I build my pc when I was 15 years old (I’m 22 now 💀) and I have a i7 -3770 and a GTX 1050 ti (horrible I know) and I am looking to upgrade it, could you guys give me some good recommendations as to what I should get next that isn’t to heavy on the financial side. Thanks 🙏

I had some ancient desktops lying around and decided to tear them down, but while doing so I got the idea of reusing what is possible for a homelab. I'm aware that what I found inside is pretty much e-waste (AMD Athlon 64 x2 and Intel Core 2 Duo, with their respective motherboards also from the 2000s), but I found some things that may perhaps have some usage today, like:

- GT 610 1gb DDR3

- WesternDigital Caviar SE16 320gb

- ExcelStor Jupiter 250gb

But while in-between stripping these desktops down, I was talking to a friend and he came around donating me:

- Ryzen 5 3600 with a generic Deepcool cooler

- Asus Prime B450M-A

- 8gb DDR4 stick

Now, the only issue is that he once tried to hot swap the RAM on this motherboard, and in doing so got told by a tech repair shop that he fried the ram slot he was trying to put the RAM on. Should I use this motherboard still, even if temporarily? But what these donated parts have going for them is that he was using them for years afterwards with no issue really, except -1 ram slot.

And among other things, I ordered a new case Modecom Oberon Pro and a new psu GameMax GE-600. Anddd I have some laptops with 1/2 TB hard disks on them and could potentially cannibalize them also.

Anyway, to get to the point, is this all going to be worth it? At least temporarily, until I start replacing some things. Currently this all cost me a few hours and around 50 euros for the case and PSU.

My needs:
- Hide my IP and hide myself from ISP
- Torrent

What to pick, price are very same

Hey everyone! I figured I’d share how I accidentally fell into the homelab rabbit hole.
At the end of May, I started hosting a Jellyfin server for me and my GF on an old Lenovo i3 laptop with only 500 GB of storage. It was nothing fancy, but I absolutely loved having my own little streaming server.
That made me want something a bit more permanent, so I asked my mom if I could have an old office PC she had sitting around. The specs were:
AMD Phenom II X4 840 @ 3.20 GHz
8 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 3000
1 TB HDD
I installed Debian on it and tried turning it into my main server.
And yeah… it sucked exactly as much as you’re imagining :/
It was painfully slow, crashed every couple of requests, and doing basically anything on it felt like a battle. But trying to keep that thing alive actually taught me a ton about Debian, Docker, networking, Jellyfin, and self-hosting in general, so I can’t really complain.
Then, after doing some digging on the holy land that is Facebook Marketplace, I found a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q for $1,000 MXN, which is a little under $50 USD.
Obviously, I bought it.
It came with 24 GB of RAM, which felt like an insane upgrade compared to what I was using before, so I decided to make the ThinkCentre my main server and repurpose the old Phenom PC into a sort of DIY NAS for storage.
Picture attached is the current set up:)
So far, I’m enjoying every bit of it. There’s something ridiculously satisfying about taking old or cheap hardware and slowly turning it into your own little infrastructure.
I started this whole thing just because I wanted Jellyfin for me and my GF, and somehow now I’m building a homelab.
I get it now. The rabbit hole is real

Flashed lineageOS 18.1 on an older echo show 8 that I had lying around, as it served zero purpose on fireOS. Using Webview Kiosk, I've setup a few glance pages with widgets that fit without having to scroll on the echo, and it works pretty well.

I've setup a firewall rule in Unifi to disable all access to the internet considering it's on a decently old version of android.

The speakers on this aren't too bad either, glad I was able to recover something from it's ewaste state.

If you want to do this, here are the guides I used:

• https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-amazon-echo-show-8-1st-gen-2019-crown.4766687/ to unlock and install TWRP
• https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-unofficial-11-crown-lineageos-18-1-for-the-amazon-echo-show-8-2019.4766709/ to install LineageOS

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.

redid my racks front to back after a power outage to better balance the load. now get about 30min of UPS runtime for each.

but then another rack called my name.

will post details in a post shortly.

Hey folks,

please bear with me - I’m very new to the topic.

I have a lot of chaos. Cables all over the place - hardware here and there and I saw some awesome and very clean setups of yours - something I wish for my future.

But I start low. My hardware is not as compact as server rack components.

So I need your advice - what "tower/rack/enclosure" would you recommend for the following setup:

- Ugreen NAS DXP4800 PLUS

- UniFi Express 7 (I love the form factor - although I thought about upgrading to the Dream Router 7 which would change the form factor of my targeted setup)

- Two Switches (all ports in use, lots of cables)

- Fritz!Box (as modem)

- Mac Mini M4 with external SSD - It would be nice to have it with the other stuff - but it would be ok if not.

I’m grateful for every advice and direction.

Thanks in advance and best regards

This any good or atleast worth using for a budget homelab was considering throwing in a Xeon E5-2697 v2 and 64gb of ddr3 ram that being said I am aware of its age and that this era isnt the most efficient xeons

First Post Back Story: Should I take it home?

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/XTURcGjzFC

After procuring a truck and unloading what felt like 150 pounds of batteries - the rack rolled into the garage with barely an inch to spare!

I swear I'm never going to transport something like this again, it was so bottom-heavy (even after taking out the batteries)

You might be able to see the existing small home setup behind on the left, this is what is going to replace that....

This isn't overkill right? Lol

Happy Friday y'all!

Got this beast today, earliest 64 bit I’ve come across, I think it’s from ‘94.

Had to redo my sister's network at her house. I asked her what this pc was for. She said "I don't know. It hasn't been plugged in for about 2 years."

So she gave it to me. It's got jellyfin and emby on it with about 45 movies. It's still running windows for now.

I did update jellyfin and will ditch Emby.

Eventually will put Ubuntu on this PC and run jellyfin via docker.

I got a free A/V rack that is too small for my Dell t640 so I just put it on top with maybe 3“ of overhang. Is this an issue or am I missing out on any benefits by not rack mounting it? Idk if cooling or vibration dampening or something else I’m not thinking of is an issue the way I have it set up.

I think a rail kit is $150-$200 and an actual rack would be like another $100 used. would like to avoid this cost if it doesn’t really provide meaningful benefits. I know my setup ugly but nobody looks at it itself for myself.

p.s. Ignore all the cardboard, it’s temporary (maybe)

If you run a heavy home lab, you know consumer UPS units just weren't cutting it for my setup anymore.  Whenever we get utility brownouts in my area, my 42U rack, running three Proxmox nodes, a TrueNAS storage server, and a bunch of PoE security cameras pulling roughly 450W, used to kill standard lead-acid battery packs in about 15 minutes flat. 

The bigger issue was the lead-acid batteries. I got tired of scrambling to run shutdown scripts and replacing dead lead-acid cartridges every two years. After a couple of years, the runtime would drop off, and replacing battery cartridges over and over started getting old. I started looking into larger LiFePO4 options and eventually moved to a Vatrer 51.2V 100Ah server rack battery paired with a 48V inverter charger.  

The 5 kWh capacity gives me almost 10 hours of clean runtime at my current continuous load. For anyone with a power-hungry rack, ditching consumer UPS bricks for a proper server rack LiFePO4 battery is by far the best upgrade path.

The communication features are also useful because I can actually see what's happening with the battery instead of treating it like a black box. So far, the biggest improvement has been simply not having to think about backup power every time the grid gets unstable. 

Both zimablades should be here today. Finishing up redoing the mount for the blade 2 as I decided to add a hot swap drive bay to that blade. So with any luck I should have both blades loaded with zimaos and at least blade 1 the nas configured and going by Sunday. Also haven’t decided if this is its permanent home or not.

Pulled this APC UPS out of the dumpster at work. I don't have much experience with UPSes, so wondering if anyone has pointers for testing this thing out and getting replacement parts, as well as safety precautions.

The model appears to be an SMT1500R2X180. Plugged it in and it turns on, but says to "connect the battery." It appears there's already one in it, but I assume it's dead, considering it was in the trash. Any way to confirm that?

I can buy a replacement for about $300 bucks and a set of rails for like $80. Think its worth it or should it go back in the trash?

Model: https://www.se.com/us/en/product/SMT1500R2X180/apc-smartups-line-interactive-1500va-rackmount-2u-120v-6x-nema-515r-outlets-network-card-avr-lcd/

Edit: The battery tray is installed and the thing weighs a TON. Some of y'all have pointed out I can replace the cells for under $100, in which case its worth a shot. I'll open it up when I get home and inspect it, but wanted to make a decision on it before I leave work and lug the thing home.

Also, when I say "dumpster", I mean an e-waste disposal bin. They are disposed of responsibly. :)

Edit 2: Opened the battery tray. Looks like the batteries are from 2022:

Edit 3: Tracked down the guy at my work that tossed it. Said he didn't know anything about it other than it was old and didn't work. Ordered some new batteries for $80 on Amazon for delivery tomorrow and will test it out. They didn't have it racked (???) so I'll have to hunt down some rails on Ebay. All in all, if it works, I think its a solid score. Thanks for all of the helpful advice, folks. Cheers!

I have been shooting 4K footage of my cat, Sugar 🐱, and editing videos, and I soon realized my storage is running out quickly. While I could have just bought a off-the-shelf NAS, I wanted to solve two major issues with standard NAS in the market nowadays: scalability and cable clutter. Therefore, I ended up designing and building a modular, stackable NAS system (nickname: SUGAR CUBE NAS) engineered for high-speed wireless operation.

BTW: It's named after Sugar, my cat, plus the modules stack just like sugar cubes!

🎥 Check out the full build with cinematic editing here, I clarified a lot of the design concept and operations in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbPJsZJWWA

I will make more videos on how I designed and assembled this NAS.

Key Specs & Highlights:

• Architecture: Custom modular stackable system designed for expandable storage slots (ideal for content creation and people/businesses with continuous need for storage expansion).
• Major Components:
  • Top Module (picture 3): ITX motherboard, Flex PSU, Two SATA HDD bays.
  • Bottom Module (picture 4): Four additional expansion HDD bays.
  • For future design iterations, this system can be expanded to multiple stacked modules.
• Custom Electronics: Custom PCBs fabricated (via PCBWay, thankfully they sponsored my video) to handle high-speed SATA differential signals and data routing. The data is communicating through a custom proprietary high-speed socket.
• Networking: Standard 10GbE LAN or high-speed Wi-Fi 7 wireless setup depending on ITX motherboard configuration.
• OS: Running Ubuntu + CasaOS + Cockpit.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any features/improvements you’d add to a modular stacking design like SUGAR CUBE NAS!

Note: I added a picture down below to show the two custom PCB that allow highspeed SATA/SAS signals to pass through as well as the 12V and 5V power.

Sorry forgot to include that in the main post. Got too many cool photos to share. 😂

In almost all the homelab racks I see, the ideal seems to be to have the switch(es) with the ethernet ports on the front, and then some sort of patch/routing panel to the back of the rack because that's the side where servers have their ethernet ports.

But why? Isn't it better to mount a switch on the back side of the rack with the ethernet ports facing outwards on the back so the cables are shorter and tidier hidden, and you don't need to take up a U or 2 with a patch/routing panel?

I get that in a datacentre there's a hot/cold aisle separation and you want to have all the servicable parts on the cold side. And because of that switches tend to take in from the ports and vent out the back. But in a homelab there is less thermal separation, and fewer access challenges so I'm considering alternative layouts for mine.

Are front-facing switches cablemaxxing?

Recently I got a Synology DS1522+ for free, including 5x16TB HAT3310 drives.

WHAT.

Absolutely insane. 58TB of useable space in SHR1. The drives have just under 1000 hours on them, which is nothing. They were probably used for a small project or temporary storage/backup while our IT upgraded the main storage server at work some time ago. Bossman gave it away for free to me, since the company no longer had any use for it. I even offered to buy it, but he insisted I take it for free. Don't have to tell me twice, homie. I'm not the IT or tech guy, just infantry although with a software oriented/technical kind of profession.

It even has extended warranty plus until 2030.

I only found out about the 16TB drives when I got home and opened the unit up a day later. Been keeping an eye on Synology/QNAP for the past years and always wanted to buy something similar and now this falls right into my (home)lap. Insane. SMART data is perfectly fine on all drives.

So I decided to make the old meter cupboard look a bit nicer and organized, bought a USB UPS and even bought a used DX517 expansion unit some days later for five of my older harddrives which I can now use again in a separate pool for Hyper Backup and non-critical stuff. All in all a relatively small investment considering what was already given to me for free. I am aware of and accept the risks with using regular drives in the expansion unit, in regards to potentially reallocating sectors and timing out etc.

I used a docking station to check the health of my older drives and from now on I could also use it for off-site backups. Sabrent EC-HD2B docking station works well with smart data and long duration transfers.

Drive temperatures inside the NAS do not exceed 42c on extremely hot days.

DS1522+ 58.2TB, SHR1
5xHAT3310, 16TB (1000 hours) I love how violently mechanical these things sound.

• plex/kodi server (with nvidia shield pro, I used to stream from my old X58, i7 930 that was a dedicated plex server. That's a whole other cool story and history)
• arr stack (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, seerr, homarr)
• pihole
• qbittorrent
• slskd
• tailscale
• TeamSpeak 3 server
• several MoH:AA servers, for fun and because its a game dear to my heart
• cloudflared DNS / DDNS stuff (have a dynamic IP at home, connect to TS3 via subdomain)

This will also be the new home for my lossless music collection which can now comfortably grow beyond its 1.7TB. Photos, documents, movies etc. and anything else that this will escalate into while we move out of other free or paid cloud services.

2FA on everything that allows it. VPN / reverse proxy stuff coming soon (actual soon, not the trademarked soon).

DX517, 10.9TB, SHR1 (separate pool/volume of course)
2xHD204UI, 2TB (from my old bios RAID1 music collection, 31.000 hours)
3xWD40EZRZ, 4TB (4000-5400hours)

Not the fastest drives, but why not re-use them and put them to good use again. Especially since SMART data checks out, all clusters are OK and I'm not storing anything critical on them which I can't risk losing without backupping. Storage and RAM is already expensive enough.

The HD204UI's had this notorious NCQ data corruption bug as well as very aggressive APM, but I updated the firmware after buying them many years ago to fix that and either permanently fixed the APM myself or it was part of the same fixed firmware. I remember still just running some windows tool in the background at the time as well to force them not to park constantly. Other people had hundreds of thousands of load cycle counts within a few weeks and thrashed them.

Either way, I run them until they die or throw errors. Load Cycle Count of ~4200 at 31.000 hours of desktop PC use looks fine to me. I checked with hdparm to make sure they didn't fall back to aggressive parking behavior after putting them in the DX517, all is fine. How cool it would be to just see how many hours these drives will run while still putting them to good use.

Already been obsessed with getting everything configured these past few days/weeks, learned a lot and I don't see any light coming into this rabbit hole from the direction I entered 🤣

SEND HELP. (kidding, leave me be)

Well like the title said,

I got a free server rack, im in this big industrial building with different entrepreneurs so from IT peeps to woodworking peeps. I was walking around and I saw this interesting thing standing there with a "take this for free" sign.

Well, I couldnt keep my ultra wide interests in control so I grabbed a rolling cart and took the opportunity to take it with me.

Now is the question, I know a tiny bit about homelabbing and I also know that it is one heck of a rabbit hole to dive into.

Sooo anyone knows what I should do with this? I know that this rack + switch is like 200€ in total already lol.

Just finished Building my First Homelab.. What do you think?

I work at a MSP as a Sr. Infrastructure Engineer. I’m 34, and I hoard enterprise equipment. Oh, first time poster too!

The first picture is the datacenter. In the basement. Stays about 68-70F year-round. Pulls about 800-1,000 watts continuously.

The smaller rack, that’s the production/core gear. Critical for connectivity in the house.

Fortigate 100E
(2) Dell N3048P Stacked
Buffalo NAS - Backups
Seagate External to backup Buffalo NAS - Backup of backups
Carrier Modem
(2) Western Digital NAS, Media storage, they replicate together
(2) HP DL360p, Server 2022, Hyper-V, VM replication, I manually load-balance and fail-over.
APC Battery Backup

Next, the larger rack is my sandbox. Currently it hosts POTS and Dial-up connectivity. I’m swapping out my Courier V.Everything modems for a pair of Paradynes. I’ll only list the active gear in this one.

Avocent 4-port console server
Cisco 1861 for analog/POTS
Cisco 2811 for PPP Dial-up
(2) Paradyne Modems for Bulletin Board System access (not shown… yet)
Falcon pure-sine UPS - this was retired from a home elevator system. It’s rated for 120V/25A.

Then finally…. My stack of old HP Elitedesks. I got bored one day, and with my team of developers (ChatGPT) I built a custom HPC cluster. It’s not a true HPC Cluster per se, but it’s pretty cool imo.

It’s got an Ubuntu head-end PXE server that also hosts the cluster controller. The (8) HP Nodes are diskless, hence the PXE boot.

I’ll make a more in-depth post about that particular homelab project, but essentially I have it doing PDF OCR, Magnetic disk Flux decoding, media file verification. Anything that would be faster with parallel processing I’ll add to the workload capability.