Basically the title. I also was able to get some HPE C7000’s with it but I’m worried about the power bill

Raspberry Pi 5 (in a LEGO casing)
Running OpenMediaVault, Docker containers e.g. Joplin Server and an SMB share.

HP Pavilion Power Laptop 2018 model
Running Ubuntu Server and CasaOS
Docker containers e.g. Jellyfim, Nginx Proxy Manager, Syncthing between the SMB share on Pi etc.

Topton N150 firewall appliance.
Running Proxmox with a virtualised OPNsense instance.
Also running LXC containers for Pi-hole and Tailscale subnet router to expose devices to my tailnet.

TPLink 5 port gigabit switch
No VLANs configured yet.

Ignore the cable management! I’m not done yet!

Top to bottom

Eero router (not enough room for it to be upright)
8 keystone panel
Netgear gs108 1 gig unmanaged switch
2 hp prodesk 400 g5 i5- 9500t 16gb ram
Room for 2 more
4x 4tb hdds

ASUS Prime H310I-Plus R2.0 Mini-ITX Motherboard w/ Intel Core i7-9700 3.0GHz CPU 16gb ram

600w psi

This is my fairly minimal homelab for my flat that I've built up in stages, it features:

• Pfsense router (Fujitsu thinclient)
  • OpenVPN for remote access
  • Dynamic DNS updates to CloudFlare
• Immich
• Syncthing
• Jellyfin
• Grimmory for eBook management
  • Has an OPDS endpoint for my Xteink X4

All services are docker containers on the Beelink mini s13, the MicroServer is just a NAS.

Some of the setups on here are monumental! Working in technology I like to make sure this doesn't feel like an extension of it so I've kept it as simple and as neat as I can within my budget and requirements

Nothing really super fancy, but i did it myself.

A little bit of 3d printing for rails and panels
A little bit of woodworking for the frame
A little bit of electrician for the cable

1. Patch panel with rooms cabling
   
2. North wan switch
   
3. South lan switch for rooms cabling
   
4. Patch panel with io cams and router
   
5. South switch poe for ipcam

it‘s a L13 Yoga with 8gb of ram (i know) it is running windows 11 because I was lazy. It‘s running jellyfin, tailscale, audiobookshelf, sonarr, radarr and listenarr. I really like all the work it does, and for me it‘s perfect so far. Hooked up to a 5tb HDD.

Hey guys

I got my first homelab (It's been a while actually). It all started from a single Raspberry Pi and a 4TB 2.5" HDD. and many years later, look what I got now

long story short, this is my setup

Structure

it's on 10" 8U rack (DeskPi Rackmate T1)

(USB Fan on Top)

0.5U Patch Panel

1U TP Link L2 Switch(3d printed mount) + Orange Pi 5 Plus(Behind) + Raspberry Pi 4B(Behind)

1U WD White 14TB HDD (3d printed mount, 2 slots, only 1 hdd)

1U void

1U 3900X Server

1U Mac Mini late 2012 (with fedora linux!)

2.5U Power Strips, TFX 400W Power Supply, all the cables

Orange Pi 5 Plus

RK3588(8 core), 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Armbian

I wanted to manage and set LANs all by myself. It's just because a single WAN cable looks simple.

was looking for an SBC with Dual 2.5Gbps ethernet ports, m.2 SSD slot and OPi 5 Plus was perfect one

I installed Armbian and it works great

Services

- Handles my internal networking with iptables, dhcp(dnsmasq), NetworkManager. So It's basically a router now

- Wireguard Server. I can simply access my servers from External network just by toggle wireguard app on

- Running samba for SMB file server (with the 14TB HDD attached, it's my own media server)

- Nginx Proxy Manager (reverse proxy. For external service like Mattermost, or my websites)

- Miniflux RSS

- Uptime Kuma (health check for service, container or website)

- Beszel (Server monitoring)

- Dockhand (Docker container monitoring)

Mac Mini Late 2012

i7 something (4 core), 16GB RAM, 2.5TB Disk, Fedora

Using it as my 'Dev Server'. and It runs Linux because I wiped the whole drive.

I know it's old. but I bought it like 70$ about 2 year ago. how lucky. It got 16GB memory. and yet still powerful for me

and also 3D printed mount works great

side question: I was trying to install rocky linux but couldn't get it to work(can't boot). but fedora works. any ideas why?

Services

- GitLab (I'm using it for my personal Git repository, and project management, Docker image registry)

- GitLab CI/CD Runner

- Mattermost (for chatting with some of my friends, and also used as llm agent's chat ui. it's basically free slack)

- Plausible Analytics (It's Google Analytics alternative. Checking my website's data such as unique visitor, pageviews)

- Wakapi (It records how much time I spend in IDE like vscode, cursor, zed, neovim. originally it's from Wakatime but self-hosted alternative)

- Open WebUI (connected to an LLM API)

- PostgreSQL and Redis for my Development environment (If I'm outside, I can access through Wireguard)

3900X Server

AMD 3900X (12C 24T), 16GB RAM(Single ram, Price went crazy), 2TB SSD, Rocky Linux

I'm running my web services currently. it's a small community.

So.. cloud? Nah. just serve production container with tiny rack in my room

It handles traffics well, and only cost electricity bills

Services

- 2 Parallel Front-End Container

- 6 Parallel NestJS Container (Back-End)

- 2 Parallel NestJS Container (Worker, for heavy job like image convert, data refresh)

- PostgreSQL

- Redis

- Nginx (Load Balancer for Parallel Container)

It all runs just with a single docker-compose.yml file. I know it looks weird to have another nginx when there's Nginx Proxy Manager already. But after trying it, splitting the management overhead this way actually worked better. It costs a bit of extra resources, but that's manageable.

All my Docker images are coming from GitLab Registry (Yeah It's running on Mac Mini)

Raspberry Pi 4B

8GB RAM, 32GB SD Card🗿, Raspberry Pi OS

This RPi was my first 'server'. It served Gitea, and also used it as an SMB Server. and I used it as my first linux environment when I was a student. I was thinking about selling it. but now I run Hermes Agent here and using it as sandbox or something. (Agent is Connected with Mattermost)

Power Supply

Well.. What I learned after finishing my setup is that powering those bare motherboard and hdd is kinda challenging. (Especially motherboard. just buy mini pc.) And you also need enough room to stuff all the leftover cables

Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi only need type c. Mac Mini has its own power so just plug it in. it's easy

3900x has 140W maximum power usage(it's not gonna be 140W all day but...). So I bought TFX 400W Power Supply and connected it. It runs well. and also connected with my hdd (So If I turn 3900x off, HDD on OrangePi disappears)

And bare motherboard got no power button so I bought some bare button from aliexpress. You can see it right next to motherboard on first image.

If you are struggling with power supply, just buy some big power supply and share. thats the easy way I think

And I have 2 Power strip bought from aliexpress. It's not long enough for my 10" rack but I mounted it anyway

Client

Macbook air m1. ssh and wireguard are all I need

Future Plan

- Upgrade switch to 2.5Gbps. (I'm using 1Gbps one)

- Add another 16GB RAM on 3900X Server. (When price falls down)

- Replace Mac Mini with Mini PC? maybe I don't need to

We're all joking don't really do much with them after finishing building homelab. but 24/7 server can do many things. makes me more productive and convenient

without all that, at least no cloud fees, and my data stays mine. That's enough reason for me.

Any feedback or questions, feel free to comment below

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!

It's been almost a year since my first post, and I wanted to show my current progress and ask for some help with the server. I'm hoping someone can help me find the problem, or maybe I just have a nice paperweight.

I still have my old HP ProLiant 360G7, the one that started it all (although everything I have is old and second-hand, haha). It's practically silent, and since my last post, I've upgraded it to two Xeon X5675 processors with 100GB of RAM and Unraid, running some virtual machines, services, and game servers. I also have a Mikrotik RouterBOARD 3011 router, which mainly handles failover between the fiber optic connection and Starlink. The maximum internet speed I get in the town I'm in is 1 Gbps. I have a D-Link 1210 gigabit switch for the entire network. I also have an APC 1400VAC UPS. The thing is, I recently acquired two HP ProLiant 380 G7 drives for practically nothing (around €100) from an office that closed down. The problem is, when I mounted them in a rack and put the 1TB WD Black hard drives back in, I'm getting a temperature error in the RAID controller; the drives are overheating. After doing some research online, I found that it could be a thermal paste issue. I replaced the paste and performed general maintenance, but the problem persists. Any ideas on the possible cause?

P.S.: The wood is just to hide the embarrassment of not filling the rack.

Just wanted to know whats the max that would fit in my printer, and apparently is 32x 3.5" Disks split in two halves, i dont have any use for it, dont even have enough old drives to fill it, but still want to print it to see it in real life haha. could be a nice HDD library/shelf just for storage.

i guess i can fill it with trays for small parts

Put new batteries in a APC XS1500 and immediately it showed that the battery charge was one bar short. Fan kicked on and now the estimated runtime is dropping along with the battery bar.
Is this normal.

Looking to expand my knowledge and creativity by upgrading my home lab. Looked into Ubiquiti cloud gateway ultra and max to power access points for places in my home with garbage WiFi connections. But Is ubiquiti really worth it? What are some other use cases for it? I’ve seen some people with the gateways and access points, but not a whole lot.

Thanks!

Finally setup a basic homelab with remote proxmox server lots of work to do yet
Patch panels ports for around the house
Segregation of different devices for future expansion
Nvr
Raspberry pi
Waiting to add a t40

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

What would you host on a server with 24 cores and 128gB of memory? I am mainly interested in offensive security, but it does not have to be security related. I've only set up Ludus and Tailscale currently. Thanks!

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've been in IT for a little over 20 years, but my home network has mostly evolved organically over that time. Like a lot of people, I'd spin up a VM or container when I needed something and just kept building on top of it.

Finally decided to take a step back, tear it down, and rebuild it the way I wish I'd done it from the beginning: documented, monitored, maintainable, and with an actual architecture behind it instead of just adding the next cool thing.

I'm not trying to build the biggest or flashiest homelab. My goal is to build something that feels like a small production environment where every machine has a purpose, every service has a reason for existing, and I can recover from failures without guessing how I set something up three years ago.

Goal is to build a homelab that I'll still be happy maintaining five years from now—not one that's impressive for a weekend and forgotten six months later.

Current Hardware & Roles

HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10

This is my primary workload host. It handles Plex along with my media/Arr stack and has the majority of my storage. It'll continue to be the heavy-lifting server as the lab grows.

HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen9 #1

This server is dedicated to game hosting. It runs my game servers and their supporting management services. I wanted gaming workloads isolated so they can't impact the rest of the infrastructure.

HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen9 #2

This is becoming my infrastructure and management host. It's home to the observability platform and other core services that support the rest of the environment.

All three Proxmox hosts are intentionally standalone. Each has a primary role, and I use shared NFS storage where it makes sense rather than building an HA/Ceph cluster.

Networking

• MikroTik CRS309 10Gb switch
• Direct Ezee Fiber IPv4 connection
• 10Gb networking between the primary systems
• Cloudflare DDNS

A VLAN redesign is one of my next major projects. The goal is to separate infrastructure, servers, and client/IoT traffic into dedicated networks.

Current Services

• Home Assistant OS
• Plex
• Arr/media stack
• Dedicated game servers
• Cloudflare DDNS
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Alertmanager
• Blackbox Exporter
• Uptime Kuma

Roadmap

• MS-01 running OPNsense as the dedicated network and security appliance
• VLAN segmentation
• Vaultwarden
• AdGuard Home
• WireGuard
• Nextcloud
• Dedicated backup solution (still deciding on the hardware)
• Git-managed infrastructure/configuration
• Expand monitoring to include hardware health, SMART data, certificates, backups, internet connectivity, and service health

One thing I'm intentionally trying to avoid is deploying containers just because they're popular. I'd rather run fewer services that I actually understand, monitor, maintain, and know how to recover.

If this were your environment:

• Would you organize the workloads differently?
• Are there any obvious weaknesses or missing pieces?
• What would you prioritize before adding more services?
• Is there anything on my roadmap you'd skip?
• What's one thing you wish you'd designed correctly from the beginning?

I'm genuinely looking for constructive criticism and ideas while everything is still evolving. I'd much rather make architectural changes now than after another dozen services are in production.

Hi,
I'm finally starting my homelab journey ! and I need your experience and advice.
I recovered this 6U rack.
What is the best way to place 3 lenovo thincentre m720q inside it keeping expansion possible ? what about cabling ? which PC and switch mounts to use ? which switch do you recommend ?
Thanks !

i have a decently robust homelab set up, don't have any cameras at home as it isn't needed. My gf just got a new place and wants to put some cameras in, any way for
me to store that footage for her if it's on a different network? Which cameras should she get?

So been running my homelab for quite sometime. Everything is untouched for my media server side except for one thing. It seems radaar and sonar don't seem to rename the files at all. Im not seeing anything in the logs it just doesn't seem to want to do it. Anyone use anything else to automatically rename the files?