All old stuff united with a new rack

Wanna know just ask?

I do plan on a rack…and yea roast my desk and chair it’s coming.

Hi! I started the homelabbing journey around 10 months ago with an Optiplex 7080 I got in r/homelabsales, and a bunch of HDDs from a second hand website in my country. Disks are connected through a PCI adapter, powered using a PicoPSU, and all of that is wired to a managed switch that centralizes LAN connections.

Today, my hardware setup is still the same, aside of adding a bit more RAM, but the learning on software stacks and services has been huge! I am running proxmox, and this is the only node I have. Things I am running on this little machine:

- Virtualized TrueNAS with several datasets serving the rest of the apps through NFS
- Gitea server
- Syncthing in TrueNAS to share directories between my machines
- Pi-hole DNS + ad-blocker
- Tailscale router
- Cloudflare tunnel
- 2 development machines I use for job-related stuff (robotics with ROS2)
- Apache guacamole
- PBS backups, + automated laptop backups with borg to the NAS
- A docker VM with dockhand, filebrowser, an outline wiki I share with some colleagues, and a torrent seeding + media stack with jellyfin and *arr.

Next steps are allowing easy airVPN connection to any of my devices (reading about that, idk if it will be through VLANs or some sort of wireguard) + probably moving TrueNAS to a dedicated host for reliability, apart from solving some NIC hang issues I am experiencing sometimes.

My main takeaway is that even with a very low budget and with minimal hardware, you can still learn a lot, while also hosting a lot of services, and that is the most exciting part of this hobby. Racks are amazing, but I don’t feel the need of getting one soon. I still feel there is much more I can do inside this little machine :)

Finished building my home server, big thanks to the community here for all the project showcases and guidance. Enjoyed the build process.

Found the M720q off goodwill, and worked on it part by part to get it here.

CPU: i5-9500
GPU: Nvidia Tesla P4
32GB RAM
170W Power supply

Got a 5015 blower fan, which is powered by a 5->12V USB booster, and the speed is controlled via Serial commands using a RP2040 (you can see the little board behind the machine). A daemon on startup keeps an eye on GPU temps and controls the fan accordingly. GPU sits at ~65° (~70W) on full load. The CPU has the stock cooler so that does get a bit warm, might need to look at that.

The 3D printed case is community sourced print files, modified to fit the fan. Still needs a bit of work. I primarily use it for my fun software projects, local LLM machine (7B models), machine learning (data and vision), light gaming via Steam Link streamed to my Mac.

Thanks again for all the help!

Hi new friends, I am not from around here but have a question that you may be able to answer! I have been asked to drive 3 hours to pick up a spare UPS from one of our sites as ours is nearing end of life. Great, except I know they’re heavy as f*€k. So, I’m not a techy lady, but I see screws. Is it as easy as unscrewing these two bad boys apart so I can move it easier?

Or am I in over my head and need to hire someone to move it?

It’s me, my coworker a dolly and this bad boy. It will be responsible for lab fridges so we have to be careful 🥲

Thank you!

About 13 years ago we got my grandmother a senior-friendly computer called the WOW! Computer. It's basically an MSI-branding-removed AIO running a custom Linux distro with a simplified UI. Pretty easy for her to use (but horribly overpriced for nothing but a custom distro and a fat-lettered keyboard, wasn't ultimately up to me though).

Shortly after her passing I took the computer and let it sit in a closet for years. Until I got the idea to play with Linux and make a cheap NAS out of it as well as giving it a platform for expandability.

Cracked it open to see what I could find. After taking off the heatsink to replace the thermal paste I found it had an AMD E-450, 4GB of DDR3 SODIMM RAM, and a 64GB HDD. Really underpowered but I could work with it.

I swapped out the HDD for a 120GB SSD I had laying around. Turns out the BIOS supports up to 16GB of 1333Mhz in dual channel so I bought an 8GB stick (still $25, wtf) giving it 12GB total.

The mobo has 2x USB 3.0 ports I could use for storage. Had four old drives in the same closet, an M.2 and 3 HDD's totaling 4TB. After getting the dock and enclosure for $58 I configured the drives in RAID with parity.

Then I loaded up Ubuntu and installed it with Xfce. Idle it's running at 9% CPU usage and 700Mb of RAM.

Got SSH working. It has a Gigabit network port, but it also has two Mini PCIe ports with one of them using a wifi card, so if it comes down to it I'll probably upgrade the wifi with a new card to make it decently wireless. I could also add a second network port for loads of fun.

I plan on setting it up to do smart home management and home security in addition to the NAS functions. It's got a touchscreen and webcam (hence no keyboard or mouse) so I will probably mount it to a stand and make a custom UI of my own for total control (think ADT/Google assistant control panel with extra functions). That will probably be ran as a backend API via browser so the CPU doesn't get overloaded.

So yeah, with the slim OS and 83$ later it runs as a nice remote NAS... for now.

Found these on side of road. I enjoy scrapping copper/metals in my spare time. But hate the idea of breaking stuff down that somone could get use out of.

So my question is who would find value in these, what's the value if they work, and are these the type of thing that if thrown out, we're thrown out for possibly good reason so shouldn't be resold.

Brand new, seal was broken, but everything inside is in original packaging and brand new.

While waiting for other stuff here is my little 4u server which keeps getting upgrades when I can afford it

Ryzen 9 5950x
128gb ram
Samsung 990 pro 1tb
2x 2TB HDD
1x 500GB SSD (will be removed soon)
RTX4000

PSU in this picture is 650watt but awaiting delivery of my 1600w

My A4000 will make space for a 3090 and a second 3090 after that (that’s why the psu upgrade)

Second server is going to be Ryzen 5 5700x , 128Gb ram and the a4000 will move in there , 1TB SSD

3rd is my router which is a ryzen 5 4650G, 32gb ram , 1TB SSD , and will get a bunch of hdds but nothing else :) this is an supermicro 1u case

All connected to a USW-Aggregation with 10gbps networking on everything.

For WiFi I use an U7 Outdoor

This all will be placed in the rack in the pic (waiting to be lifted)

Hola amiguitos espero esten bien, se que hay mucha informacion de esto en internet y demas pero quiero hablar con humanos je. Tengo esta EXO serie C con 4 ram y procesaron celeron (abro 3 apps y se prende fuego) por alguna razon tiene 2 sistemas operativos¿.

Quisiera recomendaciones de que hacer con ella ademas de tirarla jajdks. Ya saque un hdd que tenia y me seria para otra pc que tengo. Puedo eliminar los os actuales y colocarle un unico basado en linux para utilizarla como host de apis y/o paginas web? (Estudio programacion y esto me serviria para proyectos personales). Soy nueva en esto y agradeceria sus criticas constructivas y recomendaciones de uso, muchas gracias y buenas noches!

A Few More Photos

Thought I would share my apartment setup. A crossover of homelab and budget audiophile hobbies.

I have a basic N100 Mini PC that runs Proxmox. Its main job is a Technitium DNS backup server (a lot like PiHole). However, I added an additional LXC container to run as a headless Plexamp app.

• I passed through the USB bus to my xDuoo TA-10R Tube Headphone DAC/Amp for lossless playback. I can pass through from the DAC/Amp to my receiver, or power on my headphones.
• I can definitely hear a big difference, especially with my headphones.
• The main Plex server in the lower left holds all the actual media.
• You don't need Proxmox to do this — even a little Raspberry Pi can run as a headless Plexamp.

Audio Gear

• xDuoo TA-10R Tube Headphone DAC/Amp
• Sennheiser HD 6XX Headphones
• Shure SRH1440 Headphones
• Denon AVR-S660H
• JVC TD-V1010 Stereo Cassette Deck
• Marantz TT-15S1
• Pro-Ject Phono Box DC Preamp
• ELAC Debut 2.0 B5.2 Bookshelf Speakers

Homelab Gear

NAS

• Noctua NH-U12S
• Intel X520-DA2 10Gb Dual Port SFP+
• ASUS Prime Z690M-Plus D4 Intel LGA 1700 DDR4
• 128GB DDR4 RAM (4 x 32GB 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance Pro)
• Corsair SF750 Platinum PSU
• OEM 9300-8i 12Gbps HBA IT Mode
• Six 14TB SATA Hard Drives
• One 500GB Cache NVMe M.2 Drive
• Two 1TB M.2 ZFS Mirror for Docker App Data
• One 128GB 2.5" SSD as a Boot Pool

Both of these hobbies are really fun and really expensive. A lot of this gear was thrift store finds, gifts, or a lot of saving. The most recent change was putting the NAS into the Jonsbo N6 case, which fits right into the Ikea Kallax shelf unit.

Upgrade Question

I've been stuck on the audio gear side of things lately, and I think it's time for some new speakers. I really want some floor-standing speakers, but I'm unsure how necessary that is within this space. Looking for something that can fill the room at 65–70dB. Let's say a budget of $1K — what would you get and why? Bonus points if anyone's run floor-standers in a similarly sized apartment and can speak to whether bookshelf + sub would've served them just as well.

A few weeks ago I had discovered about setting up a mini homelab to run services, vpns and ad blockers and I was instantly hooked! last week I purchased an i7 elitedesk 800 G2 Mini, an i7 optiplex 7080 micro, a tp-link es210x-m2 switch and a tecmojo 6U rack to house everything.

Currently I am using the Dell Optiplex 7080 Micro to learn how to use windows server and how things work, and my EliteDesk will likely start running proxmox but for now I have windows 11 installed and connected to my server with Active Directory.

I chose to set up windows server to learn how it works and how its services work like Active Directory , Web Services, Hyper-V server and many other enterprise stuff to play around with. I do plan on expanding this set up with another mini PC for PfSense or media hosting.

Let me know what you guys think!

Couldn’t turn down a free switch and an opportunity to mess around with ArubaOS-CX. Also gave me a reason to tidy up the rack and use some shorter cables - which I ran out of.

Nothing too exciting, just Proxmox with some docker containers on the mini’s eg nginx, homepage, jellyfin, immich, bookstack, and guacamole. Qnap on top of the rack.

VPN on the Forti to an offsite for backups on Unraid which is also running Zabbix.

I recently decided I wanted to stop paying for server hosting and get a mini PC for Home Assistant, Stremio hosting, video game servers, etc. I’m pretty new to all of this, but yesterday I found this for $350, and I think I got a killer deal to get started! It looked a little too plain for me though, so I decided to give it a custom Spidey themed paint job!

Included some befores and afters

Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/qCs9ZraBDFY

Specs:

Model: HP Elite Mini 800 G9

CPU: Intel Core i7-13700T - 16 cores / 24 threads

RAM: 32 GB DDR5 (2×16 GB)

Storage: 1 TB NVMe SSD

Anyways, I hope you guys think it's cool!

Reposted to fix the photos

Getting steam updates over 20x of my ISP download speed feels awesome and I think is an actual valid use for the homelab for one.

• First picture is the SSD in a random cassette looking USB 3.0 enclosure attached to the back of my m920q
• Second picture is Steam getting an update at ~673 Mbps.
• Third picture is Beszel showing traffic between the server and my PC.
• Fourth pic is ISP speedtest on a 50/50 Mbps connection.

For those who don't know LanCache is a software for caching network traffic and then serving the cached data if you request the same data again.

SteamPrefill is an additional piece of software which logs into your steam account and pretends to download games and updates so that your steam client then gets the cached content. Because my internet is so slow steamprefill absolutely choked my internet so I made myself a ratelimited fork of it with a few options.

I absolutely could pay for a much much faster internet (and I previously did, this is my voluntary project) but why pay when I can solve the situation with a stack of cool existing hardware+software.

This is literally the first homelab I've ever done. I had participated in LPCI training and yesterday I said "Let's make my own."

I got an old Tanix TV Box, a typical 5-port TpLink switch, a small router for tests I want to do, and a Temu alarm clock with thermometer functions.

All of this is inside an outdoor fuse box because my pigeon is usually flying around my house, so I preferred to completely isolate it from bird droppings and dust.

I was really missing out on something more complex, but with this I'm already running webscrapers programmed in Go and a couple of other silly things.

Honestly, don't let others who can invest more in their homelabs hold you back. This is the only one I have, and maybe I'll improve it later, don't let anyone tell you that you can't. "You don't have to be a genius to be a great artist."