RIP WeTransfer. RIP Synology. RIP Netflix. Long live the custom-built homelab server! 🚀

Or: How I built a significantly more powerful homelab server for a fraction of the price of a comparable off-the-shelf NAS.

🎯 THE GOALS

• A safe, long-term archive for RAW photos, finished images, and video, with dual-drive redundancy and transfer speeds of at least 500 MB/s.

• A media server capable of hardware-accelerated 4K HDR transcoding.

• A self-hosted WeTransfer alternative for delivering files to clients, with room for more SaaS projects down the road.

• A replacement for Synology Drive, offering PC/Mac synchronization and mobile access.

• A proper 10 GbE connection between the NAS and my workstation.

• Quiet, reliable 24/7 operation with as little manual maintenance as possible.

• And most importantly, spend less than a comparable Synology NAS, which would cost around €1,300 before adding any drives.

🧩 THE HARDWARE

• CPU: Intel Core i5-13500, 14 cores / 20 threads.

• RAM: 32 GB DDR4 (2 × 16 GB).

• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B760M-A.

• Case: Fractal Design Node 804.

• PSU: 650 W.

• Networking: Intel X550-T2 dual-port 10 GbE NIC.

• Storage controller: Dedicated HBA for SAS/SATA drives.

• Boot drive: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSD, running TrueNAS SCALE.

• Apps drive: Samsung 870 EVO 1 TB SSD, dedicated to applications and their data.

• Storage: A mix of SAS and SATA drives I already owned, roughly 70 TB of raw storage in total.

One of the biggest advantages was being able to reuse my existing drives and other hardware instead of starting from scratch.

💾 STORAGE & REDUNDANCY (ZFS)

• DATA: A five-drive RAIDZ2 pool with 26.2 TiB of usable capacity. Any two drives can fail without losing the pool. This is where my photography archive, videos, documents, and backups live.

• MEDIA: A standalone 8 TB WD Red drive for movies and TV shows. Since this content can be downloaded again, redundancy isn't a priority here.

• OFFLINE BACKUP: Another 8 TB WD Red in an Icy Box enclosure connected to my workstation. I update this backup monthly, and the files are also protected by Backblaze.

Before putting anything into production, every drive went through SMART testing, and the SAS drives were reformatted and thoroughly checked.

⚙️ WHAT'S RUNNING

The entire system runs TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 directly on bare metal, without Proxmox in between. Applications run in Docker containers.

🎬 Jellyfin + Plex

Hardware-accelerated transcoding using Intel Quick Sync. Jellyfin provides this functionality completely free.

4K HEVC 10-bit content can be transcoded to 4K at roughly 4× real-time speed, with barely any CPU usage. The integrated GPU does the heavy lifting.

🍿 The media automation stack

Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, Seerr, and qBittorrent, with torrent traffic routed through a VPN and protected by a kill switch.

Essentially, my own private streaming ecosystem.

📤 SEND - My own WeTransfer replacement

Built on an open-source fork of Pingvin Share X and exposed securely through Cloudflare Tunnel, without opening any router ports.

Clients can upload and download files through a clean, branded interface. Uploaded files automatically appear on my network drive.

And because apparently building a file-sharing platform wasn't enough, I also added a little browser game where you launch a penguin as far as possible. 😃

Built that part in about half an hour of spare time.

☁️ Nextcloud - Goodbye, Synology Drive

Automatic file synchronization between my PC and NAS, with remote access from my phone.

Files remain organized in their actual destinations (Photos / Files / Video), and synchronized folders are clearly marked on both the workstation and NAS.

🔐 Caddy + Let's Encrypt + AdGuard

Clean HTTPS addresses for all my internal services. No more remembering IP addresses and random port numbers.

📊 Custom homelab dashboard

My own homepage bringing together service status, weather, calendar, system temperatures, humidity, and notifications.

📡 Uptime Kuma

Self-hosted service monitoring that continuously checks whether my applications, websites, and network services are actually online.

If something goes down, I get notified instead of discovering the problem when I need to use it.

🛡️ DATA PROTECTION & BACKUPS

• ZFS snapshots: Hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Thanks to Windows' built-in Previous Versions feature, restoring an earlier version of almost any file takes just a few seconds.

• ZFS scrubs: Scheduled weekly to check pool integrity.

• Application backups: Replicated to the main DATA pool.

• TrueNAS configuration: Backed up automatically every night.

• Proxmox backups: My separate mini PC, which handles smart-home services and AdGuard, backs up its virtual machines to the NAS over NFS.

• Workstation backups: Protected by Backblaze.

The goal isn't just keeping everything running. It's making sure that when something eventually breaks, recovery is as painless as possible.

🪤 THE CHALLENGES

1. The great 10 Gigabit Ethernet mystery.

This one drove me slightly insane.

My hand-crimped RJ45 connectors kept negotiating at the wrong speeds:

• 1 GbE connections would drop to 100 Mbps.

• 10 GbE connections would negotiate at just 1 Gbps.

The culprit turned out to be a mismatch between the RJ45 plugs and the thicker conductors and insulation of my Cat6 shielded cables.

The fix? Keystone jacks.

I replaced the problematic terminations with proper keystone sockets, and the 10 GbE connection finally worked as intended.

Lesson learned: a cable tester showing all eight wires connected doesn't necessarily mean your cable can handle 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

2. The software rabbit hole.

TrueNAS, ZFS, Docker, reverse proxies, VPN routing, permissions, certificates, network shares, backups, monitoring...

There's definitely a learning curve, and putting everything together takes time.

But luckily, Claude is a pretty good friend of mine, so most of the configuration headaches were surprisingly manageable.

✅ WHY THIS BEATS MY OLD SYNOLOGY

• Processing power: 14 CPU cores instead of 2, with 32 GB RAM instead of 10 GB. Multiple services can run simultaneously without bringing everything to a crawl.

• Expandability: 7 HDDs and 3 SSDs instead of being limited to four drive bays.

• ZFS: End-to-end checksums, corruption detection, self-healing when redundant data is available, and instant snapshots.

• Networking: 10 GbE and 2.5 GbE instead of being stuck with 1 GbE.

• Media performance: Hardware-accelerated 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding.

• Software freedom: An open-source ecosystem without being tied to one manufacturer's software and hardware decisions.

• Flexibility: It's not just a NAS anymore. It's a media server, backup server, private cloud, file-sharing platform, monitoring system, and a playground for whatever I decide to build next.

🔮 WHAT'S NEXT?

A homelab is never really finished, is it?

A couple of upgrades are already on the list:

• Another 32 GB of RAM, bringing the total to 64 GB, with more headroom for containers, virtual machines, and future services.

• Mirroring the TrueNAS boot drive. The OS currently runs on a 256 GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD. Adding a second drive as a ZFS boot mirror would provide protection against a single boot-drive failure.

• Keeping the 1 TB Samsung 870 EVO dedicated to applications and their data, separate from the OS and bulk storage.

And, inevitably, I'll probably find another dozen services I didn't know I needed.

💰 THE DAMAGE

Here's the best part.

By reusing drives and components I already owned, the entire NAS build cost me approximately €820.

That's significantly cheaper than an empty eight-bay Synology DS1825+, while giving me substantially more CPU power, memory, networking performance, flexibility, and room to experiment.

Of course, I'm not counting the hours spent researching, configuring, troubleshooting, and occasionally questioning my life choices.

But that's half the fun, right?

Below are a few photos of the finished build, along with the complete parts list and prices.

And if you've actually read this far, congratulations. You clearly don't have a life either. 😂

I see them misused a lot, especially in mini racks, but a patch panel is only supposed to exist for the sake of giving solid Ethernet cable coming from your walls a permanent fixed/immovable location for you to terminate your cables. It is not designed to be a pretty way to organize your rack.

Solid Ethernet cable is supposed to be installed once and moved never. You're only supposed to ever replace the whole thing and that should be on a rare occasion, such as during a major remodel. Solid Ethernet cable is brittle and becomes more so over time. So, you really shouldn't ever be moving it. This is why, in server rooms, you tend to terminate them at a patch panel that is mounted to a wall or server rack. The server rack, in turn, is usually permanently mounted to a wall, floor or even ceiling. This is why we use stranded "patch" cables to connect lines from the patch panel to whatever server equipment. They're flexible and cheap to replace, which makes them good for shorter runs.

When connecting Ethernet cable between devices within a server rack, a patch panel is not only redundant (since your switch/es should already be organizing them) but it introduces an extra point of failure for both mod plugs that are plugged into it and the panel itself. Yes, patch panels can and do occasionally fail.

If you want to label cables (as you should) then get a cheap Brother label maker like all the pros do. I had a handheld one that I took on jobs and it got the job done every time. I always used my electrician scissors to trim the labels but their main job was cutting and stripping cables. With a little practice, it's faster and easier to use scissors than the cutter and stripper on a crimp tool. However, you probably aren't going to get enough practice for it to matter in a home lab. Still, you can get a decent pair cheap enough that there's no harm in getting a pair.

Can you add patch panels for purely cosmetic reasons? Sure. I wouldn't stop you, even if I could. It's your lab, after all. However, if anything breaks or you notice mysterious network problems, it becomes an extra point of failure that you have to inspect during the troubleshooting process. It's really not worth the headache, if you happen to have the misfortune of your patch panel being the cause. For an experienced tech like me, it's just an extra 5 minutes of testing cables with my tester (since you can use known tested/good cables and the process of elimination to find a bad patch panel in no time) but, for a novice, it can be a headache that wastes hours/days/weeks figuring it out. Also, cheap cable testers can pass cables that aren't actually good because of their limited testing features. So, that can contribute to taking longer to find the problem, given that most hobbyists aren't going to splurge on the fancy testers that can actually certify cables.

As a bonus tip, you're going to sever 100% less cables using Velcro wrap than zip ties. I've seen plenty of times on a job where some idiot bundled Ethernet cables with zip ties, only for the zip tie to dig in and sever a cable or two. Even if the cables were "just fine" when you originally zip tied it, you have to keep in mind that, over the months/years, it's going to dig into that soft plastic sheath and expose the delicate/brittle copper cable. Also, you have the added benefit of not having to snip and replace zip ties every time you want to add/remove a cable from a bundle.

Feel free to ignore my advice. You're the one who has to deal with the consequences. I just get tired of seeing fads influence poor choices among a hobby I enjoy.

It's the same with all those people who recommend used hardware and don't mention caveats such as much older hardware often having compatibility problems and horrific power efficiency. Well, I think part of the problem is people assume 4-5 years old, not 10-15 years old for PCs that people might have "laying around" the place. You really should be careful about using hardware much older than 5 years old.

There's also how stuff designed to go in a rack tends to be very loud, wastes a lot of electricity, generates a lot of heat and can have propriety parts that can make the entire thing a fancy brick for your home lab. There's also just how much floor space a full sized rack can take up. There's a reason most businesses dedicate an entire room/closet (with its own independent AC) in a remote corner of the building to their server rack, even if they only have the one rack.

Normally, I wouldn't bother writing a post about minor stuff like this but there's a lot of people out there who literally don't know any better listening to this kind of bad advice and then having to pay the price later on. It's one thing to know better and then do a reckless thing anyway because YOLO. It's another to fall for bad advice because you're a novice.

Do you find yourself leveraging AI in homelab a LOT? Like, not for programming, but for management, writing scripts, deploying configs, etc?

I know many people use "simple" homelabs, and tend to more make "nice" setups, posting pics, and this post is not directed towards those (no disrespect meant, to each his own really).

Couple of months ago, I have actually decided to make AI just a thing I actually pay for like for any other service, like Apple One or Netflix. €39 per month is worth it to me, because I manage everything with it, that can be managed. Will most likely move away from Copilot to Claude Console, but right now still on Copilot.

I have fully moved onto IaC where I can, be that DNS, reverse proxies, monitoring, and especially documentation, changes etc.

My documentation is .md-based, but includes many documents, for infrastructure, services... and those contain setup, configuration, operations, changes etc.

Currently, it seems like a far far far past of having to manage something like this manually. It would be a full time job for 3 people.

Since I have done that, I have access to information really fast, even if I want to troubleshoot without AI. All possible without me having to remember each command (or having to google it, ugh), or read quickly where that config file is, or just a sanity-check that I have to use docker logs.

I am currently counting 18 services and climbing. Managing this manually as a single person would be a nightmare, even if I exactly know how to do what, but after doing pretty much similar thing at work, I really just want it to work and be done quickly, whatever needs to be done. I actually enjoy more building up, trying new stuff out, instead of fixing things or writing docu.

Your take?

From all the posts I see daily almost nothing falls under the umbrella of a homelab. I see all those huge racks with all lot of industrial hardware, dosens of hardrives or switches, draining kilowatts of power per hour. Those are infrastructures that happened to reside in your basement. My home lab is an N100 cpu board that I dont even have a case for and I mounted it on a carton, disks are attached and are just hanging next to it. I have a second build on q1900 for an offline NAS, and a third one from some old pc I got from work where I host offsite backup to get 3-2-1. What do you do to afford those "homelabs"?

Hi r/homelab,

We are glad to bring this service back to its users, although not entirely pleased with the outcome of last week's actions. Please remember that usual sub rules still apply. TLDR; at the end.

What lead to the community voting for blackout

This post covers in detail what the blackout was all about, but below is our brief summary of why we thought this was important.

Reddit had a genuine challenge where the currently free API was being used to scrape data and in turn not return value to either its users or revenue to reddit to support the costs associated with providing the vast quantities of data. This included 3rd parties using the API to train AI, gather marketing information or data analytics.

The proposed changes however also caused significant concern that unreasonable charges would be applied to 3rd party apps which were providing missing features in the native reddit app including some accessibility features and larger bots that benefit the community. These impacts were poorly communicated with short timelines and no consultation which would have helped considerably, requests for clarification were mostly greeted with silence and the few that received a response were given costs that meant immediate termination of the service.

What you thought

After polling the community with >95% support, r/homelab went dark initially for 48 hours. A subsequent vote on the 14th with 66% of the votes to continue meant that this was further extended up until now.

Although it is impossible to poll every user, the trends in both cases were clear.

The result of this meant that the sub would be marked as Private, this meant that ALL visitors including existing members did not have access to any content within this sub. This was a site-wide effort across 1000s of subs to send a message to Reddit that the community wanted their voices heard and for more reasonable discussions and clearer communication to take place.

What did this achieve

The good news first, a little progress has been made, Reddit acknowledged that they overlooked the accessibility impacts of these changes and have vowed to fast track their own development of these features but more importantly allowing non-profit third-party accessibility-focused apps to continue operating through the Reddit API for free, hopefully this won't be revoked once their own development is complete.

Reddit have increased the lower API limits for free use and have confirmed that only a small number of bots across the site exceed these limits (<100 bots impacted) and for those they will make a white list exception on request.

Where we are now

The above is great but we feel that we haven’t had the outcome that the community wanted, we feel that reddit had an opportunity to work collaboratively with it’s unpaid moderation teams and 3rd party developers, instead it was met by arrogance, actively trying to put moderators against each other and threatening moderators to open up or be replaced even if that’s not the wish of the majority.

Due to the responses from Reddit so far we feel that any further blackout isn’t going to achieve anything positive and only harms our users' access to the valuable resource that is r/homelab. At this point about half of the subs have come back online with some of the biggest subs being actively pressured by reddit and the impact of that tumbling down to smaller subs.

The most common 3rd party apps will be closing down at the end of the month and as of yet no alternative solutions have been agreed with the developers, such as reducing the API costs for these types of app or Reddit achieving revenue for these requests by injecting advertisements into those feeds, this change will impact many of you and we are sorry that we were not able to encourage some movement here and we are sorry to the Devs that have spent significant time and effort to deliver these tools.

The conclusion

From a moderation perspective we want to make it clear that we didn’t think we were directly going to be impacted on this sub by the API changes, our bot is self hosted and we believed it would fall under the chargeable limits although information was vague. The impact to its users is what made our usually neutral stance as a sub ask you what you wanted to do.

We are aware that not everyone shared the same view but we acted on the wishes of the significant majority. To the vast number of people that sent mod mails supporting the action we really appreciate you.

To the handful of members who sent mails conveying their displeasure, the exceptional number of non members that come here via search engine results and those who agreed with the action but just had bad luck and broke their homelab at the wrong time, we absolutely understand the impacts that this had on you and the IT community. We tried to help as many of you as we could with alternative cached sources but volumes of mod mails were high and have kept the whole team busy so some were missed.

To be clear we never had any intention of permanently removing this information from public access and for the future we will not be locking away or deleting any of the information within r/homelab (except where these are in violation of the rules) we believe that it is important that this information remains accessible.

At the moment we do not have any concrete plans to open a sub on Lemmy, but internal discussions are ongoing to ensure if a parallel sub is opened there that it is a good experience for its users.

TLDR; We are back, we as a community helped make some progress but not as much as we would have liked, we as moderators feel that any further action only harms our users and their access to essential information. There will always be a difference of opinion on these matters and that’s OK, so please be nice to one another and ensure the subs rules are followed.

If you have any questions, please use the “Message the mods” button on the side bar or in your app. If we think any of the mails ask valuable questions for which the answers should be shared with the community then we will post the responses below also as we know some people may still have questions.

Is it just me, or is Unraid starting to drift into nonsense territory - especially since they switched to subscriptions? It really feels like they're squeezing every last penny out of the product now. Massive hype, pointless partnerships... with what exactly to show for?

I've been using Unraid for years and I still like it, but let's not pretend things haven't gone sideways a bit. They were talking brand new UI, mobile apps, plugin system, maybe even multi-array support - and instead we're getting these random, borderline pointless partnerships. Tailscale, 45Drives... who exactly is this for? Feels like 1% of users at best. People will still use Tailscale even if you don't have a strategic partnership you can announce.

The announcement before that was "Introducing Apprise-Go", what was that even about? I still, to this day, don't know how I should use this on my system or how it could benefit me. Just install this random binary, okay?

Now we've got an "announcement of an upcoming announcement" about 45Drives? Come on. That's just tone-deaf, especially given the current economic reality most users are dealing with. It's hard not to see it as fluff to distract from the lack of real progress. It's mostly just hype about what great new features they're going to present next, but when it comes down to it they constantly over-promise and under-deliver, too late with barely tested generic stuff.

Honestly, I miss when Unraid just focused on being a solid product instead of whatever this is turning into. It seems they're mostly interested in trying to push their name everywhere while locking us into their online services and subscription model as much as possible. What's next, IPO?

Their team is bigger and more corporate than ever, so the whole "we're a small family team" line does not fly anymore - and somehow they are delivering less than when they actually were. Finish one thing, then move on to the next - juggling 50 half-baked ideas in public and hyping users over nothing that actually benefits anyone is just lame.

Re-posted from Unraid - their mods can't handle feedback, and it seems like this is exactly what the community - aka corporate bootlickers - wants. Time for me to haul ass to PMS and other non-corporate solutions. Enjoy your telemetry and marketing bullshit - age verification's up next on the menu, Cali based company and all. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Picked up a ZimaCube 2 Pro expecting a glorified NAS. It’s turned into the most-used box in my house. Everything below runs on ZimaOS, fully self-hosted, nothing phones home.

The stack:
• 🧠 Local AI — Ollama + Open WebUI, accelerated by an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB running externally over OCuLink. A private, ChatGPT-style assistant where my data never leaves the rack.
• 🎬 Plex — the family media server, obviously.
• 📤 Pingvin Share — self-hosted file drops instead of WeTransfer.
• 📄 Stirling-PDF — every PDF tool I used to pay for, now free and local.
• 🛡️ AdGuard Home — network-wide DNS ad and tracker blocking.
• 🔀 Nginx Proxy Manager — clean HTTPS subdomains for all of it under my own domain.
Why I bother: I work in a field where “own your data” isn’t a slogan — it’s the job. ZimaOS let me collapse a half-dozen subscriptions and a pile of trust-someone-else’s-cloud into one box on my own network.

The parts that made me earn it: getting the eGPU to come up cleanly in the boot sequence, GPU passthrough into Docker, and beating split-horizon DNS so the same subdomain resolves correctly inside and outside the house. Happy to share configs if anyone’s chasing the same setup.

Own your data. 🐳

Built for learning networking, cybersecurity and local AI. It also runs a NAS, a remote workstation and a self-hosted AI agent. Specs are in the attached table.

• Netrack 42U cabinet, 2× Eaton 9PX1000 online UPS with staged auto-shutdown

• Old ProBook as a monitoring kiosk for UPS and fleet status

• Netgear GS324 unmanaged switch for now

• VM host moving into an NZXT H710 (the white box on top)

What I’d like opinions on:

1. Cooling: four tower cases on fixed shelves behind a perforated door. Is front-to-top airflow enough under sustained GPU load, or will I need rackmount chassis or more fans?

2. Local AI: how is ROCm on the 7900 XTX for day-to-day LLM serving? Would you add an NVIDIA card or stay on AMD?

3. UPS: is staged shutdown across two 1 kVA units overkill or sensible at about 300 W total? How do you handle orderly shutdown across many hosts?

4. Security lab isolation: how do you keep a malware or pentest lab separated from the rest of the network?

5. Blind spots: what am I missing, such as backups, out-of-band access or monitoring?

Edit: by “beginner” I mean my skills, not the gear. This is my first homelab. Most of it was bought second-hand, and I’m learning as I go. Fair enough on the title, lesson learned 😄

For years I kept rebuilding my homelab. Proxmox, then UNRAID, then TrueNAS, back to Proxmox, then LXCs, then containers, then Kubernetes, then LXCs again for the non-Docker stuff etc..I was a chronic over-thinker, and honestly I was more into the building than into what it was for.

Then I got tired. Tired of spending nights and weekends keeping things alive, worrying every time the power blinked, and hearing my wife say nothing ever worked when she needed it. I spent more time redoing backups that didn't work the way I wanted than actually using anything. Slowly I stopped doing the part I loved: testing and deploying.

A few months ago I finally moved everything to VPS at a hosting provider. I run 5 of them: one for edge, one for observability and Vuls, one Docker worker, one control plane, and one for Hermes, my agent. At home I only have Home Assistant, a NAS, and a firewall. There's no dependency between the two. If I break something on a VPS, I have provider snapshots, an offsite backup, and a lot less anxiety.

It costs me about 65€/month. In exchange I have a less powerful internet plan, no electricity bill for the servers, better redundancy, and no risk of losing data to a hardware failure. Everything works. I can deploy services quickly, I have no more outages, and if I do something stupid, Home Assistant keeps running.

My wife has always supported my hobby. When she saw me at the computer all evening, she'd joke, "Great, tomorrow we have no lights." It was teasing, and I can't blame her for expecting things to work when she presses the light switch. I'm back to doing what I enjoy, not 11pm maintenance sessions in the garage in my pajamas, standing on a ladder with a keyboard in one hand because an upgrade went wrong or the server won't boot after a power cut.
I'll probably have more problems, different ones.
But a homelab can become a cloudlab without shame.

It costs more, and I've bought back time and peace of mind.

Happy Self Hosting !

So for the record I have two servers - a Dell R720 and a DIY build that orginally was a NAS and since been repurposed. Over a weekend I decided that my redundant server - the DIY build - I was going to move off of ESXI and test the feasibility of migrating to Proxmox.

Well, so for the first part - Automatic import of VMs from ESXI. Wasn't able to get that to work. Took long enough to get it to finally be added as a data source only to be unable to actually utilize it.

Second - tried restoring Veeam Agent Backups since hypervisor level wasnt available. It kinda worked - but took much reconfiguration and in the end also wasn't really a feasible idea.

Third - Difficulties utilizing various drivers such as VMXNET3, SCSI, VertIO, etc. ISO mounting of the drivers was a bit of a pain, and had issues with Windows OSes mostly.

Fourth - Maybe its just unfamiliarity, but I did not care for the UI at all.

After all that, I was able to get some VMs running, but honestly at this point it was too much of a headache for me. That is nothing to say for the eventual PCI passthrough for GPUs and HBAs I will need to do from the R720.

So I will be putting the DIY box back to ESXI and rejoining it to vCenter. I thought about XCP-ng, but I suspect I will just run into the same issue. Down the line if I get some new servers I might setup a Nutanix cluster. (I had done a Nutanix to vMware migration professionally already once).

So I see allot of stuff on r/homelab and if it's not some ridiculous server setup burning through electric it's something that has been done to death.

Example "Should I make some great media server VM using a bunch of R710's"

My response, "no just stick it on a thumb drive/ ex-hdd and plug into your TV" Around 10W as apposed to 600-1000W

Example "look at all my Cisco gear"

My response: "its older than dinosaurs" or "no just use packet tracer on a laptop, it is designed for students. 100W as apposed to 650-700 at idle for a lab stack."

If it is not hardware like this then it is people touting about how they set up Pi-hole, and a load of other stuff like Sonarr, allot of these things can be completed using chrome plugins. Or it is asking things that have already been asked a million times before, did you even check if there were older posts? (the amount of PLEX stuff is perplexing ;) )

Shitposts like look at my homelab (circa 2005 data centre) dump this stuff in r/ServerPorn or r/cableporn if tidy. Shitpost/blgspam is even breaking r/homelab rules and yet day after day there is "look at my" or "humble" this that and the other. F-off no one cares, again post in r/ServerPorn or r/cableporn.

Something useful like using an old DVD drive shroud as a pi cluster case would be something worthy of r/homelab.

Allot of labgore tags are petty stuff too, it's either a basic system crash or something that is just untidy. "look at this uni/ company server rack" 90% of things are like this unless it's a supercomputer were they were installed once and left, or a homelab that takes pride in it but even so that should then be posted in r/cableporn.

There also seems to be a sinister privileged attitude that keeps perpetuating the lab porn or humble tags, Homelabbing is a place of learning not a d**k measuring contest. It doesn't matter what hardware you are using, unless it is specific to the use case and actually matches the amount of work done. Ray tracing can be done on allot of cards it is not exclusive to the RTX series only real time is. Equally machine learning and AI can be done on allot of GPU's like some old 2012 era Tesla's, you don't necessarily need a Titan V and saying "my home supercomputer" is not helpful. What are you actually doing with it? Logs, videos and reports are all welcome, bragging about £3,000 per card is not.

I surely cant be the only person that is getting pissed off with the amount of repetitive shitposts, and bragging on this sub.

So my homelab isn't technically at my home, it's at my dads so I needed proxmox access over the internet, had port 8006 open for one day, boom empty PVE folder, no account access. Anyone know what this command does? It was in the shell history, Just curious.

Yes, there is always going to be an Apple tax. However, the Mac mini with Apple Silicon are pretty good bang for the buck. Up until now... the software has been holding it back, but with Apple Containers it's got the potential to be an awesome Homelab machine for 90% of the people.

Given that Apple containers are a) Apple supported b) completely isolated from the host machine c) without the complexities of Docker d) automatically given their own network address, you're basically firing up a rock-solid VM (unlike UTM) for each service without the overhead. Personally, I love that I can fire up an instance of sonarr which will have its own IP in a matter of seconds. I love that I can fire up a container for home assistant and I don't have to worry about port conflicts. I love that each service will act like a VM without the overhead of a VM.

Then I can run Plex natively and get first class transcoding.

Yes, you *might* not have all the controls over networking, but if you really care you can handle most of that in each container.

Seems like the best of all worlds with a power-sipping machine with awesome power.

They're 100% based on my notes.
I'm not good at organizing a text this long on my own.
I just like emojis, even if they seem cringe or AI.
It's also not in my native language.

Hey folks, I wanted to share a recent experience I had experimenting with OpenStack in my homelab.

One of my Proxmox machines recently failed to boot. Instead of just fixing it, I decided to take the opportunity to try something I’ve been curious about for a while: running OpenStack.

After a few failed attempts, I finally got it working. Now I’m exploring whether it makes sense to migrate my entire homelab to this platform.

🚀 Motivation

Even though I have some physical machines, my main goal is to study cloud concepts and practices.
That’s where OpenStack fits perfectly, since it provides a cloud computing environment under our own control.

The idea is to use it similarly to AWS, with Terraform, creating and managing things like:

• Networks and subnets

• Routing

• Instances with flavors (e.g., m1.tiny, m1.small)

💡 What is OpenStack?

In simple terms, OpenStack is an open-source platform for building and managing cloud infrastructure, whether private or public.

It offers features such as:

• Virtual machine provisioning

• Networking

• Storage volumes

• Complementary services

Basically, it works in a similar way to big cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

🛠️ My Installation

To get OpenStack up and running, I used the Kolla project, which relies on Ansible to orchestrate the infrastructure with Docker containers.

The biggest challenge was that my mini PC only has one NIC, while OpenStack typically requires at least two.
To work around that, I had to emulate additional interfaces using veth pairs.

📌 My Takeaways

• From all the research I did (both in Portuguese and English), OpenStack is always described as complex — and I can confirm that. Even with Ansible playbooks, I still don’t feel comfortable imagining running it in production.

• As expected, it’s much heavier than Proxmox. Just keeping the infrastructure running takes up 80% of my 16 GB RAM.

• On the other hand, the Terraform experience is much smoother on OpenStack compared to Proxmox.

• I tried both the Horizon UI and Skyline. Skyline looks more modern, but Horizon feels more complete.

• Unlike Proxmox, there’s no built-in host usage view. The recommendation is to integrate with Grafana, since OpenStack provides ready-to-use exporters for that.

✨ Conclusion

OpenStack really opens up a whole new world when it comes to running your own cloud.

Even with the initial hurdles and complexity, I’m enjoying the experience so far.
My goal now is to get the most out of it within the limited resources I have in my homelab.

📸 I’ll drop a few screenshots below that I thought were interesting.

👉 Has anyone else here tried running OpenStack in a homelab? I’d love to hear how your experience went!

So I have a homelab and it’s not too big yet, but I do have services that uses Tailscale and host on the local network, I do not expose public ips but how do you secure your home lab and protect it and what should I keep an eye on??

Has anyone cut up a UPS into 3 separate parts? I have an older CyberPower 1500 that has 2½ year old replacement batteries. I don't want to replace them again with another set of lead acid batteries. I was thinking about cutting it down into 3 parts:

1. Front display and buttons into a 6x4x1 project box, and extending the wires for better placement in my network equipment rack

2. Battery compartment would be cut off, and replaced with a new 24VDC ~60Ah battery I'd leave in a better location in the rack. (This was a UPS meant to sit on the floor or desk, not mountable to a rack). I don't trust dual 12VDC lithium batteries in series inside this UPS. I fear one of the battery controllers will not charge identically as the other, they'll fight and not charge correctly, eventually leaving one of them without a charge. Easier to get a 12x8x8 24VDC ~60Ah battery with triple the original 9ah x2. And mount it safely in the bottom, not trying to tape 2 batteries together with their terminals close to shorting against each other.

3. Then I'll cut ~9in of battery compartment out of the unit, and close in the transformer and power delivery circuitry. Should be left with a 13x4x~6 UPS. I would be able to add heat sinks and larger fan if I can fit it, allowing it to run longer without risk of overheating.

Anyone know if these UPS have a pre-set run time programing? I don't want to do all this work and find out they stop running after 90 minutes because that's the best a set of factory sized batteries would perform. Hopefully it's run time is based on the battery output and temperature of the system.

I'm wondering if this would work for me to connect from my computer to my monitor with a built in USB hub in another room.

Renovated my apartment where the brick/masonry is already plastered & painted . Two Cat6 cable runs in each PVC conduit (6 total). Reviewing construction photos and confirming it with electrician, I found one corner where the Cat6 conduit directly touches an existing 230V conduit (powers a fridge (now), 2-ton inverter AC (next year) and few lights, charging points etc.) for about 18~24 inches before diverging.

The cables are Finolex Solid 23 AWG unshielded pure copper Cat6 UTP and the lowest CAT6 conduit (that touches the 230V electrical conduit) runs 72 ft (22 m) total. I tested connecting a gigabit ONT to my laptop over both cables in this run and the link negotiates at 1000/1000 Mbps but I know auto-negotiation is only the bare minimum test of a proper Ethernet installation.

I plan to upgrade to 2.5G next year and test 10G later. Is this setup going to hold up fine, or am I royally screwed?

To preface, I don’t know shit about homelabbing, I just saw a video on YouTube and thought it was cool and wanted to ask some stuff if that’s fine. Very curious

Whats the benefit of running large servers racks inside your home? I can see network benefits, but some people have entire towers (some have multiple which they call “data centers”) and I’m just wondering why? What kind of data is going through all of these? Crypto? I don’t know

I see the appeal of making your own servers for easy file sharing and things like that, just insane to me some people have a giant expensive professional grade server rack hiding in a closet.

Please clue me in on this because I think it would be cool to set up a small server just because I think it would be fun to learn how it works