so in reality this is about 320GB of DDR3 ECC added to modern DDR5, but proxmox wouldnt embarrass me like that. Numbers are numbers!

This cluster is used for dev staging and backup/redundancies, and local AI.

One day when I clean it up I'll do a full inventory with pictures, but the way RAM prices are going I should probably revisit my contents insurance.

Ryzen 9600X, 32GB dual channel DDR5, 2x CMP 170HX
Ryzen 5700, 32GB dual channel DDR4, 5x Vega 56
Intel i7 9700, 32GB dual channel DDR4, 3070 + 2080ti
Ryzen 7500x3D, 32GB dual channel DDR5, 7900xtx + 2x 5600XT

223 GB total VRAM

I made this horror from a bunch of old pc's and hardware buried in drawers I didn't open for years. It's not much but hey, it works !

It's mainly running OMV for my movie collection along with a few other apps for my home :

- HA

- Game servers for my girlfriend and me

- OpenVPN

- qBit

- Plex for monitoring my movies and Kodi for local streaming

It has an i5-7600k, 16 gigs of RAM and a grand total of around 10TB of storage ! Most of it I got from FB marketplace or yard sales

Hoping to upgrade it very soon (maybe invest in a proper rack mounted case)

my local recycling center was doing an electronic recycling week,found this along with a PowerEdge R710, completely free

unfortunately neither one has ram, unfortunately neither one had ram, but still a cool pickup

now I just need to find ECC ram....

Was randomly scrolling Yahoo Auctions Japan and stumbled on this Starbilas 4-bay NAS. For 90 bucks, it's an absolute steal.

​Specs inside:

​Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C246D2I (worth way more than $90 alone!)

​CPU: Xeon E-2124G

​RAM: 16GB ECC UDIMM

​Bays: 4x 3.5"

​The case design is actually brilliant. 2 screws pop the outer cover off, and 2 more let the entire motherboard tray slide right out. Super easy to work on, and it fits perfectly in a 10-inch rack.

​Best part? The board still has an open PCIe 3.0x16 slot and an OCuLink port, leaving plenty of room to drop in a 10GbE card and a fast NVMe SSD later.

​Anyone ever heard of this Starbilas brand? Pretty stoked with this find!

Black vinyl covered plexiglass side panels

2x Noctua NF-F12 industrial fans (120mm, 30K RPM)

1x Corsair 140mm top fan

2x Lenovo M720q

ESXi 8: Home Assistant, Plex, and OPNsense with a X520-DA2 10GbE NICs.  Plex is using PCIE passthrough for the Lenovo’s GPU.  I’m very surprised at the performance of transcoding from it and how good it is!  No arr stack. At home I direct play everything, so not much of a resource hit at all.   

TrueNAS (bare metal): LSI 9300-8i HBA. Requires a dummy HDMI plug; otherwise, the M720q appears unable to supply enough PCIe bus voltage, causing crashes. Not a PSU issue.  Also running on 2.5GbE. 

Network switch: TP-Link Omada ES210X-M2 - Also provides the 10GbE backhaul upstairs.

Without the Noctua fans, the HDDs hit 55C+. With them, temps stay around 40 to 43C. I run them at about 10K RPM, and they’re surprisingly quiet or my tinnitus is covering them up!  I planned to put the rack in a closet with limited airflow, hence the overkill on cooling.  Works so much better in the living room. 

Yes, my M720qs are topless in the rack with 40mm 5v Nocturas blowing on the PCIE cards. :-)

Hi.
My stack:
~20 VMs via Proxmox.
All Debian aside from a few Talos machines for virtual k8s cluster

Relevant to my conversation:
One VM runs WireGuard
Another runs nginx as my reverse proxy
Another runs an instance of Authentik
Another runs grafana (and also has Ansible with a ssh key into each vm to automate docker installs, grafana alloy install for shipping logs to the grafana instance, etc)

Also have pushover integrations in some home brew apps for real time alerting already

The only port forwarded service is WireGuard. WireGuard traffic is only allowed into nginx, which then handles TLS termination, and http traffic to the other services

WireGuard isn’t on a DMZ but it is on a VLAN that all VMs are on

Traffic from the VM VLAN is blocked to my normal home network, as well as my UniFi management stuff

What is next?
I think I’m pretty secure, but to be better i’d like better visibility into what is going on in each virtual machines

Since I’m the only administrator, I tried setting up alerting via grafana -> pushover for login events to each VM, but it didn’t quite work the way I wanted to because I think it’s used for more thresholding downtime alerting versus one time things

What monitoring tools are you guys using for security?

Anyone else have any recommendations? for real-time alerting on things like login events or sudo?

Thanks

Just wanted to share my homelab, built using some old PC parts I had. The Pc case is arriving next week.

Hardware:

- AMD FX-6300

- ASUS M5A78L-M LX/BR

- 8GB DDR3 (currently only detecting 4GB)

- GTX 750 Ti

- 120GB SSD + 2TB external HDD

OS: Debian 13 with Docker and CasaOS.

I'm using for some self-hosted services:

- Home Assistant — Home automation

- Nextcloud — Personal cloud storage

- Jellyfin — Media server

I'm still working on improving the setup, optimizing resource usage, and eventually upgrading the hardware.

This is my first proper homelab, and I've learned a lot along the way.

I wanted to have a "pocket terminal" instead of a phone so I could easily use my setup on the go. I picked the ultra for the larger screen.

Proxmox. Idracs, portainer, or anything that you'd expect to run on a desktop monitor just works perfectly so far.

I have it on a wireless charging stand next to my work monitor and switch the bluetooth on the keyboard and start typing in the phone. With a VPN right at home, I pretty much have access to everything.

I don't know about longevity and all, but for the pocket computer part, it's not something I ever expected to like this much.

Just starting out, got some micro PCs, one up and running. I named everything after greek mythology which I think is fun.

Main node: Hestia, the goddess of the hearth

Then I got

Mnemosyne, titan of memory, the storage

Hermes, running Samba (not entirely sure what hermes does that mnemosyne cant do on her own but I'll find out I guess)

Dyonisus, running jellyfin

Olympus, the dashboard homepage

Argus, running uptime kuma

I plan adding:

Cleo, running Immich

Hades, password manager

Athena, lightweight LLM summarizing my dayli notes

And that underworld ferry guy running tailscale.

I'm enjoying this a lot so far!

But why do people have these switches and all these network cables in their racks even if they only have one little PC in there?

Hi guys !

I just took several days to setup an old desktop as my first home server. I put docker on it, with docker containers such as grafana and immich. I put caddy as a reverse proxy so that I generated certs with mkcert to secure my accesses. I will never plan to open any port or expose anything publicy on the internet, but I want my family to access it remotely.

I am planning to encrypt with LUKS the HDD where I store the Immich library. Also, if I setup Tailscale for the remote access, what do I need to setup things to improve security ?

Thanks!

Finally got my first 10” homelab rack setup (for now). It’s just got home network use for now, with plans to add more to it later.

Right now it’s setup as follows:

- Spectrum modem

- UCG-MAX

- Patch Panel

- Ultra 60w Switch

- power supply

- 2 APs at either end of the house (only about 1400sqft home)

Eventually I’ll add more to it to make it more complicated. All pretty much all printed in PETG minus the metal rails (Rockpath on Amazon)

Super excited to finally have a nice clean Ubiquiti setup. A lot nicer than the modem + Asus router just sitting on a shelf.

As the title states... whats your workhorse? the device that should be dead but ain't? I'll go first

Device Model: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB
Serial Number: S1DHNSAFA00236Y
Firmware Version: EXT0CB6Q
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

I'm only willing to post this now because the unRAID box is no longer controlling plex and download duties, so this 500GB drive will remain plugged in, doing quite literally nothing unless i force it to just overwrite itself forever via script and check its SMART data every week til it dies.

But Samsung claimed the 850 EVO was rated for 150TB, and claimed it was double the 840 EVO despite the 840 EVO never having a number formally announced. So I estimate I've gotten 378TB of writes out of a 75W rated drive, or 504% its rating.

I'm putting together a new router and I got an Intel X520-DA2 NIC NIC. On the WAN port I'm plugging a fs.com SFP-10GM-T-30 transceiver, which is sold as "Intel compatible". The transceiver supports multi-rate (right now my modem has a 2.5 G port and in the future I'll upgrade to fibre 8 Gbps).

As a simple test, I plugged the transceiver and connected it to a 1 G port on my switch just for very basic testing. It gets an IP, I don't have to do the module override. When it comes to performance though, things aren't great. I'm getting 1 Gbps D and ~50 Mbps U. I understand why that is, and the solution is to enable IEEE 802.3x flow control so the NIc doesn't hammer the transceiver at 10 G while it can only drain at 1 G, so we need the backpressure to avoid tons of dropped packets.

I'm on VyOS, so I configured the flow control with

# sudo ethtool -A eth2 rx on tx on
# sudo ethtool -a eth2
Pause parameters for eth2:
Autonegotiate:  off
RX:             on
TX:             on

So I'm thinking it's enabled. New speed test, same result. I honestly don't think the transceiver is sending any pause frames:

# sudo ethtool -S eth2 | grep -iE "xon|xoff|pause"
     tx_flow_control_xon: 0
     rx_flow_control_xon: 0
     tx_flow_control_xoff: 0
     rx_flow_control_xoff: 0



sudo ethtool -m eth2
        Identifier                                : 0x03 (SFP)
        Extended identifier                       : 0x04 (GBIC/SFP defined by 2-wire interface ID)
        Connector                                 : 0x22 (RJ45)
        Transceiver codes                         : 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x00 0x00
        Transceiver type                          : Passive Cable
        Encoding                                  : 0x06 (64B/66B)
        BR, Nominal                               : 10300MBd
        Rate identifier                           : 0x02 (8/4/2G Rx Rate_Select only)
        Length (SMF,km)                           : 0km
        Length (SMF)                              : 0m
        Length (50um)                             : 0m
        Length (62.5um)                           : 0m
        Length (Copper)                           : 30m
        Length (OM3)                              : 0m
        Passive Cu cmplnce.                       : 0x00 (unspecified) [SFF-8472 rev10.4 only]
        Vendor name                               : FS
        Vendor OUI                                : 00:1b:21
        Vendor PN                                 : SFP-10GM-T-30
        Vendor rev                                : A
        Option values                             : 0x00 0x3a
        Option                                    : RX_LOS implemented
        Option                                    : TX_FAULT implemented
        Option                                    : TX_DISABLE implemented
        Option                                    : RATE_SELECT implemented
        BR margin, max                            : 0%
        BR margin, min                            : 0%
        Vendor SN                                 : XXXXXXXXXXX
        Date code                                 : 260605

1. Does anyone have experience with this particular NIC+transceiver combination?
2. I could return the transceiver and get a new one. Any recommendations?
3. Should I keep the transceiver and just get a different NIC like an Intel X710-DA2?
4. Should I diagnose more? Am I missing some configuration option?

Cheers!

I wanted to build a Proxmox server with 16GB DDR5 but that is too expensive so I looked at 16GB DDR4 and that is still too expensive so I looked at 16GB DDR3 and that is still too expensive so I looked at 16GB DDR2 and that is still too expensive so I had to use 4GB DDR1 which maxes out at 1GB per stick which means I can only experiment with it.

Edit: DDR1 LGA 775 motherboards only have USB 2.0 so I need to add a USB 3.0 card for the bootable USB. Does USB mean U傻逼?

My homelab lives in my bedroom, I want it fully fanless and basically inaudible. Only thing I've compromised on is the Terra Master 4 Bay DAS, attached to a Raspberry Pi.

Many years ago built a gaming PC and its no longer in use. I'm debating to sell it or repurpose it as a new server build.

The only things that are viable for my silent goals from my old build are a 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD and my 32 GB of DDR4 Ram. But as you know, these parts are the most valuable right now.

CPU        Intel Core i3-14100T, 4C/8T, 35 W   142 €
MoBo       ASUS Prime H610I-PLUS D4-CSM        105 €
Case       Akasa Euler CMX                     259 €
RAM        2 × 16 GB DDR4                      0 €  
SSD        1 TB M.2 NVMe                       0 €  
Network    USB-Adaptor, 2,5 GbE                20 €

So it's about 500€ (560$) for my upgrade. Most of it is spent on the case and PSU.

Planning to use it as Linux Server for generally everything I can think of in my home network, except local LLMs.

My new machine would take on all the heavy workloads and could wake from LAN only when needed – or it'll be a drop in replacement for my Raspberry, if there are too many always on workloads.

What do you guys think? Is it a dumb idea to go fanless? Am I too restricted by my surroundings?

Thanks & Peace - C

I have a VLAN.30 (subnet 30) I have been trying to get working for weeks now. My lan subnet is .20.
Access point is openwrt, through a ubiquiti 2.5 flex mini, into a zima board 2 OPNsense router running through proxmox.

I have used LLMs to try and help me figure out what the hell is going on and I just cannot get vlans to work. I get them to work but they only hand out subnet 20 ip addresses. When I get them to hand out .30 ip addresses the whole lan goes down. I have tried tagging all traffic so there is no “untagged@ traffic for unifi to try and manage between openwrt and opnsense. I have set up firewalls correctly and everything.

I have followed openwrt literature on how to create a “guest” vlan and it still all goes down.

Has anyone had this experience before? I just want to get my network working and it has been nothing but trouble. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. I’ll answer any questions if it helps

I picked up this desktop tower-style storage server for a steal from my local state surplus auction. It's an HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10+. All it was missing was RAM, so I threw in 16GB of ECC DDR4. It was pretty picky about the RAM. I also tossed in an M.2 500G SSD and installed TrueNAS on it. It was set up for SATA drives, but I wanted this to be budget-friendly, so I installed a PCIe SAS HBA (shoutout u/Jerhaad for the free HBA!) and a bunch of second-hand SAS hard drives (six of them, 4 2.5" and 2 3.5".) Most of the drives are 2TB, but through a shipping error in my favor, one of the drives is 4TB (one of the 3.5" drives).

That's my first question; I understand that in order to put all of the drives in the same RAID array, they all need to be the same size and will default to the smallest size if there are one or more that are bigger than the rest. Is there any practical way for me to make use of that extra 2TB? Furthermore, what specific kind of RAID would be best for my configuration? Are there any more considerations I haven't thought of for this build? I plan to use this as a simple backup for my main PC, and maybe as a media server once that's set up. This is my first NAS and I mostly just want to make sure I'm getting as much out of this machine as possible.

Hi! I’m troubleshooting automatic restart on a DIGITUS DN-170110 (600VA/360W), connected via USB to an Ubuntu mini-server running NUT 2.8.4. The UPS identifies as MEC / MEC0003.

During a power outage, I run upsmon -c fsd (manually or using automated script scenario). The server shuts down cleanly, and then UPS switches off its outputs after the configured delay (offdelay).

That part works in 100% cases.

However, when AC returns, sometimes the UPS automatically restores power to its outputs and other times it stays completely dark (even the relay doesn't click) until I physically toggle its power button off and then on.

I’ve tested waiting from a few minutes to almost three hours before restoring AC. Tests can succeed or fail under apparently identical conditions.

Before coming to upsmon -c fsd I tried using shutdown.return (which should do exactly what I need). but unfortunately after this command it doesn't wake up ever.

At this point I'm out of option. I literally tested every possible tweaks I could. Could it be a firmware glitch? If so, I didn't find any options to update it.

By the way, manual barely describes its capabilities. They only say this "Auto-restart: Automatic switch-off function after battery discharge, automatic switch-on as soon as the mains connection is supplied with power again"

https://products.digitus.com/en/Network-and-Server-Cabinets/Uninterruptible-Power-Supply-UPS/Computer-and-Peripherals/All-in-one-UPS-600VA-360W-LED.html

I would appreciate any help on this.

Hey everyone,

Looking for some practical advice on memory upgrade for local LLM inference on my single-socket EPYC setup.

Current Setup:

CPU: AMD EPYC 7V12 (64-core Rome)

Motherboard: Supermicro single-socket board 8 ram slots

GPU: RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM)

RAM: 128GB total -2x 64GB HPE DDR4-3200 ECC RDIMMs (P/N: P20504-001 / P11446-1A1, 2Rx4, PC4-25600R)

Primary Workload: CPU+GPU offloaded LLM inference (llama.cpp / LM Studio / Ollama) running Llama 3.3 70B and DeepSeek quants.

I have a clear bottle neck as I only have two slots populated. I want to populate all 8 slots for better performance and will probably sell my 2x64gb HPE stick.

Is doubling capacity to 256GB 8x32 worth the extra out-of-pocket spend for LLM workloads, or am I dumb to get 8x16 to give me 128gbs and avoid additional cost. Also I understand that HPE ram is high quality. Are there any bargains basement brands or sites I should check out to find deals on hardware like this?

Thanks in advance

Also worth mentioning I was lucky and bought this hardware a few years ago for another project before AI got crazy and don't have bottomless pockets to upgrade it. It's the best investment I ever made 🤣