Hey everyone!
I've got a classic Dell PowerEdge R300 taking up space in the lab. Before I turn it into a high-tech space heater for the upcoming winter, I want to give it one last glorious job.
What’s the most ridiculous, fun, or unexpectedly useful thing I should host on this piece of history?
Hit me with your best (or worst) ideas!
Hope this question is appreciated here.
We just bought a home here in Germany, and we have those two cables coming out of the ground.
Question is, is that Fibre?
I want to create my own Jarvis like Tony Stark, with whom I will communicate, share my docs/photos and complete context so I can integrate it into all my applications(Gmail, calendar). Integrate it on my iPhone. Like a companion.
In future, I would like to introduce RAG performance, which I can use to read the updated docs and give me the right path to move ahead with my coding projects.
What I have right now?
Are these resources enough to get started, with at least testing?
Hey so around one year ago I first started getting into home labbing totally inspired by the members of this sub and made a post talking about my plans to create a free minecraft server host. I was met with a lot of criticism but more importantly some super helpful knowledge and advice to improve my skills. So I wanted to make an update post 1 year later and talk about the lab and how it has grown and the pains and struggles I faced.
This all started as a passion project to provide people with Minecraft servers for free as I thought the hosting space for minecraft was getting way to expensive for the cheap and older gen hardware that was being offered. I started with 2 systems that both ran duel AMD EPYC 7551s and 256gb DDR4. However the first thing I learnt doing this is that event though they had much more threads and ram the density for Minecraft containers was only 15% better than using consumer Ryzen 9 7950X & 5600MT/s DDR5. But the main differences between the two was the user experience. Servers on the Ryzen Nodes were able to hold in some cases 20 more players than the EPYC nodes (5 -> 25). This was down to the single threaded performance.
From here I decided to remove and power down the EPYC systems.
Fast foward a ton and I am now at 100k users with about 300 ccu on the network. At this point the ad revenue on the panel & affiliate conversion started to show that this could grow into something sustainable. So I took my biggest risk yet and brought 10 new Ryzrn 9 7950X, 128gb DDR5, 1TB NVMe nodes and migrated from using unmanaged Unify networking to Arista managed network switches. Specifically the Arista 7050SX & 7050QX however using a scuffed mini pc with a usb dongle NIC running VyOS. Honestly that mini pc did me proud for 4 months without failt until it went catastrophically wrong and I needed to rebuild the network from the ground up (this becomes a patteren).
Now I am gonna jump foward to today as I wanna keep things short and go into tech spec. Today the host is running:
- 31x Ryzen 9 7950X, 128gb DDR5 5600MT/s, 1TB gen 4 NVMe, 10Gbps SFP+ NIC
- 4x Hypervisors Duel AMD EYPC 7551s, 256gb-512gb DDR4, 4TB Gen 3 NVMe, 25Gbps SFP28 NIC
- 2x Hypervisors Ryzen 9 7950X, 256gb DDR5 5600MT/s, 4TB Gen 4 NVMe, 10Gbps SFP+ NIC
- 1x 172TB NAS, Raid 10, Duel 40Gbps QSFP NIC
- 2x Arista 7050SX Leaf Switchs
- 2x Arista 7050QX Spine Switchs
- 2x Juniper QFX5100 Switchs (ASIC GRE Encapsulation)
- 1x VyOS Duel 100Gbps Firewall Router
- 1x Cisco Router that my ISP gave me to terminate a P2P tunnel.
We have expanded a lot over the year and it has come with a ton of challenges.
First of all I was stupid to assume that the adsense CPM would stay the same. I quickly started to lose a ton of money on the project so as an effort to save the host we started selling cheap VPS plans using the original hardware I phased out at the start of minecarft hosting and luckily it was a massive success now accounting for 80% of our total revenue allowing us to buy even more nodes for free hosting and better backups.
Secondly I underestimated peoples want to fuck my shit up and we have been massivly hit by DDoS attacks daily 900Gbps+ Layer 3/4 and also Layer 7. With an uplink of 95p 1Gbps-10Gbps this was a massive issue then caused us to move off of OVH completely as VAC was leaking 2-3% of attack traffic to a new provider that to date has not leaked more than 0.002% of attack traffic.
Thirdly the pterodactyl admin panel grinds to a stand still when you have over 800k servers registered and luckly there are people much smarter than me on the team that were able to fork the software and create new caching and better backups, limbo, etc.
And Finally when your energy provider offers you a fixed rate per kWh of 22.3p per kWh just know that if it sems to good to be true it sadly is.
If anyone has any questions about stuff feel free to reply below I will answer the best I can but I am still learning a ton and thanks people in r/homelab for keeping me inspired.
So Self-Hosting my business on a majorly low budget... like painful low budget, altought it has driven me to learn efficent python, to the point what was running on a full rack server has been made so fast and efficent that it runs on a 8gb 10 year old optiplex with very little speed lose, and this is not vibe-coded business project, 5 years of hard work, 10 years of thought experiments and self convincing I could do. Years of building training sets, training my own ML models, scripts, coding obscure functinationlity, and Now im in the home stretch getting ready to go live.
This is not a promotion for my business idea, and I wont answer questions about the business as again not an Ad not even going to say name or what I do, but I just wanted to share my Self Hosted Datacenter, because it feels sexy to do something like this on such a small budget.
Yes its a fully 3D printed, rack, all my budget of $200 went into picking up a collection of optiplex's from an ex home laber (i dont get why they would be an ex either). We have Security, Hosting, Automation, and even redendency failover. Already had a UPS and a 5G router with tons of credit on it as a backup (won the 5gb router and credit at a CTF event) ... big box on the right is my home AI server ... which ate up the original budget for the proof of concept that became the MVP hardware.
On the shelf still to be installed is 8 x 2.5" SATA JBOD units, when I pick up more drives (if price ever comes down) that I can raid into a hot and cold backup for the main systems. Full rack including AI server is around 9 Kwh per day, which is the biggest killer in terms of cost right now.
But yea, pretty excited, nearly at the finish line of 10 years of ideas, and 5 years of building, months of 3-4am bug fix's to wake up for my day job at 9am. But im also crazy proud of my designs and system, that on such a budget the full MVP runs on minimal hardware why its currently getting stress tested by my testers, also thankfully its not a big volume business, not going to have a few k people at the same time, would be lucky if it was maybe 50 max at a day or time, and at that point if im hitting that, i'll be able to get new hardware and upload a new photo of a new full size rack that kills my power bills even more.
Home data centre ended up being used for real work so recently moved it from my garage to actual data centre. It is not the nearest I’ve ever done but every cable is labelled and tidy and I only cut one chunk out of my hand installing it. 30TB enterprise SAS SSDs, 2TB RAM and 200 CPU cores. Dual 10GB for data and 4x 1GB for app traffic. First 3 pics are it in the data centre, the next two are how it started in the garage when tidied and last two are the chaos originally for it still using consumer Ryzen chips in three of them and I think old G8 opterons and a rack of Pis. Decided to ditch the rainbow in the data centre sadly.
Installing all of this tidily I am never doing quad uplinks again straight to 25Gb + 10Gb.
Hi everyone,
I run a growing collection of self-hosted software, and one small annoyance kept getting bigger: checking GitHub release pages, remembering which version I actually run, figuring out where it is deployed, and then deciding whether an update is worth touching.
So I built Software Release Radar.
It is an open-source, self-hosted dashboard that checks upstream releases, compares them with the versions you are running, keeps machine, service and container context alongside them, and gives you a review queue where you can decide whether to Update, Wait, Ignore or Investigate.
It is deliberately not an automatic updater. The idea is to give you better information before you make a change.
A few things it currently does:
The core monitoring does not require AI.
I also want to be open about how the project was made.
I am not a professional software developer, and AI was used heavily during development. I used OpenAI Codex extensively to help with implementation, refactoring, testing and documentation.
I set the direction and requirements, decide what the application should do, test it in my own self-hosted environment, review the results and make the final release decisions. I have also tried to back that up with automated tests, security checks and real deployment validation rather than assuming AI-generated code is correct.
This started as a tool I wanted for my own setup, but I have reached the point where I would really like other people to try it.
If you do, I would especially love to know:
Bug reports, criticism, feature ideas and contributions are all welcome.
GitHub:
https://github.com/muhdusama/Software-Release-Radar
Thanks for taking a look. I hope it is useful to someone else who has also ended up with more software to keep track of than they originally planned. If so, please do leave a star on Github.
curious how common this is. found a guy in washington, east coast, renting out bare metal, and what got my attention was he could hand over multiple ips and actually control them himself.
but what im actually more curious about is the people doing it on a plain big-carrier business line. spectrum business, att fiber, verizon, frontier, ziply, that sort of thing, with a static block on it.
does anyone here have something similar on the west coast and how?
