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

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. :-)

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)

Setting up my CCNP lab. Got these for free from a local provider (thanks!) and will pair them with two Cisco routers and GNS3 dedicated server.

• WS-C2960-24TC-L V03
• WS-C2960-24TC-S V08
• WS-C2960-24TC-S V06
• WS-C2960-48TC-L V09
• WS-C3560-48TS-S V02
• WS-C3560-48TS-S V02
• WS-C3560-48TS-S V02
• WS-C3560G-48TS-S V03

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

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.

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.

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....

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.

I was browsing Kleinanzeigen (german Craigslist) yesterday and randomly stumbled upon this Dell T440 which apparently came from a company that bankrupted a year ago.
The seller who was a former employee had more or less no idea what it was, and what the specs were.

I wasn’t really planning on buying something like this so i offered 450€ for fun, but he actually agreed

Now i have this thing sitting on my desk and I’m not quite sure what to do with this lol. My homelab hardware so far is just an old laptop running Jellyfin and Frigate.

The specs are:

1x Xeon Silver 4208
32 GB 2400MHz RAM
5x 2 TB HDDs
IBM HH9 LTO-9 Tape Drive

If anybody has an idea for a good or interesting use case i would be glad to hear

Cheers

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 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.

we moved to new home so i setup my home lab temprorly. just works

ont for isp connection. my opewrt s3 2100 router, Dell wise tin client from dns and torrent client. with direct attach battery backup dell pc is workstation for gaming using parsec. 😭👍

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.

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

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

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!

Improving day by day, now i have a HP elite desk 800 g4 mini with an i5 8500, 16gb RAM 2 HGST HDDS for Jellyfin and Immich, added an iPad air gen 1 with space desk so i can monitor my Proxmox server power consumption with Home assistant.

That's all if anyone has more ideas of what i should add i love improving.

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 need to make a place for all my dreams to come true. I like the 10” racks but the options I’m finding are tiny or enterprisey. I was looking at audio video cabinets but I’m still on the fence. Any recommendations?

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.

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?