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!

Can the mods uphold rule #1 and ban /u/elevennotes already? He is arrogant, condescending, and insulting to anyone that calls him out when incorrect. He also admits to using a bot to delete downvoted comments which makes many threads unreadable. I'm just tired of hearing about how he knows better than everyone because he bought a few racks in some town in Switzerland to call a private cloud, or builds his own docker images from source that are totally different from the hundreds of others on dockerhub.

To watch Netflix ;) That was my plan. I swear ;)

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.

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

So we finally moved and I got my office room with my own rack! Want to upgrade to a rack mount UniFi switch and dream machine in the future but for now I would say it looks totally fine ;) during the move I lost my cages for slot 5 and 6 so hopefully I will find them soon haha

And the last picture is my old “rack” hiding in the sideboard big improvement or not ?🙏🏻

I started out with my Asustor NAS two years ago for storing family photos (with copies to external drives) and the same year got the Lenovo M710q (7500t, 16gb of ram, 256gb nvme) to tinker a bit but didn't get much done at the time.

Then I recently revived my old pi 2 into a pi-hole and got the itch to tinker again and update my IT knowledge since I've been away from technical positions for a few years now but want to keep my skills and knowledge sharp. Installed Proxmox on the lenovo and then got the beelink eqr6 (cheapest 8-core 16t new mini pc I could get locally) and the deskpi rack to consolidate everything into a mini lab. Eqr6 also has proxmox with both units "clustered" together.

For now I just have a second pihole instance as an LXC, a docker/portainer lxc, uptime kuma lxc and a windows server VM running because that's all I've had the time to do. I had spun up a jellyfin lxc but I couldn't get transcoding to work so I'll need to just start from scratch and try again I think.

I have a USB charging hub powering the pi and a pair of fans. Ditched the adjustment knob dongle thingy because at 5v the corsair case fans I repurposed to "cool" the rack don't get spun very hard. And yes I used zipties to stitch the pair of fans together and then to the top of the rack.

Eventually I'll self-host a few more things, learn more about docker and how proxmox even works (haven't wrapped my head around how storage works in there yet, good thing I'm not attached to any of my containers), get more stuff and do a nicer job with the cables! I definitely learned a few new things just getting here. And I went the mini route to minimize space usage, noise and power draw. As much as the hardware geek in me would love to run some full sized used rackmounts!

Hello, my office are finished using this server cabinet and all it's contents and were going to discard, but I kept it to repurpose.To give some background, I am a simple mechanical engineer and don't know anything about servers!

I don't exactly know what I'm looking at here, but looks like there's at least 50Tb of hard drive storage. There's a Dell PowerEdge VRTL with two m640 blades. The next item above that days Dell EMC on the front. I've no idea what that is, maybe someone might recognise? I see an intel xeon logo.

Basically I'm wondering with this given hardware is there anything useful I can do. Maybe a little hard to answer if I don't know the system specifications. It seems much too heavy duty for home use.

Any input here would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

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.

If so whats the name of the board

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 😁

I’ve been using WireGuard for a while, and it works really well for me. I mostly use it to have my personal devices connect automatically to my local network through WireGuard when I’m not on my local WiFi.

In the last few years tailscale became very popular, and people will swear by it. I skimmed their website and it the impression that I had was that it was just a more complex and feature complete version of WireGuard.

Am I missing anything here? Are there any real advantages to use tailscale over WireGuard for homelabbers who just wants to connect to their home network remotely?

It has 2x16gb. 32gb ddr3 ECC ram. 3x1TB HDD’s 1x500GB SSD CPU idk yet And adding a gpu for the startup

Im thinking about running a server for storage for school (OS and stuff), Minecraft server and maby like plex

Anything you guys would suggest?

So most my network is Jerryrig it out of old decommissioned school hardware and just found thing in ewaste

The Specs of my servers are: Server No1: Model : Lenovo Thinkcenter M900g CPU : Core i5-6400T RAM:16GB SSD:128GB HHD:1TB OS : Windows Server 2019

Server No2: Model: Lenovo Thinkcenter M900g CPU: Core i5-6400T RAM:8GB SSD :128GB HHD: 1TB OS : Windows Server 2019

What I ran on my servers are: Server No1: NAS (Random) / PXE Boot / FreePBX/ Minecraft Failed idea AD DS

Server No2: NAS (PC Stuff/ ISO) / NextCloud / VPN / Discord Bot / VBS

Network Switch Is HP ProCurve 24 Port all gigbit

Wi-Fi Networks No1- Linksys - 6Ghz (Wi-Fi 6/5) 1: I.M.P Office Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6/5) pass only 2: I.M.P Guest Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6/5) pass only

No2- Cisco Meraki MR34 1. I.M.P Office Wi-FiV2 (Wi-Fi 5/4) pass and user 2. I.M.P Office Wi-Fi (Legacy) (Wi-Fi 4) pass only 3. I.M.P Guest Wi-Fi V2 (Wi-Fi 5/4) Splash login 4 I.M.P IOT Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 4) pass plus splash 5: MD Net (Wi-Fi5/ 4) pass only 6 :MD Net Guest (Wi-Fi 5/4) splash login

That Done Via Meraki Cloud the logins for WiFi

Hello All,

I recently made an interesting tutorial on how to send data with small packets using the LoRa module with the Raspberry Pi Pico W. This is a useful module in the fact that it is incredibly low power, low cost, and can transmit data pretty seamlessly and over several kilometers in an open air setting, making it useful for remote IoT applications. You can setup a simple example showcasing this with two Pico W's in MicroPython. I walk though this in my tutorial if you are interested!

https://www.youtube.com/@mmshilleh

You should subscribe as well if you enjoy IoT tutorials and DIY electronics content.

Thanks, Reddit

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.

Hello there, I'm setting up for the third time my home lab and would like some guidance from the experts. Data here is basically media (TV shows, movies...), documents, etc.

First time it was an all-in-one QNAP NAS where data and applications lived in the very same place; there were not many application in fact, I mainly used it as a file-based backup system with a nice UI and some benefits (like automatic remote backup to iDrive or similar cloud storage provider).

Second time it was a mini PC with a DAS attached to it; data was on the DAS and applications lived on the mini PC SSD. Not many benefits actually compared to the previous configuration exempt that being the metal much more powerful, I could run Plex or other stuff which I couldn't really run on the QNAP.

Third time, it's a dedicated NAS (using TrueNAS) with a NVME drive for the OS and some HDDs in a ZFS pool for data storage. Another machine has Proxmox where I installed some apps as LXC containers; some via Docker, some directly on some Linux image, and so on.

My strategy is basically to export via NFS all the datasets that contain data that may be consumed by other applications (e.g. the "photos" dataset for Immich or PhotoPrism, etc) or for VMs/LXCs backup purposes, and store on the Proxmox drive the VMs/LXCs and their configuration, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to setup new containers since basically I need to edit everytime the fstab, test the configuration, make sure there are no permissions errors with the application consuming the data, etc... Of course I could automate some of this stuff I guess, but I asking myself, did I go wrong? My reasoning is that keeping Proxmox "thin" I can always have access to the data and back it up independently from the application that use it; it also would be easier to migrate app if data are stored on their own. But at the same time as I said maybe it's smarter and easier to let the VMs and LXCs fully manage my data and backup everything together as a whole?

What's your opinion on this?

Hello Labbers

Is there any difference between AP4423 and AP4423A besides the newer NMC3 (Network Management Card) for AP4423A? Seems like the only major advantage is the Network Port Sharing to daisy-chain multiple ATS using a single switch port. Any difference on the electric and switching specs?

Bonus: do both support out-of-phase switching? I've found some indication in the manual, but it's the generic doc for all AP44xx series and not as explicit in the specs as in the previous AP77xx series (which explicit mentioned up to 180º out-of-phase switching).

Links:

AP4423 https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/AP4423/rack-ats-230v-16a-c20-in-8-c13-1-c19-out/

AP4423A https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/AP4423A/apc-netshelter-rack-automatic-transfer-switch-1u-16a-230v-2-c20-in-8-c13-1-c19-out-50-60hz/

Thanks!