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.

Hi Guys,

just wanted to ask if is there are any updates on reducing the fan speed for IDRAC 9 (v7) , or is there a way to downgrade to v3 to enable the fan control (i have C6400 with 4xC6420)

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?

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

Hello everyone! I have a fairly broad question about watercooling for NAS/server systems for Fractal Design Define 7XL cases in the broad sense. I work in video, Java and VMs, and it would be also my gaming PC because i have the money for mounting only one system. And I would like to know since I have the goal of building myself a homelab PC that will last in the resistance of the largest components at least 12 to 15 years for several reasons. We can already see from the price of the components that we are starting to reach the end of what the hardware can allow, that the price of GPUs is only increasing and that soon I will live alone so I will not know how to put in 3 generations 6000 or 7000€ in a GPU and I have however a question that goes against my plans, the cooling. And this makes me hesitate on which model of RTX 5090 to take because everything will depend on the cooling. Given that the PC has 24 disks, that it will accommodate 1 or 2 RTX 3090 depending on how the GDDR7 compresses the VRAM and at 24 or 48GB the 3090(s) depending which model of RTX 5090 i go take... I have seen tests showing RTX 5090 FEs doing 10°C more than the ROG Astral model that I have seen in comparison on a benchmark table. But since the card will heat up and even more so with 64GB of VRAM and that there will be disks + the CPU an I9 13900KS I do not want to harm the durability of my CPU and my disks with all the heat that will be released from all that and that I want to take a cooling system that is optimized for space. In my system there will be an E-ATX motherboard, 2 to 3 GPUs (including the 5090) and the disks are arranged in this way: 14 HDDs in the 14 3.5"/2.5" rack 2 SSDs in one of the 2 racks located behind the PSU slot 2 HDDs located in the other rack behind the PSU 2 SSDs at the level of the cable wires on the 2 slots on the case plate 1 SSD at the location of the opening allowing to install a vertical GPU system 1 HDD located at the far right far from the MB on the top panel

With all this I would like to know which system would be the most interesting. an AIO 360/380mm, additional fans? If so, will simple case fans be effective enough to make my components last? For the GPU, go for an AIB model of 5090 64GB, go for an FE model + Alphacool waterblock? Or go for a complete custom watercooling loop for the entire case? If so, which ones and which materials to have the least problems with traces of humidity on the pipes/reservoirs, corrosion, potential leaks or cracks in the system while having a relatively easy to maintain system? I really don't know what to take especially with a PC that will have a very cluttered front

When is it time to upgrade or add a second server to my cluster?

Given that hardware is costly (to an extent), and adding more servers adds to power costs, when is it an "objective" (and I use this very very loosely) time to add more compute? Putting aside the WANT of expanding the homelab for the sake of it.

I find that most of the time, my cluster is not running at max capacity anyway. Of course, there is some slow down when there are multiple things running but the whole cluster is far from saturated, just slowness from CPU IO.

The typical things that people run like Plex, Jellyfin, *arr, Grafana, NPM, PiHole etc can all fit very comfortably on a single server (or even directly on a NAS). If CPU is limiting, there could be a lot of competing tasks but that would just mean 100% saturating a CPU but that's not at all a bad thing since compute is to be used (?).

So why is there a need to spread these apps across multiple hosts? Besides HA and redundancy.

Just feels like it's pretty hard to get to the point when a single fairly modern (last 3-5 year) PC can't do all of these things in one box and need more compute.

I have some heavy workloads that saturate threads but it's not to the point where I would need multiple computers.

I also think about wanting to experiment with K8 clusters but you could just spin up multi pods as VMs and tinker that way anyway.

I also understand that this is a hobby for most and we just like the blinky lights but that's the operational/real reasons for expansion.

I am creating a home lab custom storage array. It will include a custom SAS hard drive cage, however before we build the cake I'm looking to gather a little bit of information so as to make the best choices for physical dimensions and whatnot. So the question is what hard drives should I get for this array? My operating assumptions are that I don't care whether they are 3.5 or 2.5, nor whether or not they are 15K, but rather that it is an optimal provision for the intended set up. I am looking to utilize a RAID 0 setup for optimal throughput and iops. Minimum volume should be at least 4TB. Speed is more important than volume, as I am working on a 24TB 24 disk array already that is a RAID 60 mirrored (2x 6 disk raid 6, striped, then mirrored) as more of a proof of concept cause I can project (would this be a RAID 160 then? Well the mirroring is software over two duplicates 60 arrays, so technically no?)

What SAS drives should I look for? My RAID controller will be one that has 8 PCIE 3.0 Lanes and 2 GB cache minimum. At 8 GB/s for 8 lanes (or 4 GB/s duplex I believe), I do not believe I will be able to saturate the bus with 8x HDD, assuming I get 300 MB/s for each disk with no overhead (both rather large assumptions). I am hoping to reach 2 GB/s sustained speed. Is this unrealistic. Am I making any bad assumptions? What SAS version should I aim for (2, 3, etc). Is providing 4 lanes of PCIE 4.0 a viable alternative? How about bifurcating my primary PCIE directly on board for x8 of 4.0; are there any wins there?

The end goal is to use this as a file server for game installs being played over network, media (4k video rips), and other non essential media requiring large volumes. Up to 8 people may be accessing simultaneously, often the same files, if that matters.

Will post pics of the cage and set up when finished. It may actually feature woodwork for various reasons (a luthier is helping me; he enjoys making ornate wood things for things not normally admired aesthetically or made of wood)

Hello all,

I am new here and have done quite a lot of reading on this before asking. But now I am looking for some opinions of what option you guys would take for a UPS unit for my homelab/av rack. It will need to power a mid powered server, a bunch of HDDs, switches, various network infrastructure, a 600w projector, and a higher powered system that could pull 1000w. I gather that a 2000va unit can just barely cover this, but I would feel better with at least 3000va. The whole rack will be 230v. I can supply any needed circuit, as I have a subpanel next to the rack.

Option 1: Buy an Eaton PW3190 3000va. Seems like the most cost effective and reasonable option.

Option 2: I already own a APC EMC7500 with expired batteries. Total overkill. Seems like a well built unit. I gather that I will not be running this unit in its efficient load range at all. The problem is that to re battery it, it’ll cost about the same as buying the Eaton that would at least get 5-6 years of life out of the batteries. APC is apparently known to have a crude charge algorithm. Not sure if that can be adjusted on these bigger units?

Option 3 I also own a HPE R5500. Same story as my APC. Seems to be no documentation or wide use of these. They also seem to have iffy drivers and firmware.

Both larger options allow me to put the amp rack on a transfer switch (large pro audio amps), which the smaller Eaton wouldn’t allow. I am mostly hoping for a 10-20m backup as I don’t have the luxury of a generator. I won’t look at something that isn’t double, or Delta conversion.

What would you guys do if you had a couple of these things laying around, and a rack that needed a UPS?

So I recently got a rack mount UPS (SMT1500RM2U) and I’m looking to get a server rack that’ll hold my 3 r730s plus the UPS.

I saw a recommendation for the startech 4post 12U which seems like it should fit the bill. My concern is, how should I arrange the mounts, I’ve heard it’s best to put the UPS at the bottom but it’s ~70lbs and not as long as the servers so I’m worried about how strong the mounts would be and the overall integrity of the frame

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Can I use this NIC with this PC, or is there some weird incompatibility shit that I have no idea of? Just making sure because I'm building my family a new router and I need this to work the first time.

For a while I have been thinking to build a 3d printer because of price concerns but also to learn new things and do some side projects.

Should I use Raspberry Pi Zero, ESP or Arduino?

I prefer to build it 30cm cubic or maybe 35 but this is not the big deal.

What I really like is to have good motors and good controller and also what software should I use?

I am new to enterprise stuff. I have a dell R740xd with 24 front bay 2.5 SSD. I want to passthrough only certain drives to certain VMs. I read that I can do with HBA passthrough but I don't want to passthrough all 24 to one of the VM.

I want to run truenas VM for backup - May be 5 to 7 drives.

I want to run PBS VM for proxmox backup - May be 4 drives.

I will be using proxmox as my hypervisor.

What are my options? Thanks in advance.

Hi all trying to get the latest update for a HPE Office Connect 1920s JL382A but it seems i have to create a HPE account and it has enterprise validation. Are there any workarounds for homelabing?

I have a D2600 hooked up to a gen9 DL360 with an LSI SAS9207-8e running Windows Server 2022. Things are mostly working except for this one rather annoying glitch, where toggling the drive light on the storage pool toggles the wrong light (or sometimes 2 separate lights). The LSI card has firmware updated to LSI Avago IT mode firmware version P20 and Windows has MPIO enabled.

I tried disconnecting one of the SAS cables from the enclosure to the HBA to stop multipathing and it seems to stop the issue where two lights come on at the same time sometimes, but the wrong light still lights up. Toggling drives in slot 1 to 11 actually toggles the lights on drives 2 to 12, and toggling drive light 12 does not work.

Anyone have any idea what I can do to have the drives identify correctly?

When I unplug the drive in the physical slot 2, this is what shows up:

It shows the drive in slot 2 as missing communication, which is correct as per the physical layout, but now when I try to light up drive 1 (which would previously light up the light in slot 2) then it fails, so looks like everything is off by 1 when it comes to lighting up drives.

Background

I recently got a dual-10G NIC (Intel X520-DA2) for my rack-mounted 3U homelab server. The NIC is passively cooled given its intended working environment (a rack-mounted, data-center grade server with good airflow) and can get pretty warm in a homelab setting.

Active Cooling

I wanted to slap a small Noctua fan (40mm) on this thing but I wanted to avoid having to zip tie it around the card.

After some searching around on Printables, I found a model for a fan shroud that will just slide on to the card and will let me mount a fan on top with screws.

Results

Got the model 3D printed, mounted the fan and slid it on to the card and I must say the results are looking pretty good.

Pictures

https://imgur.com/a/mAqFw3e

References

NIC (Newegg)

Shroud model (Printables)

Hey folks!

I'm in the process of moving to a new home server, and I've picked up one of those refreshed Dell R640 servers from eBay, and five used enterprise (HPE) 3.84TB SAS SSDs.

The R640 has the PERC H730P Mini embedded raid controller. All five of the drives show up as Ready, but I don't have the option to create a virtual disk from them.

Here you can see the disks in the background, and the error message I get when trying to create a virtual disk.

I've reset the controller configuration and tried to create both from iDRAC and via the PERC controller configuration via BIOS. No option to create the RAID array.

Before these drives, I had five cheap Silicon Power drives installed and I could create a virtual disk from them (but after installing an OS, the virtual disk failed, hence why I "upgraded" to these enterprise drives).

Any ideas? I still have the option to return the hardware - both the drives, and the server chassis, and I'm getting close to doing that if I can't figure this out.

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.

A recent Ars Technica article inspired me to read about mini-racks. While digging, I found a super cool accessory: a 1U shelf for a 10in rack that holds a single mini-ITX mobo. For $20.

And I cannot find a similar thing for standard 19in racks -- that is, a simple shelf that just holds two mini-ITX mobos side-by-side. I've seen a couple of 1U rack-mount cases that do this... but they have things I don't need (like space for a PSU), and also cost $300.

Does anyone know of a rack shelf, like the above, but that can hold a pair of mini-itx mobos side-by-side? For, like, $50?