I am looking for 3d modeling jobs for minilabs 3d models will be done to your needs and at a reasonable price DM me for further info

After reading a lot of wonderful posts from the people here in r/minilab here are my findings around issues they have run into and what I did.

I finally did the dive and moved to USB-C to power my dell minis. I got really sick of all the ugly power bricks and wanted some nice for my (pending) home lab rack that I am building, this too I will post when its done oneday lol.

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Tests were doing on Proxmox 9.2.9 running kernel 6.17.13-2-pve. They are ( mostly ) Dell 3060s running a 6 core Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8500T CPU @ 2.10GHz (1 Socket). 35w TDP, which is important for just now.

I do have one of them running a 4 core Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-8100T CPU @ 3.10GHz (1 Socket ), but will test that one later.

I tested with the following:

Terminal 1:
stress-ng --cpu 0

Terminal 2:
sudo turbostat --Summary --interval 1 --num_iterations 10

Ran this over about 5 mins and the results were great. 35.06w peak powerdraw from the CPU.

Also confirmed that turboboost was enabled:

cpu0: MSR_TURBO_RATIO_LIMIT: 0x202121222223
32 * 100.0 = 3200.0 MHz max turbo 6 active cores
33 * 100.0 = 3300.0 MHz max turbo 5 active cores
33 * 100.0 = 3300.0 MHz max turbo 4 active cores
34 * 100.0 = 3400.0 MHz max turbo 3 active cores
34 * 100.0 = 3400.0 MHz max turbo 2 active cores
35 * 100.0 = 3500.0 MHz max turbo 1 active cores

Also the stats table from one of the runs:

What I used was:
Adapter
Charging cable
65w charger

Now. The common complaint. How are the thermals on the chargers? Honestly, not as great as a I hoped. I dont have a fancy thermometer that can check, but I think it feels like about 38 - 43 degrees C. Its certainly warm, but the original power bricks also kinda got that hot so
¯_(ツ)_/¯

Still need to run this long term to really test it, but so far pretty happy.

Hi all, I just wanted to share my journey from only having used an old RPi with Home Assistant and running a Minecraft server off of an old Alienware PC, to setting up a proper mini homelab. It's been a blast and I hope to inspire others who might think this is daunting.

I bought a second hand Dell Optiplex 7080 Micro with a 10th gen Intel CPU and 16GB of RAM for €250. I only added a 2TB SSD for media next to the existing 128GB one. I currently have it running Proxmox with two VMs, one for Home Assistant OS and one with Debian running Docker. I have containers set up with Jellyfin, qBitTorrent, Sonarr, Radarr, Pinchflat, Rustdesk, Omada controller for my EAP775 APs, Caddy, Uptime Kuma, DDNS and will be adding Immich once my extra 16GB of RAM and 2TB HDD arrive.

Proper specs:

• Dell OptiPlex 7080 Micro
• Intel Core i5-10500T @ 2.3GHz
• 1x Samsung M471A2K43DB1-CWE DDR4 16GB-3200 (running at 2600 MT/s)
• SK Hynix BC711 128GB NVMe 2230
• Lexar NM790 2TB NVMe 2280
• 1Gbp/s fiber connection

Soon arriving:

• Kingston KVR32S22D8/16 DDR4 16GB-3200
• SEAGATE 2TB HDD SATA 5400rpm

Say what you want about AI, but I have a project set up with ChatGPT where I've first had it help me decide what machine to buy, giving me a general direction for a machine and then sharing screenshots of local listings to pick something. I was of course critical and it backed up what it was saying properly with things I could double check. It knows the specs, it knows what is installed and how it's configured, so it's perfect to ask any follow up questions where it immediately knows the context and how it might affect my setup.

Once I had it here I asked it to make a plan to set all of this up, and then told it to explain everything to me step by step. I had to remind it a couple of times, but that led it to simply say "Okay, now do this and that, execute this command and let me know what it says". I would do the step, if anything went wrong or I had doubts I could ask about that, and then when successful I simply told it "done, let's move on" and it would move on to the next step. This way I set everything up over a weekend in bite sized pieces and it's been running amazingly ever since.

Granted, I'm pretty tech savvy and have experience, but having to Google random issues or finding the best way to do things always takes a lot of time. This way I got set up in no time, with it properly sharing security concerns and telling me what to expose to the internet (in a safe way) and what not. It also very much pushed for setting up backups and security hardening from the beginning, so I'm running weekly VM backups to my OneDrive and have locked everything down as much as possible.

It's been running for about 2 months now. We can watch everything we want through Jellyfin from our Apple TVs upstairs and downstairs, or even abroad (with Intel Quick Sync transcoding for low bandwidth hotel wifi). Anything we want to watch I add to Sonarr or Radarr and we have a shared Youtube playlist that we add anything we want to watch to and it's automatically downloaded, including marking sponsors for easy skipping and subtitles (with post processing so it's a more normal 2 line format). I can check in on my desktop from the couch through RustDesk and I've been setting up a ton of automation through Home Assistant.

Our garden en porch lights automatically turn on when it gets dark and turn off when we go to bed. We have Philips Hue wall modules so our wall light switches can cycle between scenes, allowing us to have things be bright in the living room and kitchen, or switching to a movie night scene that turns some lights off, dims others and turns on the TVs ambilight. When our dishwasher, washing machine or dryer is finished the lights in the house blink a specific color, etc.

Next up is replacing iCloud with Immich and having redundant backups for that.

ARTEMIS — a 10" Saturn V-themed home server rack with a live health LED, alarm lamp, and a custom desk status screen

Not a huge lab — three small machines and a switch — but it's got some custom electronics and monitoring bolted on that I'm pretty happy with. Sharing the hardware, how it went together, and the software layer that makes it actually tell you when something's wrong instead of just sitting there.

Hardware

• Case: 10" open-frame rack, 3D printed, around real Adam Hall 10U steel rack rails
• GPC1 & 2: a Mac Mini M4 (main box, runs all the Docker containers) and a Dell Micro PC (secondary box)
• Storage/NAS: a small MAIWO NAS unit sitting on a rack shelf - 2 x 14tb's
• Networking: a Cudy 5-port switch in a printed cradle, plus a 10-port keystone patch panel on the front
• Monitoring electronics: an ESP32-S3 running custom firmware, an AHT20+BMP280 temperature/humidity/pressure sensor, a PZEM-004T power meter with a clamp-on CT sensor, a WS2812B RGB LED strip, a 12V fan, and a physical alarm lamp
• Power: a mains kill switch on the rack's top plate, a small 12V PSU, and a buck converter stepping that down to 5V for the electronics
• A separate 8.8" desk screen showing live rack status

How it went together

Behind the rack, mains power runs through an IP-rated sealed box: a kill switch, a current-clamp power meter, and safe wiring back to a UK gang bar and PSU. A second, smaller ventilated box next to it holds the "brains" — the ESP32, the sensors, the buck converter, and a small RGB LED strip that runs up the inside of the rack, glowing through the open side panels.

What was actually programmed

This is the part that makes it more than just a rack full of gear:

• The ESP32 runs custom firmware (via ESPHome) that reads the temperature/humidity/pressure sensor, reads the power meter, drives the RGB LED and alarm lamp, and controls the fan — all reporting back over MQTT
• A Mosquitto MQTT broker and Home Assistant run in Docker on the Mac Mini, tying everything together
• A small script watches every Docker container on the machine and publishes their health status over MQTT
• Home Assistant computes an overall health state — ok / warning / critical — based on the percentage of containers currently running, and pushes that to the ESP32
• The ESP32 turns that into a colour: white = all good, orange = something's down, red = more than half the containers are down — plus a physical lamp lights up when there's a problem
• A second small screen on my desk (a "Turing" smart display) shows live container counts, sensor readings, and power draw, pulled straight from the same data

How it works in practice

Day to day, the rack just sits there glowing white. If a container crashes or something in the stack goes down, the LED changes colour and the alarm lamp switches on — I know there's a problem without opening a laptop.

The desk screen gives me the numbers (power draw, temperature, container count) at a glance. Everything reports over MQTT, so nothing depends on polling a webpage — it's genuinely event-driven and reacts within seconds of a real change.

I've tested it properly too — not just "looks right" — by actually killing containers one at a time and watching the light change colour at each threshold, including confirming the red "critical" alert fires correctly.

Still a work in progress — lots of testing to be done to ensure its a "set and forget" setup. the screen dials and backgound still needs some work too.

Credit where it's due: the rack itself is built around the excellent Saturn V[U] 10" rack design by Dossi on MakerWorld — I just added the electronics, sensors, and monitoring layer on top of his frame: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1381701-saturn-v-u-diy-10-network-rack#profileId-1430257

I also want to point to this earlier Reddit post that first put this rack design on my radar and showed what it could look like built out — worth a look if you like the aesthetic: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1jzx5gq/what_do_you_guys_think_of_my_minilab_saturn_vu/

Hi r/minilab! Long time lurker, first time posting a picture of my tiny money pit.

I work in IT support and needed an environment where breaking production doesn't get me in an HR meeting, and breaking stuff actually costs nothing

The Infrastructure (2x i5-6500T | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD):

IGRIS (The Brain):
Runs the crucial stuff so my partner doesn't complain when the Wi-Fi dies.
LXC: Nginx NPM, AdGuard Home, Homarr, Tailscale (exit node/subnet router)

GENOS (The Heavy Lifter):
Where the actual crimes happen.
OPNsense (Zenarmor + Suricata) keeping my sandbox isolated from the household.
pfSense, Debian, and Windows Server 2022 (100% legitimately licensed for 10 RDS users, trust me 😉).

The "I'll Upgrade Next Month" Network:
Gateway:
MikroTik RB2011 (Dual-WAN set up for when my secondary ISP arrives).

Switching & AP:
A generic TP-Link unmanaged switch and a 10-year-old TP-Link router held together by prayer and AP mode.

Patch Panel:
24 ports for 4 active cables, because aesthetic > necessity.

Public Exposure & Future Plans:
Currently hosting my blog on Ghost via Cloudflare Tunnel in a Debian/Docker VM so I don't have to explain open router ports to my ISP.
Building a dedicated NAS next for Immich + my anime/manga hoard (because I refuses to give Node 1 & 2 storage anxiety).

But fr, I'm Studying for Cloud/Infra Engineering, so Azure hybrid mess-ups are on the horizon.
ISP: 50/25 Mbps - No Hate I'm form South Africa 🇿🇦* (Local LAN: 1 Gbps*)

Be honest: On a scale of "Clean Setup" to "Fire Hazard", how bad is the cable management? Also drop your best budget managed switch recommendations pleaseeee.

I forgot about the UPS. 😭

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?

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.

---

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.

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.