It's a dell micro 9020. I got it for like, $18. The problem is that these have no real pcie slot for an HBA.

12tb of storage!

Moved my whole homelab into a proper rack.

The hard rule: I can't spend more than $100 on any given component. It's making this fun but increasingly harder every purchase. Only exception was the EMC KTN Shell ($106)

• Platform: 5-node Proxmox cluster, Portainer for the Docker-in-LXC side of things, Proxmox Backup Server for VM/CT backups
• Media: Jellyfin
• Identity: Authentik for SSO, Nginx Proxy Manager fronting everything - also helping connect Jellyfin to my my CloudFlare hosted URL
• Network: AdGuard Home for DNS/ad-blocking, Tailscale for remote access
• Monitoring: Prometheus feeding a custom kiosk-style status dashboard (Glance) + Uptime Kuma for heartbeat checks
• Docs/tools: BookStack as the internal wiki, a file-conversion tool, a few FileBrowser instances
• Mail: self-hosted Roundcube webmail

Dashboard is run through Glance, it includes other pages too, notably a Claude instance running on one of my nodes. Good for checking logs / making adjustments without SSHing Claude into the instance through a normal Code instance.

I managed IT for years before going freelance. Dell PowerEdge was our standard at work, so that's what I ended up buying for my own homelab.

Do most of you run the same brand or platform at home that you manage professionally, or do you go in a different direction once it's your own money and space?

Here we have my current rack setup(and on the last picture what I started out with)

So from top to bottom

A unifi UDM pro

Unifi 16 port Poe pro max

A mikrotik 10gb switch (the minsiforum and the big server are all connected via 10gb)

Then in a custom 3d printed rack PC holding system we have 3 HP 800g2 a Lenovo something and then 2 minsiforum Ms a2

Then a big server case from Alibaba with standard consumer hardware and a bunch of disks(around 72tb of storage ATM)

And on the bottom a UPS

I use this system mainly for Linux ISO's (if you know you know) and self education.Argocd, gitops, self hosting different services, been running a email server for a couple of years now with out issues. Everything running in k8s

The servers run Talos Linux + proxmox and are all managed by gitops etc

Very happy with this setup

This is a sad day..

Sometime in the past week (I suspect the 15th based on the effective date), HPE has published notice that they are ending their actual lifetime warranty program on existing products.

Now the warranty period will be End-of-Sales plus 5 years.

This new policy comes into effect January 15, 2027..

Interesting that they can change the warranty term retroactively on products.

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00161510enw

Their warranty program has been the primary reason that I use them both professionally and at home.

Basically the title. The WAF has decreased lately and I need to make this mess look nice. I am confident this is the final version, no extra hardware in the near future, therefore I want to turn the homelab into a rack.

There are 3 Lenovo mini PCs, a TP link router which acts as a switch and a Synology DXP4800. Obviously a rack would be very custom, lots of 3D printing, and I'd have to buy an actual switch, but my only concern would be power supply.

How do you manage your power on a rack? I am thinking of having some sort of hidden tray on the bottom of the rack where I could just shove all the PSUs for aesthetic purposes, but that sounds very lazy in my opinion.

Could you please give me some advice where should I start? Thank you!

Update: If there is anyone based in Europe/EU with time and a 3D printer, please feel free to send me a quote via DM on how much you would charge me to build a ready to go rack + shipping to Romania. Basically I only want to mount and screw the stuff.

When the manual says a certain cfm/min of airflow, it is not a suggestion. My previous card had a Noctua 40x10mm running at ~80% which was not enough to keep the HBA cool in the recent heatwave.

New fan is a S4028-6K and will run at about 4k rpm.

I guess this post is some kind of PSA to those who don't have adequate active cooling for their server/enterprise grade addin cards. It's a matter of time before they die.

Been hosting media and game servers for friends for quite a few years now using a pile of slop sitting on the floor of my closet. With a few donations from my Plex users, and a bunch of old recycled stuff from my job, I was able to put together this rack.

From top to bottom, left to right:

-Startech 28U Rack

-Mikrotik CRS3051G-4S+ (4X 10GB SFP)

-Mikrotik CRS326-24G-2S+ (2X 10GB SFP)

-Dell Optiplex 3060 (i3-9100T, PFSense)

-Dell Optiplex 7090 (i7-10700T, Proxmox Host)

-ADJ PC100A Power Strip

-Dell Optiplex 3060 (i3-10105T, Proxmox Host)

-Meraki Z4 Gateway (For Work)

-Synology DS220J (8TB RAID1, Proxmox Backup)

-Philips Hue Light Controller

-HD Homerun Flex DUO

-Hubitat Elevation C-7

-Synology DS1813+ (21TB, RAID6, Plex TV Show Storage)

-Dell R420 Blade (Unused At the moment, DDR3 based)

-Cisco Catalyst 3750X w/ 10GB SFP Expansion

-Dell T430 With tower to rack conversion kit (Main Proxmox Host, 28TB RAIDZ1, 192GB DDR4, GTX1060 For Plex/TDARR)

-Cisco Catalyst 3750X w/ 10GB SFP Expansion

-Eaton 5P 1500RT UPS

This has been a super fun and useful project to set up.

Running Ubuntu server, Immich, Samba, a couple Minecraft servers, and AzerothCore. Will be adding either Plex or Jellyfin as soon as i get around to it.

Nightly backups to Backblaze B2 for the important stuff

Just finished this abomination of a homelab AI extension.

It’s a watercooled, very DIY, 4 radiators parallel loop of 4x Nvidia Tesla V100 32GB SXM2 on a Chinese carrier board, paired with a 2000W PSU (it’s at the back, it doesn’t fit in the cube).

Its use is running LLMs for agents and local workflows.

All fitted in an IKEA metal mesh cube drawer. Roast me, it’s my first watercooled build.

The server is also a custom built one with Epyc Rome, lots of storage and 256GB DDR4 for context.

I already have a simple home set up,Am tired of using youtube and Ai for every thing I want to do.

I have decided to go down to the basics.

Hello guys, me and my dad made a "rack" with some wooden planks we had around to hold and organize my homelab.

The problem is how I'll manage airflow on this, I don't have much but I'd like to stay organized on what I can do with this, My current lab is 2 computers a switch and raspberry pi, the cabinet is 60cm wide, 80cm deep and 60cm height (inside). It's open on the back and I'm thinking of making a door for the front, just for the looks, since it's in my room.

The legs of the desk are temporary, they will be removed and the side will be fully exposed, this is under my main desk where I have my setup for work/school and gaming.

I've developed my own home control system that is in some ways superior to Home Assistant — though breadth of device support is of course not one of them. (Rules are conflict-checked at authoring time, every actuation is journaled so state changes have attributable causes, dead nodes get power-cycled automatically, and the whole fleet deploys through git.)

This clock/voice satellite/sensor shows my fleet at a glance.

The fleet includes:

• 2x Mac laptops (dev machines) used concurrently
• 1x Mac full time fleet server running LLMs for voice
• 9x Raspberry Pi edge devices (sensors, displays, voice satellites)
• 1x Large x86 server 2x 50X0, 128GB RAM, 32 core AMD running stuff
• 1x Small x86 server 24GB RAM, 12 core - the central orchestrator

• 1x ESP32 project

• The Mac used for fleet server runs fast lane voice support

• The large x86 server:

  • by day runs a much larger LLM used for complex voice support.
  • at night runs several coding LLMs looking for bugs in the code base. More on this below.

Radio support includes:

• WIFI
• Zigbee
• Z-WAVE
• 4x SDR (AIS, ACARS, ADS-B, other)
• Matter, Matter over WIFI

In addition, a NAS handles my local git operations plus a postgres db.

The system is running lighting, HVAC, security, cameras, WireGuard, and entertainment. It began as GlowUp which I released open source under the MIT license.

There is a self-healing service that monitors all the other services in the fleet and can restart services or power cycle wedged machines.

Voice support includes Whisper and Kokoro. The wakewords are trained locally.

Everything is local with the following exceptions:

• Weather data from Open-Meteo (plus RainViewer radar tiles)
• My own radio's AIS shipping traffic merged with aisstream.io
• My own radio's ADS-B merged with adsb.lol, enriched via adsbdb and Planespotters (aircraft metadata/photos)
• Daily scrape of Southern Company for my actual electric rate and usage
• A bridge to security company's cloud for the security panel (being the only path that hardware allows)
• JS libs from unpkg.com CDN

I am keen on software quality so a little more about the nightly bug hunting:

At night, when the GPUs go idle, the big server turns QA engineer: a local coding LLM (qwen2.5-coder 32B via Ollama) writes property tests against the codebase's untrusted-input boundaries. Every radio decoder, parser, and normalizer, 21 targets in all.

A generated test is only admitted if it passes clean on the real code AND kills a mutant copy with a deliberately planted bug. That gate filters out hallucinated tests. Admitted tests soak for ~8 hours and I triage findings over morning coffee. One recent night: 127 findings, 6 reachable, 2 real bugs fixed.

Happy to answer questions.

Hello, homelab noob here.

I've just bought a pair of rack rails (Lanberg AK-1901-B) and a 4U case (Lanberg SC01-5204-12B). I've mounted the rails like regular equipment or a shelf, using cage nuts (included ones). Obviously, the server doesn't sit flush and cannot be bolted to the rack by itself.

The holes on the server and the rails don't align, so I can't put a bolt right through both of them. What would be a proper install in this case?

I have come in to a bit of an conundrum of sorts.

I used to use a reverse proxy for all my services and have an NGINX docker container running on my NAS. It was good, and I used cloudflare to proxy the incoming traffic. I own two domains and one of them was my home domain.

I got a bit scared off of reverse proxies as I didnt understand them all that well and convinced myself I was exposing myself. As I was the only one using it in my household, I switched to wireguard and never looked back. My NGINX container is still up, just not exposed and I have a static IP that I pay for.

Fast forward to now, my brother wants to use my Jellyfin server, which I am happy to do, but he wont get the wireguard client as he uses his own VPN. I wont fight it as I am just happy he is taking an interest in what I do.

My question is, if I wanted to get back in to reverse proxy for some of my, less critical, services, is using NGINX a good idea? How can I be safe? I am on a network engineer course, so throw technical jargon at me if needed. Am i also right in remembering that NGINX will handle certificates?

I appreciate any help

Like the title says I am building a new lab to solely practice networking, I have a few labs for admin stuff but for the time being I want to keep them separate. I would also like to buy some used enterprise or business level networking equipment so I can have practice with the full functionality of things. I currently work in an environment with Unifi, but I know that its good and I want to try other brands. Any suggestions?

I was recently able to pick up a large sum of HDDs to actually populate this workstation/NAS/whatever. This is the part where I post the spec list and the experts in this sub point out how I’ve done something terribly wrong and should have gone with a different X.

-

The specs are as follows:
- Jonsbo N5: I wanted the 12 HDD bays and to have something other than a black nondescript tower to look at. Once you get into the larger quantity of drives AND want to be able to support a workstation type build the pricing starts to 3x quickly. The N5 is well priced given what you’re getting.
- AMD Threadripper 3970X: I picked this because there’s some hobby stuff I do involving heavy I/O work.
- Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS PRO WIFI: Seemed like a good option given the CPU, not much more input here. PCIe ports were a headache because of GPU sizes.
- 2x GeForce RTX 3090: I really like Qwen 3.6 27B/35B and was looking at some benchmarks which show reasonable performance with this card and that model. Not familiar with local AI and want to learn it.
- 64GB Corsair DDR4: I paid $133 for this brand new last September lol. $530 for the same kit now… I’ll buy more if it proves necessary.
- 268TB worth of HDDs: there was a really good eBay listing so I bought a bunch of drives. ZFS RAIDZ2.
- LSI 9300-16i HBA: slightly worried about heat issues here, these have no active cooling and get hot. Pretty sure I mounted it as factory intended.
- Google Coral TPU: sits in one of the three M.2 slots, very cool AI object identification component. Hobby project thing.
- 2x 1TB Samsung M.2 NVMe: one for Proxmox and the other is unused, not sure what I’ll do with it yet. I could do an OS mirror but seems like kind of a waste given how expensive NVMe is now.
- Silverstone HELA 1300R Platinum PSU: PSU is hardly a cool element of the build but finding a 1300W PSU smaller than 170mm was an activity, the options are limited. Because of the N5 design if you want anything over 1300W you have to sacrifice 4 drive bays because of the PSU size. Wattage on the GPUs is capped (theoretical peak is somewhere around 1280W which is obviously not ideal with a 1300W PSU). Someone in the future is going to find this Reddit thread trying to figure out the PSU sizing, this is a good option. There’s a brand new Corsair one that’s like 1500 or 1600W with the tiny footprint, it may be out by the time you’re reading this.

-

HBA placement is obviously atypical however I think it’s fine. Two fans blow straight at it. I was very limited on placement options given the GPUs cover the open PCIe slots. The GPUs were also literally touching, like the fans on the one closest to the CPU couldn’t spin. There’s a tiny foam spacer wedged to just barely hold them apart. So far, it’s working lol. The clearance on the top is literally 1-2mm, it’s unbelievably close.

I’m pretty happy with my cable management given how many cables I had to deal with here.

Throughout learning about the various things involved here I came to really appreciate how incredible of a technology ZFS + RAIDZ# is. Turn a group of HDDs into a single pool and accomplish a full recovery even when drive(s) fail. Brilliant.

Only thing that’s annoying is there’s 12 drive bays and 8 indicator lights, what?? The rubber handle things for the drives are also not ideal but they’re fine. I think for vibration protection they’re actually probably really good given the bumpers are rubber and the fit is tight.

I ordered the front door 3d printed mod that allows 2 front intake fans. No idea why this isn’t a stock thing.

I replaced the stock Jonsbo fans because they are obnoxious. I went with 140/120mm Artic fans, I considered Noctua but the more research I did it really appears you’re paying a 5-10x premium for an unboxing experience. Artic fans at 100% speed do have a sort of unique pitch to them that I could see being irritable to some people.

I bought everything in this build used/open-box and saved like 50% across the board. eBay “make an offer” is an incredible thing.

Hello everyone! I recently went down a rabbit hole and discovered the whole homelab/home server/nas etc world. I've been looking on facebook marketplace and stumbled upon this (Price in CAD$) is this too old to use for photo storage, plex/jellyfin (1080p and some 4k) and AdGuard? (Might even purchase simply for the drives) Any insight/help is greatly appreciated as i dont know much!

Hi everyone, this is my little homelab and I would love your feedback.

The main server is a Dell PowerEdge R720 with dual Xeon E5-2697 v2, 80GB of DDR3 ECC RAM and two Tesla P40s with 24GB of VRAM each, so 48GB total that I use for local LLM inference. Everything runs on Proxmox, with Ollama in an LXC container with GPU passthrough.

Networking: Gigabit internet connection, plus a direct 2.5 Gbit link between the server and my main PC for fast transfers and uploads. It all goes through an HP managed layer 2 switch, which also lets me experiment with VLANs and actually see what happens on the network.

Besides AI, I use the server for virtualization: I test my projects and configurations locally before pushing anything to production VPS. Breaking things at home is a lot cheaper than breaking them in the cloud.

In the second photo you can see the inside with the two P40s installed. I also recorded the SSD installation as an ASMR style video, if you enjoy that kind of thing: YouTube video

It is not silent and it is not efficient, but for what a used R720 costs today the price to performance ratio is hard to beat. And honestly, the fan noise at boot is half the fun.

Question for you: would you be interested in a full YouTube video about my setup and the whole journey, from buying the server to the final configuration? Let me know in the comments.

Disclosure: this post was drafted by my personal AI agent based on Opus, the lab is entirely my own work.YouTube video

My homelab! :D :3

-Power switch
-Gigabit switch
-Patch panel
-Raspberry Pi 3
-Raspberry Pi 4 (Backup remote access)

-Dell PowerEdge R710

On the R710, I have 3.9Tb of Usable ZFS Raid storage (I know, not a lot), 128GiB of RAM, and 2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5675s for 24 cores. I have it set up with an iDRAC enterprise card and an upgraded storage card in order to properly use ZFS. It also has a Quadro P400 for transcoding (getting it to work on the latest TrueNAS was a pain lol).

This server is running TrueNAS bare metal with Jellyfin, Jellyseer, and the *arr suite for media "collecting" along with Newt (I have a pangolin VPS for accessing my services and sharing them securely), Crafty Controller for game servers, and Filebrowser Quantum for... well... files.

The challenge with this homelab is that I had to get it to a maintenance-free point because I am going to college this fall and I can't change stuff out if a something fails.

I have a spare Dell R710 that I don't know what to do with. It has only 18 cores and I only have 12Gb of spare RAM to put in it. I've considered turning it into a Proxmox node but I don't have all that much use for that because I can just use Docker in TrueNAS.

If you have any ideas for self-hosted apps to run, I'd love to hear about em! :D

I just added Lidarr to my arr stack and this paired with Plexamp is a great start. I added all my CD rips to Plexamp, but new downloads don’t work great. They’re great for new releases and big name artists, but non-existent for niche stuff.

I’m looking Soulseek, slskd + Tubifarry. Wondering if there is something better you suggest I look at?

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently moved into my own place and can finally start exploring homelabbing and networking properly. I’ve wanted to get into this for a long time, but I’m starting as a total beginner, and honestly, I’m not yet certain which area I’ll enjoy most.

I have a PC with:

• Ryzen 5 7600X
• RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB
• 32 GB DDR5
• 1 TB NVMe
• MSI PRO B650M-A WiFi
• 850 W PSU

I know it is not a dedicated server, but I’m hoping it is enough to try virtual machines, containers, and small projects while I learn what direction I want to take.

Rather than asking for a specific thing or one setup to copy, I’d love to hear about what and where I can start in homelabing and networking. Ideally I want to start with some fundamentals that will be a very good base to have moving forward.

For each route, what are a few good first projects, what would I learn from them, and what beginner resources would you recommend? I’m looking for things that teach real skills and help me figure out what I enjoy, rather than just installing services for the sake of it.

Also, which YouTube channels, forums, documentation sites, or beginner project lists helped you when you were starting?

I look forward to your recommendations (:

This all started a while ago, mostly to clean up the clutter of equipment on my desk. With nothing fitting on the market, I glued some MDF together and threw some paint at it.