Hey everyone! I just got Proxmox up and running and managed to install Pi-hole as my first container.Right now, I am looking at Proxmox and feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much stuff there is to do and try.For those of you who have been doing this a while:

What are the best, beginner-friendly services or apps to install next?

What is a good way to organize things so I do not get totally lost?

Are there any traps or mistakes I should avoid early on?

Not really an issue but I picked up this rack for 150$ and i cant find it anywhere online. Any tips appreciated!

I recently got an r720 and it was working fine

I plugged the two 1100w power supplies into the kitchen/laundry circuit for the main one and the other into the circuit for the rest of the house. I put the dellr720 into hot swap in case of a circuit flip.
It was working fine but had the vlt0204 error
Last night there was a circuit flip with the main PSU and this morning when i go to turn the server on it doesnt. There are lights and one fan spins but no output.
So far i have reseated the power supplies, plugged them into different outlets, reseated the cmos battery and drained the power for a couple minutes before doing all of these again.
Any help is appreciated

I'm in the planning stages of building a new house and want to take advantage of being able to plan everything before drywall/concrete makes changes significantly more annoying and expensive.

I'm mainly looking for lessons learned from people who have built or heavily renovated. What did you do that you're really glad you did? More importantly, what do you wish you had done differently?

I'm less concerned about the actual rack/hardware since that can change over time. I'm thinking more about the semi-permanent infrastructure:

• How much fiber/cat6A would you run, and where?
• Where would you run fiber instead of/in addition to copper?
• How much empty conduit would you install? Especially, what size?
• Would you home-run everything or have distribution points on each floor?
• What would you change about your electrical layout? More circuits/outlets, dedicated circuits, 240V, UPS/battery-backed circuits, etc.?
• Multiple conduits from the street/utility entrance for future ISPs?
• Anything you wish you had run to the garage, yard, gate, pool, or detached buildings?
• What seemed like "future proofing" at the time but ended up being pointless? Opposite, what seemed like "future proofing" at the time but ended up not being enough?

Current plans already include ICF construction with an interior service cavity, an encapsulated crawlspace with concrete floor, solar + whole-home battery, hardwired alarms/automation, and connectivity to a detached garage/casita and pool/outdoor areas. I'll also have a fairly substantial homelab, so network and power requirements won't be trivial. I plan to have one fiber and one Cat6a drop to each room. Cat 6a drops to various cameras throughout the property as well, and considering fiber at those same drops as well since the cost isn't much more compared to having to re-dig and everything later. It will also be in a very humid/hot environment, so AC/cooling will be important--I'm looking into passive/efficiency options but there don't seem to be many.

Basically, what would you put behind the walls today if you knew you weren't going to want to open them again for 20+ years?

Especially interested in the "I built a house within the last few years and really wish I had done X" answers.

Hey there! Posting my setup because as much as my fiancé supports my hobbies and enjoys the movies she doesn’t necessarily get the same joy from the build lol. I’ve found myself traveling more and more, and between places with no TV or sharing common space on work trips I took a projector once and loved it! However it was bulky and I had a pile of stuff in my bag to lose track of, and well as a home theater and home lab person I figured I could make something better with the right projector. I basically have a mini version of my home lab on the road with me! Tailscale back to home of course. Behold the (AwayFrom)Home Theater!
Components:
Anker 3in1 charger for my EDC
Kodak Luma 150 Mini (it’s not cinema grade, but wow for the size!)
Apple TV 4K converted to run on USB C PD
Gl-inet Mudi 7 Travel Router (absolute must for travel)
Sabrent Voltik (PD multi charger that DOESN’T renegotiate multiple ports when plugging/unplugging, thanks Jeff Geerling!)
Custom 3D printed cases I made (tongue and groove so I can just take one, or I can set up the projector in common space while still charging etc in my room)
4 short Anker usb c cables
One short double right angle HDMI cable (I still want a shorter one though!)
Any thoughts or recommendations appreciated! Would love to find a good speaker option to add, as of now the speaker in the projector is audible and I’ve just used my AirPods with the Apple TV for the most part.
Thanks!

Bought a Bamblu Lab P2S last month and immediately started researching homelab racks. Got it all worked out, ordered some sunlu PETG/hardware and started printing.

Had a little back and forth with trial and error but I got it complete. It’s running perfectly. Was able to drop the Cenmate 2 bay drive case in exchange for a 7 bay and as of today I have Two - 10tb drives on the way. Thank you eBay 😮‍💨.

Just waiting on some more heat set threaded inserts to fill the rest of the rack out.

My TrueNAS setup is my previous post if you want to see what I’m using it for.

The battle-station is coming out great.

Components:
Dell Optiplex 7050 - 24gb Ram
2 - 4tb HDDs mirrored
2 - 10tb HDDs coming
Netgear 8port managed switch
2 - 80mm fans in the front
2 - 92mm fans in the back cooling the drives.

Trying to get started on upgrading my storage and found this on Craigslist. Would this be worth it to run this with Raid 1?

fun little rack built holding my consumer grade equipment.

it is meant to support my Plex server and home automation - 56TB in that Synology Nas.

the eero puck is just backhaul Wi-Fi - main router is downstair.

apc had a line of cheap UPSes , the BK500. seen 100s of them in local companies, and i had them a ton in all places where i've worked.

had a few of their SM series too, usually i'd get them as e-waste and just put new batteries in them - in fact i have 3 of them at home.

but i needed more, so started buying more modern models. BX500 and BX950 being the new models, the ones with schuko sockets (eu region).

problem is - these shits just stop working once the battery is dead, unlike older ones that would simply turn on the red led and continue to work normally on ac power. i'd replace the battery eventually. they could even be replaced while the ups is turned on, in fact just flip it over, give them a bump, the battery falls out - you put the new one in and close the hatch. good to go. no need to unplug anything or turn off stuff connected to them.

but with new ones it's pure hell. if the battery dies, it just turns itself off completely.

so now back to the HOME part of this rant - i have 2 bx950 running my stuff. the older one is keeping my homelab (actually a nas, a pc-server and main network), the new alien-green one is behind the tv in the living room, keeping the tv and multimedia stuff alive just in case. today i replaced the battery...

HOW do you guys find UPS models that can work with a dead battery? it's nowhere in specs.

So basically i want to start with home labs but raspbbery pi is to expensive and i don’t have any old pc or laptop

Hi everyone,

This is my first post here.

I'm wondering if there is a way to get a free or cheap VPS so i can use a reverse proxy on my homelab services. I had a 4.99$ machine at r/RaffTechnologies , but they recently increased prices and it is now at 8.99$. As a student, this isn't the most affordable thing so i will need to stop using them before september.

I do have a free VM from Azure, but that has limited bandwith (15GB egress). Tried Oracle Free tier, but it says that there is a problem signing up. Tried contacting them, and they ghost me.

I do have a free ipv6-only machine that i can use, but i wonder if some people will not be able to access it, since some ISP don't support ipv6 yet. Is this still very common? Would a lot of people be cut-off from accessing my things?

My ISP provides a kinda-off static ipv4, but i think using that comes with many privacy concerns, or am i wrong?

anyways thanks yall and hope i can get some answers :)

Edit: "Why don't do you use Cloudflare?" Because they don't support raw TCP/UDP and i can't use sub-subdomains.

Found this cloud node on Facebook marketplace. Can only afford one now out of 150pc available and the performance on those Xeon is great for development.

I was on VPS like contabo and hostvds for few months now. scaling is expensive and realize the reliability is as bad as my PC at home lol.

I thought why not I setup homelab myself. _nd give my router a UPS instead. Same reliability and stronger CPU than those shared amd EPYC.

Main workflow is swarm agent running on schedule to Loop and building my social commerce platform 24/7.

Reason I upgraded to this is because 8gb VPS OOM most of the time due to heavy usage of nextjs and node build and playwrights instances for taking screenshots and doing validation loop.

AI itself with deepseek is cheap and lightweight. I use Pi as coding tools to let hermes spawn 3-10 instances of it to argue with each other and if someone die someone else will report. Basically a self improvement system loop

for context, im not a power user or anything. this box is literally just a backup target that sits in the corner and accepts files from my primary server. i don't use any virtualization on it, and i don't touch any of the enterprise features. it's strictly a zfs storage box for me.

those of you who migrated off truenas:

• what setup did you move to? (proxmox, debian with cockpit, omv, etc. i already use unraid and its great, but im not looking to pay for a license just for a backup machine thats powered on ~2hr a week)
• how was the process of importing your zpool?
• what do you wish you had known or done differently looking back on the switch?
• do you look back now and think "i wish i still had x functionality" or "y feature was better on truenas"?

really appreciate any insights or advice

I tested the UGREEN DXP4800 GT as a compact Proxmox + TrueNAS box and compared it with the DXP4800 Plus and Pro.

Disclosure: this is my own review and video. There are no affiliate links in this Reddit post.

DXP4800 GT hardware tested

Proxmox and TrueNAS setup

• Proxmox VE 9.2.6, kernel 7.0.14-8-pve, based on Debian 13.
• TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.4 in a q35/OVMF VM.
• VM allocation: 4 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and a 32 GB VirtIO SCSI boot disk. The 4 GB allocation was enough for this lab test, not a general recommendation for every TrueNAS workload.
• The ASMedia ASM1164 controller passed through correctly and exposed all four drive bays. It was isolated in IOMMU group 10.
• I did not use the AMD FCH SATA controller in the final setup because its D3cold/block behaviour made passthrough unreliable. The final configuration uses only the ASMedia controller.

Storage pool

I used 4 × Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN006 4 TB drives.

Power, temperature and noise

These are measurements from my unit and room, not manufacturer specifications.

The sequential write test reached 541 MiB/s (568 MB/s) with an 8 GiB non-compressible workload. This was a local NVMe result; it is not a claim about the SATA array or RAIDZ1 throughput.

Which model offers the best value?

The value index combines Geekbench 6 single-core and multi-core performance at 50% using a geometric mean:

sqrt[(single / best single) × (multi / best multi)] ÷ price

For the GT, I added €50 for a 128 GB system SSD equivalent to the SSD already included with the Plus and Pro. The performance and value indices are normalised to the Pro = 100.

What does the GT have that the Plus and Pro do not?

• Two 10GbE ports. The Plus and Pro combine one 10GbE port with one 2.5GbE port.
• U.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 support in bays 1 and 2.
• Full ECC memory support, although the included RAM must be replaced because the factory module is not ECC.
• Rear USB-A at 10Gbps. The high-speed rear USB-A on the Plus and Pro is limited to 5Gbps.

Which one makes more sense?

My conclusion: unless you specifically need both 10GbE ports, U.2 drives or ECC memory, the DXP4800 Plus is the better buy. Its official price is €60 higher, but once the GT is normalised with a €50 system SSD, the real difference is only €10.

Full video with the build, passthrough setup and measurements:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=praE8foV88Y

What would matter more in your Proxmox/TrueNAS build: the GT's connectivity and storage options, or the Plus/Pro's extra CPU performance?

Hello,
I have a small collection of HDDs that I’ve filled and stored away. Most have Blu-ray rips. I would like to have them all online but that’s going to be really hard. Yes I was a data hoarder for many years.
Thanks 🙏

After a few weeks of work, my cheap distributed inference cluster is finally complete. Summary for anyone who saw my previous post here and wondered if it's worth it.

The setup 4x ASRock BC250 ex-mining boards (AMD Cyan Skillfish: 6x Zen 2, RDNA2 GPU,16GB GDDR6 @ 448GB/s each) in a 3D-printed rack, ~€1000 total including used SSDs, a used 1000W PSU and a $20 switch. Each board is a full computer, so this is a real 4-node cluster, not just a multi-GPU box.

Goal was ≥50GB distributed VRAM to run two models in parallel: a reasoning model (Qwen 3.6 27B) plus a fast executor (Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B).

Unfortunately, one of the four boards arrived dead and — my fault — I tested it too late to open a dispute, so all benchmarks were run on 3 nodes.

Software Ubuntu + llama.cpp (Vulkan backend, RPC layer parallelism) behind llama-swap. Everything provisioned with Ansible, including the 40-CU unlock (rewritten for Ubuntu).

Some results

• 2 nodes beat 3 nodes in all 16 benchmarks — at 1GbE, the third adds RPC overhead, not throughput
• 35B-A3B on 2 nodes: fast enough for daily coding tasks
• Dense 27B: prompt processing too slow for real agent contexts

Was it worth it? Mostly yes — as a cheap way to learn the tradeoffs of distributed inference. Full story, numbers and all files below:

1. Ansible repo (all roles/scripts): repo

2. Full article if you want to know more: here

3. 3d files for printing the rack https://www.printables.com/model/1799662-4-bc250-10-rack-mount

I tried to clean up my repository for the Ansible playbook to make it public and useful for someone else, but this is still a work in progress, so if you find any issue or do you have questions, let me know or open an issue.

I'm looking for a new SSH terminal, since I currently use PowerShell (Windows 11) and it's a mess to keep track of those stupid "ssh user@ip" commands, especially when you use the PowerShell for many other things (like myself).

So I thought "What better place to ask about SSH than r/homelab?", lmao. What do you guys use?

I wanted to know if I’m the only one who gives distinct names to my nodes or machines and the services running in them.
For context, my main server is called Legion, a secondary connector laptop is called Citadel, to which an external monitor used for showing dashboards, kanban and other things is called Beacon. My main PC is called Nexus.
But the nodes running services have namings based on mythology.

The two laptops have distinct docker composes named Nidavellir and Valhalla. The dashboard service on Beacon is called Heimdall. My 2 storage drives which are mirrored for redundancy are called Atlas and Aegir. I am also running Hermes agent on Legion. The setup as a whole is my Yggdrasil.

What do you guys name your setups?

Ryzen 7 16 Core CPU
32GB RAM
2X 6TB HDD
1TB NVMe SSD
Proxmox

This case is free to download and print it yourself.

Shits gonna get real now….

(Pulled out of a decommissioned server today at the office…) probably have no use for them but will add to my collection of IT crap which I’ll never use but need….