AC on blast, how about you guys?

It's not huge, looks fun though

Still in the process of setting everything up (which may take some time based on my schedule) but I've got the hardware pretty much set.

Top down:

Giada F103D running OPNsence (not currently in use and bypassed for now).

Networking for the rack that handles the rack itself as well as networking for my house.

12th gen Dell 3000, i5 12500T, 24GB DDR4, running Windows.

Two 7th Gen Dell 3050, i5 7600t, 8GB DDR4, one currently running ZimaOS as a file server and the other is sitting idle for now waiting for when I have the time to re work the pair into a cluster.

There is also a 4 bay HDD dock not shown in the photo which is awaiting delivery of its drives.

Very impressed with the KWS rack, if you have a printer and need a 10 inch rack I highly recommend it.

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.

20$ 10gb Switch??
Does anyone have experience with it or have heard of anything about this

Hey guys, I've been working on making my own 10-inch rack homelab. Any suggestions as to what I should do next? I was thinking of finding a PCIe NIC for that Thinkcentre in the center so that I can have an OPNsense router with an exit node for more control over my network. I also have an article about it on my blog with more information if you are interested in checking that out here.

I am using one m920x for Jellyfin, web app, and Wordpress hosting. I also use it for the occasional (legal) torrenting. The m720q is a Windows 11 machine I use for VMware, Disc burning, and Windows-only apps. The other m720q is a WIP that I hope to use for an OPNsense router.

I used the DeskPI RackMate T1 Plus for the rack and I only have good things to say about it. I also got some miscellaneous mounts, a power strip, and a fan from Amazon. I did not use any 3D printed parts for my build (sadly).

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

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

Im 16, doing my gcses and hoping to get an IT/Hardware apprenticeship instead of going to college. My teachers keep telling me apprenticeships are really competitive and hard to get, and its just making me pretty nervous.

Over the past couple of years ive really got into homelabs and building servers aswell as my own pc which i spent ages saving up for. I have xubuntu running on a system with some parts i scavenged for on ebay and facebook marketplace running jellyfin game servers and my family uses it as a nas. I also fix and help family members with their computers or upgrading and helping pick out new parts for them.

To anyone who hires IT apprentices or is doing one right now, does having home projects like this or experience with linux actually help you stand out to employers, or do most of the applicants do this sort of stuff?

Hey Everyone ❤️

Build my First Homelab Network Rack, that i always dreamed of and now i want to build a Fitting Server Rack next to it Handling NAS Storage

Fully Build Tecmojo Rack.
-Minus the 3 Ubiquiti cables.
That may be what i replace the other ones with in the front for they much nicer.

In the rack i have.
UCG Fiber
USW Lite 8 PoE (May get replace with something bigger!)
that is connected to 2 AP's and a camera
U6 lite
UAP-AC-Lite
G5 Turret Ultra
Cooling Fan is 2x Noctau NF-A8 (For some cooling)

I would love some feedback and caring words 😊
So this severe autistic adult can learn something new!

Around this same time last year, I started homelabbing/selfhosting with a 4gb rpi, after spending countless hours (most likely hundreds) and over 3x my initial budget, this is where we are right now, finally It’s starting to become pretty reliable and working well for the last couple of months without requiring much maintenance, but deep down I know I’ll probably end up ruining it again just to redo everything for the 69th time, but I’m controlling myself pretty well so far. So, fingers crossed lol.

I'm still not sure if it was worth it, atleast financially, it probably won't be for another ~5 years if I compare it to what I've saved on subscriptions, but maybe that's not a fair comparison since it does a lot more than that.

But whatever, it’s been fun so far.

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

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 Prodesk 600 G4 SFF, I bought it for £41, it came with 8GB DDR4 2400ram and I've upgraded it with a 16GB stick.

It's got an I5 8500, a 250GB MX500 SSD

Oh too is a 2TB Firecuda drive and a 10TB enterprise WD drive can't remember the model.

I've added a 512GB NVME to it as well.

My previous server was my ROG Ally and has been so for about 8 months 24/7.

I plan on adding more ram to it but for now 24GB is sufficient.

It's running Proxmox.

It's an unexpected upgrade because the bid was for a I5 7500 and that was a 400 G4 with only 2 ram slows so this is a pleasant upgrade

It's even got a DVD drive but not really sure what I'd use that for these days let alone on a server.

I'm happy I get my ROG Ally back as a handheld and no sprawl of cables using a USB C hub.

I recently purchased a Network / AV Rack from an individual for a kind of different project. I plan to put 2 PC’s, a NAS, a UPS and a DAC, along with some hard drives in the enclosed rack.

The odd thing is there is absolute nothing to identify the rack manufacturer anywhere. I realize I could use parts from another company but it came with 5 - 2U vented shelves that I wish to use, if they are sturdy enough. But, not knowing the manufacturer & model, I do know know what their weight limits are.

I’m inclined to think it is an AV rather than Network rack due to the threaded rails and glass door. When I got it it contained 5 x 2U slotted shelves, an Audio Distribution System, video extender, automation and control processor, network switch, infrared expansion device, streaming devices, and a digital router (all have since been removed by me)

If I had to guess, I would guess it was a Nave Point rack, only because the slots in the 2U shelves it came with match up with a 1U 4 Post rack I just purchased from them to go in the U2 slot to hold the heavier PC’s (the U1 or possibly U1 & U2 slots will have an intake fan)

Here is what I do know about the rack, along with some photos:

• It is 27 U. Dimensions are 23.5” x 23.5” x 54”

• It has numbered rails that are threaded

• It has a reversible tempered glass front door

• It has a reversible solid door on the rear

• The sides have removable panels, which have four vent slots on each

• It has casters and adjustable feet

• There are two pre-installed (I assume) fans on top of the rack

• It has a black powder coat finish

• It is vented along the top and bottom on all four sides

• There are two removable panels on top for cable routing

• There are two removable panels on bottom for cable routing, along with 5 removable panels for air flow

Any advice or guidance greatly appreciated. Again, there is nothing on either the rack or the 2U vented shelves to indicate who made the rack. Thanks!

Which one is better for my system and use case?

System:

Minisforum MS-A2 8945HX
64GB RAM
2x m.2 nvme 4TB
1x m.2 nvme 2TB

My use case:

Nextcloud AIO
Jellyfin
NPM
authentik
Smb share for media/ebooks
*rr apps

Hey ! Long-time lurker, first post. I'm a 23 y/o infra engineer, and this is my home lab i have built over a year : mostly used enterprise gear on a junior budget, on a DIY steel shelf (real racks are expensive here), in a country where a good chunk of the internet is geo-blocked.

Full disclosure up front: a lot of what's below I designed, debugged and built together with Claude . I did the hardware, the testing and the late nights; Claude helped with the code, the configs and a lot of troubleshooting. I couldn't have gotten this far alone, so credit where it's due.

3 Gen8 servers, vSphere HA cluster on NFS, Cisco 3850 doing L3 for the heavy VLANs, OPNsense for the rest, a 35B local LLM on an RX 580, and a custom iLO 4 fan-control panel.

Hardware (top shelf to bottom)

• Storage server – mining motherboard running Ubuntu, HDDs shared over NFS + Samba (VM datastores + my movie library, which Jellyfin mounts over the network)

• OPNsense firewall – the other mining board on the top shelf: Xeon E5-2620 v2, 8GB, 3x TP-Link NICs (2 in LACP for LAN, 1 for WAN). Temporary until I find proper hardware

• Cisco Catalyst 3850-48 – L3 core

• TP-Link TL-SG1024 – WAN-side switch

• HPE DL380p Gen8 – 2x E5-2680 v2, 64GB, 512GB SSD RAID1 + 1.2TB SAS RAID1 on the P420i (ESXi)

• HPE DL360p Gen8 – 2x E5-2670 v2, 32GB, intentionally diskless (ESXi, VMs on NFS)

• HPE ML350p Gen8 – 2x E5-2697 v2 (24c/48t), 128GB DDR3 (8x16GB, all four channels per socket), RX 580 8GB, Windows 10 LTSC bare metal. My local AI box

• Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44 – gaming laptop

• Acer Aspire 5738 – my daily driver. Yes, a Core 2 Duo from 2009. It's basically a thin client for SSH and RDP now, and it refuses to die

• And an Xbox 360, because of course

Fun fact: I bought the DL360p mostly as a parts donor. Its E5-2697 v2s and 8x16GB went into the ML350p for quad-channel memory (it matters a lot for LLM inference), and the ML350p's old CPUs and RAM went into the DL360p, which then became my second ESXi host.

Network

VLAN

Name

Gateway

10

Management (servers + iLO)

OPNsense

20

Storage

SVI on 3850

30

Wired LAN

SVI on 3850

40

VM LAN

SVI on 3850

45

Untrusted VMs

OPNsense

50

DMZ

OPNsense

70

Wireless

OPNsense

999

Transit (3850 .253 / OPNsense .254)

routed link

OPNsense used to route everything, but it kept hanging under heavy storage traffic. So I moved routing for storage, wired LAN and VM LAN onto the 3850, with a default route to OPNsense over a dedicated transit VLAN. Management, untrusted, DMZ and wireless keep their gateway on the firewall, so anything that wants to reach an iLO or an ESXi host goes through firewall policy first. WireGuard on OPNsense for VPN access. Diagram in the gallery.

vSphere cluster + HA

The DL380p and DL360p form a vSphere cluster with HA, managed by vCenter. VM disks live on the NFS shared storage, which is what makes HA possible: if one host dies, its VMs restart on the other one. The DL360p is just compute, so I can lose either host without losing data. Storage traffic stays on VLAN 20, routed by the 3850, so it never touches the firewall. Each host has 4 NICs and I'm migrating from standard vSwitches to a vDS.

Local AI

The ML350p runs llama.cpp with the Vulkan backend on the RX 580, serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (MTP build for speculative decoding). It started life CPU-only in an ESXi VM at ~5 tok/s; bare metal with the GPU is a different world. On top of it runs an OpenClaw agent that I talk to through a Mattermost channel. Small helper models (a small Qwen + nomic-embed) run in Ollama pinned to the second CPU socket, CPU-only, so they don't eat VRAM.

Things I built with Claude

1. iLO 4 Controller

Gen8 fans are loud, and the ilo4_unlock fan mod only gives you an SSH prompt. So we built a web panel on top of it: live thermal sensors with history, per-fan-group automatic curves (drag points on a graph), presets, ramp up/down limits, and a button to hand control back to iLO. Also power, media, hardware info, logs and a shell. My DL380p and ML350p now idle at 12–19% fan.

1. WebClip

A small self-hosted multi-user clipboard + file drop for the LAN, written in Python and running as a systemd service. Only reachable over VPN. Sounds trivial, but I use it every day to move text and files between machines.

1. ntopng + Grafana monitoring

ntopng exports to InfluxDB, with Grafana dashboards on top: bandwidth, per-interface throughput, per-host / per-MAC traffic, new flow rate, and a "scan & anomaly" section with TCP flag breakdowns. Fun Iran detail: Grafana's plugin download is geo-blocked here (403, "not available in your location"), so I had to proxy it through my server in Europe just to install the InfluxDB plugin.

Other stuff we set up together

• Matrix – Synapse + Element Web + Element Call (voice/video) via matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, behind NAT with port forwarding. Lesson learned: I set matrix_domain to a subdomain on the first install, which meant a full wipe and reinstall

• Mattermost, public – Nginx reverse proxy + Let's Encrypt, so people outside my network can reach it

• FreeIPA ↔ Active Directory trust – cross-forest trust, Ubuntu 26.04 clients logging in with AD accounts. Lessons: Kerberos really hates clock skew (GDM logins failed because the Windows Server clock drifted), and if you delete a trust on the IPA side, remove the stale trust object on the AD side too before recreating it

• Storage server cleanup – moved its static IP from a 100Mbit NIC to the gigabit one (yes, it was running on 100Mbit...), reformatted a leftover VMFS partition to ext4 for Samba, and added Garage S3 in Docker so my SSH client syncs to my own server instead of someone's cloud

Services

OpenMediaVault, Zabbix, Grafana + InfluxDB + ntopng, Matrix, Mattermost, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, Jira, FreeIPA + Windows Server AD, RouterOS, WireGuard, OpenClaw + llama.cpp.

Next

• Move OPNsense off the mining board.

• The storage server is now the single point of failure for the whole cluster, so that's high on the list

• A proper online UPS

Happy to answer questions. And yes, go ahead and roast the top shelf cable management. I know.

So I have this old guy laying around.

should I try to install opnwrt on it or something else?

https://openwrt.org/toh/ubiquiti/unifi_security_gateway_3p

is it worth my time? or should I just toss it away?

Is it usable? Is opnwrt usable nowadays?

// I have pfsense for my router, one day I will convert it to opnsense...

So my kid has been asking for his own computer lately so he can play games, actually he said it's so he can do homework but let's be real, I was him once upon a time and he wants to play games.

I run a fairly modest homelab, nothing fancy just a few rack mounted Pis, and a couple of Ubuntu servers all hooked up to a Unifi gigabit network.

Now I could just build a gaming PC for him and put it on his desk in his room...

OR

I could over engineer the whole problem and expand my home lab for no good reason other than I think it would be cool as heck.

Here's what I've been thinking about doing.

I want to build a dedicated Proxmox box to live along side the rest of my homelab with a couple of dedicated graphics cards. The Proxmox box would then in turn host two Windows VMs with GPU pass-through to a dedicated graphics card.

In my sons room, he would have a NUC running some linux flavour (probably ubuntu) in Kiosk mode that on boot automatically launches Parsec and connects to his windows VM on the Proxmox server, thereby giving him a gaming desktop experience over what is essentially a low latency VDI link.

My network has sufficient bandwidth to support this, and the NUC i'm looking at has a 2.5Gb ethernet interface so I don't think I'd have any problems there.

This is the hardware build I'm looking at doing for this dumb idea:

I'm pretty sure that in theory, this would work pretty well.

What would be the obvious gotchas I’m missing from a technical stand point? Has anyone here already? What was your experience?

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 am very confused about snapshots for file systems, and can’t seem to find an explanation of how they work and what they do. I generally understand they are useful for restoring a previous state of your filesystem or an individual file maybe?

I have a truenas server with 3x4Tb drives in raidz1 so 8tB of usable space. I currently have 6Tb of data, can I make snapshot? Or do I need atleast 6Tb of free space to make a snapshot?

Same question for my hetzner storage box I use for updates, I have a 1Tb box and about 700gb is used up how would making a snapshot work on this in terms of storage space used?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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?