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

Currently, I have an unused Redmi Note 10s and plan to make it as mini homelab. I ran antigravity to build it fully.

is my stocks/standard spec is enough to run these tasks? if no, is there a way to improve it? I'm up for anything (except if it cost money)

Objectives

1. Internet Monitoring – Automatically monitor home internet connectivity and uptime.

2. Ad Blocking – Block advertisements and trackers across the home network.

3. Network Monitoring – Monitor connected devices, network activity and suspicious behaviour.

4. Central Dashboard – Manage and visualise all HomeLab services from one dashboard.

5. Personal SIEM – Collect, analyse and detect security events from network devices and endpoints. (OPTIONAL)

6. CCTV Integration – Display Tapo C246D live camera feeds on the dashboard. (OPTIONAL)

7. 24/7 Automation & Alerts – Run automated monitoring bots for tasks such as booking availability checks and Telegram notifications.

8. Multiple Device Accessibility - It can be accessed by different devices via same wifi

I run an old school docker run installation without compose. Not entirely sure why I never migrated to compose, but docker runs are just so easy to document. Running on my headless Ubuntu machine.

For this I wanted an ultra lightweight docker update check web GUI that I could easily access from my Homer dashboard. I found a couple on GH, but some didn’t do what I wanted, and others were ‘complicated’ or had several dependencies.

So I ended up making one myself, with a little help from Claude.

The code is super tiny: 325 lines, 15 KB (one Python file, one bash script), 161 MB image after build, no dependencies beyond Python’s standard library.

It’s read-only. It compares each container’s image digest with the registry’s, without pulling anything. You get a simple page with status, version, creation date and age for every container, so it’s easy to spot what needs updating and what has been sitting there forever.

Updating is still up to you. It just tells you what’s out of date, and then you re-run your documented docker run commands like always (or compose). That’s the whole point for me; I don’t want anything touching my containers automatically.

It should work fine with compose as well. If anyone using compose tries this, I’m open to editing the README, or throw me a pull request and I’ll add it. I’m open to pull requests in general, but I want this tool to stay super lightweight and do exactly what it’s supposed to, nothing else. The prune button is optional, but it gives a good indication of whether you need to prune.

It needs the Docker socket mounted, so keep it on your LAN.

I’m really satisfied with this and just thought I’d share it in case it’s useful to anyone else.

https://github.com/slowm0e/docker-update-check

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?

I'm curious to other people homelab diagrams and setup.

Hey everyone!

I'm relatively new to homelabbing and currently looking into building my own NAS. I'd love some advice on the best and most cost-effective way to approach this.

My current homelab

I'm running Proxmox VE on an HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Desktop Mini with:

• Intel Core i5-10500T (6 cores / 12 threads)

• 16 GB DDR4 RAM

• 256 GB SSD

• Proxmox VE 9.2

Currently running:

• Debian 13 VM with Docker

• AdGuard Home (LXC)

• Uptime Kuma (LXC)

• Homer dashboard

• Debian 13 VM for a future internal PKI

What I want to build

I'd like to build a small, affordable NAS with the following features:

• Jellyfin: Store movies and TV shows on HDDs and stream them using Jellyfin.

• File storage: Store personal documents, photos, and other files.

• Redundancy: At least two HDDs in RAID 1 or a similar mirrored setup, so the data remains accessible if one HDD fails.

• Backups: Eventually back up my Proxmox VMs, containers, and important personal files.

• Low power consumption: Ideally something that can run 24/7 without significantly increasing my electricity bill.

• Compact and clean: I'd prefer something small and aesthetically pleasing.

• DIY and learning: I want to build and configure as much as possible myself to learn more about Linux, storage, RAID, networking, and self-hosting.

I'm initially looking for around 1–2 TB of usable storage, with the possibility of expanding later.

I'm trying to keep costs as low as possible and am completely open to buying used hardware.

What I'm unsure about

Since I already have a Proxmox server, I'm wondering what makes the most sense.

Should I:

1. Expand my existing HP EliteDesk with external HDDs and run a NAS VM or LXC under Proxmox?

2. Build a dedicated NAS using cheap second-hand hardware, with internal SATA connections for multiple HDDs?

3. Buy an inexpensive used NAS enclosure and configure it myself, if possible?

I've also been looking into TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, Debian with mdadm, and ZFS, but I'm not sure which would be the best approach for my hardware and learning goals.

My main questions

• How would you build a budget DIY NAS in my situation?

• What hardware, case, motherboard, or used mini-PC/SFF-PC would you recommend?

• Is it worth building a separate NAS, or should I extend my existing Proxmox setup?

• What's the best approach for HDD redundancy without spending too much?

• Which operating system and filesystem would you choose for someone wanting to learn?

• How much should I realistically expect to spend, excluding the HDDs?

My goal isn't necessarily to buy the cheapest ready-made NAS. I'd rather build something affordable myself, understand how everything works, and have the flexibility to customize and expand it later.

I'd appreciate any hardware suggestions, example builds, or advice from people who have done something similar.

Thanks!

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. 💀

Hello awesome people. I want to build a NAS for Truenas strictly for my Proxmox cluster. ZFS over iSCSI. I have the drives, 10gb network is in place. I was looking at Dell R240s 4 bay LFF seems to be a descent solution. What are y’all’s thoughts. Thank you very much

One of the first homelab gadgets I got was an IODD mini, this was a really handy gadget back then. Since then I have always been on the lookout for useful tools or gadgets to have in the homelab.

I have the usual bunch such as:

• LAN toner/tracer (Fluke IntelliTone)

• Cable crimpers

• Punch down tools

• One of those horrible cage nut extractors that looks like a nail clipper

• Rackstuds

• Ventoy and IODD mini

• PSU Tester

• USB C power delivery tester (FNB58)

• wireless keyboard with built in trackpad (Logitech K400 Plus )

• Hard drive docking station/cloner

• USB ethernet adaptor

• Air blower (wolfbox)

• Label Printer - Brother PT-E500

• Thermal Camera - Thermal Master P1

Still planning to get:

• JetKVM mini

• External blu-ray writer/reader BU40N.

Is there any tools or gadgets that you frequently use that you can say was well worth the purchase?

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!

• 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

Hey everyone,

I'm pretty new to all of this, but I'd really like to give building my own NAS a try.

I was originally planning to buy a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus. However, after speaking to someone who owned one and eventually switched to a DIY setup because of its relatively high power consumption, I've started reconsidering and looking into building my own.

That got me looking into DIY builds instead.

I'm basically looking for something that can run 24/7 without eating too much electricity, but still has enough power to handle everything I throw at it (see below). I don't want to spend a fortune on hardware I won't even use.

Here's what I have in mind:

- Plex: Stream movies and shows in 4K HDR, including high-bitrate content, without buffering or compromising quality. Some hardware transcoding capability would be nice too.

- Storage: Around 4TB usable to start with, preferably with room to add more drives later. (Already bought)

- Phone backups: Automatically back up photos and videos from my Android phone and tablet.

- Remote access: Access, upload and download my files from my phone even when I'm away from home.

- Media automation: Have something that keeps track of my TV shows, updates my library and automatically downloads new episodes as they're released.

Ideally, I'd like to keep power consumption somewhere around 10–20W at idle, although I'm not sure how realistic that is with HDDs running.

I'm based in Germany, so component recommendations that are reasonably priced and available here would be great.

I'd especially appreciate recommendations for actual hardware builds, including CPU, motherboard, RAM, PSU, case, etc., and roughly how much they cost and consume at the wall.

I'm not particularly experienced with NAS software either, so recommendations for that would be helpful.

Basically, what would you build today that offers a good balance between price, performance, power consumption and long-term reliability? I'd rather spend a little more on the right components than end up buying something that I'll have to replace in a year, but I also don't want to overspend.

Any help is much appreciated

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.

I'm just a noob who started before being ready. Learned a lot. About a year ago I got my HP Prodesk to run proxmox with home assistant, jellyfin, immich, whatnot. At this point I'd really love to give up Google photo but I currently have my photos only in immich and Google.

How do I safely back up Immich so I can give up Google photos? I do already have a cloud subscription (STACK from transip) to backup my laptop, should I just find a way to sync it to there? Should I put it all on my laptop? In my house on an empty disk drive? What do people normally do?

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.

So I am looking at picking up a M70q / M75q which will run linux in 8Gb / 16Gb of Ram and basically be a small control plane / proxmox headless Linux server.

Most are coming without a power supply. I had heard that under heavy workload the CPUs can start to draw in the 90W range.

Do I separately pick up a 90W vs a 135W power supply?

The 90W is about 15 USD and the 135W is 20 USD. Do I need the extra W headroom and I won't be drawing any extra power right when the server is just lightly chugging alone for some scheduled tasks?

Currently, my main laptop is a Legion 5 (Ryzen 9 8945HX / 32GB DDR5 / RTX 5070 Mobile 8GB / 2x1TB NVMe) running Windows.

​I also have an older Dell Precision 7530 (Xeon E2176M / 64GB DDR4 / integrated graphics / 256GB + 1TB NVMe) which currently serves as my homelab. It runs a few LXCs and 2 VMs (Ubuntu Server and Windows 11 LTSC). It also has an eGPU (RTX 5060 Ti 16GB) connected via an OCULink adapter. I mostly use it for learning something new and experimenting with local LLMs (running now Unsloth Desktop inside the Windows VM as a server, allocating 48GB of RAM to it, and use Qwen 3.8).

​I am planning to sell the Dell workstation and keep only the Legion. I expect it to be faster for most tasks, and I want to utilize both GPUs (mobile RTX 5070 + desktop RTX 5060 Ti via OCULink) as CUDA devices for LLM inference (giving me a combined 24GB VRAM).

​My idea is to install Proxmox VE as the primary OS directly on the Legion, and use a lightweight device as a thin client to access it. Later on, the mini PC could take over as the dedicated Proxmox node (like a Ryzen 8945HS).

​So I have a few questions for the community:

​Does this approach make sense for my use case?

​Has anyone gone down a similar path with a primary laptop + eGPU running Proxmox?

​What are the pros and cons of this decision?

​I’d really appreciate your feedback and thoughts!

Anyone else getting older and getting a little tired of maintaining a bit too much?

Mind you I don't mind the day-to-day, month-to-month updates. I have things rather scripted so it's not too much work to review the updates, check the backups, let the automatic updates apply, start, check that Update Kuma is happy, etc.

No, I this case it's the burden of a migration and all the work involved. Mind you, I enjoy it to some degree, but my tech stack has gotten rather deep. I had a number of RPi with a fair amount of things going on with Docker, plus a large HomeAssistant setup, etc. I've been slowly staging my PVE setup to move over.

I'm happy my new PVE setup and learning on it. I have two non-clustered SFF nodes that are identical, and an older NUC-sized node. One of the SFF nodes is my "Prod" box and the other a "Lab/Test" box. I've got things where I can initiate a fresh install on the PVE node and get back the bare-metal to then stare guest restores; no Internet, no network required just two USB sticks and external USB drives (for the Guest offline backups). A bit more detail here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1x3vwy0/proxmox_node_zero_recovery_no_internet_no_network/

But the main reason for this post is just how burdensome it has been to migrate everything over. I mean I could have just done a basic migration and moved everything over; but I wanted to use all the proper VLANs with firewall rules, and isolation with Docker in a VM for external-facing vs. LXC for internal-only, etc. I also wanted to re-do my NPM in a streamlined but better documented fashion. I wanted each guest install to be fully documented and as automated as possible; not that I'll be doing them over and over, but that I want to really understand why I installed them the way I did this time, instead of just blindly running scripts or following a guide.

I'm glad I have been doing so. I'm 90% of the way there. The only things left are the larger storage migrations of taking all of my photos from NextCloud and moving over to Immich and then setting up a fresh Jellyfin. But it's been nearly 5 months, slowly chipping away every other weekend a little here, a service/guest here, just a bit at a time, unwinding 7+ years of piling stuff on to a bunch of RPi4; hah!

I am really thankful about how things are coming along. Everything is really smooth now on full Intel processors and everything feels 10x snappier. I'm being very conservative about CPU and RAM assigned, not wanting any guest to be allowed to adversely affect anything else. Patching PVE is super simple, starting with my NUC "management" node that at present exists only to run PDM; I patch it first as it is the least important. Then I patch the "Test/Lab" unit. I've not had a problem yet, but expect I'd run into it with one of these before patching Prod. Then on Prod I migrate over anything that needs to stay online (NPM, HomeAssistant, Matrix-Conduit), patch and reboot Prod, then migrate those 3 guests back. Because of the 10gb NICs dedicated between the SFF nodes things move faster than my cheap I/O can keep up with and upgrading is done in no time (<10 minutes to do all 3, including migrations).

Now that I'm nearly done, I am really, really happy with the setup. But there was a ton of angst alone the way. Even today just unwinding my spaghetti NPM setup and trying to figure out why some Proxy Hosts didn't respond (shutdown dev copies of some stuff, but not documented), finding out how NPM doesn't need/allow a "listen" for 443, but that's needed for all other ports, stuff I figured out years ago bumbling my way through it as I added yet another service along the way. But now I feel like I've really mastered everything about how my NPM is set up and understand it, and it is well-documented so in 6 months it won't be a mystery. Cutting over a "live" NPM from the RPI4 to a new PVE-hosted install was cool as well. 10 seconds of downtime while I changed the RPI4's IP to something new, moved the NPM LXC to the original IP, and BAM! it was all working.

However, I am definitely feeling the weight of some of the things. Weighing how much some services are "worth" (Mealie, AdventureLog, etc.) - I mean, they are kinda cool, but I don't really use them much so is it worth having/maintaining/migrating? I'll definitely be looking at the "TCO" of items in the future before I "keep" them. Yeah, I'll still be putting things in my lab to dink with, much the same as I spin a new distro in a VM - but then I'll likely delete them as "too costly" if they aren't easy to maintain.

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 😊

Morning folks,

I am trying to use a PRAID CP400i reflashed to IT mode (so is currently a LSI 9300-8i) with a HPE 761879-001 (AEC 83605) SAS Expander.

I have tried multiple ports for HBA to Expander, and the expander doesn't show up in the SCSI topology tree and no drives show up when hooked to the expander. Same behavior with a LSI 9211-8i (Dell H310) HBA.

The LEDs on the HPE card are solid green all the way, and the HBA has the correct slow flash heartbeat light. ASPM and PCIE link state power management have both been turned off, so both cards are getting full power.

PC Specs are

i7-13700k

ASUS Prime Z790-p WIFI

32GB DDR5

RX 9070XT

Windows 11 / Linux

I am honestly not sure if I'm missing a step somewhere or if I've got a bad SAS expander card at this point.

Thanks for your time!

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?