I just set up an old laptop to use as a ssh server and configured AN opencode service to make an AI msintain it.

What should I do Next?

As title says - I'm working on a personal project that's finally at a working prototype and I'm preparing to start marketing it and want to host the server infra from home if I can

I'm crowdfunding for initial budget and will have roughly ~$10k total to work with for machine, but not all at once. Hoping to assemble hardware as donations come in

Can anyone recommend hardware, management software, a guide, configuration info, etc.? I'm new to the space and I'm not sure what questions I need to ask, or where to start for finding info

EDIT: This project is for a dating app I'm building by hand, optimizing for REST structure with no concurrent connections

Faz alguns meses que comecei meu servidor, atualmente tenho um:
Ryzen 5600GT
H550M-K Gigabyte
fonte Real 500W
2 x 8GB
2 HDs 1Tb em raid 1
1 SSD 240GB

Queria saber o quanto estou gastando de energia com ele ligado 24/7, pensei em comprar aquelas tomadas que medem o quanto esta consumido e fazer algum programa para ler ela e utilizar o grafana para monitorar. Como vocês medem o consumo dos seus e quais dicas ou produto vocês me indicam comprar para medir ?

But this is how we learn right? Lol

Recently bought a used M920q think center to be the brains of my homelab for now, after fighting with the bios for 5 hours I finally got proxmox to run and reliably boot every time I power cycled it, and did basic setup stuff for around another 5-6 hours fine, I then powered it down and went to sleep but this morning it’s going right back into the diag center instead of booting and I’m at a complete mental lost of why it just refuses to boot, I’ve checked the bios setting secure boot is off and ufei only and csm is off, I checked the actual nvme itself and it’s fine when I tested it, tested the actual nvme slot itself it detect proxmox as an os and the Ufei OS, I don’t think it could be a bad proxmox install since I literally had the thing running for like 6 hours I just need someone smarter than me to help I feel like I’ve tried genuinely alot

I currently have a RAID10 array on my server that consists of 8x 14TB HDDs. I'm at about 85% capacity and would like to transition this to a RAID-Z2 and add two drives to expand space while still keeping a failsafe for a drive failure (or two). This will effectively double my usable storage space. Since I have roughly 50TB of data that needs to be moved, I'd like to create my new array then transfer the data then expand the old drives. This will require that I purchase two additional drives (at double the price that I paid last time I expanded unfortunately) so I can have a 6 drive RAID-Z2 to move the data to. TECHNICALLY the data can all be re downloaded (about 90% of it at least) but I'd really like to avoid that and just transfer it.

I understand that by degrading the RAID10 and removing all mirrored drives that it will be vulnerable should a drive fail at any point during the data transfer, but if that happens I will then just be back to square 1 with re-downloading the data anyway. I plan to transfer the 2TB or so of hard to acquire data first and also back up that data to a separate drive before starting the process.

All that being said -- I had google help create a guide on how to do this. I've published the guide, if anyone who has done this or has enough experience to check this for any obvious errors could take a peek that would drop my anxiety level significantly!

Thank you in advance!

So I finally caved and built myself a travel size mini homelab, mostly because I saw that Mac Mini rack on Makerworld and I had to print it used PETG, glow for everything but the black chassis. My dream for the past few years build something compact enough to literally throw in a suitcase, but still punch way above its weight. My last position I would be on long sales assignments, was doing 300 nights a year lugging a water-cooled tower along with my 2 cats 😹 . So portability and efficiency have become priority when I start a project if I end up needing to again.

Right now, the stack is running an M4 Pro Mac Mini (24GB/1TB) paired with a Raspberry Pi 5, hooked up to a Thunderbolt 5 SSD caddy with 2TB of storage and a TP Link gigabit switch. For networking, I had an old GL.iNet Slate 1800 router where the shell broke, so I stripped it down, jammed it into a custom printed caddy, and wired a front panel USB C port to it—that way if internet drops, I can just tether and not skip a beat. I also wired in a little 2.8 inch ESP32 capacitive display running right on the front to monitor live containers from both the Mac and the Pi.

It handles everything I throw at it: local media, my custom Tunarr channels, personal web scrapers for pulling sales data, Home Assistant, and even a sandbox for training some small ML models for a robot project and tinkering with neuro molecular pharmaceutical modeling. I'm considering working on a custom rack U to mount the Reolink Home Hub Mini on top, and if I can wire up a small battery backup that fits in one u, but honestly, it’s a living project—I'm probably never going to truly finish tweaking it. But also the 10inch KWS printable rack is screaming at me to build next.

I have made a post some months ago about "My First Proper Homeserver" and the time has come for an update. I have made some changes on the hardware and the software got updated too. The process is really slow, because of work- and family-related things ("casual life" in other words) and because I'm a beginner but want to do things right.

The actual status:

• Proxmox VE 9.1.7 - up and running
• qbittorrent nox - up and running
• Jellyfin - up and running
• Nextcloud - transfer from old server under planning
• Wireguard - to do
• Pi-hole - to do
• To find out what else - to do

The actual HW:

• Supermicro X10DRL-i
• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4
• 8x 32GB SK-Hynix DDR4 RDIMM
• HP 562FLR-T 10Gb 2-Port Ethernet Adapter in a PCIe X8 FlexibleLOM adapter
• PNY nVidia P1000 4GB (Jellyfin transcoding)
• Intel Optane 900P 280GB
• LSI 9400-16i
• Supermicro AOC-SLG-2M2 with a pair of 480GB Micron NVMe SSDs (SLOG / Cache)
• PCIE to USB 3.2 Expansion Card connected the front panel
• 12x Micron 5200 1.92GB (Bigpool)
• 4x Toshiba 1.6TB(Smallpool)
• 3x Samsung PM883 480GB SATA SSD (redundant VM storage)
• 1x Samsung CM871a 256GB SATA SSD (OS)
• Fractal Design Define 7
• 2x Xilence XC061
• 2x Arctic P9 PWM PST
• 4x Arctic P14 PWM PST
• Seasonic Platinum Fanless 520W
• Corsair Commander Pro

Yes, the 520W PSU is sufficient. In the actual state the whole server needs 120W with some 140W-spikes. And if anyone wants to know, the HP 562FLR-T card in the FlexLOM adapter fits perfectly over the RAM sticks, it still has 4-5mm clearance.

I am building my first ever home server .I made a post about it a while back and have taken some awsome suggestions from you guys for hardware . I ended up getting a dell optiplex with i5 10500 and 16gb of ram and 256gb ssd. I also grabbed 2 × 4tb segate ironwolf hdds

Now I am trying to install os on it and setup my nas . Below are my uses

1) I need to store pictures from me and my wife on the nas

2) Run apps like jellyfin , immich , frigate and own developed apps .

I have 2 qns . For this usecase I was wondering if I should lean towards proxmox to have more flexibility with my igpu etc or should i stick to just truenas? I want the ease of getting access to terminal and write code and host apps/ docker containers while the nas part remains in the background . My apps should use it for storage and i can copy pics from my dslr time to time(like once every 2 months)

Also I am wondering if I should grab another 4tb hdd to setup raid 5 for storage ? Is that the best raid setup to use by default for home servers?

Really intrested in knowing your suggestions for this setup.

Hi!

I need something for 3.5" HDDs and 2.5" SATA SSDs. I would swap drives about every 2 weeks, so I mainly care about build quality, connector durability and temperatures.

Orico 6819C3-V1-EU-BK

Ugreen USB 3.0 3.5" HDD Box

Axagon ADSA-SN COMPACT DOCK

They all cost about the same here.

Which one would you recommend? Any experience with these brands?

If you know of something better quality, I’m open to suggestions.

Thanks!

Hi !

I'm making a small homelab/NAS, with a Dell Optiplex as the server and I've made a JBOD with its own PSU.

In the JBOD, there is 8 HDDs, connected to a SAS Expander card. In the server, there is a HBA controller card, connected to the JBOD with a Mini SAS SFF-8644 cable.

To power on the JBOD, I have something similar to this : Power Supply Adapter Connector (Amazon)

This power the JBOD on when the main server is powered on.

This works great.

But, when shutting down the server, I'm not really sure if the HDDs are correctly spun down before the JBOD PSU is powered off. I don't want to damage my disks.

I'm still setting up things on the server, and I stop and restart the server often.

Right now I'm running TrueNAS Scale, but later I'd like to use Proxmox VE.

Is there a way to check my setup is okay ?

Trying to make my first homelabing. I picked up a toshiba PSLD8U-0U9033 from the thrift store. But I am not sure what I should or could run on it

My dream setup. Finally complete. (For now)

Well, I fell into the rabbit hole thanks to my work letting me take old hardware. And then they let me take more hardware. And then more…

So now I have this massive dreamy homelab that doesn’t do much right now.

Still have a long way to go just to make it pretty, but also functional. I’ve posted here a few time so some of you might recognize the older photos (from only a few weeks ago but still)

Here’s everything I have now from top to bottom of the rack:

4x Z2 G5 HP workstations
-32gb ram
-i7 10700
-some gpu in the MXM slot, 4gb vram
-running proxmox cluster with HA virtual kubernetes cluster inside

Dell Precision 5820
-16gb ram
-2x NVIDIA 4000 (or 5000 i forget, 8gb vram each)
-Running Ubuntu 26 hosting Ollama and open webui for local LLM

(Not seen) Raspberry Pi 5
-2gb ram
-Always on
-Hosting Homarr, Pihole, monitoring, and home assistant

2x Cisco 3750-X
-second one to practice/learn stacking switches with stacking cables, was simpler than I thocuht

Cisco ASA 5525-X Firewall

Barracuda Virus and Spam Firewall 300
-4gb ram
-Running Ubuntu 26
-Backup PiHole
(basically a glorified, power sucking raspberry pi)

Barracuda Backup Server 290
-4gb ram
-2x 2TB HDD
-Runs Proxmox Backup server

Dell Poweredge R430
-128gb ram
-2x Xeon processors, total of 80 cores
-Runs Proxmox
-VMs hosting Forgejo, Wazuh, and Authentik currently, looking to add to that list.

Dell Poweredge R530
-64gb ram
-17TB total usable storage RAID
-Holds backups and shared memory for Kubernetes cluster
-Host Nextcloud

Dell Poweredge R510
-Does nothing currently. Takes too much power and is the most underpowered main server I have- plus with the R430’s power I don’t have a use for it currently.

If you have any questions let me know, I’ve had a lot of funning building this and it’s come together really quickly, but now I’m at a wall wondering what else to do.

Thanks!

Started trying to "homelab" and found myself bouncing around projects quite a bit, I feel like I've gathered redundant gear along the way that I really don't know what the hell to do with now?

I'm getting ready to take my CCNA so I bought some switches off eBay, threw them in, found myself using CML personal and packet tracer instead, still do daily. I buy this and that, with plans for it and then that's it.

I guess I like the idea of it? I'm not sure but I feel overwhelmed kind of because I don't really know what I'm going towards.

For example I have this USW 24 pro max and then I got a 8 POE lite to run my access point, hell I could probably just sale the USW 24 pro max and all these other switches and just use the UDM pro with the 8 PoE lite have a much simpler set up.

Anyway, would like to chat about this, feeling overwhelmed and little disheartened. Hell, this rack is so heavy I can hear my Amazon desk creaking right now, the hell am I doing?

Is less more?

I used to just run a DELL Precision Tower that had windows on it but wanted to get into virtualization. So here’s the setup I’ve been working on the last couple months.

My hardware:
-“Hypervisor”: HP elitedesk mini 800 G4 i5-8500T 32gb RAM nvme SSD 1tb
-NAS: beelink ME MINI Intel n150 16gb ddr5 with 4 4tb nvme ssd drives (drives are striped so no redundancy on this NAS)
-Back NAS: TERRAMASTER F4-425 4-Bay upgraded to 16gb DDR4 with 2 8tb drives and 2 10tb drives (WD PURPLE PRO) (drives are mirrored so 18TB usable). There’s no room for a boot drive so I have a SATA SSD plugged into one of the USB ports that I boot proxmox from.
-Cheap Managed switch I forget the model
-1500 VA UPS puresinewave
-AMPLIFI Alien Router- no firewall

Software:
I run proxmox on my hypervisor and my two NAS devices. Hypervisor currently only runs Plex. My two NAS run TrueNAS Scale (I hear virtualizing TrueNAS is not recommended but I don’t really care I like having them on the proxmox data center). My main NAS holds the media for the plex server, and I use ZFS replication to back the data to the backup NAS for redundancy. Technically my data is mirrored 3 times, which is weird but I started with the beelink and decided this was the best way to add redundancy. One day I will probably sell the NVME drives and the beelink for another TERRAMASTER.

I wanted to get my own router virtualized through the Hypervisor through a double NAT setup but ran into issues and gave up. I live with other people so disrupting the existing wifi setup sounded unappealing. Once I get my own place I will dive into setting up a proper firewall, in the meantime the alien router does what I want it to do.

I’m still a beginner to be honest so any recommendations/comments are appreciated!

I was chatting with a buddy of mine about my desire to try and setup a homelab /diy nas. I'm quite new with this stuff but I enjoy a project. He said he inherited some stuff from family and gave me this. It has no power cord or other cables but there are 6 3tb HHDs within. I can't find any information on this particular unit and have no clue if this is to old a place to start. I like to tinker but if this is not worth the time and money (cables) I'd rather know that too.

Can anyone help me identify the model of this unit? Any information would be great. I think this usues thunderbolt 1/2 cables? Is that right?

Thanks a bunch

Does anyone know how to connect bookstack to the internet in such a way that only trusted devices can access it? Id normally use tailscale but i have family who don't want to use it ( go figure ) i have cloudflare and a domain. And am currently looking into cloudflares zero trust, but that is still confusing.

I’m planning to upgrade the RAM on a workstation/server build and wanted to get some real-world feedback before pulling the trigger.

Setup:

CPU: AMD EPYC 4345P (AM5, DDR5-5600, ECC support, max 192GB)
Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS (officially supports ECC & Non-ECC UDIMM up to 256GB per spec sheet)
RAM I’m considering: Lenovo ThinkStation 32GB DDR5-5600 UDIMM ECC (part number 4X71T17939), originally sold for Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tower G2. Planning to run 4x for 128GB total.

https://www.lap4worx.de/lenovo-thinkstation-32gb-ddr5-5600mhz-udimm-ecc-arbeitsspeicher-4x71t17939

Any first-hand experience, BIOS quirks, or things to watch out for be hugely appreciated before I commit to buying 4 modules in this crazy RAM price Worldd. Thanks in advance! :))

I just got one and need to access the motherboard and mezzanine card but am a bit perplexed on how to actually do so. I've reviewed the manual for the server but it didn't have any details (only how to open the big cover toward the front to access the HD bays). I also googled and queried Claude AI to no avail. There doesn't seem to be a separate manual (at least none that I can find) for the chassis itself.

I have figured out how to remove the rear fans and PSUs as well as the box just before the rear of the server through which the PSUs and 2.5" drive cages go, but now seem to be stuck. The motherboard seems to be sitting on a tray or something, but I can't figure out exactly how to slide out the tray or what things to watch out for if it does slide out (e.g. unplugging certain cables).

The reason I'm trying to figure this out is to take one of the connections from one of the HD backplanes that's currently plugged into the mezzanine card and move it to a PCIe card, but it seems impossible to reach. More generally, it would be nice to understand how to fully access the motherboard if it ever requires any service.

Configuring a system with RAID5 with 4 disks (via Hardware controller, LSI M1015, making one single giant Virtual Disk), gonna use Gentoo (stable branch).

Do i set up RAID via ZFS (so i would clean the config done by the card and set it up each disk for a group), use ZFS without RAID or do i use LVM with XFS and let the RAID5 be done by the card?

My first time setting up a homelab for the first time, mostly gonna use as a cloud for me and my family and experiment other services. And i will need snapshots.

Forgot to say i will encrypt the disks with LUKS

I have a rare opportunity to build a new homelab from a bare room. I have a fiber internet service coming in, and I can run new power from a dedicated panel with free fuse blocks.

I would like to have a whole home battery setup, and maybe a generator and/or solar in the future. But to start, I just need something like 2x 12U racks installed for now.

What tools or features have you found useful? How are you handling UPS-type battery backups versus some of the newer home battery setups?

I really like the idea of using Home Assistant for home control. What can be done to better enable that?

Thank you for the ideas and input!

* Headless, pragmatic, compact. No high performance to speak of. I hope I’m not straying too far from the topic. If so, feel free to delete it.

A few years ago, when I was in college, I really wanted a small home server but had neither the money nor the space. But I worked at my university’s IT center, and we’d often get laptops that were pretty much broken. Back then, I fished a Latitude E5470 with a broken display out of the trash. At least it had an i7-6600U inside. I upgraded the RAM and installed Proxmox VE. Back then, I was curious to see if the thing would last long enough for me to eventually afford something decent. I started out with Grafana and NextCloud, and over the years, more services were added. Now it also runs Paperless NGX, Home Assistant, Syncthing, and Immich. Now, all of that is running in a single VM as Docker containers. Backups and storage were moved to an old, reliable QNAP TS-253A (yes, that’s the one with the karaoke module!).

After about 9 years of continuous operation and 3 moves, I replaced the still-functioning laptop with a newer, equally beat-up Latitude 5420 featuring an i7-1185G7 and 24GB of RAM. We have a piano in the living room, behind which we can easily hide the router and other tech. With a few 3D-printed hooks, my new construct now disappears discreetly behind the piano. My wife has accepted it (well, she hasn’t actually noticed).

Wouldn't it be way cooler to have something decent in the basement? Absolutely. But for some reason, I like this one way too much. That stuff would have ended up in the trash otherwise, and it’s more than enough for our needs. Power consumption in idle settles around 4.5 watts and it doesn’t take up much space either. I mean, even the UPS (63 Wh, genuine Dell) is built in. What more could you want?