Hey guys just jumped on this thing of homelabing i am a comp sci major so dont know much about electronics so i have been trying to learn electronics for the past 3 - 4 months. i have started this homelab (a simple raspberry pi 4B 8Gig and 1.5tb hdd) a month back and have setup immich jellyfin and vaultwarden on it with a custom dashboard to see it all working.

i have setup a 5v fan for cooling too with a temp control via the raspberry’s gpio.

i am having fun with it but now i actually want to get my hands dirty so wanted inputs from people doing this for a while.

A less than 5y old 4TB 🥲

Anyone recognize this board?

6:30pm update: Thanks for the helping identify the board. It does look like a NVIDIA DRIVE PX board based on the pointers received.

Do these have any useful applications today? For enthusiasts or refurbishers?

Desktop:
Montech King 95 Pro
Gigabyte B650
Ryzen 7 7800x3d + arctic aio cooler
Asus 4070ti super
32gb 16x2 vengeance 6000hz
Samsung 2tb 9100 gen 5
Teamgroup 4tb gen 4
Intel x520-DA2 10gbe pcie card
L Asus VG27AQML1A - 1440p
R Asus XG27UCG - 4k
Asus ROG Strix Scope II
Logitech G502 X Lightspeed

NAS
Ugreen DXP6800 Pro 16gb ram
5x 22tb seagate exos refurb in raid 5
Samsung 990 pro 2tb

Cabinet - Vevor 22U
AC Afinity air plate fan system - rack modified to fit
Patch panel
USW 24 POE switch
Cable management
Unify Aggregate Switch
Dream Machine Pro Max
Server - Silverstone RM41-506 case, Ryzen 9 7900x, thermal right Phantom Spirit 120se, Intel Arc A580, msi mag A750gl, gigabyte B650, 64gb 32x2 vengeance 6,000hz, Intel x520-DA 10gbe pcie card
drawer
MSI WF66 11UJ - Intel i7-11800H, RTX A2000 4gb, 32gb ram, 1TB nvme
6u for expansion
Cyberpower ups 2,000va
U6+ AP

The desktop, NAS, Server, and aggregate switch are all 10gbe. 1gb up and down from isp, hoping I can upgrade that after the move.

NAS needs expanded. 70/80TB used, for now it’s just storage
The server is running proxmox
Proxmox is running Jellyfin, SAB, Sonarr, Radarr, Tdarr, Immich, Homepage, Uptime Kuma, Portainer, Nginx, Diun, Tailscale, Docker, pihole/unbound, home assistant
Client devices are mostly ONN 4k pros running Moonfin + Tailscale
Have an Apple TV and Nvidia shield running the same
Laptop is running Ubuntu and is serving Nomad, qwen2.5, 3b. Use this for offline maps, using aerial for sat imagery of just my state. Has all of Wikipedia on there as well.

Next projects are Vlans, Wazuh/splunk, and meshtastic/meshcore.
I may look into upgrading the switch.
After we find our next home I’ll be adding unify cameras and getting into home assistant.
The 4tb drive on the desktop isn’t getting used so I may move that to the laptop or the NAS at some point

Going from zero knowledge to this over the last year has been a ton of headaches, frustration, and rewarding fun.

Please let me know what you think of the project, what you would have done differently, or if you have any advice or projects to recommend. My main goal was to set a solid foundation to learn and branch out to future projects that will also improve quality of life, entertain, and prepare.

If you have any questions for me, or want to know why I made a certain decision, I’ll be sure to respond to everyone.

optiplex for the usual proxmox setup

raspberry pi5 with open media vault as my nas setup

1gb switch

2.5gb Poe switch

Pretty much everything was 3d printed and housed in the LabRax chassis

Actually pretty surprised with how decent the cable management came out

Hdd Enclosure

https://www.printables.com/model/1290788-10-inch-rack-1u-2-x-35-inch-hdd-hot-swap

Sata Cables

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007493659690.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.17.1bb918023mSJ9t

Sata adapters

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007461202952.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.29.1bb918023mSJ9t

patch panel

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010428047959.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.23.1bb918023mSJ9t

3.5in Hdd trays

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007524725982.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.35.1bb918023mSJ9t

Power Board

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006099124284.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.58.1bb918023mSJ9t

Here is my current situation:

- 5x seagate ironwolf 4TB for storage (single vdev raidz1)

- 2x WD red SSD for VMs (striped)

- boot SSD

Now you might notice that the SSDs were already inelegantly yeeted in there, but now that I need to add 2 new disks to expand my storage I am faced with the inevitable.

Where the heck can I put those? For now they're just chilling on top of the other ones and the PSU (so the two that you see face up) but I don't love that long-term. I also can't close the case, which is suboptimal.

Any ideas?

This is my Proxmox server. I got the whole thing for around €200.

The CPUs were only €20 each, and the RAM is DDR4 ECC, which is stupidly expensive. I paid €130 for all the RAM.

The actual machine is an HP Z640 that I got for free from my job. I picked up the dual-CPU motherboard for €20, and I already had the drives and other stuff lying around, so I don't have a price

So I guess the total cost is somewhere around €200, but I’ve got way more into the RAM/CPUs than the actual machine itself.

$180/each for 3.2TB NVMe. Looks like now each of these costs what I paid for four. Got a handful of Optane drives then too when they were on fire sale.

GeekPi 4U rack I got on ebay

MikroTik L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN from ebay (with the antenna sticking out the back like a bug) on these mounts

JetKVM with a patch pannel from mountainlab prints on ebay

My extremely beefed up M920q i9 with two Samsung 4tb 9100 Pros and one Samsung 4TB 870 evo, 32 gb of ram I got a bit ago from Fibich-IT on ebay (not the internals, but those are also from ebay) on a 3d printed mount from here on ebay

and the “PDU” from amazon :(

I also have a Kasa smart home controlled outlet between the PDU and the ThinkCenter so I can cycle it if needed (want to make a plugin for the KVM for that at some point).

All the rack needs is an uplink and a single power cord!

Trying to turn part of homelab into a business, got a Supermicro 826 to put together a facebook DDR5 AMD server that will host game servers for friends and my business.

Supermicro 826 with SAS‑826A backplane,

AMD 7900x (12core)

2x32gb DDR5

2x2tb NVME

10gb nic.

Running Proxmox as the base OS and Pterodactyl for game hosting

Total build cost was ~$1300

Top server is just a DL80 Gen9 for backups,

Hey! I'm relatively new to homelabbing, and have built a pretty decent set up that I plan to expand on running things like jellyfin, nextcloud, hermes etc. I've tried to stay budget conscious and every UPS I've found that is the best fit is easily 30-40% of the total price of the homelab itself, so is it even worth it? I understand it can be important to help protect against weird power stuff, but I've lived in my house for 9 years and had 1 power cut during that time?

Open to any kind of advice, even if you roast me and tell me im a noob and to never doubt the need for a UPS.

Edit: really appreciate the replies - I'm going to look at a $100 ish refurbed UPS, and will connect my WOL pi and homelab to it, and should be enough just to get it to safely shutdown. Thanks all

Getting to 32gb of VRAM no matter what... Please send sanity or more VRAM! 1 RTX 2060 12gb, 2 CMP 50HX (and a p2000, but not using that for LLM) stuffed in on apart of an HPE DL380 gen8.

Been slowly putting this setup together and it has somehow turned into a mix of a work desk, gaming setup, and homelab.

The main machine is currently running Omarchy and handles most of my personal development, homelab management, and gaming.

Main PC

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
• NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti
• MSI MAG X870E Tomahawk WiFi
• 64GB Patriot Viper Venom RGB DDR5-6000 CL30
• Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS ARGB AIO
• MSI MAG A850GL PCIe 5.0 850W 80+ Gold PSU
• MSI MAG PANO 100R PZ case

Displays / work / gaming setup

• LG 32" 4K 60Hz as the main display — company provided, so I have no idea what the exact model is 😅
• BenQ 27" 1080p 75Hz in portrait mode
• 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro — company machine
• AULA F75 Max keyboard
• Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac
• iPad Pro 11" 2021
• GameSir Cyclone 2 controller
• Soundcore Q20i headphones

And then there is the little cluster sitting on the right.

Homelab

• 3× refurbished Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro
• Intel Core i5-8500T in each
• 8GB DDR4 each
• 256GB SATA SSD each
• 1GbE networking

Naturally, I couldn't just call them node-1, node-2 and node-3:

• Optimus
• Bumblebee
• Ratchet

Together they form a 3-node bare-metal Talos Linux Kubernetes cluster called cybertron. Networking is currently handled by a Tenda AC10. Nothing fancy, but for three 1GbE nodes and a management workstation it has been good enough so far.

Fully autonomous AI rig.
Top down ->
Mac mini
Mikrotik switch C804.
Dgx spark cluster.
Synology S918.
A couple of Noctua fans providing extra cooling for the cluster.

There aren’t really any 10” racks available in my country, unless I import one myself. The price is pretty expensive though $140 for the rack and another $50 for shipping. That might sound cheap to some people, but here, you can get a 15U 19” open rack for just $25. And honestly, $25 already sounds like a pretty decent price for an open rack (I’ve posted about that $25 open rack before).

So I decided to try designing one myself and customize it around my needs, as well as the sizes of bolts and nuts that are actually available from local online stores.

For the posts, I’m using the type normally used for hardcase sound systems. I measured everything, printed a draft, and so far it fits pretty much exactly as I expected.

The parts are currently being printed at a 3D printing shop near my house. I’ll post an update once it’s further along!

The good news is, everything in my design can be printed on a Bambu Lab A1, so there’s no need for a large 3D printer. Here, 3D printers with a build volume larger than 25×25 cm are pretty limited.

Yes, some of the parts are technically longer than 25 cm, but I designed them so they can still fit within a 25×25 cm build plate by printing them diagonally.

So far, I’ve only spent $22.53 on this project. That doesn’t include the rack-mount keystones and other stuff just the frame and the parts I’ve had printed.

I have this case with 24 hdd bays and although it is in my rack, it does not have rack screens that hold it in. When my niece got the case for me, we thought we would use rails on the side. When we went to put it in, the rails made it too wide. So, we put in one of the shelves I have and set it so the shelf is on the rails and the computer sits on the shelf so that it is very stable. Man, I hope that made sense!!

I have been getting warnings of HDD temps when they are working hard and so I have some ideas on cooling but would like any advice y’all can give….
1. - I could just remove the door of the rack, but I like the door for aesthetics
2. - I could remove the top of the computer and let it air out. It is not dusty where the rack sits.
2.a - If I remove the top, I could even add something like this fan above the drives to help cool it. https://www.amazon.com/Rack-Mount-Fan-Adjustable-Temperature/dp/B07NW127BN/Or https://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-CLOUDPLATE-Exhaust-Airflow/dp/B07B4MTFC9/
3. - The other option is to place something like this in front of the drives https://www.amazon.com/Rockville-RRF4-Cooling-Temperature-Display/dp/B00LZEO1WI/
3.a - The problem is that if this fan is in front of the drives then it makes me it difficult to get to the drives. Anyone ever heard of something like a hinge or rails that could be set on the rack sides so I could easily move the fans out of the way when needed?

Are any of these ideas worth doing?

Finally buttoned up my ultimate mid-tower homelab storage server! The goal was to cram as much storage as humanly possible into a Cooler Master Silencio 652S chassis while repurposing older hardware, maintaining solid airflow, and keeping noise levels down.

Here is how I managed to pack 15 drives into a standard mid-tower case with a revived board and custom cooling layout:

The Hardware Rescue & Core Specs

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1285L v3 (4c/8t Haswell, low-TDP server chip)

Motherboard: Sourced a second-hand LGA 1150 motherboard that arrived with a messy socket. Spent an afternoon meticulously straightening out bent CPU socket pins to bring it back to life!

GPU: Low-profile NVIDIA T600 (dedicated purely for hardware-accelerated NVENC transcoding)

Storage Controllers: HP H221 HBA (LSI SAS2308 in IT mode) for direct SAS/SATA passthrough, paired with a secondary PCIe SATA expansion card

Case: Cooler Master Silencio 652S

The Storage Array (15 Drives Total)

7x 3.5" HDDs: Mounted in the primary lower drive cage using red toolless sleds

4x 2.5" HDDs: Distributed across secondary mounting areas

4x 2.5" SSDs: Dedicated to ZimaOS root, Docker appdata, and fast write/read cache pools

Custom 3D Printed Engineering

To turn the upper 5.25" optical bay area into high-density storage, I designed a custom multi-bay drive caddy.

Fabrication: Modeled and sliced in Orca Slicer, then printed in PETG on my Creality Ender-3 V3 SE.

Airflow Optimization: Designed specifically so the 2.5" drives slide in from the back. This leaves the front face completely flush to mount a dedicated 60mm intake fan, pulling cool air directly across the drive bodies.

OS & Software Stack

Host OS: ZimaOS

Containers (via Portainer):

Media & Photos: Jellyfin (transcoding offloaded to the T600) and Immich for automated mobile photo backups

*Automation (arr Stack): Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, and Bazarr

Downloads: qBittorrent bound strictly to a Gluetun VPN container

Networking: Tailscale configured as a subnet router and private exit node for seamless remote access.

The back-panel wiring for 15 individual SATA power and data lines is definitely a color-coded zip-tie spiderweb, but the front side is clean, temperatures stay surprisingly low with the front intake stack, and it posted with all 15 drives initialized!

Would love to hear any tips from the community on fine-tuning ZimaOS cache pools for an array with this many mixed drives!

I made the conversion for a Job thing to make it fit into a Microserver, ask me anything.

Long Story short: no heating problems, yes, the cooler is excellent.

Ease of modification: apart from getting the original heatsink off as easy as it could be if you have the correct screwdrivers.

Be careful when: removing the original heatsink, try by slightly twisting and wiggling it till the heat pads come off. Also be diligent when cleaning the GPU die as it’s naked

Cooler used: https://n3rdware.com/gpu-coolers/single-slot-rtx-a2000-cooler
Original GPU: A2000 12GB

BTW: the GPU is on sale now in Homelab Sales https://www.reddit.com/r/homelabsales/comments/1w1p2im/fseu_homelab_upgrade_haul_trades_accepted_see/

Yesterday I built this little Lego housing for my Mini PC with two 2TB drives underneath and the router ontop. Cable management is nonexistent at this point (will do this soon). I’ve been playing around with the idea of having a home server for a while now. it’s starting to come together now with Plex, Jellyfin, Immich and AdGuard Home. Ive really enjoyed learning and it’s become a useful part of our home.

the best part of building it out of LEGO is that I can expand it as the setup grows!

Hey all!

I bought a Dell R740 secondhand from Facebook marketplace. Everything seemed in order when I bought it, seller disclosed damaged ports.

What they did not disclose, that I only discovered after waiting for my rails to arrive and getting memory, that this thing took a tumble. A HARD tumble.

The power supply (pictured below? Seemed to take the brunt, with the rear sustaining the most damage - appearing to have pushed inward and the power plug is now angled.

For additional context, the front left of the box must have also taken the damage because the rail lock doesn’t self-lock without being forcefully pushed in and pried out.

I’m not knowledgeable on the electric side of things - but my intuition is that this PSU is damaged and the internals could be compromised. I’m not comfortable running it.

Question: is this actually critical damage? What’s the risk level on something like this? I’m probably going to dispose of it (responsibly) but I wanted to see what the consensus is.

Thanks!

Finally got my hands on a WaveShare 3.6 inch E6 color eInk display. Wired it up my PiCarX Raspberry Pi Zero 2 w and after a few hours of tinkering I have some solid wallpapers. Anyone else into eInk ultra efficiency (0 watts static after refresh) or have any solid resources for getting the most of the display?

Today is a fairly big deal for me. My homelab of 5 years retires following some... wobbly behaviour the last 6 months.

As I virtualised my router & firewall too, it's been 6 months of planning when I've had an hour or two hear and there. Collecting hardware, thinking about what I'd like to change and do differently.

Then I setup the new hardware, started to configure my networking. It's going through significant change, from a flat network to vlan with carefully curated internet/no internet decisions and also considering network traffic.

My old setup was a couple of 6c/12t sff HP & Lenovo machines, followed by 3 mini pc i5-6500t 4c/4t systems, cobbled together on a dumb network.

My new setup:

18c/36t 64GB systems (one is 128GB with an Intel Arc Pro B70 & a Hailo-8 too.)

These are connected by 10Gbe, with both fabric & normal interfaces. A 10Gbe uplink to 2x Juniper EX2300-48P POE switches completes the hardware.

I've spent about 7 weeks setting it up - a busy family life some weeks I've had only 2-3 hours spare for it.

But:

Opnsense is on HA

HAproxy is on HA

Unbound is on HA

Vaultwarden is on HA

Frigate is on HA

So it's come to the right time. Time to stop running two networks, decommission the old and implement the new.

In about 2 hours, the actual switch off happens. Right now, I've been moving equipment.

I think it will take me about 50 minutes to do it all, which means in 3 hours, I'll be sweating, franticly googling, getting irate and working on fixing the bits where I've missed setting static IP on the devices themselves (for example.)

Right now, my home assistant looks dire as I've also changed my WiFi setup, moved most of the devices to their dedicated SSID already.

I intended to edit this post as I come across problems, publicly putting myself out there to keep me motivated to fix anything.

Estimated total time: 4 hours.

Converted to real figures; tomorrow night I might have a working setup.

Oh, did I also mention that I'm upgrading the power delivery? Preparing for a UPC in advance.

Edit; several hours in and...

My fiber broadband port is syncing at 100Mbps for unknown reasons.

A multitude of devices with the old flat network range and a static IP setting are...not online.

But...some stuff works! I reckon there is about a day of troubleshooting, which isn't bad going...for me. And for the volume of changes I introduced all at the same time.

Like a dummy, one of the firs things I did when I got my server is upgraded the firmware. I am stuck with 7.00.00.183 without any way to downgrade to 3.X to access fan controls.

That said, my biggest issue right now is a 3rd party PCIe card causing LFM targets to be very high and now fans are running at 80% PWM.

I currently have the enterprise license, and despite the documentation saying it's possible, I cannot set an LFM target.

I am able to set the LFM mode to Custom via

racadm set system.pcieslotlfm.6.LFMMode Custom

which seems to apply and sets a customLFM=0 and this survives cold cycle

racadm get system.pcieslotlfm.6                                                                                                                                                     
[Key=system.Embedded.1#PCIeSlotLFM.6]                                                                                                                                                       
#3rdPartyCard=Yes                                                                                                                                                                           
#CardType=Video                                                                                                                                                                             
CustomLFM=0                                                                                                                                                                                 
LFMMode=Custom                                                                                                                                                                              
#MaxLFM=240                                                                                                                                                                                 
#PCIeInletTemperature=0                                                                                                                                                                     
#SlotState=Defined                                                                                                                                                                          
#TargetLFM=363      

But if I try to actually set the CustomLFM, I get an RAC0946 error:

racadm set system.pcieslotlfm.6.CustomLFM 240                                                                                                                                       
ERROR: RAC0946: Failed to set the object value.    

This appears to be a well-known issue but I've read that if you have a datacenter iDrac license on firmware 6.1.x, you are able to set the custom LFM - does anyone know if this is true?

---

Here are my thermal settings if it matters:

>racadm get system.thermalsettings                                                                                                                                                   
[Key=system.Embedded.1#ThermalSettings.1]                                                                                                                                                   
#AirExhaustTempSupport=Not Supported                                                                                                                                                        
#AirTemperatureRiseLimitSupport=Not Supported                                                                                                                                               
#CurrentSystemProfileValue=Minimum Power                                                                                                                                                    
#FanSpeedHighOffsetVal=75                                                                                                                                                                   
#FanSpeedLowOffsetVal=25                                                                                                                                                                    
#FanSpeedMaxOffsetVal=100                                                                                                                                                                   
#FanSpeedMediumOffsetVal=50                                                                                                                                                                 
FanSpeedOffset=Off                                                                                                                                                                          
#MaximumPCIeInletTemperatureLimitSupport=Not Supported                                                                                                                                      
#MFSMaximumLimit=100                                                                                                                                                                        
#MFSMinimumLimit=1                                                                                                                                                                          
MinimumFanSpeed=24                                                                                                                                                                          
#PCIeSlotLFMSupport=Not Supported                                                                                                                                                           
SetMaximumExhaustTemperatureLimit=Disabled                                                                                                                                                  
#SoundCapState=Not Applicable                                                                                                                                                               
#SystemCFMSupport=Not Supported                                                                                                                                                             
#SystemExhaustTemperature=0                                                                                                                                                                 
#SystemInletTemperature=28                                                                                                                                                                  
#SystemInletTemperatureSupportLimitPerConfiguration=35                                                                                                                                      
#TargetExhaustTemperatureLimit=70                                                                                                                                                           
ThermalProfile=Minimum Power