u/khadddict

A while back I posted my messy setup here (https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1ucz5me/longtime_lurker_finally_posting_my_setup) : hardware scattered around, cables everywhere, nothing actually held in place. It finally has a home 🎊.

Recently decided it was time for an actual rack, went with a 10-inch Lab Rax. I actually bought a 3D printer mainly for this project, plus it's just genuinely useful for a ton of other things.

The rack itself was the easy part. Finding rack-mount shelves for a GEEKOM A9 Max mini PC or a Raspberry Pi 5 in a FLIRC case wasn't, so I designed and printed my own and published them on Makerworld if anyone wants them for their own Lab Rax.

Also went in along the way:

• A JetKVM, mainly so I can still reach my node's console if it loses network (noticed a lot of homelabs here have one or more, so now mine does too lol)
• A UniFi Switch Lite 8 PoE to power the JetKVM directly
• An RGB fan for cooling (and for the lights?)
• A 1U power strip to power everything on the rack
• A brush cable panel, started as an off-the-shelf Amazon part but redesigned as a 3D print to keep the rack color-consistent

Full writeup with photos, videos, and print links: https://blog.khaddict.com/posts/the-lab-rax/

Happy to answer any questions 😄!

Since my last post, I asked Peepo to clean up the diagram (done with Homelable).

He complained a bit, but he got it done. If you have any feedback or suggestions for improvements, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks in advance :)

Been lurking here for years, always telling myself "I'll post when it's done." It's never done, so here we go.

Everything runs on a single GEEKOM A9 Max Mini PC (128 GB DDR5 RAM, 4 TB NVMe). No rack, no cluster, just a tiny node supervised by Gengar & Peepo (cable management handled by them too, clearly). At the moment, Proxmox hosts 16 VMs and 4 LXCs.

Network is segmented into 4 VLANs (CORE, ADMIN, INFRA, EDGE) behind OPNsense with strict least-privilege firewall rules between them. For external access, an Infomaniak VPS acts as a TCP passthrough over WireGuard → HAProxy at home terminates SSL. The status page runs directly on the VPS so it survives homelab downtime.

I'll probably drop a proper network diagram (started on Homelable) at some point. No ETA on that one.

Kubernetes is a 3-node Talos Linux cluster, all workloads are Helm charts deployed via ArgoCD with secrets injected at sync time via the ArgoCD Vault Plugin.

Config management is SaltStack across all VMs, YAML inventory as single source of truth, HashiCorp Vault for secrets, and StackStorm for event-driven automation (VM lifecycle, internal cert provisioning with EasyPKI...).

Observability: Prometheus + Grafana + Loki, AlertManager → Discord.

And there's an Ollama LXC with Open WebUI because 128 GB of RAM had to go somewhere.

Live service list: homepage

The whole config is open source if you want to dig in: voidnode. Always open to feedback & ideas (yep I still have lots of RAM), and if anything in there saves you some time or gives you inspiration, a star on the repo is always appreciated!