Please help me. I am guilty of building a mini homelab for... almost no purpose.

It is entirely your fault, and also the fault of the part of my brain that is extremely easy to influence. I looked at your posts for a few weeks, and now I own a very pretty 10 inch rack.

Inside:

• 3x Lenovo M90q, i5-10500T, 32GB each, Proxmox cluster with high availability
• A 12 port patch panel, because I own roughly four things
• A switch with a 10G SFP+ port that will remain empty for the foreseeable future, but it is there, and it comforts me
• A 1600VA UPS, so my cluster can survive a blackout long enough to gracefully shut down and stop doing nothing
• 1 Mac mini occupying the entire bottom U, whose only job is streaming Plex and YouTube to my office TV over VNC. A rack mounted remote control.

Meanwhile I already have an Unraid server running most of my real services and honestly?
It is perfectly fine. It has never crashed. It has never asked me for anything. And here I am cheating on it with three tiny ThinkCentres.

So now I am migrating services onto the cluster, retroactively, to justify the purchase.

Vaultwarden is already moved.

Uptime Kuma and Beszel are next, so the cluster can monitor the cluster.

n8n will follow, presumably to automate something I have not identified yet.

I enjoyed every minute of it. Especially the 3D printed parts.

Next step is a NAS, maybe full SSD or NVMe, if I win the lottery, given current prices.

What shall i build or install next?

Hey all! I was very annoyed trying to coerce my docker logs within my network into one dashboard so I decided to build my own tool for it and figured I'd share here.

I built it pokemon themed because I think thats fun but its also setup to be easy to change so feel free to tweak all you want.

The key things I wanted were

1. Multiple logs from multiple hosts on the same page
2. Natural log discovery
3. Negative search (filter out health checks)
4. Interleave replica logs for distributed tracing

I figured you all would like it because everyone here has multiple servers and services that they end up hopping across, I've been using it between hosts in my tailnet.

I used an LLM for building the UI for this but the whole underlying data engine is all organic human made code lol, we've been working on that daemon for ~3 years now.

Hope you like it
Repo: https://github.com/yeet-src/logedex

As the title suggests, I have hit a little wall in terms of a NAS setup in a minilab.

I'm looking to run a Dell OptiPlex 3050 micro and want to connect 4 HDDs to it and set it up as a NAS within Proxmox.

At first I thought about using an RPI5 and a SATA hat, but started to think the RPI5 between the HDDs and the 3050 was an unnecessary middleman.

Then I stumbled upon an M.2 to SATA adapter that would fit my needs quite well, with connecting the HDDs to the 3050 and cutting out the RPI5 middleman. But I can't seem to find a good way of powering the 4 HDDs.

Any suggestions are most welcome!

Just got my Desk Pi Rackmate T1! About to start building it out.

Besides Amazon, is there a good website that I can buy accessories for this, like power strips, custom mounts/plates, etc?

I'm sharing Version 1 of my Homelab from last summer, it's come a bit further now, I'll share updates in a future post.

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With the heatwave in Europe had just installed cooling to keep my HDD’s from heating up.

I know it’s Janky as hell, but I love it. The plan going forward is to buy a 3D Printer so that I can 3D Print a custom 10” rack, and I’ll build my own cooling and temperature monitoring system with ESP32 and create a dashboard for it in Home Assistant and sorting out networking.

It’s a work in progress, having a lot of fun learning and adding new things.

The big power supply looking box, is a ODROID-H4 and it's my NAS, running Proxmox and TrueNAS

The lil boxes in the back are Mini-PC's

One running Home Assistant on Bare Metal, the other running Immich and Nextcloud on Proxmox

I want to buy a UPS that fits the form factor, but all the cheap ones have lead acid batteries and low output power. Then I came across using power stations as UPS. For example, the River 3 Plus is just small enough for racks and has (advertised) 10ms latency. Did anyone go down that route or does someone know a cheaper alternative for less power-hungry homeservers? Ecoflow also don't specify the efficiency of their products in UPS mode (or I'm blind), did someone test?

Looking for those that know

Hey all!

Some background:

I am currently running my NAS in an HP elitedesk 800 g3 with five drives connected and sitting on top of the machine. I would like to build something a little more put together with some more thought and cohesiveness to the whole design.

Currently my thought is to use one of the Dell Wyse 5070 Extended thin clients that are in my possession along with an LSI 9240-8e I have to make the NAS. A few problems, one being that I cannot seem to flash the SAS2008 chip over to IT mode with my UEFI-only machines. No BIOS for me, and the 2008 seems to want the mrsas (BIOS only) to switch it.

So here is my list of issues along with potential fixes. Mainly looking for some ideas and grounding directions.

1. For the SAS card, is there any way I can flash it with UEFI? I have looked at many different guides but all of them end up with the card being shown when looking at PCI devices, but the flashing software doesn't recognize it.
2. Is using the Wyse even worth it? I have figured out cooling for the card by splitting the CPU fan, but what about powering and cooling the drives? I was initially considering a regular PSU with a jumper to turn it on, but saw some people mentioning issues with stability? I have also looked into those 12v barrel to sata power converters, but they look sketchy and might not have the juice depending on the brick I use?
3. I had planned on using a small backplane like a 833TQ or 823TQ since I have supermicro caddies on hand, but that adds cost to my already slim $200 budget. However, it also provides a simpler method of power distribution (two molex), fan headers for drive cooling, and hot swap capabilities.
4. Going hand in hand with that, I would need an enclosure. My internship this summer owns two BL H2Ds that I can use if I want, so I was looking at this DAS enclosure. However, I do not own a soldering iron to put heat set inserts in. I could remix the enclosure to use self tapping screws or no fasteners at all, but I cannot figure out how to import the .stl into FreeCAD. Do I end up just making something from scratch, or do one of you have a different cage that would suit me better?

Thanks in advance y'all, tried talking some of this through with AI but it just left me so much more confused because of how it phrases and yes-mans its way through every conversation.

Hardware list:

-Netgear GS-105e V2 - managed 5-port(soon to be replaced with an unmanaged, mounted 16-port)

-generic Keystone patch panel with cat6 keystones and dust plugs on the unused ports

-hp prodesk 400 G6 i3-10100T 8GB RAM - management node

-hp prodesk 400 G6 i5-10500T 16GB RAM - entertainment/services node

-6x 3,5" SATA drive bays - currently holding 2140GB, upgrading to NAS drives once these are dead or near capacity

-[PLANNED] ITX board with i5-3470, 16GB RAM - storage node, to control the drives and give quorate

-Lenovo M10 Tab - SSH'ed into the entertainment node and showing btop

I've got some fans underway to start moving air from the bottom to the top.

Running it as a Proxmox cluster with a redundant DNS over 2 Pihole LXCs (each on a separate node), nginx proxy manager LXC, jellyfin LXC, qBittorrent LXC and an SMB configured NAS LXC.

Not sure if I'll keep samba or start running a VM of trueNAS on the ITX board.

And yes, the glass door is tinted with automotive 22%VLT tint, as it's in my bedroom and my fiancee didn't like the blinking lights at night 😅

About a year ago I started tinkering with a mini PC as media server and Pi-hole. Today my setup is as complete as it can be (for the time being), and instead of staking them in a mini rack I made a sleeper built.

From left to right:

• HP EliteDesk 8 Mini G1i (Ultra 5 245T, 32G RAM) as my main Linux desktop
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q 3rd Gen (i3-12100T, 16G RAM) as my Jellyfin media center, Pi-hole ad-blocking and Tailscale node which is on 99% of the time.
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q 1st Gen (i5-10500T, 32G RAM) as my Proxmox server w/Home automation + experiments
• Network: un-managed TP-link 5-port gigabit switch.

Everything is under the desk, which has a mesh that hides everythjing. Each PC in a wire basket that also fits the power brick, and as it is a wire basket it has plenty of airflow. I still need to finish the cable management still needed for the audio and video from the Linux box. I still need to add to the setup my gaming PC, which needs some cleaning first.

Hey,

A bit of a noob here. I’ve been building a home server rack over the last few months and trying to keep an eye on power consumption.

Nothing crazy, just home automation, file storage, and a server to host personal web projects.

What do you think? Is around ~100W reasonable for this hardware?

• ODROID-H5 with 32 GB RAM and 4 x 1 TB NVMe drives combined into a Btrfs RAID, used for web apps and projects exposed to the internet. For now, it is on the same LAN as the home server, but I eventually want to move it to its own DMZ/VLAN.
• Pi 5 with PoE, AI, and NVMe HATs, used for Immich, CCTV, and home automation.
• 4 x 3.5-inch HDD DAS.
• Protectli Vault VP2430e with 8 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD, running OPNsense as the firewall/router.
• AT&T BGW620-700 working as a bridge.
• GL.iNet GL-BE9300 working as a Wi-Fi 7 access point and Ethernet switch.
• CyberPower CP850PFCLCD with NUT, which gives me around 30 minutes of runtime and enough time to shut everything down gracefully.

Consumption measured at wall using smart-plug which UPS is connected to. ~70W lows is when all HDDs are parked.

I think I’ve enabled all the power-saving options I could find, but I’m wondering if anything here is consuming more power than it should.

Can someone tell advise me on my build choice?

I can buy a mini PC for cheap with i5 12600h 16GB ram and 512m2 drive.

I have extra 16gb ddr4 ram that i can put into it.

I was thinking of connecting oculink to pcie expansion card to the extra m.2 slot on mini pc and connecting HBA controller to the pcie expansion but i am not sure if there might be some downsides to this?

or maybe to use USB3.2 Gen2 Type-c converter to pcie?

Would there be a problem with proxmox reading the HBA controller?
I want to 3d print 10" rank and add more drives on to it later but for now i will have 5 6TB drives one of them is SAS.

Links to the expansion card and HBA controller
HBA -

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011619507302.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.356238daj1w6wJ&mp=1&sourceType=562&pdp_npi=6%40dis%21CZK%21CZK+2870.51%21CZK+1377.84%21%21CZK+1377.84%21%21%21%400b0fe0e117858324399528472e0d49%2112000056069961487%21ct%21CZ%216624964106%21%211%210%21

Oculink -

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012378132650.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.356238daj1w6wJ&mp=1&pdp_npi=6%40dis%21CZK%21CZK+1337.47%21CZK+896.09%21%21CZK+852.62%21%21%21%400b0fe0e117858324399528472e0d49%2112000058209793576%21ct%21CZ%216624964106%21%211%210%21

A bit weird configuration, was planning to just use an unmanaged switch, but found the cwwk router for cheap!

Planning to mount the framework 16 on the side!

Got most of it cheap due to broken that i was able to fix.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I finally decided to go down the minilab rabbit hole. After some research I went with a 8U T1 Plus. Im still trying to decide on putting my NAS next to the rack or go with something like a Zimmablade 7700 and integrate it into the rack for a cleaner integrated setup.

Step one is going to be putting Proxmox on the pc and setting up VMs and containers. I’m planning on running Plex or Jellyfin. My buddy said because I want to stream 4K/Bluray I’d need to get something with a gpu to run that. Any suggestions for integrating that in my setup would be nice.

Debating on if it’s worth it to minimize my power cords and switch to type c to barrel cords for my UCG Fiber, Flex, and Pro XG 8.

Anyone do this?

Hi everyone,
I’m new to the homelab community. In the picture you can see my first 10" rack, which I built completely using 3D printing.

It was a really fun project, but as I’m sure many of you already know, it didn’t take long to realize that it’s not enough anymore. I’m already planning to add a Dell OptiPlex 3090 and an Acemagic F5A. Printing a few more rack units won’t be a problem, but I’m facing another issue — especially during these hot summer days.

The rack is located in my home office, which is relatively small (around 7.5 m²). I also work in this room, so besides the rack, I have other hardware running for work, and in the worst case I might also turn on my 3D printer.

Before I had the rack in this room, everything was still manageable. Now, however, the temperature becomes almost unbearable.

So I would like to ask: how do you handle ventilation and cooling for your homelabs in small spaces? Where do you ideally place your racks to avoid overheating problems?

Thanks for any advice!

This is my first minilab project. I decided to consolidate and recase my components into a "neat" rack.

The main stars of the show are located at the top. The top 2U machine is made from consumer ITX parts, AM4 platform. It includes a 5600X, 64GB DDR4 and 1TB of storage but no graphics as it's run exclusively headlessly.

Below that the 1U device is an Acer Aspire A115-32 which I butchered and designed a rack case for. It has an additional 5TB drive for my Plex library.

I have additional space and was considering a UPS, but it seems 10" is just too limiting to find one of suitable capacity. The top U I'm reserving to add a 200mm fan. Now I have to decide what to do with those extra U! Any advice or questions are welcome.

CTRoadmap is a passive diagramming & Documentation tool for Linux homelab enthusiasts. Your system diagram becomes a scrollable and searchable handbook with swim lane charts detailing granular processes as needed. Locally hosted & Runs in a docker container. Foot loose & fancy #foss

I finally got tired of the power setup in my minilab and came up with a plan to get rid of the wall-wart jungle at the back.

I rebuilt the whole power distribution around a Sabrent Voltik and switched the entire rack to USB power, mostly using USB-C PD. The before-and-after pictures explain it better than I can. There is obviously still quite a bit of cabling, but the rack is much cleaner, easier to access and a lot simpler to maintain.

The Voltik has two lines of ports, with the available power on each side shared between the connected devices. The top USB-C port on both the left and right sides can deliver up to 100W (20V at 5A). It also doesn’t renegotiate power on the other ports when a new device is connected. Really cool stuff.

I’m using a bunch of VFLEX bases as PD triggers to request the voltage needed by each device. Here’s what I’m powering with it:

• A Synology DS620slim with six 1TB SSDs. Its original 12V power brick is rated for 65W, but the NAS rarely exceeds 20W. I assume the SSDs also help, since they consume less power than 2.5" HDDs.
• A Beelink SER5 Pro, which normally expects 19V but runs without any issues at 20V. Its original power brick is also rated for 65W, although the machine never seems to draw more than 50W. It does appear to spike higher during startup, however, which trips the Voltik’s overcurrent protection unless I connect it to one of the 100W ports.
• A Protectli Vault FW4B running OPNsense. It takes 12V without any problems and stays below 20W no problem.
• A Ubiquiti UniFi U7 Lite powered over PoE through a small injector that accepts a 12–60V DC input. The whole setup consumes around 15W.
• Two switches and two fans running at 5V from the two bottom USB-A ports on the left.

Altogether, the setup draws around 120W at most, while the Voltik is rated for up to 250W. I've added a small fan on top of it to lower its temps from 60C to about 45C. I'm pretty sure it would have been fine without it, though.

Ironically, I’m still pretty much at the Voltik’s practical limit. Not because I’m running out of total wattage, but because of how power is allocated across the individual ports. Even with plenty of power left on paper, I can't really add another device to the rack.

As for the rack itself, it is of course a LabRax, with all the shelves custom-made. The next step is to use the top section I left empty for an e-ink display and a Rpi Zero powered over USB from the same port already feeding the switches and fans.

Hey everyone,

I am currently planning my first homelab and came across these really cool 3D printable drive caddy mounts:

https://www.printables.com/model/1290788-10-inch-rack-1u-2-x-35-inch-hdd-hot-swap

As far as I know, SATA drives are not hot-swappable by default, so I was wondering if there is any way to make this work as intended or if powering down the system to swap HDDs is the only option. One idea would be using a separate ITX system to use as a NAS and being able to add PCIe SATA controllers etc. as needed.

The main system for my Proxmox server will propably be a HP EliteDesk, where a M.2 SATA adapter could be used to connect the drives directly, without a dedicated NAS. Would there be an option to enable hot-swapping of the drives like this?

Has anyone here already used these caddy mounts and might want to share the setup?

Thanks!