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 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.

I am currently stuck in the dilemma of looking up too many video's and not actually taking the first step.

I want to create a home lab that is necessary for my needs and making sure to future proof it without it being a overkill.

What I plan to do is:

Experiment on networking side, create vlans, trunking and wish to have a IPS on router.
Probably have my own NAS in the future (have as a future proof option)

I'm mainly more leaning into the networking side of things and getting a hand on experiment and probably practice my self to pentest my own network. (I am a beginner in Cybersecurity).

I'd prefer cisco related stuff because I really like playing around with their IOS. But it's not a requirement, just preferred. Still willing to see other options.

So I am here to ask the experts.

I was originally thinking of something like a Mikrotik router, specifically MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN. Which I have heard good things about, but it might be a overkill on what I actually need for the moment.

Switches I was thinking about something like a Cisco 1300 8 port or Some kind of a Ubiquity switch or just a TP-Link since they tend to be a little more affordable compared to Cisco.

And then I need a AP, if I do take the non-wirless router option. Which I am not too familiar with but Ubiquity is usually a good option.

Otherwise I had a big thought about UniFi Dream Router 7 which does actually contain almost everything you'd need in a router including IPS and IDS, including the Wifi.

But please let me hear what you recommend and what you think would be a solid option on what I need! Thank you in advance!

After spending weeks getting everything set up I really never want to have to start again. where do you keep your backups for all the services you built? I put copies on my TrueNAS but want another one just in case.

I’ve found 4-bay USB SATA docks for as little as $50, but are there any USB docks or enclosures that support at least 4 SAS HDDs for around the same price? I want to use them with a mini PC as a NAS. The mini PC only has one M.2 slot and one SATA connection, so I need a USB-connected enclosure with its own power supply to power the drives. The main reason I’m looking at SAS drives is that I can get refurbished SAS HDDs for roughly half the price of equivalent storage, with a 12-month warranty.

Requirements:
Supports at least 4 SAS HDDs
Connects to the mini PC via USB
Has its own power supply
Exposes each drive individually to the OS (no hardware RAID required)

Cooling and noise aren’t concerns, and used or older hardware is fine. Are there any affordable options around 50, or is that unrealistic for SAS? If 50 isn’t realistic, what price range should I expect to pay? Any budget-friendly DIY ideas are welcome, too.

Thanks!

I recently started to host vault warden in my homelab and was wondering 2 things. 1, Are cloudflare tunnels safe to use to access vaultwarden?, and 2 What cloudflare settings keep this setup safe? Thanks.

Picture is for algorithm and is unrelated

Hey guys!

My job is doing an infrastructure upgrade and they are basically going to ewaste all the old equipment. I've already asked and they would basically give them to me if I wanted them. My question is any or all of these worth taking to put in a home lab? My one concern is since its enterprise equipment they are relatively loud and guzzle electricity. Provided I can get past that are these worth it?

The equipment is:

4x dell 7920 rack

5x dell r740

And 12 old monitors from 2014.

About a year ago I decided I wanted to attempt a career change (I currently manage a gym) before I get so old it becomes impractical. I started looking into learning some tech with the hope to start at an entry level job and over time eventually choose a career path and then climb the ladder within that space. To that goal, I've earned my Network+ and Security+ certifications, and used a few websites to teach myself some beginner level python, SQL, and basic commands to navigate CLIs, among other things.

I recently stumbled on a grant for up to $2000 to build out a home lab, and the grant is awesome because it specifically mentions that it is open to students and those looking to change careers. As part of the application, I have to list the equipment and cost of everything I would purchase with the money. At the moment, I'm barely scraping by and do most of my work on my 5 year old laptop, so purchasing my own homelab equipment isn't somethhing I've ever really considered. I'm aware there's a lot you can do with cheap or even free virtualization software, but up to this point I've chosen to spend my time learning other low level tech concepts, so I haven't gotten to play around with any of those programs yet.

Now that I'm really looking into the possibility of building a home lab for the first time, I'm realizing I have no idea what I'm doing. I mean, I passed the net+ and I have a basic theoretical understanding of what routers, switches, servers, UPSs, VPNs, firewalls, different types of cables, etc are, but looking at people discussing these things in depth on reddit, I realize I'm in way over my head. I'm really only looking for equipment that would help me learn the practical skills I would need to know in a networking role, so I would assume I don't need anything crazy, but at the same time I'd like a setup that I can use to imitate the kind of work I'd be doing as a networking professional. I've got little to no understanding of what specs I should be looking for. what constiutes a good price, what brands are most trusted by the community... all that kind of stuff. Does anybody have any advice on where to begin?

I'm starting my homelabbing journey with an old dell optiplex 790 with i5 second gen intel cpu, 16gb ddr3 ram and 128gb sata ssd with 500gb hardrive. Is it enough? if it is how would i start with my journey? Do I install proxmox or plain linux server (I would probably choose ubuntu server)?

How long would you think it would be till i need an upgrade? or another pc?

I am running pfSense 2.9.0 and I noticed some very strange behavior that I am not sure how to sort out exactly.
I have a device assigned a Mac address of 22:2f:d0:ae:02:57.
That Mac is statically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.45.
Problem is I am seeing that Mac being used by several different IP addresses as can be seen above. My DHCP pool is .100-.200 so the IPs are being dynamically allocated
I also double checked this by running a packet capture on 22:2f:d0:ae:02:57 and I am seeing several IPs assigned to that Mac addresss in the packet capture. Not sure how this is possible.
I cleared DHCP leases, ARP, rebooted, and this behavior is still present.
This is only happening on this one Mac address.
Any ideas what is going on here?

So, we've just bought a house and now have a proper garage. I am looking at putting a much bigger server cabinet in the garage with a fibre cable into the house to my office.

I have a Dell Opitplex 3070 with an i5 9500 but I want to expand the home lab to something like 3x Lenovo Thinkcentre. 1) Low power consumption 2) To learn High Availability 3)To expand what I'm running.

What are some cost friendly computers I could buy off ebay to match the hardware across all 3 for Proxmox HA? I am thinking 3x LENOVO THINKSTATION P320 TINY.

Any suggestions be welcome and appreciated! :)

A couple of years ago, my base M1 MacBook Air (8 GB) developed screen lines, and eventually the entire internal display died. Instead of trashing or trading it in for pennies, I decided to repurpose it as a dedicated, low-power homelab node.

I set up my typical headless stack: Arr stack, self-hosted n8n running on Colima, Home Assistant + MQTT in Docker, and a native Jellyfin instance. Except for Jellyfin (which took advantage of the Apple Silicon Media Engine), everything ran strictly on the CPU, leaving the GPU and Neural Engine completely idle.

Recently, I decided to set up an NVR for my 2688×1520 (approx. 4 MP) camera running full-resolution detection directly on the main feed.

Phase 1: Vanilla Frigate on Docker (via Colima)

I deployed Frigate 0.18 inside Docker. Because running pure CPU detection is heavy on an 8 GB base machine, I set up the apple-silicon-detector sidecar to offload detection to the GPU.

• Setting this up wasn't plug-and-play: exporting the YOLOv9 model manually required custom troubleshooting to avoid architecture mismatches.
• Results: The ZMQ detector ran at ~33.39ms inference speed.
• The issue: The fanless M1 was pinned on GPU utilization 24/7. While the chassis didn’t enter emergency thermal throttling, constantly stressing the GPU on a closed-lid, fanless laptop running non-stop was far from ideal for a long-term homelab box.

Phase 2: Native Apple Silicon with Fregata

I came across Fregata (https://fregata.app/), which runs native Frigate under the hood on macOS instead of through virtualization layers.

The migration was straightforward—it pulled over configurations cleanly and automatically downloaded optimized CoreML models on first launch:

• Detector Inference Speed: Dropped from ~33.39ms to 2.45ms (over a 13x speedup).
• Hardware Distribution: Instead of slamming one compute engine, Fregata maps tasks natively:
  • Neural Engine (ANE): Primary object detection (running at 2.45ms with detector CPU at ~1.2%).
  • GPU: Offloaded for enrichments (Face Recognition at ~43.97ms, License Plate Recognition at ~49.28ms).
  • Media Engine: Hardware video decoding/transcoding.
  • CPU: Idles around ~3.7% total system usage.
• Chassis Thermals: Without the GPU constantly pegged for base detection, the laptop stays completely cool to the touch.

It also integrates directly with my Dockerized Home Assistant + Mosquitto broker setup over MQTT, and semantic text-based clip searching works out of the box with near-zero latency.

If you have an old or cosmetically damaged Apple Silicon Mac lying around, using native macOS binaries that target the ANE/Media Engine turns it into an unbeatable, near-silent NVR node.

Hi all,

I’m trying to build a home library of hard drives. The idea is to download a few large datasets from Hugging Face and run them through my RTX 5090.

I tested the setup with an 8 TB IronWolf Pro. I paid €370 for it, and now it probably costs over €450. A new 30 TB Seagate is over €2,000, and I’d need around 20 to 30 drives. That’s way too much for a homelab whose only purpose is my own research.

Has anyone built a home NAS (really a DAS) by connecting the PC directly through a SAS card to a rack of 20, 30 or even 50 drives? And is there an easier and cheaper way to make this work?

Thanks!

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?

So i’m about to set up a homelab for the first time and after some reading i think i’m done with the folder structure. The setup is a prodesk 400 g6 + Synology ds414. Anything to add, tips and tricks?

.
├── home/
│ └── username
│ └── docker
│ ├── stacks
│ │ ├── arr
│ │ │ ├── flaresolverr
│ │ │ ├── gluetun
│ │ │ ├── lidarr
│ │ │ ├── prowlarr
│ │ │ ├── qbittorrent
│ │ │ ├── radarr
│ │ │ ├── seerr
│ │ │ ├── sonarr
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── audiobookshelf
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── dockhand
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── homepage
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── jellyfin
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── metube
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── navidrome
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ ├── romm
│ │ │ └── compose.yaml
│ │ └── scrutiny
│ │ └── compose.yaml
│ └── appdata
│ ├── audiobookshelf
│ ├── dockhand
│ ├── flaresolverr
│ ├── gluetun
│ ├── homepage
│ ├── jellyfin
│ ├── lidarr
│ ├── metube
│ ├── navidrome
│ ├── prowlarr
│ ├── qbittorrent
│ ├── radarr
│ ├── scrutiny
│ ├── seerr
│ └── sonarr
└── mnt/
└── nas
├── backups
│ ├── appdata_backups
│ └── system_backups
└── data
├── downloads
│ ├── completed
│ │ ├── audiobooks
│ │ ├── isos
│ │ ├── movies
│ │ ├── music
│ │ ├── other
│ │ ├── podcasts
│ │ ├── roms
│ │ └── tv
│ ├── incomplete
│ │ ├── audiobooks
│ │ ├── isos
│ │ ├── movies
│ │ ├── music
│ │ ├── other
│ │ ├── podcasts
│ │ ├── roms
│ │ └── tv
│ └── torrents
├── media
│ ├── audiobooks
│ ├── movies
│ │ ├── christmas
│ │ ├── family
│ │ └── movies
│ ├── music
│ ├── podcasts
│ ├── tv
│ │ ├── family
│ │ └── movies
│ └── youtube
├── isos
│ └── cachyos-desktop-linux-260809.iso
└── roms
├── ps2
├── psx
├── nes
├── snes
└── switch

Good day, people of r/homelab!

TL;DR: What should I look out for when choosing cat6 cables for Ethernet runs throughout a house, especially when some will be carrying PoE?

Long story short, my missus and I are finally building our first house. And being the engineer wannabe that I am, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to go a little overboard with the home network.

The plan is pretty simple: I want every room, every planned CCTV location, and even potential future CCTV locations to have their own Ethernet runs going directly back to a central server/network room. Some will be regular Ethernet, while others will need PoE for cameras, access points, and potentially other devices down the road.

Since the house is still being built, I figured now is the best time to get everything wired properly rather than regret it and start tearing into walls a few years from now.

I've been browsing Cat6 cables from different manufacturers, and the price differences are baffling. Some cables marketed as Cat6 cost 10 times more prr meters than others.

I understand that not all cat6 cables are created equal, but I'm having trouble figuring out what actually matters and what's just marketing.

I'm not necessarily looking for the cheapest option. I'm perfectly happy to spend more if there's a meaningful difference in quality, reliability, or safety. I just don't want to pay 10 times as much for something that performs essentially the same.

I did try asking AI about this, but the answers didn't exactly inspire much confidence. And considering these cables will probably be sitting inside my walls for the next couple of decades, I'd rather not base the decision entirely on what a chatbot tells me.

So I figured I'd come here and ask the actual professionals and hobbyists who have experience working with this stuff. Nothing beats advice from people who've actually installed, maintained, and occasionally regretted their own cabling decisions.

I'd like to get this right the first time, since replacing cables buried inside walls isn't exactly something I look forward to doing.

Any advice, recommendations, or lessons learned from your own installations would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

My home automation/NVR machine runs Windows for Blue Iris and Docker Engine inside Ubuntu WSL2 for a few supporting services. We originally ran Docker on Windows, but moved to Docker Engine in Ubuntu after that setup stopped working reliably.

An unexpected reboot exposed a recovery gap: the containers had restart policies, but Ubuntu wasn't being started while the Windows account was logged off.

The useful clue was Task Scheduler event 332. Our "Start Ubuntu WSL" task was repeatedly skipped because its user wasn't logged on. The creation script requested password logon, but the installed task was behaving like an interactive-only task.

We repaired the task and added a post-registration check of its installed principal: LogonType must be Password, and UserId must match the intended account. The startup script wakes Ubuntu, discovers its current IP, refreshes Windows portproxy entries, and keeps a foreground WSL process alive. Docker is configured separately to start inside Linux, then container restart policies handle the containers.

After the repair, Docker responded and the three active containers were running. At the point described in the article, we still needed a logged-off reboot test to prove the full recovery path. The script also has limitations: a fixed ten-second startup wait and warning-only HTTP checks.

I wrote up the failure, code samples, troubleshooting commands, and sanitized scripts here (my own blog):

https://iliagilderman.substack.com/p/making-docker-in-wsl-recover-after

I'm interested in the architecture tradeoff: if Windows must stay for Blue Iris, would you keep WSL plus scheduled tasks and forwarding rules, use a conventional Linux VM, or move the containers to a small separate Linux host? Have I added more operational complexity than this saves?

Disclosure: I used AI assistance to draft and edit the article and prepare this summary; the setup and troubleshooting are from my own system.

Hiya folks!

In the past, I’ve used Draw.io when making network diagrams. Homelable looks pretty neat, but it also looks very Ai-assisted, and I’ve hear one too many horror stories of insecure dependencies and unnecessary telemetry. Does anyone know of any third party audits, or have firsthand knowledge by poking around the codebase/network logs?

(Again, looks neat, no insult intended by asking)

Install Adgaurd Home as LXC directly on proxmox or create a VM for debian + docker, Which is preferred? This will serve whole home network.

This is an optiplex micro, and I have another wyse 5070 as well that I will likely put a backup adguard on, just unsure if it will have proxmox or just debian + docker

I also have a pi3 i have been running it on, but its using a microsd so figured if get off of it - should I just leave it on here?

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

I'm testing a tiny side business: renting 4 mini PCs that live in my house to vetted customers for dev work (remote desktop and SSH). Home connection is 1 Gig fiber from a big US ISP, and it's the only decent option at my address.
My ISP's terms bar renting out "use of or access to" the service, so I don't want customers' internet traffic leaving from my home IP.

The plan:

Customers connect in through Cloudflare Tunnels (no open ports at home)

Everything else the machines send goes over WireGuard from my router to a VPS in Dallas, one public IPv4 per machine

Fails closed: if the tunnel drops, the rental VLAN has no internet

Port 25 blocked, per-machine speed caps, connection metadata logging, auto-quarantine on scan patterns

Customers are card verified

Questions:
1. Has anyone run something like this? Did your ISP ever notice or care?
2. Which VPS providers are actually OK with this use?
3. What holes am I missing?

I know colo is the clean answer. It's not an option for me right now, so I'm trying to do the next best thing.

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