My MS-02 runs on rocks I guess

Was going to be my Ai inference server but I guess not.

(Before and after)

My 1 month progress into the world of homelabs. Been on a bit of a privacy/self hosting kick lately, originally wanted to get adguard and an Immich server spun up with potentially something to feed my security cameras into. Then my friend gave me his spare modem and it quickly spiraled from there.

Specs:
Hitron CODA modem
Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra
Unifi 8 port POE switch
U7 lite access point
Lenovo m910q - i7 6700, 8gb ram (soon to upgrade), 512gb nvme, 2tb hdd, 750gb external drive
Raspberry pi 3b with a 2tb external drive
DeskPi t0
Eaton 5s 700 UPS

The unifi gear made a huge difference in my WiFi speeds at home, easily double to quadruple the speeds my x7b modem was giving me. I’m on a gigabit plan at the moment, and eventually will upgrade to 2.5 gb in the future. At the moment the mini pc is hosting my Immich photo library and my primary adguard dns, and the pi is a failover adguard server. I’m planning on also using the pi as a backup to my Immich photos. I am going to add a vaultwarden and frigate instance on the mini pc, using the 750gb external to store the video footage. Haven’t had the time to tinker with everything how I want to. Always looking for more ideas on what to add/improve.

Don’t let the cute little cabinet fool you. From the outside it looks almost empty, but inside it’s packed with a full virtual lab.

Current setup:

- Proxmox cluster on a couple of HP mini PCs (i9-10900T + 64GB each)

- vSphere cluster on Minisforum MS-A2s (8945HX + 128GB each)

- LincStation N2 giving me about 12TB of formatted ZFS storage, feeding everything over 10GbE + iSCSI

- Four-port Comet X IP KVM

- Bluetti elite 100 mini as UPS

Cable management on the sides is still a work in progress, but it finally feels like a real lab instead of a pile of boxes on the floor. Still got a bit of room left. Open to suggestions or gentle roasting. Happy to finally be in the club!

This summer, my guest server room donated its wall heater’s 240v circuit to my server rack. But it’s getting cold outside, so I made the servers into a thermostat controlled heater . The rack’s servers run science tasks at the lowest priority. World Community Grid’s Mapping Cancer Markers, CERN’s ATLAS simulations through LHC@home, and Folding@home. A simple governor script reads the thermostat (mysa) in the room next door and sets how many cores the science VMs can use. At or below 68 °F by day (66 °F at night), full speed. As the room warms, it backs off gradually. On UPS/generator, it stops completely.

The baseboard heater in the adjacent room has its set point a degree below the floor, so it kicks in when needed but only after the science watts. A watt of science compute costs me the same as a watt of baseboard heat. But this heater does good while doing it.

A couple of notes, ymmv . My local PUD electricity is cheap and mostly from renewable (USA PNW) so I haven't invested in a heat pump yet, if I did the maths stops mathing on efficiency. We won't talk about summer ;-)

 The VMs run on a Cisco C220 M5 (2x Gold 6138, 40 vCPU) and a Dell R640 (2× Xeon Platinum 8173M, 56 vCPU), BOINC and Folding@home on Ubuntu VMs, monitoring is a custom Python collector to TimescaleDB to Grafana. The scripts are pretty simple and specific to my thermostats, hardware bmcs and ups but if there is enough interest I can throw up something more generic to share. This is mostly to show how I am using my labs extra hardware capacity for good and give other homelab users some ideas.

Alright here’s what we’re working with
UCM
UDMSE
Desktop is running Debian 13 with an i7 14700 with 64gb ddr5 and dual gpu, 7900xtx + 3060. 2x 4tb gen 4 nvme 1x 2tb gen 4 nvme
Samsung one box
Terramaster D8 - 3x 8tb barracuda HDD, 4x 2tb gen 3 nvme
WD my cloud home (I do not use this hunk of shit so just forget it exists)
M3 Mac Mini
Star tech 16 outlet PDU
4u server case: Debian 13 headless, Ryzen 9 7950x, 64gb ddr5, 2x 4tb nvme gen 4, 4x 4tb SSD, 2x 12tb HDD
Cyberpower CP1500PFCRM2U

The monitor on the rack is connected to the Mac mini and the Samsung one box

My cable management is WAY better than it once was but I know it’s pretty gross still 😭😂

edit: i wasnt going to edit this but shit is killing me am retard i meant to say the mac mini is connected to both the monitor and the samsung one box. ok roast away today is my birthday also, this is my gift to you

I'm pretty new to homelabbing and this whole project started because I wanted to separate my home network from my parents network. We live in a house divided into two independent homes, but sharing the same ISP connection.

Somehow that turned into VLANs, firewall rules, AdGuard Home, Proxmox, Tailscale... and here we are 😂

My current setup is pretty simple:

- TP-Link Omada ER706W router + ES210GP switch

- Old HP ProDesk 400 G1 DM running Proxmox, Omada Controller and AdGuard Home

- Raspberry Pi 4B running AdGuard Home and acting as a Tailscale subnet router

I'm also planning to add Home Assistant and probably Jellyfin with some kind of Real-Debrid integration, since I don't have much local storage.

Since I'm learning most of this from scratch and using AI quite a lot to help with configurations and troubleshooting, I decided to document as much as possible so I don't become completely dependent on AI every time something breaks.

I'm using Obsidian with a private GitHub repo to keep track of my hardware, network settings, commands and everything I've learned along the way. The image shows my Obsidian graph view so far. It's not my actual network topology, just how my notes are connected.

I'm curious, how do you guys organize your homelab documentation?

Update to my previous post.

First image:

Primary Proxmox node (i5-6400, 16 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) running 24/7. It hosts Adguard, Nginx, Tailscale, Home assistant, a website in production and a few other things.

Still thinking about printing it in grey again.

Rack:

-Patch panel

-5 ports unmanaged switch

-NanoKVM

Second image:

Secondary Proxmox node (Ryzen 7 1700X, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD, NVIDIA GT 710) currently running Immich and an Ubuntu 26 VM with two OctoPrint instances in docker to manage the 3d printers and cameras. I also use this node for testing.

Back ups are stored on a separate NAS: AMD A8-6600K, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, two old 80 GB drives for the Truenas SCALE boot pool and two 1 TB HDDs for backups.

It also runs Jellyserr, Jellyfin, Plex, Jackett, Radarr, Sonarr managed through Dockge, and a dedicated container for downloads using Gluetun and qBittorrent.

https://github.com/abarriuso/bay2rack

Web generator

Just wanted to share my setup and ghetto "rack". Still working on looming everything and getting the underdesk runs nice and neat but I'm pretty happy where it's at. Running a K3s cluster focused on AI inference with AMD hardware for a fully declarative config. I currently have 2 machines in the cluster.

Top of rack down:

HP ryzen sff(HQ)--- Cluster control plane, 32gb ddr4, recently added RX 9060, ubuntu 26, also used for 3d slicing or browsing when needed.

Ryzen 7 5700G rig(NAS)--- 32gb ddr4, Intel arc b580, ZimaOS, shared volumes get used within the cluster for cold model storage. Using this rig for standard homelab services being served (jellyfin, arr stack, etc.)(not in cluster)

Bottom shelf:

- Orico hardrive bay with 2x 8tb WD red that is connected to the NAS.

- HP elitebook running proxmox for pentest lab enviro(not in cluster)

- Eero mesh router

Then the second "rack":

Cluster worker-Ryzen 3900x, RX 7900 xtx, 32gb DDR4, Ubuntu 26 server

This setup is the main inference workhorse running my Hermes instance(with a Debian trixie sandbox for Hermes SSH backend) as well as llamacpp and whispercpp. I am actively hunting for a second 7900xtx for this machine. Currently running gemma4-26b-a4b at a average of 75 tok/s. Yes I know the ram is mismatched I had a stick fail and just added in another matched speed 16gb I had on hand.

The monitor you see running is from a unitfile I wrote to launch amdgpu_top on tty2 so I can easily view GPU stats and the printer below is for my a daily newspaper I have Hermes write in HTML on a cron loop then print to be ready to read with my morning coffee.

More coming soon hopefully.

Take a look at my cluster repo for a more detailed write up and all the yaml. I will be packaging my k3s stack into a helm chart sometime this week to make the process of setting this up be no more than a handful of commands.

https://github.com/bnice00/k3s-Hermes-Llama

Just for extra: on the desk I have my macbook air a1466 running arch and my macbook air m4 which I use as my main development rig.

Designed and made my own mini rack today! Had the opportunity to come up with my own design and cut it out using the laser cutter at work. Really pleased with how it turned out!

Top to bottom

Ubiquiti UDM Beast - 2x 480GB SSD
Ubiquiti USW Pro Aggregation
Ubiquiti USW Pro Max 16
Ubiquiti UNAS Pro - 3x20TB + 3x22TB = 132TB RAW
Lenovo M70q Gen6 - 16GB - 512GB M.2 - Plex Server
4x JetKVM (not in use currently)
3x Minisforum MS-01 - 64GB RAM - 256GB M.2 - 2TB M.2 - 4TB M.2 - one in repair currently - 3 node Proxmox Cluster
DELL Optiplex 7080 Micro - 16GB - 512GB M.2 - 480GB M.2 - Download Machine
DELL Precision 3630 Tower - 16GB - 512GB M.2 - 2TB SSD - 8TB HDD) - Proxmox Packup Server
Ubiquiti SuperLink Gateway
HPE R1500 UPS

Whats not in this Image
Ubiquiti USW Pro XG 8 PoE
Ubiquiti Flex 2.5G 8
Ubiquiti E7
Ubiquiti U7 Pro XGS
Ubiquiti U5G Max
Multiple Ubiquiti Cameras
Asustor Flashstor FS6706T (TrueNAS Box) 32GB - 2x 512GB M.2 - 4x 1TB M.2

Gaming PC - 32GB DDR5 6000 - Ryzen 7 9800X3D - Alphacooled AMD 7900XTX - 2TB M.2 - 1TB M.2
Wife PC - DELL Precision 3630 Tower - 16GB - 1TB M.2 - NVIDIA T1000
MacBook Air M4 - 24GB - 1TB - Ollama Server with qwen3.5 vl for visual image recognition / text extraction for small project for a friend, accessible via Pangolin AI Gateway.

Remote Site 1 Parents
DELL Precision 3630 Tower - 16GB - 512GB M.2 - 4x 8TB SAS HDD - Proxmox Packup Server
HPE Storever 2024 LTO7 Tape Library - 8x 15TB (as of now)
HP R1500 UPS

Remote Site 2 Friend
DELL Optiplex 7080 Mirco - 16GB - 4TB SSD (Backup of important Backup)

ISP
Vodafone Cable Business - static IPv4 - 1000/50 - currently best option.. no fiber in sight.
Telekom Unlimited 5G - 500/250

VPS
Hetzner CAX11 - 2 vCPU - 4GB - 40GB - fosrl/Pangolin
Hetzner CPX11 - 2 vCPU - 2GB - 40GB - not in use anymore
Netcup Piko - not in use anymore

Basically its gore in terms of how it looks and what drives I used. I really cheaped out with disks in terms of SSDs as I only have consumer SSDs and this is my biggest issue with my setup. Network is ready for fast disks but currently there is no option to upgrade due to disk prices..
Really want to get better disks because everything feels unnecessarily slow.

Hey my Homie-labbers,

Today I want to show you my new homelab I built myself. It's an all in one case with a Star Wars (Rebels) color theme.

Link to all STL files incl. assembly manual (ai generated)

https://github.com/clusterzx/Homelab-DIY-Case-NAS-ATX

It houses my main homelab server with:

NAS:

• 4 x 10TB SAS HDDs
• 2 x 4 TB SSD
• 4 Bay SAS Backplane
• PicoPSU
• ATX Breakoutboard
• Power on/off switch

Server:

• X99 Server Board with 8 RDIMM Slots + IPMI
• 1 x E5-2697A v4
• 128GB DDR4 2400 RDIMM ECC
• 1 x NVIDIA T400 (for Frigate)
• 1 x Broadcom LSI 9300-8i HBA card
• 1 x 1TB NVMe SSD

The case is one solid piece, but split into two compartments with connection slots between both parts. I added an E-Ink Display that constantly cycles through 9 different screens about my proxmox server and its health status.

Sure, there are some flaws that showed up after printing and building (the HDD Caddies pop up when they're seated in the backplane and hit the case, some walls are wobbly af), but it was fun designing and printing this case.

I’m usually more of a lurker here, but I wanted to post this because I constantly see some version of:

“Never expose anything in your home lab to the Internet. Internet = bad.”

I understand where that comes from. Being extremely cautious is obviously the safest approach. Short of unplugging the computer from the wall, keeping everything completely inaccessible from the Internet is about as safe as you can get.

I just don’t think that level of isolation is always necessary.

So I decided to see what I could actually find out about my own environment.

I have several services exposed to the Internet, including Authentik, OMBI, Blue Iris, Immich, Lubelogger, AzuraCast, and Rocket.Chat.

Some of these are exposed through Authentik because they don’t have authentication that I’m comfortable relying on by themselves. Everything runs through an NGINX reverse proxy, and Cloudflare proxies DNS for most of it.

I absolutely care about security. I don’t want random people on the Internet having easy access to anything on my network.

At the same time, I want friends and family to be able to use some of these services without turning it into an IT project for them.

I know VPNs are commonly recommended, and they absolutely have their place, but I don’t think it’s reasonable for every use case to tell friends or family, “Install this VPN client on your phone or computer, connect to it, and then you can use this thing I told you about.”

Most people are just going to say no.

There’s a reason you don’t have to connect to a VPN before opening Google.

So I wanted to get a better idea of whether my current setup was actually full of holes.

At work, I have access to Horizon3.ai NodeZero. (horizon3.ai) It’s an enterprise automated penetration-testing platform that can perform both internal and external penetration tests.

I ran an external test against my home environment.

The short version is that the only thing it really flagged as a potential weakness was the Blue Iris web interface.

It was not able a compromise of Blue Iris. The finding was essentially that Blue Iris was exposing a management interface, although I don’t think that description is completely accurate for how I’m using it.

It discovered the other Internet-facing services as well, but it did not identify them as exploitable weaknesses and was not able to compromise them.

And I didn’t exactly make the test difficult.

I gave NodeZero every URL/DNS name for the services I had exposed, along with the public IP address of my firewall. In other words, it knew exactly what was there and exactly where to attack.

We use the same system against our company infrastructure, and when it runs, our firewalls and other security tools light up pretty heavily. It very actively probes, attacks, and attempts exploitation.

So I have every reason to believe it was doing the same thing against my home environment.

For anyone curious, my home firewall is OPNsense.

I’m not suggesting that exposing services to the Internet is risk-free, or that everyone should start opening ports on their firewall.

My point is simply that I think there’s a lot of room between:

“Expose everything with no protection”

and

“Nothing in a home lab should ever be accessible from the Internet.”

With proper authentication, reverse proxying, patching, segmentation, and some actual testing, I think Internet-facing home lab services can be done reasonably safely.

Feel free to ask questions about the setup or the NodeZero results. I have some redacted screenshots if anyone is interested.

And yes, if you want to tell me I’m an idiot for exposing things to the Internet, that’s fine too. 😄

I mainly wanted to put some actual test results out there for other people to look at and discuss.

Yes I wrote this and then had AI revise it, because I am not a good writer.

Just discovered this community! I've mostly lurked on Reddit so please forgive any posting errors. This community is up my alley so hope to be able to contribute some.

I’ve been building a homelab in my basement over the past year using hand-me-down computers. It started with Home Assistant and the rabbit hole got very deep. I've been using Claude AI to guide me since my sys admin skills are a bit rusty. My system admin history goes way back to System V Unix when I worked for AT&T. A long time ago! Been blown away though by how the AI can guide you to the point of getting everything running and it helps document too.

Anyway, back to the topic. I've made good headway on the network and systems, but the lab itself is a mess. I’d like to get the network and servers into a cabinet, and I’m trying to decide between a 19" rack and building a shelf system. What’s on the shelves right now:

• Proxmox on a 2012 Mac mini (16 GB): Home Assistant, Pi-hole, NGINX Proxy Manager
• Kamrui N100 mini PC (16 GB): a second Proxmox node, with the second Pi-hole
• An old gaming tower (i7-4790K, 32 GB, RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB): local LLMs and Frigate for one of my cameras
• Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe: Suricata IDS
• Network: Motorola modem, UniFi Express 7, a UniFi 16-port PoE switch
• A bunch of USB drives and a dock for backups

As you can see almost none of it is rack-mount (the tower, the mini PCs and the Pi would all need shelves), so I’m not sure a full 19” rack is worth the space. Wondering where best to look to obtain a rack or cabinet without breaking the bank say under $200-300? Anyone built their own? Appreciate any suggestions!

PS - please don't judge the mess too harshly. lol

Luis

I am new to homelabbing, studying computer science and currently only have an i5-8500t Prodesk with 16gb ram, a 256gb ssd + 4tb usb hdd as a NAS to free my main NVME drives. I know a lot of people here have fun configuring and setting things up or getting them up and running again when they break, but I really just want to start with some reliable, actually useful services to get started.

I have a desktop and laptop too, and I've thought about using Syncthing to backup and sync my notes to all my devices with the homelab to avoid conflicts. Another thing I saw that actually seemed useful was Erugo, as sharing large files was always trouble for me and most messengers have pretty low file size limits. What else would you recommend?

I know these types of posts are repetetive, but I searched the reddit first and most are pretty old and full of extremely large lists of services that would probably never be useful to me, with no mention of reliability. I also wanted to ask with the context of studying computer science, as I thought there might be more "niche" recommendations that are hard to find under the usual posts but could be very useful to me.

Honestly, I also want to keep it to essentials at first too because I am unsure of how much the cpu can handle. I know its far from the weakest, but it still worries me.

A couple of month ago I decided to move all my services (except DBs) from my VPS and host them myself. Nothing critical so seemed like a good opportunity to get started with home Lab-ing.

K8s Nodes:
3 M720q 16GB RAM 512GB Storage i5 8500T.

Media Server (Home Server):
x470 Gaming Plus RTX 2070 Super 32GB RAM 3x4TB Disks

Huawei CPE (ISP)
RB5009 Router
TPLINK AX55 (Access point)
TPLINK 8 Ports 1Gbps Switch

Most these I already had so just re-purposed.

Any comments or suggestions welcomed.

I wanted a NAS that didn't look like a pile of USB enclosures and cables, so I built this.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 5 with nvme HAT
• 4× 3.5" HDDs: three old 500 GB drives (two Seagate, one WD Green) plus a 4 TB Seagate
• An 80 mm fan with a wire grill above HAT, sitting above the Pi and pushing air in.

Software

• Raspberry Pi OS (headless)
• Each drive is a separate ext4 mount, mounted by UUID with nofail so one missing drive doesn't hang boot
• Samba shares for the photo archive and media, Docker for a few services (Portainer agent, node_exporter → Prometheus/Grafana)
• smartd watches drive health

Hi, I got into this a few months ago. At first, I bought a mini-PC (16 GB RAM, Intel® Celeron® N5105 at 2.00 GHz) and set up a little stack on it using Docker. Basically: Jellyfin, *arr, Immich, Vaultwarden.

Now I wanted to share all of this with my family, but I realized that my 1 TB external hard drive was almost full. So I decided to go big and buy four 4 TB hard drives (ST4000VNZ06).

My problem is this: what should I buy, a NAS or a DAS?

Honestly, I didn’t even know DAS existed before doing some research. I understood that a DAS is cheaper and that it’s basically just a dumb box, leaving all the processing to the mini-PC (will it be able to handle it?). But I’m afraid I’ll regret not buying a NAS later; it seems like everyone’s always talking about NAS, not DAS, so I wonder if I’m missing out on something… And if I end up buying a NAS, won’t my current mini-PC become useless or redundant?

Thanks for your help.

I have been tinking with some of these mini PCs that I have managed to collect from some ewaste bins around my area. If you have changed the CPU to any newer generation, even from something like an i5-7500 to an 8500 it requires a BIOS update. You might get some misleading symptoms such as three red flashes and 5 white flashes which is supposed to represent a power rail failure. I have confirmed this with systems that were originally the Intel 6000 series and 7000 series going up to an 8000 series so that I was able to get quicksync support.

What other services/devices should I add?

The Tesla M60 seems like it has the leftover work from a dual-GPU Maxwell Quadro card. The pads for where video outputs would be are for DVI and mini DisplayPort, even though none of the Maxwell GPUs used mini DisplayPort other than the NVS 810. The SLI connector is there but none functional. It also has the holes for where dual 8-pins would have maybe been soldered in?

I get the purpose of leaving unpopulated pads on a PCB, but this really seems like a lot of features to add in just for product development unless way more was planned?

The other Maxwell multigpu Tesla, the M10, completely lacks pads for any video output connectors or standard power connectors, so it's clearly not just something universally done when designing the Maxwell Tesla GPUs.

The Tesla M40 is the exact same PCB as the Quadro M6000, just without the video outputs soldered on and the 8-pin EPS connector used instead of the dual 8-pin

Title says it all!

I've got two SATA M.2 drives on a PCIE card as a scratch disc in my TrueNAS system. I've only got a single PCIEx1 slot on the board, and I would like to repurpose it as another SATA controller.

Has anyone seen a dual Sata-M.2 -- to -- single SATA port converter? I think I remember one from StarTech in a 2.5" form factor, but I thought to ask the Homeland Hive Mind.

I am about to start my journey in homelabbing and I am trying to think of simple projects to do. I have an old PC that will be running Ubuntu and will have Docker and Pihole on it for sure but idk where to go from there. I don’t have any use for a media server atm. What are some projects you would recommend?

Hi everyone, since most generic engines do not target this type of hardware i though I could make a small inference engine for budget/low power NAS builds with this SoC. It may not be blazing fast but it can definitely deliver for 24/7 applications !

What we run today:

LFM2.5-D1-omni a decision model at about 500tok/s
LFM2.5-1.2B Thinking and LFM2.5-350M at ~15tok/s and 35tok/s respectively
Embedding Gemma 2 - about 800tok/s

You can see more performance figures in the github repo:
https://github.com/paragontasx/ferro

Some idea on how you could use this and why i chose the above models:
EG2 - multimodal embedding text video images audio all in one place
D1 - Small decision model for very fast decision making
Chat Models - In case you want interaction with the system.

Possible use cases:

1. Camera event verification fully local.
2. Search everything by describing it. Because EG2 puts text, photos, CCTV clips and audio into the same vector space, one query like “white van in the yard at night” or “the dog barking” searches all of them at once.
3. Find sensitive data in file shares.
4. Clean up photo libraries. d1 sorts each photo as person, pet, receipt, screenshot, document or scenery. Receipts go to your document intake, screenshots get moved out of the camera roll, and blurry duplicates get flagged by EG2 similarity plus a d1 “is this the better shot?” check.
5. Voice commands for Home Assistant without speech recognition.
6. A complete local loop in one process: retrieve, decide, write. EG2 retrieves, d1 judges, and LFM2.5 writes. For example, a morning digest: overnight camera events, log triage and backup results, each filtered by d1, then summarised in a short paragraph by the 350M model. Speed doesn’t matter here because it runs as a batch job.
7. Explain only what was flagged. d1 triages every log line or alert, and LFM2.5 writes a one-line explanation only for the few that score high. You get human-readable alerts without paying generation cost on every event.

Fun fact this was developed mostly by a locally hosted Qwen3.8 Flash Next with major assistance from Sonnet 5.5 using Hermes Agent.