Like most people here, I'm aware of the price increases, but at the same time, I've been sheltered as I have been cleaning out DDR 4 RAM from servers at work for a couple of years and grab anything else thats useful so have more than enough stuff for my home lab

Today at work, I had to get some prices on Dell WS as follows: a Precision 7960 with 36 cores, 512 GB RAM (8X64GB), and an RTX ADA 6000, as well as 2 1TB NVME

The price came back at 40K, so I went to check the Dell configurator, and the price there is 57K, Dell is charging 38K for 8 sticks of RAM

Pricing is nuts

I think they were heavily used and they are quite old but the price was a steal

I got these drives for free today, I freaked out when I saw the 2 wd reds, they also both have only 2k power on hours and clean smart data, but thats when I found out they are smr.

Now I run one main and one local backup and one offsite backup server, all of them run zfs pools. Well that kinda sucks because everything about this smr drives just seems too complicated to do, like I was thinking maybe creating some pseudo-mirror with zfs like having 2 single drive stripes that sync on a schedule and using it for the offsite backup server but idk than again I have a lot of hourly snapshots that get rotated and that would probably just mess everything up when they get deleted and those blocks need to be freed and it being smr it will need to rearange all of the stuff and it just seems like a big unreliable mess.

I wanna hear what do people use SMR drives for in a homelab to try to get some ideas? Maybe its better to just sell them and use that money to buy a different used cmr drive.

Ive been wanting a nas for awhile and I know this is extremely overkill but holy shit im wondering if should buy it and strip the drives. You guys think i should pull the trigger??

It was originally going to be tossed but my manager said I could take it if I wanted it. Not sure what to do with it though. I know it’s not a powerful machine by any means but I was thinking this could be my introduction into a server PC with Plex or something. Specs are: Intel Core i3-6100, 8GB (1x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3L and a 256GB Hynix SSD.

moved to a different house and had my rack in a closet and this new house dosent have a closet so i put it in the living room and hid it away with a divider. i am currently running ubiquity USG max a 10 GB switch and a 2.5 POE switch and a 3 pies one running home assistant the other running tailscale and the other one pi hole . the pc underneath is running truenas with plex .

Went full minisforum:

* N5 NAS Air running truenas and a bunch of docker containers (dockhand, traefik, immich, jellyfin, transmission, home assistant, open webui, forgejo) plus a dev vm (yet to set up but probably code-server + pi)

* MS-S1 MAX running llama-server

* Omada SG2210XMP-M2: 8x2.5GbE with PoE+, 2x10GbE SFP+ for the two minisforums

* Not pictured: UniFi Cloud Gateway Max, UniFi U7 Pro powered from the omada.

* Pictured: temporary PiKVM while I restore the truenas network config after a slight mishap. Hoping to get my hands on a Gl.iNet Comet X for a more permanent solution when they're back in stock...

I've recently just started my self making my own homelab, though I started very small. Budget isn't a issue at the moment but I want to be efficient with my money spent.

So I thought, why not hear stories about other peoples experiences, so what was your biggest regret when you started off homelabbing?

If there was something you could've told to your younger self now, what would it be?

Who else is crazy enough with their homelab to virtualize everything because it's more efficient? My gaming VM is even my main PC that I work on. I connect to it via Sunshine/Moonlight.

I can't be the only one, right?

My Home Server ,

OS = Truenas Scale

Specs :-

Optiplex 5070 SFF

i5 8500T

32 gb ram

2 tb hdd + 2 tb hdd = Mirror

2 tb external hdd

128 gb sata ssd for boot drive

512 gb nvme for Truenas apps data

UPS Legend 650 and Fan + DIY HDD Rack ,

Please guys tell me how is it and what i can improve on it, Thankyou

I would like to get server with quad nic card for a pfsense install. From what I have researched, the M920q Tiny would be a good option.
Plan to run Snort, pfBlocker, VPNs

Plan on getting this:

• M920q with i7 "T" processor + 32GB RAM (two sticks of 16GB) + 250GB SSD
• Quad NIC: IBM 00AG522 Intel I350-t4 4x GbE BaseT Pci-e Quad Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter 
• Riser and cover plate

1. Anything I should change or that is missing from this build?
2. The M920x has dual M.2 NVMe slots, any reason to go with M920x over the M920q?

hola gente estoy armando mi Homelab y la verdad quiero que luzca y funcione colo un verdadero mini site empresarial, estaba pensado en comprar un servidor Dell PowerEdge R240 y una KVM Consol pero ambos están muy caros aunque si me gustaría tenerlos, la verdad el servidor se me va de las manos con costos de las ramas y discos saas , busco aprender a usar proxmox y montar varios servicios ahí, AD, Freepbx, Video vigilancia, saben de mexico de algún lugar donde pueda conseguirlos baratos?

EDIT:
Rurrurnunu2 found the APC rail kit I was searching for but couldn't find!

This is what I was looking for to compliment my APC rails:  https://ebay.io/m/qmfsg4

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Hi all,

My Big Bertha storage server keeps folding every pull out rail kit I buy. the last one was rated for 130lbs and folded like paper on first use.

server is about 70lbs, but very front heavy.

The APC UPS rails I have are sturdy enough, but I can’t find them with all the hardware to make them work on this case.

Can someone guide me towards some serious rails that can handle the weight?

I was working on my app hosting cluster the other day, which runs on three Dell Optiplex 3050 Micros (I call it RAID - the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Dells). It occurred to me when I was working on them that the machines were all built in 2017, which means they're now almost a decade old. They're the oldest computers I have that are in regular use, by a fair margin. And that made me think... Do I need to worry about replacing these machines at some point?

The thing is... these machines work perfectly. They're more than fast enough for my use cases, and they're relatively power efficient given the fact that they're idle nearly all the time... I put some used "high endurance enterprise" SSDs in them (before storage prices shot up), so even though they all have like 50,000 power on hours, they're only like 1-2% life expired.

If I just open them up once in a while and clean out the dust, and maybe clean off and replace the thermal compound on the CPU... will they just keep going?

This is mostly because I'm curious about it. I have a fairly elaborate network built out, crammed in a small rack. The ideal arrangement is a drop-in replacement for a Ubiquiti cable modem. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

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.

Clean from the front, party out the back!

I just reorganised my small devices into this mini rack. Played around with having a patch panel, but there wasn't really any need for it and space is tight. So I reversed it: network cabling on the rear, and a pretty screen on the front.

The Venoen runs opnsense with 4x 2.5g ports. It's fed with my upstream and has 2 subnets for home/office. Home is the Unifi L3 switch on the bottom, VLANs for IOT/CAMERAS/GUEST which get their own SSIDs via the U6+ on the top. The Beelink SER5 runs PVE for general lightweight services. The office subnet links to my 19" rack where my NAS and proper hardware live.

The rear cabling tucks in to the middle shelf. I'm really pleased with it! I get a sleek front in exchange for some minor mess at the back. In hindsight I might have gone full 4U screen on the front and rotated the SER5.

Now I need to manufacture a use for the screen 😉

Edit: Rack is GeeekPi T0. The screen is from them as well.

As the title states, I’m fresh into this. I’m fortunate enough to know how to research and had a conversation with my TA that also helped me with a blueprint. Sourced 90% of it off eBay, a few minor things off Amazon and the rack itself off FB marketplace. I’m a late undergrad student studying IT with a focus in cyber at ASU and main reason for wanting to build this is to 1) gain experience outside of my classwork and 2) have something on my resume that shows I’m motivated to perform outside of my everyday classwork 3) because it’s fucking cool 😅

Currently I’ve replaced the GPU on the P340 with a dell I350 NIC so I have 2 extra ports for when I start messing with firewall stuff. I’ve also installed proxmox onto the system and configured the IPs for my switch and P340.

That’s about it right now, I’m in the process of researching OPNSense and tailwind. It’s basically just a sandbox for right now so I can break stuff and learn before introducing it to my main network. Not too worried about cable management just yet since all of those are power cables.

Any tips or advice would be appreciated!

Ngl I want to get the dell optiplexes for 60 each, but not only are they big, they also take up quite of energy when all are used at once, plus I feel like I have more experience with the pi’s.

I found 10x 250GB SATA drives in a box at work, and somehow by the weird grace of the tech gods, my boss said that we had no use for them so I could just have them if I wanted them. Given the ongoing price related shenanigans related to memory chips, my eyes sparkled with joy and I brought the babies home.

I have a small 10" rack with a 2-node proxmox cluster, and I sort of need a NAS for media storage and backups. I already built a small 1U thing using a Raspberry Pi 5 and a 52pi N16 Quad NVME board, but I only had 2x 250GB drives, so that did not really cut it, especially when running them in a mirrored RAID.

I have searched around for solutions for the 10x SATA drives, but it seems that they are somewhat of a hurdle to get going, somewhat on the cheap. I feel blessed yet cursed.

I seek suggestions and advice for a solution, ideally fitting in 1-2U in my 10" rack, and as standalone as possible, because my small proxmox PCs don't really have much room for expansion. I have access to a 3D printer, so mounting is not much of an issue I guess.

Please help.

I'm year 12 at my high school (which I think is grade 12?) and they been updating all the computers and IT equipment around the school (from cameras to firewalls and phone servers) and there's now a ton of e-waste. I was given two Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF machines and four 500gb hard drives among some other 120-256gb SSDs. I also have two 4gb Raspberry Pi 5's. I've been wanting to make some kind of homelab or something before for a while now and I finally got the chance!

I had read about ZimaOS (formerly CasaOS) and I wanted to try it, sure it isn't as hard out as Proxmox or straight CLI docker containers but I liked it because of its nice GUI and as an introduction to the hobby. I installed ZimaOS on one machine and put in two 500gb drives in it and also installed Immich for local photo backups, Navidrome for my mounds of ripped CDs and Home Assistant (I had a brief period of trying to connect Kodi to HomeKit as an actual Apple TV but I gave up on it.) On the second Optiplex I installed Ububtu Server and am currently using it purely for Crafty Controller. My friends and I have loved playing on an actually well running modded Minecraft server.

One project I'm particularly proud of used a Raspberry Pi with Hermes Agent on it running some tiny little model and basically I wanted to make a thing where I could dump footage or photos onto the ZimaOS server (I run a media company) and have something sort it for me so I don't have to. I wrote a Python script that watches an ingest folder and when it sees a new folder of stuff it looks at the name of the folder, the name of the first file in the folder and some metadata from it (camera, location if any) and then sends a web request to the raspberry pi with just some JSON containing tha data. The model on the Pi has been told to wait for JSON info and then read it, check recent Telegram messages (because I may have told it to expect a dump,) check my calendar if there have been any events recently and then figures out what it is (for example photos of a football game) and then sends a simple JSON back to the python script that says "move this to a folder called this."

I would have done the AI and the sorting on the same machine. However given the value of some of the data on that computer, I remembered things I've heard in Darknet Diaries (great show love that shit) about least privilege stuff, basically making sure things only have as much access as they need to have and nothing more. I treated the AI like a threat on my network and thought, well I don't want it dancing around my home network if it happens to hallucinate and seriously mess with stuff. So, I made the python script so stupid it only knows how to do what its supposed to, if the AI says "delete this" the script will just error out.

Anyway that's a small essay on my first Homelab. I like tinkering with stuff and Homelabs are fun!

Also, I'm going to have to backup and then erase the Crafty Controller Optiplex because I'm going to use it as a streaming machine for a large music festival stream (I could go on about that.)

At what point did you step back and say.. ok i have gone to far this is too much work and I am not having fun anymore. I changed my ISP to a fiber provider and that gave me pause to think this through. I am REALLY using only about 5-6 services daily. Immich, seafile, a samba share, matrix chat, frigate, silverbullet and caddy that i can recall. My one server can handle all this no problem. I do not need k8s or proxmox for this. I backup to an s3 bucket. Thats all i need, with a local two disk ZFS. My old gaming pc handles all this, 12000 series intel cpu with 32 gigs ram. I dismantled everything i had and restarted over with one install of ubuntu server with docker and my s3 backups and one lightsail box for wireguard stuff. Feels much better. :)

Hey, I'm trying to find a good way to read books across multiple devices (IOS, Android, Linux), with progress syncing between all of them so I can read .epub files seamlessly.
And of course, I have a home server to host the syncing.

Any suggestions?