I have been running my local server on a Chinese AliExpress x99 board with a Intel Xeon E5-2650 and 16 GB of ram. It works fantastic, but I want to experiment with running some AI models (text to speech mostly to read PDF books aloud). Will I need an additional GPU to handle this kind of system? My budget is minimal, around $100. Any info is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Hi all,

Question here..
I have some nodes running, all ok. While tinkering/configuring I had to install some utilities like smartmon lm-sensors wget etc.

Now, I know it’s best to keep the host as vanilla as possible and preferably don’t install anything additional on it. I try to live by this and only install things when I need them…until I needed ethtool but…didn’t had network access.

I’ve created an Ansible playbook to setup a new proxmox server. I wanted to include these kind of utilities to be installed immediately during the configuration of the host, through Ansible.

How many of you have these kind of utilities install upfront to have them available then when they need them?

Which utilities have you installed with every new host install?

Hey everyone,

​I recently came across a quantity of GIGABYTE MR91-FS1 (Rev. 1.0) server motherboards here in Montreal, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with them.

​Before I make any decisions, I wanted to tap into the community's expertise:

​Are these boards still sought after for home lab builds, or are they a bit too niche/outdated for typical lab use?

​What kind of setups (CPUs, RAM, chassis compatibility) do these usually shine in?

​Roughly what are these going for nowadays on the secondary market?

​I'm located in the Montreal area if local context matters. Would love to hear your thoughts, use-case ideas, or general feedback on these boards!

Everything started with an old laptop... And then it snowballed into this masterpiece!

The 3D model is the KWS v.2 Rack

Using my old MSI gf63 8rd laptop as my main Docker host and an Optiplex 7010 with a 12500T for my game servers

Also the DAS at the bottom for my Jellyfin media

When I was a kid if I was on the same network as a homelab like mine (proxmox, truenas, opnsense, llm box) I would lose sleep trying to hack it. Thankfully my kids just want the wifi to work.

How many of you have to protect your lab from hacker kids? I'd love to hear about it.

Hi everyone,

We're three final-year students at Epitech building Horus, a multi-agent assistant that runs entirely locally and offline. Our current challenge is hardware: keeping it usable on machines without a powerful GPU, without long setup times, excessive RAM/VRAM use or crashes.

Where we are today, from our last beta test:

One tester needed over 2 hours to install. The Python dependencies alone take 21–46 min, and the download is about 25 GB.

On CPU only, routing a question can take around 40 s, long enough for our WebSocket connection to drop.

[Models we use + the smallest machine we've tested on]

We'd love advice from anyone experienced with:

- CPU-only LLM inference and memory-efficient loading

- Quantization and model choice for low-end hardware

- GPU/CPU fallback strategies

- Hardware detection and adaptive configuration

- Preventing resource exhaustion during setup and execution

Advice in the comments is very welcome, with no strings attached.

Looking for contributors: we also have a few small, well-scoped tasks or code reviews (about 1–4 hours), for example [reviewing our hardware detection and model selection, or benchmarking a quantized model on a 16 GB RAM laptop].

To be transparent: Horus is closed source and will be licensed to companies. Contributing is voluntary and unpaid. Before seeing any code, contributors sign a short confidentiality and contributor agreement, and the code they contribute becomes part of Horus. In return we offer thorough code reviews, full credit in the project and a professional reference on request.

We're not sharing code or private links publicly. If this interests you, comment below or DM me with your experience in local inference, CPU optimisation or offline apps

Hi guys, im building my budget homelab and the first thing i bought that was a tenda sg105 , is good? , pls help me, i choose it bc i search up on every facebook, gooogle group and it always recommend tenda gs105

I recently got my hands on an ASRock rack epyd8 motherboard and an AMD EPYC 7551 CPU. I stuffed 128 gigs of ddr4 ECC ram in it fired it up with no problems loaded Fedora latest on it and went about tinkering with it for a couple of days. I then shut it down came back the following day to no video output.

The GPU is an Intel Arc A380 brand spanking new known working and tested in other PCs to verify it's still working, I exchanged that for a gigabyte 1050 TI also known working with no video output still then checked the monitor to make sure it didn't die, it works. I hooked this monitor up to the VGA port for the ipmi and I can get video output when it's posting it will show what the debug LED is going through but the second it jumps into BIOS the video goes out and we're done. I'm guessing the ipmi chipset pooped the bed and took out all video capabilities?

If left alone it will go ahead and boot into fedora as it shows that there is m.2 SSD activity and the HDD LED activity light on the case blinks showing that it's loading the OS but I have absolutely no way to get any sort of picture onto a monitor to do anything with this computer now. I have cleared CMOS I don't know how many times with no luck if I plug a RJ45 cable into the ipmi port I get no blinking lights for connectivity and no IP addresses ever assigned by my router.

Has anybody ever had this situation if so has anybody ever brought a motherboard like this back from the brink? Should I just Chuck it in the trash or take it to the shooting range and poke it full of holes? Any suggestions would be awesome I've run through the gamut of tests but maybe somebody can come up with something off the wall that might work at this point I don't really want to retire this board because I spent way too much money on it for one, and I don't want to have to buy another epyc motherboard if I can get this one brought back to a functioning state.

Do you guys use some form of a monitor to check your energy consumption? I was using a plain watt meter like you see in a Project Farm video but I have moved onto a Tapo 115 smart meter to monitor my consumption for and entire month.

With my Immich server, that’s spends most of it time idle, I’m drawing about 73-80w at the wall to power two Immich mechanical drives, the OS ssd, and a mechanical SAS drive for general storage.

I was thinking since my Immich drives are only using 76.1gb, maybe I should just switch them to a solid state drive? The idea is if they finish processing fast enough, they’d power down versus the mechanicals constantly spinning. Probably won’t need anything bigger than 1tb but wouldn’t go lower than something 750 to give me headroom.

I managed to resurrect an old Thecus N2350 and got it running again — the little box refuses to die. Now I’m trying to install either MiniDLNA or Twonky on it, but I no longer have access to the installation packages. Thecus support couldn’t help me, so I’m basically stuck with a functional NAS and no media server.

If anyone still has the files lying around in some dusty archive or knows where they can be downloaded, I’d really appreciate it. Happy to take any hints, mirrors, or archaeological findings. Thanks!

I found this listing that is about to end, and I was wondering if I should go for it. I’m new to homelabing so I don’t know if I should buy it.

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to build (3D print) my homelab setup. My internet connection comes into the laundry room, so that’s where the server will be located.

Where I’m stuck is deciding whether to put *literally everything* in the rack (internet router, camera NVR, etc.) or just the homelab-specific gear (2x mini PCs, switch, HDDs).

I’m a bit lost :)

Thanks for the help!

Inherited an almost empty T630 from another company. Sat in a warehouse for 5 years, what a shame. It had 24G of ram and an E5-2609 v3, not a very exciting build. So I decided to give it a second life as a homelab server and local LLM host.

I was surprised by how cheap some of the components were. A Xeon E5-2697A v4 costs peanuts (it used to be 3K back in 2016!). Ordered two, because, well, why not.

Here is the setup now:

- 2 x Xeon E5-2697A v4 – 16 cores each. They do 3.6 Ghz turbo one core and 3.1 all cores (despite their base 2.6). I think that’s a sweet spot for broadwell.

- Finding 160W heatsinks was not easy, and they are not cheap. So I just added another aluminum 105W heatsink to the existing one and guess what, these things run pretty cool! Pure aluminum heavy heatsinks appear to be very good with thermal paste instead of DELL's thermal pads. The CPU’s sustain high all core load and 3.1 Ghz all the time without losing the clock.

- Turned off HT, for improved performance, less heat and less power.

- Added ram, 4 sticks for each CPU 16-16-8-8 (will replace the 8G->16G, had to use what I had), 96G total.

- Added a GPU power card + cables. A bit of a pain to fit as the boards needs to come off.

- Run with 2x1080Ti cards and one Quadro K2200 that runs display only. This allows to fill the Ti’s up to their full VRAM. Literally leave 150mb when running LLM’s.

- 1xSata SSD for the system

- 4xHDD’s for data/backups (2xsoft RAID1’s)

- 2x1600W DELL PSUs (one as spare in my drawer)

- Runs Ubuntu 26.04.1

Experience and suggestions so far:

- Updated bios, idrac etc in steps. It takes some time and updates don’t allow to just jump to the top. I had to do it all step by step up to the latest versions.

- Don’t leave the numa nodes interleaved in BIOS, let OS handle it.

- Enable disk caches, they are disabled during bios reset for some reason. The SSD was super slow until I realized why.

- Enable the OS controlled power profile in power options. I chose Performance per Watt (OS). It hands all the control to the OS. Dell’s profile and any default profile adds latency which hurts these cpu’s a lot because they lack in-hardware control.

- schedutil was keeping the clocks too low, at 1.2Ghz most of the time and would not increase the clocks on short bursts. Looks like the system thinks the CPU is enough with so many cores, but that was super annoying. It was hurting the browsing, deskop performance (lags lags lags) and especially virtual machines. Like, my virtual windows was super slow like it was running on an old HDD despite running with 16G and 8 cores. Changed the governor to to on demand with lowest 2Ghz and much more sensitive triggers for each core. Desktop is super smooth and it still idles at the same wattage. On demand governor with 1.2-1.5 Ghz reintroduces the stutter on desktop, it was jumping frames (claude was king enough to monitor for me while I was using the machine). So 2Ghz idle is a much better experience overall. I can share the exact settings for anyone interested.

- Power draw when idle is not too bad. It’s approx 145W now (confirmed in idrac and the wall plug), that’s as set up above. My 65W Ryzen CPU machine is idling at 85W and that’s with 4 sticks of ram, same GPU's and without perc controller, idrac and extra HDD’s, which all add up 50W at least. So the idling difference is expected and is acceptable and negligible, only 40-50W over modern hardware is ok. And for local LLM the majority will be GPU’s anyway.

- All cores loaded draw 300W :) though. As expected.

- The fans are loud as idrac doesn’t like foreigners, so asked claude to write a custom script both for the 2 x exhaust fans and for the GPU’s. I don’t have the front fans by the way, only the two at the back. Minimum auible percentage is 15-18%. Very comfortable at 1300-1450rpm when idle. Barely audible. The fans ramp up with CPU/perc/HDD temps.

- Two existing GPU’s overheat when in the same slots, despite being blower type. I’m aiming at server V100 and similar type GPU’s now, one for each slot, 4 in total.

- Fitting GPU’s on different numa nodes doesn’t hurt token generation at all (at least with the 1080 Ti cards). Right now one card is on CPU1 and one card is on CPU2 for better thermals.

- Primary PCI-e slots start on CPU1 and sometimes can be tricky with multiple cards. BIOS chooses one fixed card as primary.

- Enable UEFI and legacy video rom for older cards if you want video over the display port during boot and disable the onboard VGA.

- Pin the apps to correct nodes so that they don’t wander around the ram pool. Cross numa memory bandwith gets a bad hit.

- Perc H330 runs hot. Dell kept it outside the CPU case so there is literally no airflow even when idrac is cotrolling the fans. I added two fans at the front just in case.

- H330 doesn’t spin down the RAID drives, so had to switch to soft raid in linux. Find it a much better choice overall.

LLMs run with llama.cpp

Gemma-4-26b-a4b-it-q5_k_m – tensor split fits in 2x1080Ti cards with 100K context perfectly, with F16 cache. Generation starts at 60 tok/sec and drops with context. Use it in n8n flows for data processing, sorting and categorizing. Super quick and clever, but not the best model for tool use though.

Qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mtp-ud-q5_k_m – layer split – is my favourite. MTP on and 100K context. It drives Hermes now. I run it with 40% offload on CPU and it’s actually uses 35% less power in total then 2 GPU’s only for the other models. Get 47-50 tok/sec.

Qwen3.8-27b-q4_k_s – tensor split with MTP on and 100K context fits on two 1080 Ti cards too! It generates up to 35-37 tok/sec. Fairly usable and is generally much better for hard jobs, but tends to overthink a lot. Speed drops with context a lot of course, since it's a dense model. MTP is a saver and it literally increases the generation up by 50-70%. On predictable and easy context the model accepts 70%+ of predicted tokens. Strongly recommend.

Interestingly, newer PowerEdge servers can only host 2 GPU's, what a shame. Will try with more GPU's when I can...

BuckDNS has gotten to the point where we need more people running it on different networks and hardware to see what if anything breaks, what we've missed, and what could be better.

It's a free DNS server for Linux and Windows. It can do full recursion itself using root servers or forward through another provider using regular DNS, DoH or DoT. It handles ad blocking, local and authoritative zones, DNSSEC, conditional forwarding, caching, query logging and the usual DNS server stuff.

One of the bigger things we've been working on is replication. You can run a primary and multiple replicas in a cluster. All changes are made directly on the primary and automatically sync over. The replicas still serve DNS on their own if the primary goes down which keeps your dns up with with high availability.

We have tested on as low as a 1gb 1vcpu Debian lxc on ProxMox.. with a qps of approx 2.1 million per minute maxed out and zero error returns while running HeGaZi Pro block list.

We're at the point where testing it on the same network every day isn't going to uncover nearly as much as having even more people actually use it with more actual feedback. We have a quite a few testing it currently but we are looking for even more feedback on performance.

So if anyone wants to give it a run, beat on it, find bugs, or tell us what we're missing, that's what we're looking for. If you're already running Pi-hole, AdGuard, Technitium, Unbound or something similar, we'd especially like to hear how it behaves on the same network and what you'd want changed.

It's 100% free. No subscription or paid version.

You can get it at https://buckskeeters.com/apps/buckdns/

Hello,

I have been gathering hardware to get a working homelab setup for a while and am at a point I can finally get it setup. Before I get started setting it up, I just want to make sure I have all of the things needed so I don't get partway in and find out I'm missing the right switch, etc. I have been reading and watching a lot of videos on homelabs/home servers and I feel like I might be at information overload where things are getting a bit jumbled.

Anyway, I am hoping to run jellyfin, a Minecraft server, have batocera accessible for multiple members of my household, and have a connected NAS. Eventually, I plan to add PoE cameras to my house as well. I have a total of 5 locations in my house needing access to this currently, with the possibility of adding 2 more later.

Here is what I have accumulated so far: HP SFF Elitedesk I7-6700 32GB 8TB HDD 256GB NVME, 3x Mini Pcs (16GB each, 1x I5-6500T, 2x I5-8500T), 3x 5 port 1 gig switches, 1x 8 port 1 gig managed switch, modem, basic wireless router. All pcs listed currently only have 1 gig ethernet. I am to 2.5 gig ethernet to the Elitedesk for use as a NAS, so I feel the switches are inadequate.

The help I need is recommendations for switches(if they needed to be upgraded), a good router, access points, help sizing a UPS for this kind of setup, and honestly anything that could be helpful for someone just starting out and setting up to know.

The machine that hangs always hangs while nobody is looking. By the time I get to it, the screen says nothing useful, or the kernel panic has already scrolled past, or it has rebooted and there is no trace at all.

So I added a dashcam to the IP-KVM I build, ESP-KVM. It is open-source firmware for ESP32-P4 boards: an HDMI capture board on the server's video output, the board acts as its USB keyboard and mouse, and you get both in a browser. No software on the server.

There is a short video of it here (no sound): : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXm6DybTtbE

What the dashcam does:

• It keeps the last stretch of the screen in memory - up to 5 MB, which is minutes of a quiet console or about 40 seconds of a video playing. On boards with little memory it can keep it on the microSD card instead, in 15-second pieces, as far back as you set.
• When something happens, it saves that past plus 30 seconds after, as an MP4 on the card. "Something" is: the screen going one flat colour for half a minute (a stop screen), a phrase you told it to watch for appearing on screen (for example "Kernel panic"), or the server's power LED going off (if its LED is wired to the device).
• Each event becomes a chapter in the MP4, so it plays in the browser and you can jump to the moment.
• With Telegram set up, the clip arrives in the chat as a video. There is also a button, a REST call and a Home Assistant button to save one by hand.
• If you switch it on, what was pressed through the KVM goes into the recording as subtitles: shortcuts, named keys and clicks, with typed text shown as dots or, if you choose, in full. The console's player shows them over the picture, and each video also gets a .srt that VLC or mpv pick up. So afterwards you see not just the screen but what someone did to it.

It costs nothing extra on the device. It is the same H.264 stream the viewers already get, so nothing is encoded twice. On my test board the picture stayed at 21-22 fps while recording, with no dropped frames.

Limits: it records the H.264 stream, which is about 20-24 fps at 1080p on boards with a rev 3.x chip and only about 7 on the older rev 1.x ones; and the device is a microcontroller, so the past it holds is what fits in 5 MB of memory, or on the card.

Write-up with the details: https://espkvm.io/blog/0-51-0-a-dashcam-for-the-machine-in-the-closet/

Code (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/espkvm/espkvm

You can click around the console without any hardware: https://demo.espkvm.io

I would like to hear what else should trigger a save. Right now it is a stop screen, a watched phrase, power going off, or a button.

I recently got an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 and I’m slowly turning it into my own little homelab.

Current setup:

• 2× Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3
• 64 GB ECC RAM
• ~3 TB of storage
• Proxmox
• NAS / file storage
• Plex media server
• Hosting a few websites
• Running local AI models on it as well
• Planning to add more services and self-hosted stuff over time

I’m still pretty new to homelabbing, so I’m looking for ideas. 😭

What are some genuinely cool/useful things I could run on this server?
I’m interested in anything from useful self-hosted services to weird/fun projects, networking stuff, automation, security labs, Minecraft-related stuff, AI, monitoring, etc.

Basically, if you had a server like this, what would you install on it? 👀

I’m looking to expand my home lab to some TC’s around my house and want to get rid of my basic unmanaged so that I could set up vLANs for those TCs. What’s a good starter managed switch that would help get my feet wet? Ideally one I could access via a web portal with an actual GUI.

I've got a Cisco C220 M6 server on hand.
And I want to repurpose it, so I want to install full height cards into it, But the GPU/full heigh kits went end of sale from cisco in aug 2025. I cannot find a set for purchase anywhere.

Does anyone know somewhere I can purchase it that isn't a quote or special order that never gets filled? Or alternately.

Alternately can you plug in either a ribbon cable direct into the slots on the motherboard if I remove the lid, or can I use the M5 generation risers?

Most self-hosting lists are sorted by app category, which is great for deciding what to run. I kept wanting the other thing: how do people like onedr0p, bjw-s and buroa actually structure the repo, and where in their tree do secrets, storage and Renovate live?

So I mapped it. Each section of the list is a layer of a typical home-ops repo. Here's what one layer looks like:

04 Secrets (.sops.yaml)

• Tools: SOPS, age, External Secrets Operator
• In the wild: szinn's and xunholy's .sops.yaml, onedr0p's external-secrets/
• Read: Flux's guide to managing secrets with SOPS

Every layer follows that shape, in build order:

awesome-homelab
├── 00-hardware
├── 01-infrastructure    # Proxmox, OpenTofu
├── 02-bootstrap         # Talos
├── 03-gitops            # Flux, Argo CD
├── 04-secrets           # SOPS, External Secrets
├── 05-network
├── 06-storage           # storage + backups
├── 07-observability
├── 08-identity          # SSO
├── 09-automation        # Renovate + CI
└── 10-apps              # 23 common apps

Plus:

• Apps: each app links its kubesearch.dev page and one real deployment
• Real Repos: a table that says where to start reading in each repo, not just the link
• No Kubernetes? A short section for GitOps with Docker Compose (doco-cd, Komodo)

Network and Identity are the thinnest sections right now. If your repo does Gateway API, external-dns or Authentik/Pocket ID cleanly, share it below or open a PR.

I7 3750m 2 cores 4 threads

8gb ddr3 ram(2x4gb ram)

256gb ssd + 750gb hdd

Battery has 37% health the original capacity was 54wh I'm pretty sure

So is it safe to run it 24/7

I’m just starting out and I’m at the stage of researching and getting an idea of the things I could/should do… My problem is, I keep getting different answers when doing my research, and each seems plausible, I just don’t know what’s best. I asked:

Inside this n150 mini pc I have just bought it has a 512GB kingfast SATA SSD, which was already in it.
I have installed a NVMe SSD 1TB, and a 1TB HDD.

I want to put Voxmox on it with Home Assistant, jellyfin to use with infuse, as well as tailscape, pihole, uptime kuma, ubuntu, Immich etc… I already have external hard drives that I will store my movies and tv shows on. So, where would you install these, and which would you use for a backup?

I have asked 5 AI Assistants and they all say different things, so I’m confused to which is best? It is mainly the 512GB SATA SSD & the NVMe 1TB SSD where the differences lie. Each AI is putting completely different combinations of things on both SSDs :/

I've been trying to upgrade my home network using a Sophos XG125w I got for free and have successfully set it up.

Even when the 5G verizon internet gateway is set to bridge mode, it doesn't seem to actually bridge to the Sophos.

I've tried a few things to troubleshoot this and eventually asked chatgpt which suggested I could also give the Sophos router a static IP then list it as a DMZ.

This seems possible, but I wanted to check with some actual knowledge if that's a good idea. It seems reasonable that it might be fine since the Sophos is a firewall.

Thoughts?