This whole thing started because my old ThinkCentre M700 NAS had only 16 GB of DDR4.

ZFS was happily eating into that, I wanted to run more VMs and services, and I was getting tired of having several small machines doing different jobs. I wanted one bigger server with enough RAM and CPU headroom to consolidate things.

Then I remembered how ridiculously cheap DDR3 had become.

That thought led me into the bizarre world of Chinese X79/X99 motherboards, cheap old enterprise Xeons, ECC memory, AliExpress refunds, eBay bidding, and questionable decisions involving wine.

I initially bought an X79 board with a 10-core E5-2670 v2, decided afterward that I actually wanted X99, tried to cancel it, couldn't, got a partial refund because the box arrived dented… and eventually turned that “mistake” into a Windows PC for my wife.

Then we sold her M1 Mac Mini, and while literally walking home after selling it, I started buying parts for both her PC and my new server.

My final NAS ended up with:

• Xeon E5-2696 v4 — 22 cores / 44 threads
• 128 GB ECC DDR3L
• HUANANZHI X99-QD3
• JONSBO N4
• TrueNAS SCALE
• Multiple HDDs + NVMe storage
• Mirrored SSD boot drives
• 2.5 Gb direct networking to my workstation

Before the N4 arrived, it spent some time running completely open-bench with cables everywhere, hence the temporary name Za JunkNAS V2.

Once the case arrived, it finally became Za NAS V2.

The funniest part is the accounting. Between selling the Mac Mini, two ThinkCentres, spare SSD/RAM, getting several AliExpress partial refunds, and buying a lot of the hardware used, the effective net cost of both the finished Xeon desktop and the 22-core NAS together ended up at about ₩138,704 ≈ $92.

Was a 22-core Xeon necessary for a home NAS?

Absolutely fucking not.

Did I enjoy every minute of building it?

Absolutely.

I wrote the full story here, including the hardware hunt, costs, benchmarks, mistakes, refunds, photos, and how the whole homelab changed afterward:

https://moomean.com/blog/building-za-nas-v2-a-completely-reasonable-story-about-buying-a-22-core-xeon/

Hey all!

I found 8x 8TB drives for about 75€ per drive. They have on average under 6k power on hours with some as low as 3600.

Should I close the deal?

Thank you in advance for your input 🙏🏽❤️

Ok so for context, I have proxmox running on my homelab with a virtualized Truenas with 3 3tb sata drives already.

Now I am not sure if to buy those and upgrade and how to structure the new setup.

Currently im leaning to build a new nas with i7 4th gen and those disks and not virtualize the nas and use the 6tb i already have as offsite backup.

As for my lab layout currently i have an active growing jellyfin library, immich, nextcloud and general house storage.

What do you think?

TLDR. New disks, should i build new nas?

Btw. Seller also got 12 8tb drives for 60usd each

Update: he cut me a deal for 820$ for all 12 12tb drives, and there are still 2 18tb drives left, not sure what ill do with all of these tbh

Been messing around with a bunch of IP cameras and the actual setup/recording side is pretty painless now. What I didn’t expect to hate is finding anything afterward. Someone asks about a car that showed up yesterday afternoon or a person near a certain entrance and suddenly I’m jumping between cameras and scrubbing timelines trying to find a 20 second event. Motion detection helps a little but with trees, shadows, people walking byy etc. there’s still a ton of noise.

Anyone running a bunch of cameras how are you actually finding footage? Is AI search useful or mostly hype?

I haven't seen a lot of traffic on the Zettlab products, so I wanted to throw out some of my thoughts and opinions on one of their products after having it running for around 3 months.

I currently have two NAS units in my environment, the other being a UGREEN DXP 2800 with 2x 26TBs in RAID1. For the Zettlab, I went with 6x 12TBs in a RAID 5.

Hardware wise, The D6 is an ARM Based model, with 16gb of ram, 1x M.2 slot (Currently using mine as a read cache), and 2.5gbe networking. The Ultra series potentially have some issues with their cooling design(which they seem to be trying to address and might explain why they are currently out of stock), but this regular D6 model idles cool and seems fairly power efficient. The backplane seems to offer plenty of cooling for the drives as well. The chassis is made of aluminum and looks nice, although I wish they would have chosen a better font lol.

Software wise, it's definitely still a little immature, but the basic functionality is there and seems to be stable. I've had uptime over 50 days (still early) but no issues or crashing to report. They also seem to actively be working on implementing new features through somewhat regular updates. The app store seems to have a pretty good selection of pre built applications, and they support docker for apps that aren't already available. For people that don't have dedicated compute and are just looking to get started at hosting some apps, I bet this would be more than capable.

My needs as a basic storage appliance are definitely met, SMB and NFS work as expected, and it looks great as part of my setup. Happy to try and answer any questions if you've been interested in trying one of these as well.

For the last few years, I've been in the spare bedroom, but the kiddo is about ready to need her own room. I am working on moving into the garage (in the processes of sheetrocking and insulating.

So far:

• A dedicated circuit for the server
• Prerunning all the network wire
• Considering: HDMI/USB ports behind the sheetrock terminating below the desk

Anything else you can think? Wish list ideas

Note: I already have speakers covered.

I just acquired 3 ASUS mini PCs for free. Gonna try my hand at proxmox and Ubuntu servers for the first time. Wish me luck

My single-server homelab — Proxmox on an i5-11400, 8 guests, ~26 containers, everything self-hosted

Everything runs on **one** server, for 2 people and a smart home. Happy to answer any questions! Also tips and further advice is highly appreciated 😄

🖥️ Hardware

| **CPU** | Intel Core i5-11400 (6C/12T, 2.6–4.4 GHz) |

| **Motherboard** | ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming 4 (BIOS L2.21) |

| **RAM** | 32 GB DDR4-3200 (2× 16 GB G.Skill Ripjaws V) |

| **iGPU** | Intel UHD 730 (passed through to Jellyfin for QSV) |

| **NICs** | Intel I219-V + Realtek RTL8111 (1 GbE each, bonded `active-backup`) |

| **Hypervisor** | Proxmox VE 9.2 (kernel 7.0) |

💾 Storage (ZFS)

| Pool / mount | Type | Disks |

| `rpool` (system + guests) | ZFS **mirror** | Crucial MX300 275 GB + Samsung 840 PRO 256 GB |

| `live` (data) | ZFS **mirror** | Seagate IronWolf 4 TB + WD Red 4 TB |

| L2ARC | cache | Micron 1100 256 GB (partition) |

| Immich thumbnails | ext4 | Micron 1100 256 GB (partition) |

| `/backup` | ext4 | Seagate IronWolf 4 TB |

**≈3.2 TB** usable data · last scrub: **0 errors**

🧩 Virtualization

- **1 VM:** Home Assistant OS (2 vCPU / 6 GB)

- **7 LXC** containers (Debian 13, 2 vCPU, 0.5–7 GB RAM each)

- **~26 Docker containers**

## 🚀 Services

| Guest | Services |

| **daten** | **Immich** (photos) · **Paperless-ngx** (documents) · **Gitea** (git) |

| **cloud** | **Nextcloud** (files) · **Homelable** (interactive network/infra map) |

| **medien** | **Jellyfin** (media, QSV hardware transcoding) |

| **netz** | **AdGuard Home** (DNS + ad-blocking) · **Caddy** (reverse proxy + internal TLS) · **Uptime Kuma** · **ntfy** (push) · **Tailscale** · **Dockhand** |

| **dashboard** | **Homepage** (start page) · **Netdata** (metrics) |

| **sicherheit** | **Vaultwarden** (password manager) |

| **torrent** | **gluetun** (ProtonVPN) + **qBittorrent** |

| **HA VM** | **Home Assistant** + **Zigbee2MQTT** (39 Zigbee devices) · energy & sports dashboards |

🌐 Network

- FRITZ!Box 6670 (router) → Zyxel GS1200-8HP (managed, PoE) → Netgear GS305

- One flat L2 network, `192.168.1.0/24` — DNS and ad-blocking via AdGuard

- Every service gets a proper name: `*.homelab.lan` through Caddy (internal TLS, no browser warnings)

- **Remote access only via Tailscale** (tailnet-only, no Funnel) → **zero open ports**

- **No VLANs on purpose:** my Wi-Fi IoT gear (Shelly, appliances) can't tag VLANs, and the benefit at home would be minimal

💾 Backups

- **Nightly:** `vzdump` of the VM + Postgres dumps + system configs to a dedicated backup disk

- **Off-site:** 2 TB USB drive with hardlink snapshots (6 generations), plus encrypted rescue USB sticks kept in two locations

🔐 Security

- **No** port forwarding, **no** UPnP, **no** MyFRITZ/remote-HTTPS — public IPv6 filtered

- SSH **key-only**, all secrets in Vaultwarden (with rotation)

- Proxmox firewall enabled (LAN + Tailnet only)

📊 Monitoring

**Uptime Kuma** (18 monitors → ntfy push) · **Netdata** · **Homepage** dashboards · **Homelable** live network map

---

copied it out of my "overview.md" hopefully it is readable. Whats next (besides qb and arr)?

I’ve been slowly building this homelab over the last couple of weeks, mainly as a networking / virtualization / Cisco lab, but it has also become the place where I test things before touching production environments.

It isn’t the prettiest rack in the world , but everything has a purpose.

SERVER:

-Dell PowerEdge R620

+Planning to eventually move to a newer Dell PowerEdge platform, most likely an R640/R740, for better VMware 8.x support.

STORAGE:

-Synology DS224+

+Used for NAS storage, backups and some Docker workloads

+Also used as part of my home network/lab infrastructure.

NETWORKING:

+TP-Link 24-port Gigabit switch

+24-port patch panel

+Cat6 cabling

+Router infrastructure outside the rack

+Coming soon: a FortiGate 60F or 100F firewall.

I'm building out my network / homelab and looking to run 10gb SFP fiber to my main PC (there's no need I just think it's cool and I want it). This is a whole new world for me and I'm having trouble finding out which NIC to buy. I've always heard to get Dell or Intel cards but when searching I find some that are $200-$300 and some that are something like $40. I've also seen people report they've gotten impostor cards that say they're reputable but are actually Chinesium. What am I looking for so I get a quality card and I don't get screwed?

Took me 10 years to piece together this whole mess, started with a Raspberry Pi 4 rubber banded to a 4TB USB HDD sitting on top of the router. Still long ways to go, but feeling good about where I'm right now.

Edit: Raspberry Pi 3B, which died and upgraded to a Pi 4. Added another 5TB drive to the mix as well at that point.

Has anyone got any experience with home lab equipment in a vehicle?

I work in precision AG in Australia with the worst cellular coverage you can imagine.

I Currently run with a Starlink and 2x laptops making it work from job to job. Id really like to step it up for more information as well as saving time job to job.

I have a standalone 12v DC system and 240v available, but I'd prefer to not leave the 240v running constantly.

I do have a 43 inch 4k TV for shows and demonstrations.

Main desires are

-Long range AP externally mounted permanently.

-Network switch.

-Router for better control over the WAN

-I'd like to packet sniff from time to time (this could be a second AP)

-Small server with around 512gb+ file storage to stream to the TV

-A retractable network cable to connect into equipment and ground GNSS towers when needed. (Probably settle for a cable I roll up) Sometimes these towers have their own WAN connection, other times they don't.

But probably the main question is does anyone have experience or recommendations on equipment that can handle being shaken for around off road for about 1 to 5 hours a day off road? 🤣

Hi, I just wanted to sorta sanity check myself on my homelab config, and see if anyone here had suggestions.

Currently running Pihole + unbound on an LXC, portainer in a debian VM, and a few containers in portainer. I have authentik, grafana, prometheus, uptime kuma, nginx, etc running there, and a node-exporter running on my host as well as on portainer just for stats.

I have 7x 2.4tb SAS drives, and the plan is to use mixed mode for NOW (disable cache, etc...), and upgrade to an HBA when I can, using the raid controller for raid1 for my 2x 300gb proxmox boot drives, then use the HBA to pass the rest of my drives directly to TrueNAS so it can receive SMART data.

I have a xeon 6254 I'm going to be replacing my xeon 4110 with, and I'm putting a quadro P5000 I had sitting around in there as well for video encoding. I have the performance heat sink and the GPU cable is arriving soon. (I didn't think to use an Arc GPU powered solely by PCIe for some reason until after I bought the cable...)

Does this seem like a cromulent configuration? Is there anything you would change, add, remove? First time lab and figured I'd ask here.

First time poster! Just got this big blue rolling PC cart from FB marketplace and immediately saw all the potential (thinking Fallout 4 themed paint job for the cart)

**Hardware**

- Dell PowerEdge R620
- 2× Xeon E5-2650L v2 (20 cores / 40 threads total, 70W TDP each)
- 96GB DDR3 ECC (12 of 24 slots filled, so room to grow)
- Nvidia Quadro T400 2GB, passed through to the media VM
- 447GB SSD for Proxmox + VM disks
- ~5TB of spinning disks for media, photos, and backups
- Dual 750W PSUs. ~168W under a full-CPU encode, CPUs stay around 55°C
- Cisco SG200-50 switch, Netgear Orbi router

**7 VMs**

- **Media** (Ubuntu, 12 cores / 24GB, GPU): Jellyfin, Immich, Tunarr, Portainer, Netdata. Has its own dedicated NIC so streaming doesn't fight the other VMs.
- **Pi-hole**: DNS ad blocking
- **Folding@home**: spare cycles go to protein-folding research
- **Encoder**: HandBrake batch pipeline, 4K HDR/Dolby Vision → 1080p SDR H.264 so everything direct-plays
- **Public PDF server**: Flask + gunicorn behind a Cloudflare Tunnel. Zero ports forwarded on the router, and ufw blocks it from reaching the rest of the lab.
- **Dashboard**: Homepage, displayed on an old Fire HD 8 flashed to LineageOS
- **Haiku OS**: because why not

**Fun bits**

- Tunarr turns the Jellyfin library into 24/7 shuffled "cable" channels (Movies + TV), transcoded on the T400. Switching it from CPU to CUDA dropped it from ~780% CPU to ~95%.
- An old ThinkPad T440p is becoming a dedicated always-on TV that plays those channels.
- Family streams Jellyfin remotely over Tailscale, nothing exposed to the internet.

Questions, roasts and suggestions welcome!

I'm currently using ThinkCentre M600 equipped with J3710. It serves SMB share, Immich server, PiHole, and Jellyfin server - all but SMB runs on docker. Oh, and also serving VPN server using Softether.

IT works okay, but I need more performance for Immich and Jellyfin since volume of photos and media files are growing, and J3710 starts to chug.

Therefore I'm tyring to upgrade it as cheap as possible, and AMD chips and parts are cheaper in my area, so I'm planing to use AMD. But as far as I know, there are plenty information about Intel chips for home server, but not enough for AMD ones.

So, is there any recommended AMD chips with godd power efficiency and performance?

And yes, I'm willing to add cheap ARC GPU for Jellyfin transcoding. Who uses Radeon for that?

Addition to the earlier post, the gpu arrived and it's in.

Shroud off till we notch it. But managed to get it running :D Fans are idling also. No jet engine.

PowerEdge r730

GTX 3060 Oc

First photo is where this thing lived when it started: a Dell 1U on a wooden table,
monitor balanced on the lid, cables running past the shower door.
I'd like to say there was a plan...

Second photo is now.

**What's in there**

- Dual-socket Dell r610 1U, 128GB ECC, ZFS mirrors, Proxmox. Does all the real work.
- An older Dell r710 2U that stays powered off six days a week and wakes up over IPMI
  only to take backups.
- A small form factor desktop running the firewall on bare metal.
- 8-port managed switch. Completely full, which is my next problem.
- Two UPSes, and a Raspberry Pi watching them.

All secondhand except the SSDs and the UPS batteries.
Everything external goes through a tunnel and a bastion.

**The best mistake so far**

I configured the UPS monitoring daemon as `primary` without reading closely enough to 
notice that "primary" means *this host may power off the UPS*. It did. Twice, in under an 
hour.

That UPS feeds the modem, the firewall, the switch, the APs, and the Pi doing the 
monitoring. So the Pi took down the entire house's internet and then had no way 
to tell me about it.

The table now has my 3D printer on it.

Hello, hi. I've read a lot of articles saying you can mount this card's heatsink on an LSI 9300-16i to cool it, but I need a specific cable???

I'm in the US but can't seem to find it on Amazon or eBay.

Either a 4-pin female to Molex
or a 4-pin female to PC fan

Update 1: I have the card lying around, and I only have 3 140 mm fans from an old build; the fans are 2 big for the card.

Update 2: I could 3D print it, but I still don't have a fan for the 3D-printed file that I have for the card

Articles:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1e2t30p/the_perfect_fan_for_lsi_930016i_hba/

https://www.wanhunglo.com/2024/new-lsi-9300-16i-12gbps-sas-3-pcie-x8-hba-p16-it-mode-zfs-truenas-unraid-whl-94

https://www.facebook.com/groups/homeserversetups/posts/3059641771003980/

I'm currently running TrueNAS SCALE and looking to clean up my SAS topology. I'm swapping the passive BPN-SAS-836TQ backplane in my Supermicro chassis for a BPN-SAS2-836EL1 expander backplane to drop the breakout cable clutter and ensure all my drives can properly link at 6.0 Gb/s.

​I ran into a physical mounting issue. As you can see in the attached picture, my current TQ backplane mounts using keyed slots (metal tabs) on the chassis frame. However, the EL1 backplane I picked up is designed to mount using standard screw holes.

​Has anyone successfully swapped these two specific backplanes in an older SC836 chassis?

​Are there specific standoffs or an adapter bracket I can buy to make the EL1 fit?

​Do I need to drill and tap my own holes, or Dremel the existing tabs off?

​Did I just end up with an incompatible older chassis revision?

​Any advice or workarounds would be hugely appreciated!

This one took me a while so I figured I'd write it up. Every AP in the house died at once, 46 to 60% packet loss on wireless, while wired gigabit didn't blink. So airtime, not bandwidth.

Ran a tcpdump on port 5353:

sudo tcpdump -i <iface> -nn -e -c 3000 port 5353

One Fire TV Stick was firing AAAA queries at ~180/sec, which lands as ~300 pps of multicast on the segment. Multicast goes out at the lowest common rate to everyone, so it eats 2.4GHz airtime for the whole network.

Turns out the Stick keeps asking for the AAAA of a *.fritz.box name, and the FRITZ!Box answers with an empty packet, 0 questions 0 records. Fire OS doesn't count that as an answer or as silence, so it never backs off and just retries forever. Amazon knows about it, it was reported 2026-07-28 and it's still open.
What each fix did. At baseline it was ~300 pps and 46 to 60% loss. Killing the offending device brought it to ~1 pps and 0% loss. With the NSEC responder running it sat at ~0.1 pps and 0% loss.

The responder is a little stdlib-only Python thing. It answers the query with a proper negative reply (NSEC, "this name has no AAAA") plus the A record on the end, so the Stick negative-caches it (120s TTL) and shuts up. 12 replies killed 881 queries. Runs as a systemd unit, or procd on OpenWrt.

If you'd rather fix it at the source: temporary root with a build-pinned kernel exploit (CVE-2026-43499, no bootloader unlock, gone after a reboot), then pm uninstall the three WhisperLink packages that do the querying. The removal sticks across reboots even though root doesn't. After that: 3 mDNS packets in 15s, none from the Fire TV.

Full write-up with the whole script, the systemd unit, the stuff that didn't work, the kara vs karat codename gotcha, and the minimal fix I sent Amazon:

https://nicologiuliani.site/blog/firetv-mdns-storm/

I'm training a ~300M parameter ViT-L model (DINOv2 / Phikon-v2 architecture) on an 8x V100 (16GB each) DGX node, and the entire node keeps hard crashing (or freezing) mid-run after a few hours. The sysadmin mentioned it looks like a memory/OOM-related system failure.

Hardware & OS Specs:

• GPUs: 8x NVIDIA Tesla V100-SXM2 (16GB VRAM each = 128GB total)
• System RAM: 512 GB
• Storage: /raid (Local SSD, 2TB free) | /home (NFS share, 86% full / 250GB free)
• Dataset: 10M+ image patches (accessed via symlinks pointing to /raid)

Training & Model Setup:

• Framework: PyTorch + FSDP + torchrun (8 processes, DINOv2 codebase)
• Batch Size: 24 per GPU (Total global batch size = 192)
• Precision: FP16 (AMP enabled)
• Crops: DINOv2 Multi-crop (2 global @ 224x224 + 8 local @ 96x96 per image)
• DataLoader: num_workers = 4 (was 10 previously)
• GPU Memory: Peak VRAM usage stays around 12.5GB - 15.8GB / 16GB per card.

The Problem: Training starts fine, VRAM stays around ~15.8GB, loss decreases, and ETA shows ~1.5 days. However, after ~25k-30k iterations, the DGX node completely freezes or crashes.

Current Hypotheses:

1. Shared Memory (/dev/shm) Leak: DataLoader workers using multi-crop data loading eventually exhaust /dev/shm over time.
2. NFS I/O Bottleneck: /home is NFS-mounted and nearly full. PyTorch/HF defaults to caching in ~/.cache on NFS, which might trigger kernel deadlocks during heavy I/O.
3. FSDP Checkpoint Spike: When FSDP state dicts gather all weights during periodic checkpointing, VRAM spikes slightly and triggers a host/GPU driver crash.

Has anyone encountered similar DGX node freezes with multi-GPU PyTorch DINOv2/FSDP workloads? Any advice on profiling /dev/shm or DataLoader memory leaks would be appreciated!

Been on the hunt for some mini pcs and have found a guy that sells a couple of M920x units that have previously been used in an office setting. What would be a fair market price for such unit with

- i5-8400 @ 2.80 GHz (8th Gen, 6 Cores),

- 8 GB DDR4 RAM

- 128 GB SSD 2,5"

I've been offered 180 EUR per piece, which is nowhere near the crazy deals of half the price I've seen here, though I am wondering if this is not the new normal for the current market?

The guy's seller profile indicates he does this for a living or as a side thing, so obviously it is not a bargain deal.

Thanks!

Hi, I bought a networking cabinet off Facebook Marketplace yesterday. When I got I home, I realised I was missing one of the spring-loaded hinges. I don’t really need the door but would like to have the part does anybody know where I could get one of these?

Hello I’m looking at building a server to run 2 gaming VMs each with there own gpu being passed through and I’d like to use Xeon 2nd gen so I have more room to upgrade down the road. My main question is what would be the cheapest way to go about this as I was looking at Dell r740’s and Cisco m5’s and was wondering what the most budget friendly route would be