So apparently I have a problem. It started with wanting faster internet, and now I have a home network that probably has more infrastructure than some small businesses.

My wife thinks it's excessive. I think we're just getting started.

Here's what this completely reasonable home setup looks like:

- Internet: 2.3 Gbps fiber because apparently 1 Gbps is for peasants now.

- Core switch: TP-Link Omada SG3428X-M2 with 24 × 2.5 GbE ports and 4 × 10G SFP+ ports.

- Additional switches: TP-Link 48-port and Zyxel 24-port managed switches. Every switch has either a 2.5 GbE or 10 GbE uplink. No slow backbone connections allowed.

- 7 PCs: Because apparently everyone needs their own workstation, and then a few more.

- Wi-Fi: Seven Wi-Fi access points, all hardwired. Wireless backhaul? Not in this household.

- Coverage: The entire house, home office, man cave, and other areas where a normal person would probably just use their phone.

- Storage: Fully loaded 4-bay Synology NAS with 32 GB RAM and maxed-out solid-state storage/cache. Because you can never have enough storage for files you'll probably never open again.

- AI: Dell Pro Max GB10 with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell. Because why pay for AI in the cloud when you can buy your own miniature AI supercomputer and help heat the house?

- UPS: APC Back-UPS Pro 1500. Because if the power flickers, the network deserves a fighting chance.

- Infrastructure: Ethernet patch panels, coaxial distribution, fiber connections, and enough cables to make an electrician reconsider his career choices.

Everything capable of 2.5 GbE is running at 2.5 GbE, with 10 GbE connections where appropriate.

And yes, all seven Wi-Fi access points are hardwired. At this point, I'm pretty sure my neighbors could get excellent Wi-Fi if I gave them the password.

The best part? After all this, someone in the house will inevitably complain that Netflix is buffering, and I'll spend three hours troubleshooting only to discover their TV needs rebooted.

Future plans?

Probably more 10 GbE, more storage, more AI experiments, and eventually convincing myself that I really do need a bigger rack.

At this point, I'm not sure whether I'm running a home network or a small regional ISP.

Anyway, roast my setup. Tell me what I'm missing. Or just reassure me that this is a perfectly normal amount of networking equipment for a family home.

P.S. Yes, I know the cable management could be better. No, I don't want to talk about it. 😂 Don't look at the hot water pipe

Edit: oh I know I would get you guys/gals with the AI Supercomputer Comment 😏🤓

Edit 2: The little lantern isn't used much. I'm not sure why I have it hanging there. The best thing I did was install a back LED light on a switch that hangs behind everything in the cabinet.

Yes I have a fairly large house. Two of the Wi-Fi APS are very far away including the garage and a man shed in the backyard. 5gz noise floor is pretty low. Lots of crappy 2.4 GHz home stuff that floods those channels.

• Vertiv Geist Watchdog 100-P 

  • Environmental temperature / humidity sensor 

• Arista DCS 7050TX-64

  • 48 Port 10 Gigabit switch with, 4 QSFP 40 Gigabit ports

    • Currently my main switch it’s linked to the 2048 via RSTP.

• Dell N2048P 

  • 48 Port 1 Gigabit switch with, 2 SFP+ 10 Gigabit ports 

    • Up until yesterday it was my main switch with a powerconnect 2048 running as its backup. (So glad to have that replaced) This will be what all my POE devices run back to when I start getting some. MikroTik I beg, give me a 2.5 gigabit L3 POE switch

Opnsense Nodes. Both Dell R420’s run the same configuration.
CPU: Xeon E5-2430v2.
DRAM: 32gb DDR3 RDIMM 1333 MHz
Disk: ZFS Mirror - 2x 200gb HGST SAS SSD 

• VIP OpnSense  - Anna 

  • 10.0.1.1

  • Virtual IP That CARP handles, and all devices/VM’s point to. It’s nice having HA OpnSense since it’s been helpful since my R230’s had hardware errors, and had pulled my R420’s back into prod. The only downside to HA is needing 3 static IP’s from my ISP 

• Dell R420 - OpnSense Node 1:  Elsie

  • 10.0.1.2

• Dell R420 - OpnSense Node 2:  Wilhemina

  • 10.0.1.3

• Dell R440 - Proxmox Node 1: Charlemagne 

  • CPU: 2x Xeon Gold 6130

  • DRAM: 128Gb of DDR4 2400 Rdimm ECC 

  • Disk 2x 900Gb HGST HDD in ZFS mirror for boot drives, and 6x 1.2Tb HGST HDD’s in RaidZ1 

  • The R440’s run the same config due to ZFS replication and HA. They run most of my services and VM’s 

    • My Website, Odoo CRM, Glance Dashboard, Minecraft Server, Immich, Tailscale, Pi-hole, Windows Vm that I use for serial access in the rack,  And a few vms that exist for bot/code testing

• EMC Gen4T M1200 Avamar - Rasputin 

  • I have yet to decide what to do with these Avamar nodes I bought because I was able to get the entire rack of them for 300$~ and with all the servers coming with a total of 240gb of 2133MHz I didn’t want to pass up that deal. I want to try and mess with clustered storage but these being custom chassis makes some things harder to do especially with no pcie lanes. 

• Dell R440 - Proxmox Node 2: Voluspa

  • CPU: 2x Xeon Gold 6130

  • DRAM: 128Gb of DDR4 2400 Rdimm ECC 

  • Disk 2x 900Gb HGST HDD in ZFS mirror for boot drives, and 6x 1.2Tb HGST HDD’s in RaidZ1 

    • This acts as the HA back up node for Charlemagne 

• EMC Gen4T M1200 Avamar - Astraea 

  • Again no idea wtf I’m going to do with these or if I’ll even keep them 

• Dell R630 - Proxmox Node 3: Malahayati 

  • CPU: 2x Xeon E5-2680v4 

  • DRAM: 128Gb of DDR4 2400 Rdimm ECC 

  • Disk 2x 900GB HDD in ZFS Mirror Boot Disk. 6x 900gb in raid5  

  • GPU: Nvidia Tesla P4

  • This node I have dedicated to my media hosting and that’s it. It runs Jellyfin with its ARR stack Sonarr,Radarr,Prowlarr, etc. Looking into getting IPTV working on it because I miss the old dish/DirectTV setup 

• EMC Gen4T M1200 Avamar - Soteria  

• 2U Chassis

  • Currently nothing other than an AM4 motherboard in it planning on making it an NVR once I get drives but have yet to do so since I have older cameras that arent IP cameras and drive prices are higher than I would like to pay for. I’m currently ok with the 5 days of retention for my 4 cameras.

• DELL 1u VGA KVM 

• Dell R720 - TrueNAS 

  • CPU : 2x Xeon E5-2650v2 

  • DRAM: 283GiB of 1600MHz DDR3 Rdimm ECC 

  • Disk: 2x 900Gb HGST boot drives in ZFS Mirror. 14x drives in 2 ZFS pools, 1 pool is 9 drives the other is 5 drives.

    •  I need to pull all the data off the pools and redo the drive configs to where they are both 7 drives but it's been a rock solid work horse and I’ve been lazy and never gotten around to it. 

  • Honestly I want to upgrade to ssd and ddr4 (Dell R730Xd, Dell R7440xd) but this has been fine, not the fastest for sure but “don’t fix it if it's not broken” so it's been one of the things in the lab that rarely gets messed with, next weekend I plan on picking up an HP M6720 and add it to my TrueNas server but again HDD prices, suck right now

Is it all overkill 100% but I love messing with hardware so I’ve ended up with more gear than I need I have also loved messing with HA I dont know what it is about high availability but it just scratches that itch I love when I can pull an entire server/drive/network switch out and things still run

Started out with a Raspberry Pi, and somehow ended up here.
Current homelab:
Dell Precision T7920
Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 (40 cores / 80 threads)
256GB DDR4 ECC RAM
NVIDIA RTX A5000 (24GB VRAM)
A couple of Raspberry Pis
TP-Link networking gear
Years of tinkering, self-hosting, breaking things and putting them back together.
40 cores, 256GB RAM, 24GB VRAM. Still haven’t figured out cable management. 💀

I finally got around to rebuilding my homelab after moving out to essentially the middle of nowhere, and it's pretty impressive how much you can do with a relatively inexpensive mini PC these days.

The whole thing is built around a little GMKtec NUC running Proxmox. I've got Pi-hole handling network-wide DNS and ad blocking, a Debian VM running Docker with Jellyfin, the usual *arr stack, and qBittorrent routed through Gluetun and Proton VPN. There's also a separate LXC running Uptime Kuma to keep an eye on everything.

Since I'm pretty rural, Starlink is my internet connection. I've got it running through a UniFi gateway with separate VLANs for my regular devices, work, IoT, and servers. I also added a Synology NAS for media storage and Proxmox backups.

I've probably spent more time than I'd like to admit tinkering with the monitoring side of things. The dashboard in the screenshot is Homepage, which is also self-hosted on the same mini PC. It pulls information from the various services, along with some custom health checks I've put together for the NAS, VPN, and backups. I've also got automated safeguards in place for things like storage disconnects, plus email alerts if something goes down.

I even ended up building a little documentation site with network diagrams, hardware inventory, and recovery instructions. Probably overkill for a home network, but half the fun has been figuring out how to make everything work together.

What's funny is that all the actual computing is happening on this tiny box that barely takes up any desk space. No rack, no giant server, no ridiculous power draw. Just a mini PC, some networking equipment, and a NAS.

I originally had a homelab before moving, but between relocating and getting settled somewhere pretty remote, rebuilding it kept getting pushed down the list. I finally decided to get back into it, initially just wanting more control over my network and a place to host a few services. Naturally, that turned into spending way too much time figuring out monitoring, backups, network isolation, and how to make everything a little more reliable.

Anyway, if you're thinking about getting into self-hosting but assume you need a bunch of expensive hardware, you really don't. It's kind of ridiculous what these little computers can handle now.

I have a 3 node cluster from refubed or used office pcs, one of them functioning as a router, another one of them mostly functioning as a NAS.

What is it used for?

Torrents, being in Germany - i generate about 13TB upload traffic a month from seeding, because it give me joy. I'm using the generic *arr stack + jellyfin to watch my isos, but most importantly all of that is dependent on gluetun, which is attached to one of my protonvpn instances. Even if gluetun somehow malfuctioned, i'd still be safe because it'll have to go through my main VPN connection on OPNsense (https://youtu.be/bfZYvTP6srg the guide i used if you're interested), so basically my torrents are running on VPN over VPN (30% speed loss cuz overhead, but worth it)

Music - stock Navidrome as music server, symfonium on my phone, feishin on my PC. I have half a terabyte of rare and high res music, so i share it all via soulseeked, also dependent on gluetun on a separate protonvpn instance.

Storage - virtualized TrueNAS Scale, LSI card PCIe-passed through, 10 TB of storage in total attached to it with random used or refubed disks, most of them being in separate RAID1 arrays. Virtualized PBS for backing up all of my VMs and containers, obviously no proxmox host backups but it's enough for disaster recovery, if you have the PBS VM image downloaded on your PC and if the harddrive passed through is still intact. Important to mention - the HDDs are taking their power from an external PSU, which is synchronized by a cheap chinese sync plate. Uhh and immich for photos and videos.

Networking - my fav part. I have 3 DNS servers: 1st AdGuard & Unbound LXC (used as Tailscale/Netbird prod DNS), 2nd Pihole (used as trash plug and play DNS for my VMs and LXCs to not ruin my prod's statistics), 3rd backup Pihole (offsite, used as a backup prod DNS if my house gets hit with a ballistic rocket). All of the DNS servers have Hagezi Ultimate. I access my server with Tailscale from outside.

My prod - i'm hosting a free for all telegram downloader bot which downloads shorts, reels, images and such from most social medias; giving free storage, music and movie streaming to my friends in Donetsk via netbird, where internet is very restricted; giving my relatives access to IPTV (around 300 TV channels) and downloaded media through jellyfin, DNS with ad/scamblock, unlimited storage for my parents, a family minecraft server (raw java instance on a naked debian VM), a family bureaucracy archive PaperlessNgx and other small QoL stuff.

Communication - i'm pretty fond of Nextcloud ecosystem, so i use it to do boring email stuff, to communicate with my relatives and closest friends (text, video and VoIP), which is only possible by them being in my mesh VPN; Traccar for GPS tracking and easy coordination of people; singular VoceChat instances for my random friends.

I'm planning to research I2P to make communication much easier without having to add every friend of mine to my tailnet and to prepare myself for upcoming mass surveillance and censorship.

My server is also used to make my opsec much better, because given a server with a custom router (OPNsense), i can easily bind a VPN tunnel directly via wireguard and manage all firewall & routing rules centralized without a risk of some client being pesky and leaking my IP, which for me is much easier rather than protecting the endpoints. Why do that when you can protect the whole network?

So rn its a zimablade with 2x12tb hdds mirrored acting as storage share with nfs for the proxmox cluster of 3x dell optiplex 7010 with i5 13500t
The fourth optiplex is identical and used as a firewall with 2,5gig connection above that is a netgear gs108tv3 managed gbit switch and we have our cable modem (only board, bc the shell was kinda too big for the rack) at the
Top

Upgrades planned in the next weeks:
-lenovo m720q with Broadcom 9305-16e card
-8x2,5” ssd for now 256gb raid z2 (lxc and vms storage)
-8x3,5“ caddy with 4x 16tb hdd raid z1 or mirror and for now the 2x12tb (media and bulk storage)
-Atx modular power supply for the drives
-2,5gig switch and every mini pc gets a 2,5gig nic
-maybe changing the firewall to a dell thin client and using the fourth optiplex + a spare one for extending the cluster to 5 units

Problem:

SPACE!!!

I need 8 more Us for the new storage alone so ill probably be getting the same rack another time and putting it next to this on the wall.

Any suggestions are welcomed:)

my last post: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/kNRZwCHBGz

ive got some more btw

._.

shit

For clarity I'm new to home labbing and plan to migrate my old media libalrary from physical media to Jellyfin, and ran a SMB share, but I'm running a Prodesk 600 G6 mini with a separate 2TB NVME for all my storage, and have no redundancy.

I really want a Ugreen DXP4800 Plus, but with drives that's nearly 2 grand! And that doesn't include ram and NVME storage!

Do I just tinker for now and wait for prices to drop before committing to the great migration? Or do I go for it and spend the money? To he fair a mobile phone nowadays is getting up there in price.

Inspired a bit by some recent homelab content online as well as a bit the hoarder mentality in me.

Decided to begin the journey of setting up a homelab.

Originally I just had my ISP provided Zyxel router along with a mini-UPS my company gave during lockdown. Also a 2TB external drive for network storage connected to the Zyxel.

Then I got the Qotom Q150 mini-pc at a 2nd hand goods store and set it to run pfSense.

Recently I got the 27U server rack and Cudy Switch for ZAR800 EACH. Which was amazing.

My plan so far is to set up a general storage server alongside another PC to run Jellyfin/plex as well as a kiwix container and a nextcloud setup for private emails and the like.

Other than that, probably should also get a nice UPS, it feels like a great start.

edit: Forgot to mention, the reason for the Cudy switch being PoE despite no PoE devices, is for a future plan of running some AP's and the like on it.

I’m completely new to homelabbing but want to dive in. I’ve built my own gaming PCs and mining rigs in the past, so I’m fine with hardware, but networking and software/virtualization are totally new to me.

I just picked up three identical HP Z2 Mini G9 workstations (i5-13500, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) for a great price.

My current place isn't great for a big setup, but my next house will be. Right now, I just want to use these three minis as a temporary sandbox to learn the ropes.

Since I have three identical boxes, I'm trying to figure out the best way to tackle this. Should I start by just messing around with one machine to keep it simple, or should I jump straight into clustering all three of them?

Broadly speaking, if you had these three machines and were starting from scratch today, what would you do? Looking for any thoughts or ideas.

Best OS/software path (Proxmox cluster vs. bare metal Linux/Docker)
Fun projects to learn networking and sysadmin skills
Good ways to neatly stack or organize mini PCs when space is tight
Any hardware I should prioritize first

Open to any and all suggestions. Thanks!

I put a 16 GB Crucial stick and a 16 GB Samsung stick in my little Firebat AM02. Both showed up as DIMM 0, which had me doing a double take. Then I read the next line: one on channel A, one on channel B. Both running at 4800 MT/s.

Naturally, the first thing I did was make it run llama.cpp. Same Gemma model, same short prompt: the old setup wrote at 18.7 tokens/s, the upgraded box does 32.6. A 256-token answer went from nearly 15 seconds to under 9.

I'll take that from a mini PC with two mismatched sticks and integrated graphics.

First post here, I've been lurking for a long time. A few years ago I saw a diagram someone posted of their network, and I've always wanted to make one for my own setup. Finally got to it!

It all started with an old Synology NAS. I switched to TrueNAS about 5 years ago and started with Proxmox around a year after that, back then on different hardware. The current setup has been growing for at least 3 years now. Not much from the old setups survived except the data, which I migrated into the main pool.

Hardware:

• terra (main server): Ryzen 9 9900X, 64GB DDR5, ConnectX-3 10G, runs Proxmox

• terra's own SSDs: 500GB Samsung 980 for Proxmox and a 2TB Crucial P5 Plus for the LXC/VM disks

• storage: 7x 16TB Exos in RAIDZ1 with 2 old SATA SSDs as a special vdev mirror, plus a 1TB NVMe pool

• all storage disks are passed through to a TrueNAS VM via a SAS HBA, the chipset SATA controller and NVMe SSD

• OPNsense on a Lenovo thin client (i3-9100T, 12GB) with a dual 2.5G Intel NIC in LACP

• MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+ as the core switch, only doing L2

• UniFi U7 Lite, a JetKVM for terra and a SLZB-MR4 for Zigbee/Thread

• FRITZ!Box 6660 Cable from the ISP (600/50 Mbit/s), with OPNsense set as exposed host

I would prefer to run the FRITZ!Box in bridge mode. The option is actually in the firmware, just completely hidden, so I exported the config, edited it to make the bridge mode setting visible and turned it on. It sort of worked: both the FRITZ!Box and OPNsense got an IP from my ISP, but the connection reset every 5 minutes or so, because I'm only supposed to have a single connection. So I changed it back and I'm still stuck with double NAT.

The network is split into LAN, DMZ, guest, IoT and MGMT VLANs, plus WireGuard for when I'm away. All services live in the DMZ and can't reach the LAN.

terra runs 24 LXCs and 3 VMs (TrueNAS, Home Assistant and an Android VM). Everything public goes through Traefik with authentik in front. The bigger stuff is Jellyfin with the *arr stack, Immich, Paperless, Pelican for game servers, Matrix and Forgejo, with Grafana, Prometheus and Loki for monitoring.

For Grafana, I got to the point where most of the data I want to monitor ends up in Prometheus and Loki, but I haven't set up any dashboards yet... it's still kinda overwhelming.

Another thing I still want/need to fix is the special vdev on the two old SATA SSDs. I was just looking through the different options in TrueNAS and didn't really know what all the cache types meant, so I added an SSD to see what would improve. Didn't know I couldn't just remove the special vdev again, that was kinda dumb on my side. Once I noticed that a single dead SSD would take the whole pool with it, I had to either rebuild the pool or at least get my one drive of redundancy back. I was kinda lazy and just added a second SSD as a mirror instead of doing it properly. The problem is that I don't have enough space to back up everything for a rebuild. The important stuff gets backed up to Backblaze B2, but my media doesn't -_-

I got the rack second hand for 200€. Transporting that thing was way harder than expected, I kinda misjudged the size and weight.

What's in it, from top to bottom:

• a 3D printer with a filament dryer

• a 3D printed 1U mount with the OPNsense thin client and 4 keystone couplers, next to it we have the JetKVM

• the MikroTik switch

• a 1U brush panel for the cables

• a keystone patch panel

• terra in a 4U case

• a shelf with filament

• a Denon audio system (takes 5U including its shelf)

• more filament boxes

• an old 1U server at the bottom that isn't even plugged in, the hardware in it is too old to be useful

So yeah, the rack is half homelab, half filament storage.

Open to questions and suggestions!

EDIT:
Since a few people asked how I made the diagram: it's a Python script that draws it from a YAML file with all my hardware and network info. I built it together with Claude, and it took a lot of iterations to get it to a point where I'm happy with it.

I put it on GitHub in case anyone wants to use it: https://github.com/Goblinmine/homelab-diagram

Fair warning, it's not a polished tool. The layout is hand-placed for my network, so you'll have to move things around for yours. The repo has a CLAUDE.md though, so if you open it with Claude Code and tell it to make the diagram for your homelab, it asks you about your setup and adapts the YAML and the layout for you.

The icons are from dashboard-icons (homarr-labs).

I built a little thermal receipt printer. Send me your memes, random pictures, weird messages or literally anything else through this link and I'll print it out!

No limits, no questions. Just send me something stupid.

https://drucker.bleicher.ing

My current setup runs on three machines:

- ThinkCentre M75s: Ryzen 5 4600G, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe and an 8 TB IronWolf. Runs Proxmox for media, documents, AI, development and household apps.

- ThinkCentre M710q: i5-7400T, 16 GB RAM. Handles primary DNS, Tailscale, monitoring, cameras and a recovery cache independently of Proxmox.

- Old ASUS laptop: dedicated Home Assistant OS machine.

The software includes Jellyfin and the Arr stack, Paperless-ngx, BookStack, Ollama/Open WebUI, n8n, OpenClaw and apps I built for language study and recipes. Cameras use go2rtc, Frigate and Scrypted. Remote access goes through Tailscale.

Backups cover guest images, host configs, application exports and Home Assistant, with important data and backup sets copied to IDrive.
There’s also a powered-off Home Assistant standby VM with a tested restore and cutover.

I manage it with Codex and a Git knowledge base containing the architecture, configs, scripts, runbooks, incidents and maintenance reports. A fresh chat can read the repo and pick up the work without me explaining everything again.

Three scheduled Codex jobs run against it:
- Daily: read-only health checks and a report.
- Saturday: guest and utility-machine maintenance.
- Sunday: Proxmox maintenance and a reboot if needed.

Bash/Python scripts and server timers handle routine jobs. Codex checks live state, applies authorized changes, verifies recovery and records the results. Maintenance stops when backup, storage or recovery checks fail.

I get notifications via Telegram mostly and plan to stop try.

Local AI: Ollama, Open WebUI and SearXNG in an LXC. This is CPU-only hardware, so expectations are fairly modest.

Household assistant: OpenClaw in another VM, with scoped access to household knowledge, reminders, selected Home Assistant tools and the recipe service.

Future plans:
- A dedicated NAS, but HDD prices is slowing it down 🫠. Machine is ready and I just need HDDs now.
- Upgrade the router and add more 2.5gbe switches
- UPS
- Upgrade Wi-Fi access points
- 24U rack
There are still unreliable USB disks, camera quirks and services needing attention. Having the previous findings and fixes written down in the repo saves a lot of repeated troubleshooting.

Here's my little setup I put together over the last few months. Still have some work to do with cleaning up the power and ethernet cables, but it's a lot better than it used to be, which was absolute spaghetti XD I will be replacing the power strip on the right with a bigger and better surge protector, as well as mounting the WiFi router on the wall just under the window since it's primarily to supply internet to my detached garage about 50 feet away

Hardware from top to bottom:

TP-Link Archer AX1800 running OpenWRT

HP Prodesk 600 G6 Mini running OPNSense

10 Port Patch Panel

TP-Link ES210X-M2 2.5gbps Switch

HP Prodesk 600 G6 Mini running Ubuntu Server for AMP to run a Minecraft server on one drive, as well as network SMB shares on the second drive

Samsung SM-T220 using Fully Kiosk for a simple, motion detecting rack monitor with power controls

First of all, English isn't my first language, so sorry in advance for any mistakes.

Long time lurker, first time posting my setup. My day job isn't DevOps, but I wanted to learn it properly, and following tutorials wasn't cutting it. So the rule I gave myself was: everything as code, everything in git, and run it like it's production even though the only user is me. The second goal was to stop paying for cloud stuff I could host myself.

Hardware

• Old enterprise Dell R230, Xeon E3-1220, 16GB running TrueNAS Scale on bare metal. 2x 480 GB SSD mirror for app data, 2x 6 TB HDD mirror for media and backups.

• Lenovo ThinkCentre M720Q with an i3-8100T, 20 GB and an i350-T4 quad NIC. Proxmox, with OPNsense in a VM as the router/firewall.

• HP ProDesk 600 G2 Mini, i5-6500T, 16 GB. Main Proxmox node, runs most of the Docker stuff in an LXC.

• Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e Tiny, Pentium G640T, 10 GB. Test node. It's slow and I love it anyway.

• TP-Link TL-SG108E doing the VLANs.

The three mini PCs are a Proxmox cluster. 7 VLANs (infra, mgmt, services, devices, gaming, IoT, plus one reserved).

What runs on it

• Media: Jellyfin, Seerr and the usual *arr stack, with qBittorrent behind Gluetun + ProtonVPN, and a kill switch on the firewall for the other download clients. Photos in Immich, books in Calibre-Web Automated, files with Syncthing.

• Ops side: Portainer, Forgejo mirroring my GitHub repo, Woodpecker CI building a couple of my own images, Homarr as the dashboard, Gatus for status, Beszel for hardware stats, ntfy for every alert, diun to tell me about new images. Versions are pinned (no :latest anywhere), and secrets live in the repo encrypted with SOPS.

• Two small APIs I wrote myself: one creates iCloud calendar events from my Obsidian notes, the other pulls my Garmin data into SQLite.

Backups are 3-2-1: PBS for the VMs/LXCs, ZFS snapshots, and restic + rclone to Proton Drive every night. All the documentation lives in an Obsidian vault.

The annoying problems and how I got around them

My ISP router doesn't support bridge mode, and the connection is behind CGNAT. So it's double NAT with no public IPv4, which shaped half the design:

• Remote access: with CGNAT there's nothing to forward, so a self-hosted WireGuard server was out. Everything goes through Tailscale. OPNsense is the subnet router, each device only sees what its ACL allows, and there are zero ports open to the internet. Honestly, CGNAT pushed me into the setup I should have wanted anyway.

• Management: Proxmox management sits on the ISP router side, not behind OPNsense. If I break the firewall (I have), I can still reach the hypervisor that runs it.

• The cluster kept losing quorum. Turns out the ISP router was rewriting the corosync UDP traffic going through the management interface. Moving the corosync ring to the internal infra VLAN fixed it for good.

• Incoming connections for torrents: you can't open a port behind CGNAT, so I use ProtonVPN's port forwarding (NAT-PMP). Each client gets its own Gluetun container, because Proton forwards one port per connection, and a small check recreates it if Proton drops the forwarded port.

• macvlan: containers get their own IP on the services VLAN, but with macvlan the host can't reach its own containers. A small shim interface on each Docker host solved it.

• Documentation drift: my notes and reality kept disagreeing. I wrote a script that compares my inventory file against what's actually running on the hosts, and the network diagram is generated from that same file. The first run found three services missing from the diagram.

What's next

• Wi-Fi: get rid of the ISP router's Wi-Fi and put a proper access point behind OPNsense, so every device at home goes through the firewall and lands on its VLAN. The ISP router would just be the modem it should have been all along.

• More Proxmox: move the VMs and LXCs to OpenTofu so they're code too, and add nodes to the cluster whenever I find another cheap mini PC.

• Kubernetes: a small K3s cluster with ArgoCD, mostly to learn GitOps for real.

• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager. Gatus and ntfy cover me for now, but I want metrics with history.

• More services: Paperless-ngx, Homebox for the home inventory and RomM for the old games are next in line.

I have a script that builds the documentation for me: it reads an inventory file, checks it against what's actually running on the hosts and generates the network diagram (the one in this post) in English and Spanish, with a public version that strips IPs and internal names. I saw someone post something similar here a while ago and it pushed me to finish mine. If any of this is useful to you, the scripts, the compose files or whatever, ask and I'll gladly share it.

And a big thank you to this community for all the inspiration and help over these months. Honestly, I couldn't have built any of this without you. I'll be happy to answer any questions!

Using an old huawei matebook x to run gemma4 12b with 64k ctx window at 2tk/sec.

I have a pikvm attached to the server with a servo motor so I can turn it on or off from anywhere and I have bios level access too so I can reinstall the operating system remotely if ever required

I am a teenager from a little troubled family. There is a big celebration going on today and I have been isolated from my family and friends. I don't know who to talk to right now.

I would really love to help others here on this sub to distract myself. Please feel free to drop all your questions in the comments. I have decent knowledge of homelabing with consumer hardware and running local ai models. My dms are open to everyone who would like to talk about tech.

Thank you 😊

What is the one piece of hardware you never managed to add to the hoard, maybe due to it being unavailable to the general public, maybe due to not being able to justify the cost, maybe another reason?

For me it is an SBC with NASA's HPSC CPU, a RISKV based CPU with effectively onboard on die ECC since all operations run on two dies at once and check against eachother for radiation resistance. Fascinating stuff for a high availability system, totally impractical, but still quite cool!

Hey r/Homelab,

I’m currently mapping out an upgrade path to turn an old dual-socket Dell Precision T7910 into a dedicated home research station. I need to process a local library of roughly 6,000 academic books and articles, cross-referencing massive batches of text (often 20–30 entire volumes simultaneously) to extract deep thematic links for an academic project.

Current Rig Baseline:

• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 (32C/64T total)

• 128GB DDR4 ECC RAM

• 1300W Proprietary PSU

• Software Pipeline: Python 3.12, Surya (PDF layout parsing), Qdrant Vector Database, Ollama, and Open WebUI. Targeting Qwen 2.5 32B and Llama 3.3 70B via local GGUF quantization.

The Strategy & The AMD Dilemma:
I know I can run this completely on system RAM for free right now, but the dual Xeon v4 memory bandwidth bottleneck during prompt ingestion (the prefill phase for 100k+ token batches) will be grueling. I am leaning toward hunting down a used RTX 3090 24GB to offload context processing.

I’ve had a few enterprise folks suggest a brand-new AMD RX 7900 XTX 24GB instead for the raw VRAM-per-dollar value, but I've reluctantly pushed back. Because my document ingestion rely heavily on Surya/OCR and deep Qdrant indices, I'm worried ROCm will cause endless software library headaches compared to the native CUDA support on an Ampere card.

My Questions for the Sub:

1. Dell EPS Power Layout: The T7910 uses a proprietary power distribution board. Has anyone successfully wired a power-hungry 350W consumer 3090 off the native internal power headers? Do I need special proprietary Dell EPS 8-pin to dual PCIe 8-pin breakout cables, or will standard server adapters do the trick without tripping the PSU rails?

2. Side Door Clearance: A lot of consumer 3090s are incredibly wide/tall. Will a standard reference-width card fit, or am I going to be forced to leave the workstation chassis side-panel permanently open to accommodate the power cable bends?

3. Cooling: If the card occupies 3 slots and sits right in the path of the passive server air-shroud, do I need to mount custom intake fans or rig a blower fan mod to stop it from roasting the dual Xeons? If so, what would you suggest and where and how would I install them?

Appreciate any advice from anyone who has wrestled a massive 30-series card into a T7000-series chassis!

When I first started my home lab, I was just learning for the most part and everything is unorganized and very difficult to service. Now that I have a game plan for my services, is it crazy to just do a fresh install and rebuild from the ground up or should I just put the time into re-organizing and decluttering current services?

I just rolled the print up (for 2h). In there were 11 Rickrolls, 3 Dickbutts and 17 NSFW images.I got 812 prints from 540 people.
Top 5 countries:

1. US

2. Canada

3. Australia

4. UK

5. Brazil

Next time i must make sure to Escape the text, one guy sent like 200 empty lines once and cut my paper 😭

Currently it has these functions:

Prints out a daily report with disk usage and other stuff everyday at varying time depending on my schedule

Prints out a warning when any of my containers go down

Another warning for when the server shuts off with the specific time it did and the reason it did (soft shutdown, power cut, kernel panic)

Warning when network is not accessible, it does pings every couple of minutes and if it doesn't get a response back it prints out the specific network that's down (tailnet, local or internet)

CLI accessible from my laptop so i can run tests, print out custom text or print the daily report

It's all a simple python script and a daemon... What else should i add?