Hey y’all! I’ve been on workers’ comp for a couple of weeks, and I’m not sure if this is boredom, me contemplating a career change, or a little bit of both 😂. Since I’m not very mobile right now, I decided to dive into the homelab hobby.
Current setup:
2× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i5 8th Gen
● 40GB RAM

● 512GB NVMe + 512GB SSD

● 2.5GbE NIC

● One has an HBA card

1× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i7 8th Gen

● 40GB RAM

● 1TB NVMe

● 2.5GbE NIC

What I originally planned:

● i7: Main Proxmox or kubernetes server running Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud, Technitium, NetBird, OPNsense, and other open-source services.

● i5 #1: Proxmox or kubernetes for SOC, IAM, cybersecurity, and other lab environments.

● i5 #2 + HBA: TrueNAS SCALE bare metal with my two 8TB HDDs.

Now I’m realizing TrueNAS can run VMs and containers, so I’m reconsidering the whole layout.
What would y’all do?

● Move the HBA into the i7 and make it the main TrueNAS/virtualization server?

● Run one dedicated TrueNAS machine and one dedicated Proxmox/kubernetes experimentation lab machine?

● Or keep the original three-node setup?
Also, what open-source programs/services are y’all running in your homelabs that you’d recommend?

Hi All,

Just about to start my first homelab today and I'm a little bit stuck on the OS. Not looking at running anything crazy, just mostly storage backup, media server, game hosting, ad blocking.

I was leaning towards using ZimaOS since it looks like a really easy way to get started but was thinking of potentially looking into something linux based/proxmox in the future.

Is it possible to start by setting up ZimaOS and then learn something else on a virtual machine (i think?) and make the switch? Or will i just end up giving myself a bigger headache in the long run for no reason?

If it's simple enough to switch afterwards then i'd probably just pick the easiest option to get up and running for now.

Thanks!

They claimed a single command solution, but casaos simply will not work correctly

I use my Dell desktop as my everyday Windows PC, but it also does some server duties.

The internal HDDs store my media library for Plex streaming around the house. I also run Syncthing to back up work files from my laptop over Wi-Fi.

For additional backups, I use external drives for work files, photos and videos. The setup currently has 3 internal HDDs, 2 internal SSDs and several external drives.

I'm glad I bought most of my storage before the RAMageddon hit.

I'm not running a dedicated NAS or server rack, just making use of the hardware I already have.

What would you suggest adding or improving? Any useful upgrades or services worth considering for this kind of setup?

My PC is a Dell Vostro 3910 with i3-12100 and 16GB RAM.

So i have been using CasaOS for some days now and love it for hosting my own cloud and Minecraft server, but i have discord bots that i struggle to launch with casaos.

On ubuntu desktop, all i have to do is open the file in terminal and write "node ." to start it and it works perfectly.

But on casaos ive read that i need to make a docker/app to launch it but when i try the guides it doesn't work for me.

So does anyone have experience in how to do it properly?

hello- i know next to nothing about computers, my husband was the tech wizard. sadly, he passed away in a work incident over the summer. he was working on building a home server, and it’s currently hosting my important documents, photos/videos, movies, and probably other things. it is up and running as intended.

however, i don’t know what to do if it ever stops working for whatever reason or if i need to move with it.

what do i need to know to keep it running? i dont really know what questions i need to be asking.

ive been trying to degoogle for a while now to avoid costs with subscriptions because my student one is ending soon.

I had a few questions:

What components do i need to keep into mind for a google drive / Google photos esque servers

What could be some of the risks like if im away from home and the server goes down What ways you could reduce that risk and or be able to fix it remotely.

The storage itself I think 10Tb would be more than enough for pretty much everything I need it for but then which raid method i choose comes into mind. So what would you recommend regarding that.

So I have a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB, but I've been wanting to get something that's like Intel or AMD based, like a mini PC, because I've had so many problems with my Raspberry Pi 5. Do you guys have any recommendations? When I asked Gemini, they recommended something like a "Dell OptiPlex 3060 Micro". I don't know if there's any better options or not. I think I want something that's around $200 or less.

Last year I had a tough decision to make: either buy a completely overpriced Synology NAS for 1100€, with totally outdated hardware but a solid OS, or spend a bit more and build a small server where I could comfortably run Proxmox and manage all my containers from there.

My inner tinkerer wasn't going to settle for less, so I bought 2x32GB ECC RAM, a 245K, a 1TB Crucial T500, a 4TB 990 Pro, 2 HDDs and a WS W880 motherboard, and put together a nice little Proxmox server for just under €1,600.

The most expensive part was actually the motherboard, which hurt a bit, but the ECC RAM was worth it to me.
When I got curious and checked the current prices of all those components, I couldn't believe my eyes – my jaw literally dropped.
Since GTA 6 is coming out next month, I simply sold one ECC RAM stick for €1,200 and used that to buy a brand-new PS5 for €900. And I still have some pocket money left over for games.

What do you guys think about how PC
component prices have developed lately?

I have a weird question and I'm not sure if it's possible. Can I make copies of games and store them on a server to create my own digital game library?.

I've seen videos of people downloading movies, TV series, and even huge archives of the internet, but I'm wondering: if I store a game on my own server, does that mean I actually own the digital file?.

Note: I’m completely new to the homelab scene and have no idea how most of this works yet, so please be merciful!.

Basically looking for a way to keep my work backed up so I don’t lose it, in the simplest hands-off way possible, ideally without slowing down my computer.

My PC is Windows 10 LTSC.

My NAS is running TrueNAS

Not sure which tool(s) should I use?

or what's the best way to approach it?

Is there any hope for using this for a home nas. Just so I can empty out my Google photos because I'm not paying for storage. And hold my music collection that is filling up my desktop and my phone and a couple random hard drives. Lol. I got it for free so if not no big loss.

Hi, I'll start by highlighting low energy consumption is the top priority.

I have a n150 mini server running as my main media, photo backup, home-assistant server.

With things up and running I'm worried about data loss/duplicity.

Can I spin up a Rasp Pi 4 2gb as a 2nd location and (somehow) periodically backup to some hdd's?

As you can tell, I am no expert so any info and insight would be useful

As the title says, I don't think I quite grasp how HBA cards work. Doing some reading it seemed like an IT card was just a pass through of sorts and the CPU and OS would do basically the 'magic'. IR mode is meant to control a RAID directly from the card, yes?

I ask because I bought an IT HBA to hook up a SAS drive I got to use more as a backup since my main NAS is on a NUC. Just figured it wouldn't hurt to grab a few cheaper drives and shell out for the PCI card. But after plugging everything in, nothing sees it. I dual boot with Ubuntu and Win11. Neither OS sees the drive or card, and the BIOS doesn't even see the card.

Did I get a dud? Am I totally missing something? I can understand why the drive isn't recognized, if the card isn't...

I know this is probably a super newbie question but the reviews I read said it was pretty much plug and play. Which it definitely has not been for me anyway.

PC I'm trying to read this all on is:
B550 Tomahawk mobo
Ryzen 5600XT cpu
64GB DDR4 3600 RAM
AMD 6700XT gpu

the specific card I bought is:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYW43716

the HDD I am working with is:
Seagate Exos 7E8 6TB SAS 12Gb/s 3.5" ST6000NM0005

looking for any and all guidance. And apologies for any dumberessness on my end. Still learning a lot about all of this.

I impluse brought 4x 18tb SAS drives for $275 each and now I'm regretting it when I could have gotten 10x 4tb for $600. I don't have a nas yet or know if I need that much storage and I don't know the state of the drives but the seller just says they are working. Should I cancel?

Most distributed and multi site homelab stacks require spinning up separate infrastructure tiers just to validate and route a single write: a message broker, a schema registry, a graph authorization service (like SpiceDB or OpenFGA), and a cache layer in front of the database. Even on a local rack or across a couple of sites, you end up burning RAM and network hops just to glue containers together.

I just published a formal systems paper investigating an alternative architecture over NATS JetStream and PostgreSQL that collapses all four layers (JSON Schema registry, stream routing topology, identity grants, and Postgres Row Level Security policies) under a single five token canonical subject:

tenant.<tenant>.dag.<family>.<id>

Because the family token is a deterministic function of the record's immutable schema ID (Kind(schema_id)), evaluating an incoming write is just a fixed sequence of in process memory lookups on one string: derive the subject, match the grant trie, resolve the stream, and validate the payload.

Key findings from the paper for bare metal, edge, and multi site setups:

• 225ns in process evaluation: Deriving the subject, matching the identity's grant trie, and finding the stream take ~225 nanoseconds together in memory with zero external network calls (JSON Schema validation takes ~15.2us for a 726 byte record).
• Disconnected site execution with NATS leaf nodes (Section 10): Remote sites run a local NATS server as a leaf node listening on loopback in its own JetStream domain with an 8 GB local file store. When the WAN link drops, the remote site still validates schemas and permissions locally and commits writes to its own disk. When the line returns, the hub cluster sources the leaf streams in ~0.14 to 2.2 seconds with zero duplicate rows.
• Single round trip Postgres RLS reads (Section 8): Instead of querying an external cache for permissions and then querying Postgres, pipelining the role and tenant binding alongside the SELECT in a single round trip adds just 4.6us over a raw unguarded read and hits 142,564 reads/sec at 64 workers.
• Verified across 1.45M production messages (Section 6.7): Folding 33 JetStream streams into a 7 table Postgres read model allows a full deterministic database rebuild and verification from the log in under 9 minutes.

The full 21 page paper (SPEC.pdf / SPEC.md) and the raw benchmark reproduction scripts are up on GitHub if anyone wants to read the proofs or test the numbers against their own hardware:

• Paper (SPEC.pdf): https://github.com/MOG-Systems-Inc/primbench/blob/main/SPEC.pdf
• Benchmark Data & Scripts: https://github.com/MOG-Systems-Inc/primbench
• Overview: https://mog.systems

Curious how others here are handling multi site state sync and WAN partition recovery across local nodes.

So three cheers for having smartmontools monitor my BTRFS raid1 setup and emailing me that one of the drives was failing. It gave me enough time to do a final emergency backup before I had to shut the server down.

Boo for today's inflated HDD prices. Ugh. But at least I got fast shipping. Pool rebuilt overnight and got everything back up and running with no data loss.

So be sure to have email alerting up and working on your home server!

I have a homelab server that i use everyday for storage, music and home assistant. My brother got angry that my pc is running 24/7 and he said . Just leave it of an turn it on when you need it. But i use it everyday at home, at school. in the bus and everywhere especialy for music. But he refuses to accept that becose of his autism. He claims its a fire hazard and a waste of electricity. I ran after me and hit me even when i went to turn it back on. The server is located in the basement in a dedicated room for power and internet stuff. Please help me. i will take tips, mediacal advice, homelab tips, anything just help.

So I am not sure which route to go with my home server build.

I have been testing True Nas for some weeks on old desktop with a i5 8400, asrock H310CM-DVS, 16GB Ram with 2 1TB HDDs and 2 240GB SSDs in a small 15L case.

Now I want a dedicated server with more room.

What the server should do:

- storage for backups/files/media

- selfhosted cloud for access outside my home

- some media streaming (Jellyfin or similar)

- host the occasional Minecraft server

Case: Jonsbo N6 is currently the favorite (havent bought it yet)

As far as I understand the case supports both Sas and Sata drives, not sure which ones to choose

9x 2TB drives should be enough for a long time, but might start with a couple 4TBs to keep some headroom for the future

I will be getting a Lsi HBA for 8 (or 16) drives, 8 might be enough with the MoBo Sata Ports

Also 2.5G Lan is a must, I think a pcie lan adapter would be better than a MoBo with 2.5G cost wise

Might get a Sfx PSU to make it easier to build in the case and to use a full tower cooler

The Main Question right now is Intel vs Amd

To my undstanding Intel would be better for the streaming but Amd would be better for games and has ecc support

I am fine to loose out on some video encoding if Amd and the ecc support is worth it, otherwise i guess Intel would be better, but I would have to buy ecc ram (not sure how smart that is right now)

Both streaming and game server hosting are less important, the main function of the server should be data storage

Budget: not exactly sure, it shouldnt be high end stuff since I wount be doing crazy stuff with the server but I am fine with paying for more up-to-date hardware for power effinciency or other benefits

i guess for the case 150€, cpu+mobo ~200€ + ecc ram if needed ~ 100€, HBA and 2.5G LAN ~75€ sounds fine (but the budget can be adjusted in either direction if it makes sense)

also depending on the cost for the drives I was thinking about starting with ~10TB total storage and buying more as needed later

And are there any other things I should be aware of before buying the parts (maybe like pcie lane splitting)?

What is best os for a server i5-4570 8GB of ram and a Nvidia GeForce 710 mainly Minecraft and Emby

So I finally need to add space. I thought I would never run out 6 years ago, but now I'm down to 5tb left. I've also never had a failure and want to plan for that. My setup is Unraid on a Node Fractal 804 case. CPU: Intel Core i7-14700 2.1 GHz 20-Core Processor with 32GB of DDR4 ram. All 8 HDD bays are filled. I have an 8-port LSI/HBA card (ServeRAID ​M1115 LSI ​9223-8i 8-​Port PCIe ​6Gbps SAS/​SATA Contr​oller), I run 8x 14TB WD Western Digital Red Plus 14 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drives, with 2x parity. 2x 2TB M2 cache drives. Fractal Node 804 case. I would like to add more bays instead of increasing the size of my current maximum drive due to the 14TB dual parity drives. I feel like this would be cheaper and easier than just getting another 2-3TB on my parity drives (thus allowing me to slowly add higher capacity HDDs outside of parity). If I can just plop another one or two 10-14TB drives in my system that would keep me set for another few years. Now that you have that, here's some details on my questions.

1. With my case, I see online people saying there is room for 10 HDDs. However there are only 8 HDD trays. If I was able to add 2x more HDDs, where would those go?

2. I feel like I would need a 16 port LSI Card. So when I replace my card, would Unraid still recognize all the drives in their prior configuration? Would I somehow need to make sure the drives are connected to the same/equivalent port on the new LSI HBA card? Or can I just connect them to the new card, set it and forget it? However, my motherboard also has at least one (possibly two) free SATA ports. If I can mount two more drives, could I connect them directly to the motherboard without messing with the drive/server performance of the other 8 drives connected through the HBA card?

3. What happens after I install and connect a different / new LSI card? I've never done this type of thing before. Anything I need to do in unraid to prepare before I install, or after I do?

Hi!

I've been using Plex with my home & phone devices for movies and music for a year now and I'm looking to improve my current setup.

Right now, I'm using my gaming laptop (msi GL75) as server which imo is like using bazookas to kill flies. So I'm looking for something small that can be connected directly to the router like a Raspberry pi 400 kit and won't need a lot of power to run.

The idea is to be able to keep using Plex and that doesn't seem to be an issue.

What I'm concerned about is external drives, storage space and being able to share the server with friends and family that are not in the same location.

I'm currently using more than half of a 2TB hard drive only with my music. If I get the Raspberry pi 400 kit, most howtos and setup tutorials advise to get a pretty expensive SD with TB of storage and I will be able to have up to 4 external drives for storage. Should be enough, but I wonder: will it? can I optimise it further?

Addendum: is there a way to upload into the raspberry pi server from other pcs?

Thanks in advance for your time, patience and knowledge!

Just picked up this 2nd hand, but basically new WD My Book 10Tb for €215. It had the WD100EZAZ whitelabel disk inside.

I'm adding this to my 4-bay Synology to go from SHR with 3 disks to SHR-2 with 4 disks. Was this an ok deal? Because I just learned it is probably CMR. I've been running a similar disk for several years already in my ds220+ and now the ds423+ without any issues.

So I‘m looking to put a server and some networking equipment (all NVMe/SSD, no spinning disks/HDDs) in an RV or camper that will be driven on paved and non-paved roads. Afaik this type of equipment shouldn’t be exposed to the bumps and vibrations of the road, while ofc it should be safely mounted so it doesn’t fly around while driving. How would you go about this? I was thinking of using some foam or mattress type of material but curious to hear if anyone has done this or if anyone has some better ideas!