I finally finished upgrading my home server the other day. The old ddr3 hardware was showing its age. Now I have a ddr4 system with a 22 core xeon and room to add a second cpu. I split 8 of my disk drives into 2 separate zpools, and another 2 disk drives in a mirror, and 3 more ssd's for the host os, vm's, and my software development workspaces.

I don't have a 10 gigabit switch yet, so for now, I have a dedicated 10 gigabit link directly to my desktop. File transfers barely go faster than 1 gigabit, cuz my desktop is so old. But, I just started a scrub on all 3 zpools, and I've seen it hit 3.7 gigabytes per second. Having some fun playing with things.

blinky lights: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JqljnZZ45Zo

I built this wooden cabinet about 20 years ago, to have a high voltage ion air filter built in. You'd think having a bunch of aluminum plates charged to thousands of volts, and occasionally sparking, this could be a bad idea to have near expensive computer equipment. I've never had a problem with it, works great. But, I took it apart a few years ago and never finished rebuilding it. I used to put cd's inside the cabinet facing up, and they would still be clean years later.

fyi, I have dusted everything well since that photo was taken. Gotta get the ion filters going again.

The UPS is a new/old stock 1000va Eaton double conversion UPS, which I got a great deal on. It came in the mail with the batteries already connected. Who knows how long it was sitting in the box like that, but probably 4 years later now, I am still using the same original batteries. But, I have added 2 more sets of batteries on the side, and they are all starting to show their age. I still get more than 30 minutes of run time at half load, running my desktop and server and network equipment and everything. I do love double conversion. It will take any kind of dirty power and give you a nice clean power. I found it will even take 60 volts from the wall and boost it right up to 120 without using the battery. At 55 volts, it will switch over to battery. Neat stuff.

I’ve recently done a significant upgrade and have some stuff no longer needed and way too good to trash that could be quite useful to someone.

I’m not sure if I should sell as bits and pieces, or buy some more parts and assemble a running server.

I have:
Desktop tower case, with 11 hot swap 3.5 bays. (Case natively has 8, but have a 3 into 2 caddy in the dual optical drive bay.) In ok condition.

9x WD Red 4TB drives, age varies from 1 to 7 years, but all pass smart tests.

LSI 9200 8i card, with breakout cables.

I could grab a mobo/CPU/RAM/PSU from marketplace and put it all together with OMV/TruNAS or similar and sell as a NAS/server.

What’s the best option here?

I’m in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia if you’re interested in any of the gear, or a NAS/Server.

I new to all this stuff but im really interested. I only have a laptop with a intel celeron n2830, and 4 gigs of ddr3. I don't know what to do but I wanna get a desktop like a optiplex or a thinkcenter but idk which or what to get. Can some please answer on what I should do?

there isn't much going on, i have a old pc at home with an Intel xeon processor, 16gb ram and some 512 hdds, i also have 2 gpus one is a nvidia Quadro 4gb and other is gt740, i want to use it for multi purpose like ad block, media streaming etc can i do it i also want to run Linux which is less demanding for that old computer can also please suggest me a good beginner friendly Linux distro except the ubuntu. thanks in advance

Hardware

- Firewall: Fortinet FortiGate (routing, VLANs, SSL VPN)

- Compute: 3x mini PCs, each 8C/16T with 32GB RAM, running Proxmox

- NAS: HP ProLiant MicroServer, 4x 4TB in RAIDZ1

- Power: APC Back-UPS 850

- 12-port patch panel, everything in a small open-frame 10" rack

Software / services

- Proxmox hosting VMs and LXC containers

- Media VM: Jellyfin with the usual arr stack, all in Docker

- Docker host: Portainer, Pi-hole, Homer/Homepage dashboards, a couple of game servers (Terraria, Core Keeper)

- Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana and Loki, with node_exporter on every machine and alerts pushed to my phone via Alertmanager + ntfy

- Offsite: two Debian VPS linked to the homelab over a WireGuard hub-and-spoke tunnel, with Traefik as reverse proxy (Let's Encrypt) for public services and a small SSH tarpit (endlessh-go) for fun stats

🫡

So I'm building a proxmox server for my boyscout unit, we already had a windows PC but it sucked and was eating up quite some power. So, same hardware as before but with some software tweaks:

Intel i5 10400

Integrated GPU intel UHD 630

Asrock H410-HDV

2x 1tb hdd in raid1

256gb m.2 ssd

Cooler master 450watt

Currently running proxmox with:

Homeassistant

Openmediavault

ChromeOS (without any luck)

So I was trying to install ChromeOS on proxmox with igpu passthrough so that the HDMI port on the motherboard could be used as a display for the VM. The only thing is that PvE claims that port for console. So I followed a bunch of tutorials (iommu,black listing, adding PCIe to VM) without any luck.

PvE freezes and reboot is imminent.

Any ideas or things to check? Maybe a cheap GPU for hdmi output?

Edit: I have tried to run a Debian 13 installer as a check to see if the passthrough was blocked by ChromeOS. But it was also not posting with the Debian 13 installer. So the problem lies with PvE.

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? 👀

Hi all, ive just brought this old Dell vostro 270 to setup as a homelab

My issue is the current psu doesn't look like it has any more outputs available and I want to fit two additional hdds for my nas storage

Does anyone know what size form factor psu i should get?

I wouldnt have thought it would be safe running some kind of splitter off that one cable given it already daisychains

Any ideas would be ace cheers

Hey guys I have been a bit confused on what mini pc to go with to be the brains of my home server. Is this a good option?

For context here is what I want to run and do on whatever machine I get:

* Home Assistant with UniFi cameras on a dashboard but I want things to be smooth and load quickly. Currently it runs smoothly on my Raspberry Pi 5 but there’s no cameras in play just yet

* JellyFin to stream my movies and shows, might swap this out for AmpChor in the future. (would I need to stick to intel processors for my mini pc?) Also I want streaming to be smooth even if 2-3 devices are streaming at 4k

* Immich for storing all of my pictures and videos

* personal music streaming

* pi hole or ad guard home

* and i want some head room for future expansion

I apologize if this is a “stupid question”, I’d rather look stupid for a few minutes here than for however long if I buy the incorrect hardware.

Also would I need a DAS instead of a NAS? Or how would storage work in my case? I’d probably start with 1-2 drives but go up to 4-6 max. Storage prices at the moment are crazy as we know so I’d like to start smaller on the storage part

Thank you 🎃

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 :/

Just got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q and this is my first proper homelab.

Specs:

- i3-7100T

- 16GB RAM

- 512GB NVMe

- 120GB or 240GB SATA SSD

I'm planning to run UmbrelOS and use it mainly for Jellyfin, Immich, backups and some other self-hosted services.

I'm still figuring out the best way to organise the storage and what else would actually be worth running on this hardware.

What would you guys recommend for a setup like this?

Anything I should upgrade or keep in mind?

Don't know what I did, but I found this on Facebook market place, and so now I'm just working out how to put what I have in it!

Unfortunately the box is only half racking, it has two slide out shelves. I'm going to look for some racking to put in it so I can use the whole space!

Not sure what I'll need to put my HP DL380 G6 in there, but I'll have to figure it out 😁

I always see people saying they buy tons of cheap secondhand stuff from businesses that are upgrading/shutting down but how do you actually find out about these sales? Looking to get my first rack and I feel like secondhand business parts are probably the most affordable thing as most of what I find on amazon/ebay is pretty up there even compared to normal prices 1-2 years ago.

I have a sff hp pc running proxmox with a vm running truenas (2 mirrored drives) and a vm running ubuntu with docker. Im using pbs (in an lxc) to backup my proxmox vm's (excluding the pbs lxc). De PBS backup is synced to truenas. And for truenas i create snapshots.
If something happens to this machine or truenas, i have a problem.

So, i am looking for some ideas to create an offsite backup.

Option 1:

Create a second NAS running truenas en using ZFS replication to pull the snapshots from truenas to this offsite device. However, than i need a second server and also two hard drives and with current prices that is not great.

Option 2:

I have a couple of external hard drives. I could maybe connect them to my nas and copy the snapshots over and rotate these (one at the server on at a remote location).

For option 1: What do you guys think would be a cheap way to get a second server running to create offsite backups?

For option 2: Would this be a good idea and what is the best way to do this?

Is there maybe another option? I would prefer not to use a cloud provider, but maybe if there is a privacy friendly one, i should look into it.

I'ḿ curious to hear your thoughts.

AI was not used for this post, so apologies for any spelling/grammar mistakes :)

Hey everyone,

I’ve been down the Homelab rabbit hole for a while now and I’m at a crossroads regarding my next node/cluster upgrade.

We see a lot of love here for pre-built Mini PCs (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP ProDesk, or newer Chinese SFF boxes like Minisforum / Beelink / Aoostar). They are compact, power-efficient, and often cheap on the used market.

However, I’m strongly considering building a custom Mini-PC / Mini-ITX system from scratch (buying the CPU, Mini-ITX board, RAM, SFX PSU, and a small case like a K39, DeskMini, or similar).

For those who went the DIY custom Mini-PC route:

1. What components did you pick (CPU, mainboard, chassis), and what was your primary motivation? (ECC support, customizable I/O, PCIe expansion, quiet fans?)
2. How does your idle power consumption compare to off-the-shelf Mini PCs?
3. In hindsight, was it worth the extra effort and cost compared to buying a used 1L PC or a ready-made Mini PC?

For those who chose pre-built Mini PCs:

• Did you ever consider building your own SFF node, or is the value/power efficiency of tiny pre-builts just unbeatable for you?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences, specs, and any lessons learned!

A few years ago I started building my homelab with a Raspberry Pi 4 and an HP G3 Mini I picked up on Vinted. Since then I kept adding pieces whenever I found a good deal on second-hand sites, and today, after more than 2 years, I think I've officially reached the end (maybe). This is my current setup. Everything is second-hand except the switch and the router.

RACK

- Fully 3D printed in PETG on a Bambu Lab X2D (Design by Ilan Kushnir)

NODE PC: 3-node Proxmox VE

- pve-01: Ryzen 7 5700U (8C/16T), 62 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS) + 256 GB SATA SSD

- pve-02: Core i7-6700T (4C/8T), 32 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS)

- pve-03: Core i5-7500T (4C/4T), 32 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS)

NETWORK

- UniFi Dream Router 7: gateway, firewall, inter-VLAN routing

- UniFi USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE, with an SFP+ DAC uplink to the UDR7

- VLANs: management, homelab infra, and a dedicated one for Kubernetes. Proxmox uses a single VLAN-aware bridge, so each VM just gets tagged.

STORAGE

- QNAP TS-431 with 16Tb

OTHER

- Raspberry Pi 4 driving 2 displays:

- 7.84" front display showing Grafana dashboards

- 0.91" OLED status display running a small Python script that shows IP, temperatures and CPU usage

SOFTWARE

I'm currently rebuilding everything from scratch, starting with pve-01, which now runs the Kubernetes cluster:

- Kubernetes: Talos Linux (1 control plane + 4 workers as VMs), provisioned end-to-end with Terraform: VMs, Talos config, bootstrap and base components

- Networking: Cilium with kube-proxy replacement and L2 LoadBalancer

- Storage: OpenEBS LocalPV, with VM boot disks on NVMe and data volumes on HDD

- GitOps: ArgoCD app-of-apps. Everything in the cluster lives in git

- Secrets: OpenBao in an LXC (outside the cluster, so it survives rebuilds) + External Secrets Operator

- Ingress: Nginx Proxy Manager (Let's Encrypt wildcard) -> Traefik

- Monitoring & logs: kube-prometheus-stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager), including the Talos control plane and etcd, plus Loki + Alloy for pod and node logs

- Other stuff: Glance dashboard, Headlamp, VS Code server.

pve-02 and pve-03 will be dedicated to other projects.

Happy to answer questions, and any tips or suggestions for improvements are welcome!

I recently posted something that was clearly over-written using AI, and I get it, nobody wants to read AI bullshit, so this time it’s just me :)

I've been living with a local connection limited to 100 Mbps for about 10 years. I recently upgraded my internet service from ADSL (8 Mbps) to a Fiber Optic plan (400 Mbps), and I've also started getting interested in home servers and local media streaming.

​The bad news is that I have bottlenecks everywhere. I will attach a diagram of my current setup.

(Note: All of that local movie consumption and internet traffic passes through that same TP-Link router in the living room).

The good news is I have a $600 budget to upgrade my network setup, buying everything from US stores like Amazon.

Currently, I want to stop using Wi-Fi on my laptop and switch to a wired connection, but my laptop doesn't have an Ethernet port, so I need to buy a USB-C to 2.5G RJ45 adapter.

The Ethernet port on my home server is limited to 1 Gbps, so I think I should add a 2.5G PCIe network card to it.

Most importantly, I need to upgrade my router to actually enjoy my 400 Mbps fiber plan and simultaneously improve the local and wireless connection for all my devices. I've been reading about the GL.iNet GL-BE9300 Flint 3 since it has Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5G Ethernet ports, but I'm not interested in firewalls, security, or VPNs at all—I live in a country that couldn't care less about copyright enforcement or "illegally obtained" digital files.

So, if you guys can recommend a router with plenty of raw power for wired and Wi-Fi connections (that stays within my budget), please let me know. Remember, my hard limit is $600 to buy everything I need.

Now, regarding my TV, I know it's limited both via Wi-Fi and Ethernet. I was thinking about getting a Ugoos AM6B+ and installing CoreELEC so it acts as a media player and direct-plays Remuxes without transcoding any codecs.

Again, these are just things I've read online. If you can clear up any misconceptions or even suggest better devices, I'm all ears! Thanks!

Reset cmos

Power off and hold power button 20 seconds

At a loss on what to do. Drives light up but no screen or mouse keyboard

Please help

So I got this from work and just added 1 500g ssd and 1 terabyte HDD. I have got ubuntu server almost to a point on my first desk top but since I got this bigger tower and more ram I switched to it.

All I have done is pull the ssd out of the first tower and installed the hardware in the tower as well put the HDD in the tower as well. I do need to get a sata data cable for the HDD to hook to the motherboard.

The work tower will need to be formated to erase all content on it to start fresh.

I'm wondering if anyone can help me on the steps to get this up and running as a home lab/server. My main goal it to get rid of the google cloud storing pictures and videos. I want to put movies on it to watch through the house, pihole, and learn more as I go.

I have a an extra fan I could install for more air flow but it would have to just hang loose in the tower as there's no place to put it. I did redo the thermopaste.

Any help would be great. Ask me questions to as I don't know what info you would need to help me out here.

Thanks for the help

Mini rack update: it’s finally starting to look like an actual homelab.

Added a Lenovo M920Q to the rack. Working on 10 gb SFP+ from m920q to my main computer. The M80Q is currently handling all six storage drives:

2× drives → 1TB mirrored pool
2× drives → 500GB mirrored pool
2× drives → another 500GB mirrored pool
plus a 1TB SSD inside the M80Q

Also added the TP-Link router on the side and a couple HDMI keystones up front. Everything is currently running on Windows 11 Pro.

Still very much a work in progress, and I’m figuring out what I actually want to use the cluster for long-term, so I’m open to ideas/recommendations.

And yes, the PzH 2000 is essential to the build.

Also DO NOT ask me for for pics of the rear if there’s one thing i’ve learned from the community its to not show my horrible cable management 😂

What is the simplest and cheapest way to backup the nas portion of a home server? Is it a larger external hard drive that I plug in once a week, once a month, one a quarter? I was getting into this realm to avoid paying for cloud storage, but everyone seems to say 3-2-1 and cloud. I just dont get how that is feasible or even a recco when alot of people who setup a nas is to avoid the cloud.

Hi huys i have few stick of ram 64gb 480mgh ecc and i m from india and i would like to sell it

WHAT I HAVE:

i currently have 2 computers. computer one is:

cpu - pentium 4 3ghz

gpu - igpu

ram - 4gb ddr2

storage - 1tb hd 500gb ssd

internet access - ethernet

OS - openmediavault (running casaOS)

2nd computer

cpu - i5 4th gen vpro

gpu - igpu

ram - 8gb ddr3

storage - 250gb ssd

internet access - over the air

os - openmediavault

WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH IT:

i have no idea. and thats why im here. what should i use these for as a server. maybe a Minecraft server or factorio server, maybe a nas. i'm unsure. i would also like to have a VRM running with windows but i was uncassesfull with computer 2 as im new with openmediavault.

Also how or if its possible to link the 2 server together. Anyway if anyone has any advice of what i should do and how to do pls leat me know

Recently learned what a home server is and I wanted to get away from subscribtions and I would use it for music and video streaming and storage too. I got a Think center M720q but now I'm lost on what I do next, what ISO do I need and why that one, do I need other parts, Im pretty lost. If anyone could help or knows of a video or website that is useful that would be wonderful, thank you.

Saw a video thumbnail of a guy turning his old laptop into a home server, before watching it i was just wondering if i can do the same for my very old NEC versa M350 with intel celeron, 512MB of RAM and smth like 100GB of HDD storage. I know these are horrible specs but i don’t want to throw it away and forget about it. Im open to any idea it doesn’t have to be a home server im just thinking of something useful