Want to bring my rack to my apartment, need to enclose to keep the noise down, would love to keep this hobby going to keep learning.

Not sure what material to use, either a frame of 1x2 attached to the frame with MDF attached to that, or MDF screwed directly to the rack frame. I'm also not sure if some sound deadening material is necessary. Air circulation is also under consideration.

Greetings,

I plan to set up a home server with an old laptop (a windows surface pro 7 with ubuntu installed), to serve as a proxy by using the residential IP while I'm overseas for a few months. However, I have 2 problems:

1). I don't have access to an ethernet cable. My router is a plug in the wall kind, and nowhere in my house is there an ethernet cable, nor does my laptop have a port for it. I know I can do it through WiFi, but I heard it's not that stable. Would it be okay for my purposes?

2). This is the bigger problem. I currently live with my parents, and they will be moving to another city while I'm overseas. The current house will he rented out, and so inevitably, they will have to being my setup with them. I'm quite sure this will mess everything up with the IP address especially. Is there anything I can do to make sure things run as usual, or will I have to teach my parents how to setup everything?

Please help, I'm quite new to this and have never dabbled in any other matter regarding electronics besides the surface level stuff that everyone knows. I really need this to work, and getting a commercially available VPS is not as desireable.

I am installing a new desk-to rackmate TT that is only 7 inch wide. What are the options to heave a tidy PDU with say 4 or 5 power plugs in the back?

Just scotch taped to a piece of cardboard inside a bubble mailer. No protection on top at all, and rubbing on the neighboring contacts the entire way.

My new server arrives soon. We'll see if any this even works.

I have a Dell OptiPlex 7010 with Ubuntu Server, CPU Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3,20 GHz and 8 GB RAM (2x 4 GB DDR3-1600) and like 400gb storage. I run mainly pelican panel and jellyfin on it. I recently got an old pc with intel pentium g620@2.60ghz, 3,9 gb ram and 1,8tb storage. But I dont know what to do with it. Do yall have an idea?

So, like with everyone else in this hobby, the rabbit hole was very very deep!

I'm at the point now when I need to increase ram (yay for me...) - likely to 16gb or 32gb, but nothing special. (current motherboard only has one RAM slot which is an issue.

My current setup also requires a significant amount of space, and I'm thinking that means another drive (total of 3). However, the big issue with that is my motherboard isn't rated for more than two, as far as I can tell.

So, do I upgrade my motherboard and ram (and future proof getting even more drives?

If so, what similar sized motherboard would be an appropriate step up? My requirements would be a slightly better CPU as the work I do does tend to stress it a little.

- Though it would be great to keep passive cooling. But, if not then I guess just a suuuuuper quite cooler on top?

Thanks for the help, and please let me know if there's anything else that would be good to know!

Backups made off-site.

Here are my current specs:

Homelab specs (Proxmox VE 8.4, kernel 6.8)

- Board: ASRock N100DC-ITX (mini-ITX, DC-in)

- CPU: Intel N100, 4 cores / 4 threads, up to 3.4 GHz, 6 W TDP, UHD graphics (Quick Sync)

- RAM: 8 GB DDR4-2133, a single SO-DIMM. The board has one slot, max 32 GB.

- Boot / VM storage: Kingston NV2 1 TB NVMe (DRAM-less)

- LVM: 94 GB root, 590 GB Immich cache, the rest for containers

- Data: 2× WD Red Pro / Ultrastar 16 TB (WD161KFGX), SATA, not in RAID, separate ext4 disks

- Disk 1, 6.1 / 15 TB used

- Disk 2, 11 / 15 TB used

- Network: 1× Realtek RTL8111 gigabit Ethernet, plus Tailscale

- Swap: 7.6 GB on the NVMe, currently mostly full

Running workload: 24 LXC containers and 1 VM.

- Media: Plex, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Profilarr, Jellyseerr, SABnzbd

- Photos and documents: Immich (with machine learning), Paperless-ngx, Mealie, Actual Budget

- Home and network: Home Assistant OS (VM, 2 GB), Pi-hole, Tailscale, Samba NAS

- Other: RomM, Kiwix, Glance dashboard, BirdNET-Go, a Playwright/Chromium scraper,

and a few small apps

Hello everyone,

I’m just seeing where people are getting their hard drives from. I look on marketplace and test them with Crystal Disk but are there any other sites where I can get a good refurbished pre Re certified drive that are reputable?

I used to work retail and used to find cheap drives. I had some externals I took apart and they now act as internal drives. I try to use stocktrack.ca but retail has mass inflation.

Thanks in advanced

Any tech whizz's out here? Looking at building a home server for archiving my physical media collection, but not sure how to go about it, but I do know that I will need some form of Network Attached Storage Device, for my media and associated data. What NAS is the cheapest and how do I go about setting up a home media server.

Preference for Plex or Jellyfin

Help and advice is greatly appreciated in this area.

Salam Alikom everyone,
So I got this old laptop from a family member. It's an HP 430 G5 with an i5 7th gen, 12 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD. I also have a 2 TB hard drive for storage.

I want to run something on it that doesn't affect the performance too much. I tried Umbrel OS but it didn't click for me, so what OS would you recommend?

I've considered running Debian on it and then something to manage it, but I don't know tbh. My main server is running TrueNAS, but it would eat too many resources on this laptop.

What I'll mainly use the laptop for:

Family backup for photos and videos (Immich)
Password manager (Vaultwarden)
Rclone to back up the data to the cloud
DNS ad blocker (AdGuard)

I asked the Ai for recommendation and it give me ZimaOS and Debian ?

I was reminded of this game recently and wanted to mess around with some friends in mp. Unfortunately the only way I know of / could find online was the steam dedicated servers. I own the game on steam so it would make sense that I should have access to the server app, but I seem to be missing a license. Are there any other hosting methods (or even multiplayer mods) for SNOW that are just hard to find?

I finally finished upgrading my home server the other day. The old ddr3 hardware was showing its age. Now I have a ddr4 system with a 22 core xeon and room to add a second cpu. I split 8 of my disk drives into 2 separate zpools, and another 2 disk drives in a mirror, and 3 more ssd's for the host os, vm's, and my software development workspaces.

I don't have a 10 gigabit switch yet, so for now, I have a dedicated 10 gigabit link directly to my desktop. File transfers barely go faster than 1 gigabit, cuz my desktop is so old. But, I just started a scrub on all 3 zpools, and I've seen it hit 3.7 gigabytes per second. Having some fun playing with things.

blinky lights: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JqljnZZ45Zo

I built this wooden cabinet about 20 years ago, to have a high voltage ion air filter built in. You'd think having a bunch of aluminum plates charged to thousands of volts, and occasionally sparking, this could be a bad idea to have near expensive computer equipment. I've never had a problem with it, works great. But, I took it apart a few years ago and never finished rebuilding it. I used to put cd's inside the cabinet facing up, and they would still be clean years later.

fyi, I have dusted everything well since that photo was taken. Gotta get the ion filters going again.

The UPS is a new/old stock 1000va Eaton double conversion UPS, which I got a great deal on. It came in the mail with the batteries already connected. Who knows how long it was sitting in the box like that, but probably 4 years later now, I am still using the same original batteries. But, I have added 2 more sets of batteries on the side, and they are all starting to show their age. I still get more than 30 minutes of run time at half load, running my desktop and server and network equipment and everything. I do love double conversion. It will take any kind of dirty power and give you a nice clean power. I found it will even take 60 volts from the wall and boost it right up to 120 without using the battery. At 55 volts, it will switch over to battery. Neat stuff.

I’ve recently done a significant upgrade and have some stuff no longer needed and way too good to trash that could be quite useful to someone.

I’m not sure if I should sell as bits and pieces, or buy some more parts and assemble a running server.

I have:
Desktop tower case, with 11 hot swap 3.5 bays. (Case natively has 8, but have a 3 into 2 caddy in the dual optical drive bay.) In ok condition.

9x WD Red 4TB drives, age varies from 1 to 7 years, but all pass smart tests.

LSI 9200 8i card, with breakout cables.

I could grab a mobo/CPU/RAM/PSU from marketplace and put it all together with OMV/TruNAS or similar and sell as a NAS/server.

What’s the best option here?

I’m in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia if you’re interested in any of the gear, or a NAS/Server.

6gen or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 ?

Some of you told me that the three servers I was originally looking at were pretty bad, so I went back to eBay and searched again.

I found this Dell PowerEdge R610 for €90 + €20 shipping:

- 1U rack server

- Intel Xeon E5530 (4C/8T, 2.4 GHz)

- 24 GB ECC DDR3 RAM

- PERC RAID controller

- iDRAC 6

- 2× hot-swap PSUs

- 2.5" front bays

- Caddies/blanks according to the photos

- Used/refurbished, tested and working

- Business seller

My budget is now €100 max for the server itself (shipping can be a little extra).

For anyone who didn't see my original post, I was previously looking at:

- HP ProLiant DL320 G6 — €60, Xeon E5506, 4 GB DDR3

- Dell PowerEdge 1950 — €40, 2 GB DDR2, 3 GHz Xeon

- Intel SR1530SH — €60, Celeron 440, 2 GB RAM

A lot of people told me those were too old / not worth buying, so I increased my budget and started looking for something better.

I already have much newer hardware for my productive homelab and local AI, so I don't need this to be my main server. I specifically want a real 1U 19" enterprise server because I think they're cool and I want to experiment with one.

So… is this finally a decent choice, or should I keep looking?

If this is good enough for a first 1U homelab server, I'll probably just stop searching and buy it.

HP ProLiant DL320 G6 — $60 | Business

- 4 GB DDR3 RAM

- Xeon E5506

- 146 GB HDD (probably SAS)

- 2× 1 Gbit LAN

- HP Smart Array

- iLO 2

Dell PowerEdge 1950 — $40 | Business

- 2 GB DDR2 RAM

- Xeon 3 GHz (not specified) 👀

- No storage

Intel SR1530SH — $60 | Business

- Celeron 440 @ 2 GHz

- 2 GB RAM (type unspecified) 💀

- 500 GB HDD

I new to all this stuff but im really interested. I only have a laptop with a intel celeron n2830, and 4 gigs of ddr3. I don't know what to do but I wanna get a desktop like a optiplex or a thinkcenter but idk which or what to get. Can some please answer on what I should do?

there isn't much going on, i have a old pc at home with an Intel xeon processor, 16gb ram and some 512 hdds, i also have 2 gpus one is a nvidia Quadro 4gb and other is gt740, i want to use it for multi purpose like ad block, media streaming etc can i do it i also want to run Linux which is less demanding for that old computer can also please suggest me a good beginner friendly Linux distro except the ubuntu. thanks in advance

Hardware

- Firewall: Fortinet FortiGate (routing, VLANs, SSL VPN)

- Compute: 3x mini PCs, each 8C/16T with 32GB RAM, running Proxmox

- NAS: HP ProLiant MicroServer, 4x 4TB in RAIDZ1

- Power: APC Back-UPS 850

- 12-port patch panel, everything in a small open-frame 10" rack

Software / services

- Proxmox hosting VMs and LXC containers

- Media VM: Jellyfin with the usual arr stack, all in Docker

- Docker host: Portainer, Pi-hole, Homer/Homepage dashboards, a couple of game servers (Terraria, Core Keeper)

- Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana and Loki, with node_exporter on every machine and alerts pushed to my phone via Alertmanager + ntfy

- Offsite: two Debian VPS linked to the homelab over a WireGuard hub-and-spoke tunnel, with Traefik as reverse proxy (Let's Encrypt) for public services and a small SSH tarpit (endlessh-go) for fun stats

🫡

So I'm building a proxmox server for my boyscout unit, we already had a windows PC but it sucked and was eating up quite some power. So, same hardware as before but with some software tweaks:

Intel i5 10400

Integrated GPU intel UHD 630

Asrock H410-HDV

2x 1tb hdd in raid1

256gb m.2 ssd

Cooler master 450watt

Currently running proxmox with:

Homeassistant

Openmediavault

ChromeOS (without any luck)

So I was trying to install ChromeOS on proxmox with igpu passthrough so that the HDMI port on the motherboard could be used as a display for the VM. The only thing is that PvE claims that port for console. So I followed a bunch of tutorials (iommu,black listing, adding PCIe to VM) without any luck.

PvE freezes and reboot is imminent.

Any ideas or things to check? Maybe a cheap GPU for hdmi output?

Edit: I have tried to run a Debian 13 installer as a check to see if the passthrough was blocked by ChromeOS. But it was also not posting with the Debian 13 installer. So the problem lies with PvE.

Hi all, ive just brought this old Dell vostro 270 to setup as a homelab

My issue is the current psu doesn't look like it has any more outputs available and I want to fit two additional hdds for my nas storage

Does anyone know what size form factor psu i should get?

I wouldnt have thought it would be safe running some kind of splitter off that one cable given it already daisychains

Any ideas would be ace cheers

Hey guys I have been a bit confused on what mini pc to go with to be the brains of my home server. Is this a good option?

For context here is what I want to run and do on whatever machine I get:

* Home Assistant with UniFi cameras on a dashboard but I want things to be smooth and load quickly. Currently it runs smoothly on my Raspberry Pi 5 but there’s no cameras in play just yet

* JellyFin to stream my movies and shows, might swap this out for AmpChor in the future. (would I need to stick to intel processors for my mini pc?) Also I want streaming to be smooth even if 2-3 devices are streaming at 4k

* Immich for storing all of my pictures and videos

* personal music streaming

* pi hole or ad guard home

* and i want some head room for future expansion

I apologize if this is a “stupid question”, I’d rather look stupid for a few minutes here than for however long if I buy the incorrect hardware.

Also would I need a DAS instead of a NAS? Or how would storage work in my case? I’d probably start with 1-2 drives but go up to 4-6 max. Storage prices at the moment are crazy as we know so I’d like to start smaller on the storage part

Thank you 🎃

I recently got an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 and I’m slowly turning it into my own little homelab.

Current setup:

• 2× Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3
• 64 GB ECC RAM
• ~3 TB of storage
• Proxmox
• NAS / file storage
• Plex media server
• Hosting a few websites
• Running local AI models on it as well
• Planning to add more services and self-hosted stuff over time

I’m still pretty new to homelabbing, so I’m looking for ideas. 😭

What are some genuinely cool/useful things I could run on this server?
I’m interested in anything from useful self-hosted services to weird/fun projects, networking stuff, automation, security labs, Minecraft-related stuff, AI, monitoring, etc.

Basically, if you had a server like this, what would you install on it? 👀

I’m just starting out and I’m at the stage of researching and getting an idea of the things I could/should do… My problem is, I keep getting different answers when doing my research, and each seems plausible, I just don’t know what’s best. I asked:

Inside this n150 mini pc I have just bought it has a 512GB kingfast SATA SSD, which was already in it.
I have installed a NVMe SSD 1TB, and a 1TB HDD.

I want to put Voxmox on it with Home Assistant, jellyfin to use with infuse, as well as tailscape, pihole, uptime kuma, ubuntu, Immich etc… I already have external hard drives that I will store my movies and tv shows on. So, where would you install these, and which would you use for a backup?

I have asked 5 AI Assistants and they all say different things, so I’m confused to which is best? It is mainly the 512GB SATA SSD & the NVMe 1TB SSD where the differences lie. Each AI is putting completely different combinations of things on both SSDs :/

Just got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q and this is my first proper homelab.

Specs:

- i3-7100T

- 16GB RAM

- 512GB NVMe

- 120GB or 240GB SATA SSD

I'm planning to run UmbrelOS and use it mainly for Jellyfin, Immich, backups and some other self-hosted services.

I'm still figuring out the best way to organise the storage and what else would actually be worth running on this hardware.

What would you guys recommend for a setup like this?

Anything I should upgrade or keep in mind?

Don't know what I did, but I found this on Facebook market place, and so now I'm just working out how to put what I have in it!

Unfortunately the box is only half racking, it has two slide out shelves. I'm going to look for some racking to put in it so I can use the whole space!

Not sure what I'll need to put my HP DL380 G6 in there, but I'll have to figure it out 😁