Thought I'd share my little home lab setup. Apologies for the reflections in the photo, and yes, the cable management is still a work in progress! 😂

It's been a bit of an ongoing project, and what started out as a few mini PCs has slowly turned into this monster.

Currently running a five-node Proxmox cluster, a couple of dedicated DNS machines, a separate Proxmox Backup Server, UniFi networking and a load of self-hosted services.

Everything from Home Assistant and Plex to Jellyfin, the usual *arr apps, Tdarr and various other bits and pieces I've accumulated along the way.

Most of it is built around second-hand Dell Micro PCs. I've been gradually upgrading the hardware, tweaking power consumption and trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of these tiny machines.

There's still plenty I want to change, particularly the cabling and rack layout. I'm also planning a custom 10-inch rack build, because apparently I can't leave things alone for five minutes.

It's definitely become more of an addiction than a necessity at this point! 😂

Anyway, thought you lot might appreciate it. Always interested to see what everyone else is doing with their mini PCs!

Hey, since I'm in the topic of homelabs since last year, I decided to share my mini homelab. I have a HP ProDesk 400 G3 Mini with an Intel Core i5-7500T CPU since September. I previously had an ASUS K-50D Laptop but because it was the models that were desoldering the GPU by itself because the older AMD GPU's were preeeeetty bad. Then I had an Lenovo G510 laptop with an Intel Core i5 4th gen CPU (I don't remember the exact model :/) It's still working but since it's a laptop with good memories to me i didn't want it to just sit in a niche below my desk so I since my birthday is in September i bought the HP. Also because of my birthday i bought a TP-LINK SG108E switch because my old very-cheap switch was 5-port and I didn't have enough ports so i bought the new switch that has 8 ports. Overall I'm very satisfied with the setup, I know it isn't very tidy or clean (it's sitting there since September) but I wanted to show you all my setup. Tell me want you want about it!

Anyone have suggestions for power strip, bench power supply etc?

My homelab lacked monitoring and I had this old ESP8266 around and decided to use it has a separate monitoring device for all my services. If something goes offline it sends a webhook to my discord monitoring channel.

Looking to get a small HP Mini / Dell Micro or Lenovo small PC that is reasonably modern (last 5 years) and can take 96GB RAM or more. Ideally DDR4 as that is still cheap. My intention is to run ESXi or Proxmox on it

Hey r/minilab

I've been building WallWatch, a free Android app to monitor and manage pfSense® Community Edition firewalls from your phone — live dashboard (CPU/RAM/temp/uptime), gateway and interface status, firewall rules, NAT, DHCP, services, OpenVPN/IPsec/WireGuard, home-screen widgets, and background monitoring with alerts when a gateway drops or a cert is about to expire. No account, no ads, no analytics — it only talks to the firewall address you give it.

Before Google lets it go public on Play, it has to sit in closed testing with real testers for 14 days — that's the part I need help with.

What's involved:

- Send me the Gmail address you use on the Play Store

- I add you to the tester list (usually within a day)

- Install it from the Play testing link, open it, and just use it for 14 days

You don't need a pfSense box to help — there's a built-in demo mode with sample data, so you can poke around every screen without connecting to anything real. If you do run pfSense, even better — try it against your own firewall and tell me what's broken or confusing.

Full details and the sign-up steps: https://wallwatch.hackthelab.uk/testers.html

Happy to answer anything here, or come say hi on IRC: #wallwatch on Libera.Chat. Thanks

* WallWatch is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Netgate or Rubicon Communications, LLC. pfSense® is a registered trademark of Rubicon Communications, LLC.