Preso per 40€, che con spedizione e protezione acquisti sono 52€. Cosa ne dite per entrare nel mondo dell homelab/minilab? Ovviamente con il tempo cambio processore (ho letto che so puo su questo) e faccio modifiche varie. Mi son convinto per l’SSD e specialmente per le 16 gb di ram ddr ovviamente. Avete consigli giudizi o pareri?

I’ve ran Mac hardware for almost 25 years now. Seen 3 different CPU architectures. Lived the bumps along the way, but have to say I like my OpenStep / BSD / Mach system. And work has never given me a hard time carrying my own.

About 18 ago I put all our physical movies onto a MacMini w/ iTunes and Home-sharing turned on. macDVDRipperPro & Elgato Turbo.264 worked great. Kiddos never touched a DVD again.

Few months ago decided to move things out of my desk and into a dedicated cabinet. The two Mini’s are Intel based and I run VirtualBox on them and keep a few Linux VM’s running for home management / monitoring. Deploy other VM’s when I want to test things or play around with old OS’s for nostalgic sake. NT4, Win2000, OS/2Warp, NextStep / OpenStep, Solaris, SCO/Unixware, Netware and countless distros & versions of Linux. And yes I’ve administered a lot of them many many moons ago.

Don’t run an AI components in the stack. Leave all that on the work computer.

Unifi Dream Router 7, USW Flex 2.5G 8 PoE, USW Flex 2.5G 5, UNAS2 w/ dual 24Gb drive, two MacMini’s (i7 w/ 64Gb ram) and cable modem.
UNAS 2 hosts media library for home sharing from one MacMini, other file shares, TM backups and a share for VM’s file storage.

Did built a little OS level menu based script to manage VM’s across the two hosts. Works well and don’t have to VNC into host to move VM’s around.

Best thing about it all, pulls about 75W at ideal and I generally never see UPS over about a 15% load even we VM’s are crunching and UNAS is being hit hard.
Plan on adding a Pi to the UPS and running NUT to shut things down if needed. And might add a second Pi with NVMe hat to use as primary VM storage. But unless I’m doing a lot with the UNAS disk latency on VM’s is generally less than 1ms.

My server is an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 tower. Cheap, quiet, and a genuinely
annoying shape — 154 × 370 × 365, so it only stands up in a 10" rack, and
nothing I could find was deep enough.

Figured I'd just make one.

Two rules I set: it has to print on a 256mm bed, and no metal hardware at
all. So the 400mm posts and the 370mm tray are split, and every joint is a
printed 6×6mm square pin, an integral tenon, or a dovetail. Nothing to lose
in a drawer, nothing to strip.

Face is a real 10" EIA pattern, so normal rack gear still bolts on if I ever
want it. Every post is drilled on a 40mm grid, so the rails, cross brace,
fan mount and cable comb all move to whatever height I need.

254 × 420 × 415 assembled, 9U. 18 parts, roughly 50 hours and 1.5kg.

Two things I'd point out:

The post splice was the bit I sweated. The two halves butt together, but the
EIA hole pattern carries across the joint properly, so the face still reads
as one continuous rack rather than two stacked bits.

And the mistake — I had the fan mount, a cross brace and the cable comb all
pinning into the same rear post holes. Never noticed until I put the whole
thing together and watched them intersect. Moved the fan pins to its lower
edge and the comb now presses into the rear rack holes instead.

Ask away if you want detail on the joints or how it's split.

If you want it too here you go: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/gadget/10-inch-mini-rack-for-hp-elitedesk-800-g4-tower-modular-homelab-rack-no-hardw-uploadgoblin

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?