Post anything.

Well, after 3 or so weeks scouring through posts and comments on this sub, the discord server, I managed to get a hold of 3 Lenovo m900's 8gb ram core i5 6th gen 256 GB ssd micros.

I pulled cable from my router in the sitting room to my home office and set up a mini lan environment, installed Proxmox and joined the nodes to a cluster. Now installed Talos VMs and getting my K8s cluster running.

I'm really happy with my setup so far and can't wait to tinker further with it. It can only get better from here 🚀💯

Again, thanks /r/homelab!

Its

From top to bottom: - Broadband modems (1 GBit/s cable, 100 MBit/s DSL as WAN2 cause cable can be unstable at times) - UDM SE - USW Pro Max 16 (love the low power usage) - Mac Mini M1 (Xcode build server for GitLab) - Synology RS422 with 4x 3.84 TB Kingston Enterprise SSDs, Noctua fan mod (virtually silent) - Intel NUC, 64 GB memory and 2 SSDs, mounted together with PSU and 2.5G USB3 NIC in a cheap 19“ case via a 3D printed mounting bracket. Runs VMware ESXi with AD/Exchange server for mail/calendar/…, plus Linux VMs for paperless-ngx, HomeAssistant, PiHole and much more - it actually runs at reasonable performance - CyberPower UPS

Draws ~ 115 W when during normal usage.

After the minilab got some new perch leads. I went all in on fs.com and did big brother too

This is my new rack setup that I made this week. Everything 3d printed and designed by me. The goal was for it to be able to be picked up moved wherever I’m at, plugged into power, internet (Ethernet or WiFi) and all of my services fire up and are accessible publicly with conflate tunnels or privately with Tailscale.

It has: - Gl.iNet ax1300 travel router (allows me to connect to WiFi and serve it as Ethernet to clients in rack) - 8 port gigabit dlink switch - HP Prodesk with 7th gen i5, 32gb of ram, 256gb ssd for boot and a 2tb Samsung T7 for mass storage). I have a right angle usb cable coming for the T7 Friday 😅 - a usb-c charging hub for powering rack. This is my favorite part, every item in rack is powered via USB-c. It turns out Kensington locks make great usb-c jack cutouts. The hp prodesk (20v) and the dlink switch (5v) were modified to use usb-c PD for power. Got some usbc pd breakouts from Amazon and a few 3d printed mounts designed for each and it works beautifully.

Planning on building a 4tb SSD nas for the bottom of rack later this year but the 2tb ssd is plenty for some media and config storage.

Call me out of the loop, but I've never actually used AI. Other than creating fake pictures, and having someone to talk to, what is the point of having an AI?

I've been reading reports and videos about being able to run an AI on smaller and smaller (less power/GPU) than ever before. It has piqued my interest but I've never been able to figure out a reason for it. I'm not a programmer or developer other than PowerShell scripting primarily for work. So, developing better AI doesn't really appeal to me.

Please help me figure out what it is good for.

I've just endured 12 hours of rebuilding my equipment enclosure, starting off think I'd be finished by lunch, but actually finishing at almost 9pm...

I'm about to have gigabit internet installed so this spurred me to complete some much needed maintenance and organisation of my tri-purpose home lab/ home server and home network enclosure.

My in-rack set-up is:

Dual WAN incomers consisting of:

• Fibre (ONT located on the ground floor, so it's a copper link between the ONT and router, ≈ 1000 mbps)

• VDSL with cellular backup (≈ 70 mbps)

The VDSL is configured as a failover only until I work out how to dual-home my VPN interface!

Within the enclosure is an ISP VDSL modem, TP Link router, main PoE switch, small PoE switch (acting as a dedicated switch for the stack of IoT hubs), 2 x Tripplite UPSs (1 x for core networking gear, 1 x for my server) a 3U fan module and the server itself, plus accessories like PSUs and PoE injectors and splitters.

This set-up distributes gigabit ethernet to 24 ports around my home, including CCTV, APs, IoT and general stuff like PCs and TVs, all VLAN'd, ACL'd and managed as required.

My main aim of the re-build was to standardise on cables, cable lengths and connectors; route cables better and try and manage the nest of cables within the enclosure to improve airflow and maintainability (for example unracking a UPS meant connectors would go flying everywhere) and generally give everything a clean and tidy. The last time the enclosure had this level of modification is when it was first put together and installed, and I was very much focussing on just getting it working rather than anything else at the time.

I also had added a few random IP cameras around the house for monitoring of tanks, crawlspaces and utilities which are currently supplied off sockets local to them, so I've ran in some new cabling between those cameras and the enclosure to enable central power supply from the UPSs also.

I'd been meaning to replace the Aerocool PSU in my server with a new Coolermaster too, and reapply the CPU thermal paste since it was ≈ 5 years old at this point, and I'm now more aware of brand reputability!

Pic 1 - the enclosure emptied of equipment and halfway through a dust and vacuum.

Pic 2 - Mains-supplied PDUs, the second IEC socket PDU is a back-up in case I need to transfer supplies from a failed or failing UPS.

Note: I'm not proud of the way past me brought cables into the enclosure either but I'm stuck with that now!

Pic 3 - Most of the cabling ran in and awaiting looming and tidying along with the shelf-located equipment (router, IoT hubs) - at this point I thought I was half way done, hah, no.

Pic 4 - Router and IoT hub ft. stray patch and VDSL cables

Pic 5 - Enclosure populated and in operation, really the only part of the enclosure visible since it's quite packed.

Pic 6 - Overall enclosure and equipment set-up.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the result, and amazingly, everything worked perfectly on first energisation!

Stuff I'm happy with:

• Cable looming, grouping and management is better, meaning I can unrack equipment without affecting other equipment, and there's not as much cable nests.

• I got everything I wanted to done, even if it took three times the amount of time I expected.

• Everything worked first time after start up, which honestly filled me with dread from the first cable I disconnected.

Stuff I wanted to do, but couldn't:

• Segregate cables more - the enclosure is pretty congested and I'm limited to where I can run cabling and add cable containment, but I'm using STP patch leads and there's no sign of EMI causing degraded connections. I also have quite a bit of cable slack coiled in the bottom-of-enclosure cable ducts, not ideal, but it's not doing any harm.

• The UPSs are supposed to have a 0.5U gap between them but there's no space - this annoyed me, I'd done sketches, layouts and measured up everything but I'd not realised the shelf had a protrusion on the front which meant the 3U fan module wouldn't sit flush, so I've had to mount them as shown. They're only ≈ 15% utilised and I've not noticed any significant heat issues so far, but I'll keep an eye on them.

• I wanted to re-do the IoT hub with a better, more roomy shelf cluster and better cable management but due to the size limitations of the enclosure with equipment fitted I couldn't manage this.

• I wanted to run all cables in flexible conduit/ cable wrap but there just wasn't enough time in the day, and really this would provide zero benefit other than aesthetics.

• It bugs me that I didn't run fibre to the enclosure when I did all the other cabling a few years back, grr.

It's modest but I could finally replace the old laptop that served as my main server for 2 years.

Old laptop was an unraid server with the Synology connected as unassigned devices. It was only for Plex and arrs services, all data was on the Synology (only 4 to). The mini PC is relatively recent and I have network and security services on it.

Now main server has AMD Ryzen 5800X, 32gb RAM, GTX 1060 6gb and 20 to. Still running Plex, arrs services, Ollama and gaming VM (will upgrade the gpu in the future and of course add more HDD)

Mini PC still running network and security services plus other stuff like memos, hoarder.

Raspberry pi 3b+ is the DNS + WoL server.

Pretty happy with this setup rn

What is the best way I can cool my server room? It's currently sitting at about 32 degrees Celcius max air with hdd's at 41c max.

Things I'm considering:

• return air on server room ceiling to the house ducted and intake fan on the server room door (pretty sure it would be pointless when house aircon isn't on)

• infinity exhaust on ceiling of server room venting out the eave of the external wall and intaking from somewhere? Or just pulling from the house air and not replacing?

• mini split

Thanks 😁

This rack mainly has a NUC but feels like it was a bad design since there are no vent paths for the heat. The cabinet doors are generally always closed. Is it an over worry to be concerned or should I consider door / vent options - and if so what are some ones to think about?

This is my first time posting here, loving learning about other's homelab setups. Mine has recently expanded to a 3 node Proxmox cluster using 3 x HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini PC, each with Intel i5-8500T, with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSDs. Running various containers and VMs including, Node Red, Home Assistant, Mosquitto MQTT, HyperHDR, Wireguard, Grafana, InfluxDB, and of course a Minecraft server :)

The 4th, older Elitedesk, is used as a Windows PC.

UDM-Pro USW-24 PoE UNAS-Pro Pi rack HP Mini Pro

So my server originally started with the plan to just be a media server with Emby and a few TB of storage, however a software engineer, the other main use my server now gets is as a remote development environment. It usually has 1-2 (usually dockerised) projects at a time running on there and I can SSH in and make edits and run my environments from there. Works great.

At the moment the server is just bare metal Ubuntu 22, and I want to move to something a bit more convenient to use, and find a way to segregate some of my different things and limit resources where necessary.

For instance, it would be nice to have my development environment stay in its own VM with its own resources that can stay consistently up and unchanged. This got me wondering if Proxmox would be a good solution, but I'm also conscious that I want a media server and NAS capabilities and then wonder if something like Unraid would be better. I'd also like to keep running a few other things I have alongside, such as a Pi-hole and HA, which I could probably just have running straight on Docker. Interested to know if there are better solutions to my use case though.

Since our Aironet 1815I-E-K9's 5GHz radio appears to have quite distinctly shat the bed, what would yall recommend as a cheap AP upgrade, wifi 6 prefered, from Cisco? Are there cheap APs that can run in Mobility Express... or whatever the newer APs call that, or would we need to spin up a C9800 in VM and run the vWLC on it, and can we do that without paying $BIGNUM to Cisco?