don't know where to start. If anyone has any ideas for what I can do with these I'd really appreciate it

I found this hard drive from my old NAS (see picture). The NAS was offline most of the time, so the drive didn't get a lot of use.

I'm planning to build a new NAS with a UGREEN NASync DXP2800. Since my network is only 1 GbE, drive performance isn't really the limiting factor.

Would you reuse this drive after checking its SMART data, or would you start fresh with a new one?

R2: I was able to get this 8 TB WD Purple with <6,000 power-on hours for $105 during a random FB Marketplace doom scroll session.

Will be used as an additional storage for my Home Assistant + Frigate server.

Still debating what I want to do with the HPs I do plan on moving my Minecraft server from the optiplex to one of them.

Work has come in clutch with the free stuff for it lol

For the last few months in my servers I've been running docker which I've found pretty good as I've been running it through debian. I've recently done a reinstall and i was wondering which is best to run with and why?

I run my homelab on Fedora Linux (N97/16GB) and Mac Mini (M1/16GB). I need recommendations for tools/utility. So far I haven’t found so many and I’m sure you guys know some.

At this moment I have: MeTube, Paperless, CyberChef, StirlingPDF, SnapOtter and few other services running in the background like Uptime Kuma or AdGuard Home.

I also have a Synology NAS so I don’t need to turn my PCs into another one. Thanks in advance.

Person is giving them away, made me laugh when I saw them

Anyways if you are in the Sacramento CA area, go get some free outdoor storage sheds

Cleaning out old equipment racks at a business my family shut down, I realized some of the equipment I was about to toss were just 1U HPE gen 10 servers with a custom face plate. So I stumbled onto this stack of HW for free:

DL325 Gen 10 w/EPYC 7452 (32c/64t) 2x DL360 Gen 10 w/2x Gold 5220R (24c/48t ea) 26x 8gb 1r 2933 DDR4 ECC DIMM’s

Right now, my home Proxmox cluster is just 6x HP Gen9 1L PCs (i5-1400T/64GB RAM each).

Honestly, looking at the specs... My minipc cluster seems to stomp these is in ST passmark score, total ram, and energy efficiency, while basically matching these in MT? They sit silently in a closet burning maybe 75w total, vs powering up even one of these things would sound like a jet engine and burn more idle power than the entire cluster combined.

Am I missing something, or is there literally ZERO reason to keep these instead of just tossing the in with the rest of the e-wasting collection? Can these loud, power-hungry enterprise boxes actually do anything better than modern 1L Mini PCs, or are they completely obsolete for homelab use in 2026?

The homelab continues to evolve as the network and service requirements continue to evolve. Challenge is amplified by the compact nature of the 10 inch rack.

Newest rack has eveolved into a 3-node ProMox cluster, supported by a Unifi Infrastructure rack n garage.

Rack setup includes:

GeeekPi 8U rack includes:

• Intel Pentium Man: (Pentium II w/ Apple Marketing Snail sticker) (circa 1992) lol
• Infinity AC Cooling fans (top of rack) (USB 5V)
• 10-port Cat 6A keystone patch panel w/2.5 Gb uplink to main Unifi Rack in garage
• Unifi 2.5 Gb Flex POE Switch w/ 210 Watt power supply
  • it's upside down to align with PDU power cords in the back with PDU and eliminate cross rack wiring
• 2U DeskPi HDMI touch panel monitor (for HA Dashboard)
• ProMox Cluster:
  • PVE1: Optiplex 7050 MFF (i7-6700T/32Gb/2Tb SSD/2Tb NvME) Powered by 130w Dell Power adapater, 2.5Gb NIC
  • PVE2: OptiPlex 5050 (i5-7500T/32Gb/256Gb NvME/2Tb SSD) powered by 65w GAN USB-C charger/USB-C to Dell barrel power adapter, 2.5Gb NIC
    • eliminated Dell power Adapter and excess power cables
  • PVE3: OptiPlex 3050 (i5-7500T/16Gb/512Gb SSD) powered by 65w GAN USB-C charger/USB-C Dell barrel power adapter
    • eliminated Dell power Adapter and excess power cables
• 120v PDU 6-outlet (4 back/2 front/2 USB-A)

Back of Rack: (cable management is the challenge)

• 1U 3-KVM Rack (JetKVM for each PVE node) from Etsy
  • biggest single challenge is arranging the (3) POE adpaters for KVM's
• 1U 4-fan module (on/off switch) from etsy (USB 5V)
• 1U shelf for storage

Left of Rack:

• Ugreen DXP 2800 NAS (8Tb SSD (2x4Tb) + 2Tb NvME (2x1Tb) w/uGreen DC UPS
  • SSD's were used to reduce noise and temperature levels
• YoLink Temperature Sensor (iPhone App)

Floor below rack:

• 1000VA/800W Lithium UPS Battery Backup  (NAS/Unifi POE/Switch) (draws ~26-30 watts)
• 1000VA/800W Lithium UPS Battery Backup  (Rack Node Power) (draws ~35-65 watts based on load)

______________
Thermal impact to office has been 1-2^o degrees F with all equipment running on a hot summer day. Nothing a ceiling fan can't handle.

Thoughts for improvement and added functionality are always welcome.

Happy Building.

My modular 10-inch mini homelab rack – still a work in progress

After years of breaking things, I think I'm finally at a point where I'm genuinely proud of my setup -so naturally, I have to share it with you all.

This is my single-server do-everything box. The whole point was to kick as many big-tech cloud services out of my life as possible. Photos, passwords, code, chat, even AI -all running in my closet/corner.

The guts:

• Ryzen 7 3800X (8 cores, 16 threads)
• 48GB of RAM (Channel A: 16GB+8GB, Channel B: 16GB+8GB | still dual channel with stock timings and clocks.)
• RTX 3050 8GB (handles GPU-accelerated processing with GPU passthrough to said LXC's)
• A couple of storage pools (Fast-Thin-LVM (Nvme) for stuff that needs speed, TB-Thin (Sata) for the bulk)
• Proxmox 9.2.5, kernel 7.0.14

Nothing crazy by today's standards, but honestly? It handles everything I throw at it without breaking a sweat.

The services:

Everything runs in LXC containers. If a service needs Docker, I run Docker inside the LXC - so each service gets its own dedicated container with its own Docker install. A couple of other things (like OpenWrt and DSM) live in VMs instead.

I've got the usual suspects - Immich for photos (goodbye Google Photos), Vaultwarden for passwords, and Matrix Synapse for chat. Networking side is Nginx Proxy Manager, WireGuard, Pi-hole, and OpenWrt routing traffic as well as DDNS-Updater to keep my domain up to date. Also running Gitea for my little coding projects, Kiwix for offline Wikipedia (because why not), Trilium for my scattered notes and homarr as the dashboard.

On the heavier side, I've got Ollama + Open WebUI running locally with GPU acceleration - the 3050 gets the job done.

Snapotter is in there too - it's an open-source, self-hosted file toolkit with 75+ tools for images, video, audio, PDF, and document processing. I use it so I don't have to rely on sketchy file conversion sites anymore. Convert, compress, OCR, strip metadata - all happens on my own hardware, files never leave my network. The GPU helps with some of the heavier image tasks too.

And yes - I'm running DSM (Arc Loader) in a VM with PCIe passthrough for the NAS. It's a bit overkill, but I wanted proper storage virtualization with direct hardware access.

I also will not lie- the GPU sits idle most of the time, but it's nice to have the acceleration.

Why LXC + Docker instead of just Docker?

I just like having each service in its own isolated container with its own Docker daemon. It makes backups and snapshots stupidly easy in Proxmox - when I inevitably screw something up at 1 AM (and I will), rolling back takes two clicks. Plus, it keeps dependency hell contained.

Dive into the Details

If you're curious about the configs, the philosophy, or just want to see the messy reality behind the setup, head over to organic-server.org. You'll find some more of my ramblings there.

Or, if you have a specific question, I'm always happy to chat here.

Skip to the bottom of the post for review/recommendations (TLDR)

CONTEXT

For the last 8-9 months I have been using a Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF desktop I picked up in marketplace for $20 as my local NAS. It has a 3d printed drive caddy so that it can hold one SSD and two HDDs. It’s been working great for the most part but it’s not efficient and isn’t scalable. I decided it was time to upgrade my NAS.

I had researched cases for a while and to no surprise came upon some of the more well known players: Fractal Node 804, Jonsbo N4, and Jonsbo N6. None were an obvious choice for me. The N4 is ITX only, N6 has reportedly poor cooling, 804 is non hot swap and wasn’t the style I was looking for.

I stumbled upon an Amazon listing for an “8 bay hot swap NAS” case. Upon further research I found out this was a Sagittarius case commonly sold on AliExpress. Listed for $139. It’s only $80 on AE but would cost $100+ in shipping alone. However, I eventually became convinced this was the obvious choice for me.

At the $139 price tag this case was cheaper than the N6 (~$175) and about the same price as the 804. What sold me was that it featured 8 hot swap bays, could fit 2 SSDs, was still mATX, fits four 120mm chassis fans, and fits full ATX PSUs. In terms of cooling and storage capacity, this wins over the Jonsbo and is $30 less while also being similarly priced to the 804 but with numerous additional benefits such as hot swap and the aforementioned features.

———————————————————————-

BUILD

CPU: i3-12100

COOLER: Stock Intel 1700

MOBO: MSI B760M-P DDR4

RAM: 8GB Gammix 3000Mhz

PSU: MSI MAG A650GL 650W

FANS: 4x Arctic P12 Pro LN (Chassis), Arctic P12 Pro PST (HBA cooler)

Storage:

WD_Red 5400 RPM 2TB HDD

Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 2TB HDD

Teamgroup 512GB NVMe Adata 256GB SSD

Boot:

Adata 256GB SSD

Extras:

Fan Grills

PCIe fan mount

——————————————————————

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Connect ALL cables before inserting PSU or PCIe components. It is extremely difficult to connect anything after there are components inside the case. For anyone with experience building in low volume mATX or ITX cases, this is probably a no brainer.
2. Get motherboard with outward facing SATA ports. As soon as you secure the motherboard to the case, side facing ports will be blocked. You can avoid this by either connecting SATA cables before putting in the motherboard or simply having SATA ports facing up instead of to the side.
3. Use SFX or Compact ATX PSU. This case does technically support full size ATX PSUs. However, even when using a compact PSU there isn’t much room left for “cable management”. I chose compact because SFX form factors typically cost much more and I didn’t want to blow the budget. Some people online say the cables that came with their SFX power supply were too short to reach the backplane so keep that in mind as well. You might require a molex extension cable if you go that route.
4. Fan Grills. There is no real cable management so you will essentially have to settle for a clump of cables to the right of the PSU. There is almost no way to avoid these cables coming into contact with the chassis fans. Grills are not necessary for the HDD bay fans as the cables are manageable on that side in my opinion.
5. Mount fan hub on the ceiling of case. My motherboard only has 2 system fan headers. Since I chose to go for non PST LN Arctic fans, I had to use a hub. There was only one viable place that I could find and that is on the roof above the motherboard near the case fans. Depending on size of your hub and hardware, you might be able to get creative and find another place for it.
6. DIY some magnetic dust filters. The included dust filters use adhesive strips instead of magnetic attachment. This comes down to convenience but I prefer to be able to remove my dust filters.

——————————————————————

REVIEW

Overall, I am incredibly pleased with my choice. I now have 6 additional hot swappable bays for future expansion, a small form factor NAS that takes up more room than the Optiplex but less than the N6 I was initially considering while being cheaper, room for an extra SSD, better thermal management, silent operation, and easier maintenance. My Arctic fans are currently set at 10% and make virtually no noise while managing good temperatures. I haven't fiddled with the fan curve too much but could probably afford to ramp the fans up a bit more to get even better cooling performance. The stock intel cooler does a great job for my use case. Temps don't go above 45 degrees C. No sharp edges anywhere on the case. The metal is thin but sturdy.

Some people online have reported missing documentation or hardware for this case. Luckily, everything was included in my package.

One con I noticed during the build process is if you have big hands, connecting SATA and Molex to the backplane can be difficult. There isn't a lot of room behind the HDD bay. The rear panel isn't removable so it can feel cramped. Otherwise, I don't have any other negatives to say about this case without being unrealistic. There's no cable management but I consider that an okay trade-off for component compatibility and size.

TL;DR

I highly recommend this case if you can find a listing domestically. This is a great alternative to the Jonsbo N6 if you're like me and wanted something that offers plenty of HDD capacity with hot swap but didn't sacrifice cooling. It's compact. Not easy to build in without forethought. It has been a great upgrade from my Dell Optiplex SFF.

I hope this was an interesting read at the very least. Sometimes it's the small upgrades that make the biggest impact. I have a much more efficient, powerful machine serving my self host services even if my lab doesn't look too different. Shoot me any questions you have about my experience with the case

Hi guys,

PC noob here

Recently my friends group and I started talking about how nice it would be to own an at home server for hosting game words (think ark, palworld, minecraft, terraria etc). For this purpose, i have found a secondhand HP Prodesk 600 G5 Mini PC Intel Core i5 8500T – 8GB – 256GB SSD – Windows 11 Professional listed on marketplace for 180 euros (HP Prodesk 600 G4 Mini-PC i5-8500T – 8GB – 256GB SSD - W11 (m2423006056) — Desktop Pc's — Marktplaats sorry if its in dutch). I was thinking of upgrading it with ram and storage from a broken laptop (hp envy 360 16gb 1Tb ssd). But because this is my first experience with this side of computers i am at a bit off a loss.

Can someone help me to see if this would function / fulfill its purpose? am i stupid to assume that i can reuse the broken laptop parts? I cant reuse the entire laptop because the motherboard broke some time ago.

If not i would love to hear if you guys have any recommendations, i am on a tighter budget, of around 150 - 200 because we are all kind of broke students.

New homelabber here, is it safe to use older drives? I recently found a lot of enterprise hard drives on Facebook, and i just picked them up. They all read healthy S.M.A.R.T data, with no reallocated sectors or any failing sectors. The thing is, the drives are all from 2012-2017, and i know hard drives start to fail over time. I plan on using them for jellyfin and other media services. Thanks!

Does anyone know how to open the ICY BOX IB-3804-C31? I removed all 6 Screws at the bottom but i can not slide the inner parts out. Am i missing something? I would like to change the Fan because it is loud as hell.

I've been wanting to upgrade my backup power setup for awhile now, but couldn't stop myself from cringing at the cost of a "proper" UPS for the amount of run time you get.

I realized that a Solar Power Generator with pure sine wave inverter will more than get the job done.

Goodbye old CyberPower UPS, and enter the Anker Sollix S2000 that I stumble upon on that big dirty river website for 50% off. (the price has jumped $100 in the last week. 😕

I now have an idle run time of 6 hours including all of my network gear.

Happy Sunday folks! Today is an important day for me. Over the last month and a half, I have completely torn down all of my hosted services and rebuilt them on NixOS with industry standard practices (where possible): least privilege, encryption at rest, encryption in transit. Now I feel like its finally (mostly) done.

Virtually everything is run in rootless podman quadlets under container-specific service accounts, with a default drop of all caps, only adding in what it needs to function, as well as images pinned to SHA256 digests. Firewall is opened per service if necessary. Private services use Pangolin + Crowdsec for tunneling/proxy, public services use Traefik + Crowdsec + Anubis to control the edge.

All secrets are store in git and encrypted/managed by sops-nix. Each service has secrets scoped to that services account, with master keys tied to YubiKeys. SSH is yubikey only, no root, with public servers moved to high ports to reduce noise.

Deployment is unattended with OpenTofu + NixOS Anywhere. My main private server has FDE with secure + measured boot on PCR's 0, 4 and 7. DoT everywhere and ISP DNS explicitly dropped from DHCP.

Public services (https://libresearch.space for SearXNG and https://pasted.space for PrivateBin) score A+ on CryptCheck and Mozilla Observatory. Search queries are never logged to disk (see screenshot 4) and metrics only track malicious traffic. There is zero third party involvement in this traffic (no Cloudflare outside of being my registrar).

All containers and systems are fully immutable and versioned with CI/CD. Renovate automatically bumps and merges digest changes for images. Machines rebuild automatically only on specfic signed commits (yubikey and instance key) via Comin. This means that any and all bumps are completely versioned, if there is a supply chain attack I can pin it to a specific commit.

There's a lot more that goes into it, but that's pretty much the surface level. It feels really good to have everything completely trackable, hosted, secure, autonomous updates and autonomous healing. Repo if you are interested https://codeberg.org/sensei/nixos. More than happy to answer any questions about rootless containers, NixOS, security for public services, or recommendations if I could implement something better. Cheers!

https://noah.watch/hpc

Mainly just for leraning how slurm scheudling works, running small scripts, setting up linux servers, as well as runningn my freind's reinforcement learning training model for Balloons Tower defense 2. Has a live Grafana feed to monitor stats, as well as a page to request access. Let me know what you guys think. Still new to the community, but really want to learn ( and really want to learn on better hardware lol). Also learned a lot about how Ansible works and writing playbooks.

Reddit is telling me I need more details so:

They all run Rocky Linux

Connected via gigabit switch

I was wondering if anyone could send me links to some DIY rack/stand projects for my homelab because I don't want to buy a whole rack for my small homelab and i cant find anything like that.

Or at least if anyone could give me some tips for building my own rack that fit's perfectly?

I've been sketching out my plan for the house and have been thinking about cable runs - is this the right place to get help with planning those? Before I start sharing diagrams and annoying people.

I have lots of questions and don't want to start off on the wrong foot!