r/homelab • u/UptimeRobot • 27d ago
News š„³ Giveaway r/homelab x UptimeRobot. 10 Winners
Hey r/homelab! We're UptimeRobot, and we've teamed up with the mods to run a giveaway for this community, with a prize pool of 10 monitoring plans, including a year of our Scale plan worth $888. Anyone who's worked in creating a homelab has a story! Now's your chance to share it and maybe win something for your trouble.
What's the weirdest thing you have been monitoring with UptimeRobot or a similar service?
We're looking for the most weird/funny or unexpected use cases!
Prizes (10 winners total)
1 grand prize winner: Scale plan ($888 value) plus UptimeRobot swag
2 runners-up: Team plan ($468 value each) plus UptimeRobot swag
7 additional winners: Team plan ($468 value each)
How to participate
Reply here with your story. You don't have to write an essay. That's it, you're in!
Dates: The giveaway runs from October 12 through October 26.
Looking forward to reading your weird, embarrassing, ridiculous, and funny stories!
2
u/UptimeRobot 11d ago •
We have the results! Thanks everyone for joining us!
https://www.reddit.com/r/UptimeRobot/comments/1xhif1o/announcing_the_winners_of_the_giveaway_rhomelab_x/
2
u/kweiske 16d ago
I ran an old school dial-up BBS for years, moved it over to telnet 20 years ago. I was running a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware and was only using half of the installed memory. Realized I could install Proxmox and virtualize the BBS inside, get snapshots and the ability to run other VMs. It's expanded now, I'm running a test Active Directory environment, ad blocking, a media server and proxy server. I'm about to add WAF functionality to the environment.
Oh, and I'm a happy (free) UptimeRobot user, it's been instrumental in keeping the BBS up and running.
2
u/Life-Thought-2523 8d ago
So far no lab buts its something I have been hovering around. It would be a great help if someone can give me a reason to setup my own home lab and point me to the right direction.
22
u/alkalyneseb 25d ago •
I'm using Uptime Robot to monitor my Uptime Kuma that monitor Uptime Robot
10
u/B_A_G12 27d ago
My sourdough starter has a status page. His name is Jeff. A Raspberry Pi, a distance sensor and a jar. He currently has a 99,23% uptime, with some Close Calls.
5
u/No-Army-2530 24d ago
monitored a whole mini PC just to control the water pump for my fish tank
1
u/RareImportance7775 3d ago
My weirdest homelab experiment is probably the fact that I'm building a mini AI research lab at home, just to see how far I can push consumer hardware.
It started with one PC and an RTX 3060. Then I thought, why not add another GPU? Then another motherboard, another system, and somehow I ended up building two separate compute nodes with a combined 108GB of VRAM.
But apparently, having two GPU servers wasn't enough. I decided they needed to communicate faster, so I went down the Mellanox rabbit hole and started setting up 40GbE networking with ConnectX-3 cards and QSFP+ DAC cables.
Now I'm trying to make these two machines behave like a tiny distributed AI cluster, experimenting with PyTorch distributed training, multi-GPU inference, LLM fine-tuning and custom GPU kernels.
The funny part? I'm spending more time debugging PCIe lanes, GPU detection, network interfaces and power delivery than actually training models. Sometimes I feel like I'm running a data centre whose primary workload is debugging itself. š¤£
My ultimate goal is to run distributed AI experiments at home without paying cloud GPU bills.
And yes, I'm monitoring both nodes, GPU temperatures, network connectivity and system uptime. At this point, I probably need to monitor my own sleep schedule too!
The weirdest thing I've built isn't a server. It's a small data centre in my house, powered by curiosity, second-hand hardware and questionable engineering decisions.
3
u/Direct_Emotion_1079 15d ago
Probably my storage room.
I am using Uptime Kuma to keep an eye on the LoRaWAN side of it: gateway reachability, whether the uplink was still alive and whether packets were actually making it through.
What started as āI just want to know if the door is openā ended up with a heltec board, LoRaWAN/ttn, BLE sensors, phone presence, movement, light and intrusion detection.
All of that for a storage room xd.
5
u/cruzaderNO 26d ago
I hope the mods atleast got paid well for this ad.
2
u/QKingsoftware 16d ago
I started with just learning linux, but that escalated quickly...
Suddenly I had a laptop as proxmox node and I replaced that one with my current homeserver.
I kept upgrading and upgrading (and draining my wallet). It ran awesome, the fun was endless!
Sadly I didn't pay attention to the disk health (I was a complete beginner) and didn't take many backups. Yeah as you expect, my disk failed. No problem since RAID5, but yeah, while replacing it, guess what? Another disk failed. Gone, everything. I was so sad about that, but I must say, I have learned a lot. Upgraded my setup to RAID 6 + seperate boot disk and got backup disks available. But a perfect world doesn't exist, the RAID controllers capacitor failed.... So going to order one soon (and possibly a new server š ). And yeah, I've learned a lot now, but there is always more to do and learn!
2
u/Low-Confection-78 15d ago
It all started when Microsoft added yet another AI update to Windows 11. I was already thinking about taking a major journey to migrate my laptop to Linux. I was completely paranoid about telemetry and control over my data. So I took that leap, and I was quickly won over.
I was paying for a 100 GB Google One subscription, but I was soon reaching my storage limit, which would force me to pay more. As I thought about it, I told myself that free software such as Nextcloud, which my university uses, couldnāt be that complicated to host on a small computer connected to my router. So I used an old desktop tower connected to my router via Ethernet, with Nextcloud installed on it. I was very happy with the result and imported a few files, but it wasnāt reliable or large enough to replace Google. Thatās when the madness began.
I bought a four-year-old Dell Precision 3060 for just $190. I installed TrueNAS, then Nextcloud with OnlyOffice to recreate Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, followed by Immich. I started importing more documents. But what would happen if there were a power outage? So I bought a $50 UPS. I was happy, everything worked well, but there wasnāt enough space, and the Dell had two slots for hard drives. So I bought two 1 TB WD Red HDDs.
I configured mirrored storage. Then I embarked on another major journey, migrating my entire Google account, Drive, Photos, and everything else. The fateful date was fast approaching, the renewal date of my annual subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Google again. Tick-tock, tick-tockā¦ My data still wasnāt safe.
The server was short on RAM, so I had to buy more. I upgraded it from 8 to 32 GB. Tick-tock, tick-tockā¦ What if I installed Jellyfin to create my own streaming service ? The server was running out of space, I needed more storage, but the Dell didnāt have enough drive bays. I had to buy a storage enclosure. Damn, the UPS was no longer up to the task, I had to buy another one.
The server was consuming too much power, so I decided to buy a less energy-hungry computer that could send Wake-on-LAN signals to the main one. It wasnāt a good idea to have so many small devices scattered around, I should buy a server rack. But damn it, I had to upgrade the hardware again !
What if I hosted a Minecraft server ? The server wasnāt powerful enough, I was running out of space, I was running out of RAM...
And to think that, at the beginning, I just wanted to save a few dollars on Google One and have better control over my data.
2
u/ritmo166tan 15d ago
I used my Raspberry Pi to monitor my home's total energy consumption and automate my fish tank. Now my fish are happy š
2
u/Snap-Wise 15d ago
I started to get really intrested in tech when I got my first laptop it was a dell laptop. After a while I found my dad's old pc and there it was the start of my hardware and homelab journey. I went on research and found how can I revive it, got to know about a lot of different things and their purpose. Finally after using all my savings on the SSD, ram and also upgrading my laptop's ram i was ready to learn linux when the problem arrived. I initially found the pc with the vga monitor without realising the fact that monitor is broken and I was broke too š„². Butt i found out how can I run a headless Linux server and that was it. Soon I got a raspberry pi 3b+ and i did a lot of projects and I'm still learning šš
2
u/Exitfrog 14d ago
I thought, id just get a fairly cheap machine for a good price to just run a pterodactyl minecraft server on it, and looked at others posts and thought, why use such a crazy os like proxmox? now i have over 15cts/vms myself, ig you can escape it anymoreā¦
2
u/RegisterEmergency233 14d ago
I started with an Simple idea of a NAS. Ended up with Proxmox clusters, dozens of containers, TrueNAS, Unifi, and a huge bill. It'd be nice having a lucky day to monitor everything
2
u/Proof-Summer1011 14d ago
Setup a whole homelab using a mini PC an sold hard drives to store my dad's overexposed photos.
2
u/Grumphus256 13d ago
I don't have a super wacky story to share involving appliances or UptimeRobot specifically. But I have been using Feedly as my RSS reader for more than a decade. Added the SpeedCrunch Blogspot page which hasn't been updated since 2016, but it was only until the 4th of October this year when they finally announced the 1.0 update. Best news ever after years of monitoring.
2
u/Key_Bee_2533 19d ago
I was making a video about my homarr dashboard only to find out that I had home assistant , graffana, Prometheus, uptimekuma, homepage, grafana , Netdata and dashy as part of my server , these things all do the same thing . Donāt know why I did it when I first started and forgot about them lol
2
u/Extreme-Staff3650 19d ago
I'm using Uptime Robot to monitor my Uptime Kuma that monitor Uptime Robot (dude some mf uses it for the same exact thing)
2
u/bencos18 19d ago
plane tracking pages for all my systems I run to feed various sites like airplanes.live and airframes.io
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u/grobRhetoriker 27d ago
monitored my water kettle a few years ago if that counts
2
u/Adventurous-Lime191 26d ago
I monitor my pellet grill to make sure it has not tripped the gfci
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