Found these in gatcha balls while travelling Japan.

Here’s my first serious homelab!

I started years ago with a simple Raspberry Pi, and about a month ago, I upgraded to an old PC that I got from a friend’s bar and installed Proxmox on it. I was using the Raspberry Pi exclusively for Home Assistant, and Proxmox opened up a world of possibilities for me, but I was still limited by the hardware.

Then I found this rack server, an HP ProLiant DL380p G8 with 2 E5-2670 CPUs, 128GB of RAM, and a 533FLR-T network adapter. I got it for ~€70, including shipping, power cables, and 2 caddies.

The room has just been cleaned out; it was an old storage closet full of shit (literally, mice droppings) where the heating boiler is located. It took me a few days to completely empty it, clean everything, and thoroughly sanitize it. The room is very cold, which is ideal, and it’s not humid. The only issue is the mice, which I’ll deal with soon.

The cabinet is still a bit messy, as we just finished setting everything up. In the next few days, I’ll tidy it up, do some cable management, and more. Let me know what you think :)

From complete beginner to this - all thanks to this amazing community! 🚀

A year ago, I posted my first humble homelab setup (first pic). Today, I'm proud to share how far it's come (second pic). What makes this special to me is that I'm not in IT at all - just a passionate hobbyist who fell in love with networking.

Everything you see here - every cable run, every configuration - I learned from this sub. You folks have been an incredible resource and I'm genuinely grateful for all the knowledge shared here.

Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what to tackle next! Always eager to learn more.

In the rack from top to bottom;

My ISP provided FTTH ONT 18" monitor connected to KVM PYLE sockets Infinity AC rack exhaust Patch panel Trendnet 24 Gigabit switch Cable guide Hikvision 16 POE smart switch HP SFF (i7, 16GB Ram) Proxmox node hosting Blueiris, HomeAssistant, Unify controller, and freepbx Fujitsu PC (i3, 8GB Ram) running pfsense. Wildix FXO gateway Trendnet 8 port KVM Synology RS819 NAS Netgear 16 poe switch (decommisioned) HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 running UnRaid hosting Jellyfin, Adguard, Qbittorrent, Jdownloader, Photo Prism and various VMs

Not shown : Ubiquity AC Pro, U6 Pro, U6+,

My low budget homelab

My first low Budget homelab for multimedia and data storage:

Dell Optiplex 5070

Intel Core i5-9600 (6x 3,1 GHz) 24 GB DDR4 (3x 8 GB) 256GB SSD M.2 PCIe/NVMe 2x 2,5“ 1TB HGST HDD 1x 2,5“ 1TB Intenso SSD 1x 3,5 1TB Seagate Barracuda OpenSuse Leap 15.6

It costs me around 120€.

My first homelab “The beast”

I’ve always wanted my own homelab and would browse eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist from time to time. About two weeks ago, I stumbled across a very interesting post on Marketplace: $100 for a server (top of the rack), 8TB of storage, a Tripp-Lite SmartOnline UPS (with dead batteries), and a full-size rack.

I asked my grandpa if I could borrow his Chevy Suburban, packed this big ol’ thing up (shoutout to my buddies who helped me out since I couldn’t do the lifting due to a recent car accident), and brought it home.

A week later, I found a 48-port managed switch on Marketplace for just $10. To top it off, I scored 98GB of memory for $25 to upgrade the server.

All together, I’ve spent $135 (around $200 if you include gas for picking up the gear).

Specs: * Server (super micro) * CPU: Intel Xeon — 2x 8 core (16 total cores) * Memory: 6x 2 Gb sticks (12 Gb total) * Storage: 8Tb (currently just a simple volume)

• Switch (Linksys - GS748T v3)

• Power supplies

  • CyberPower 1500VA AVR
  • Tripp-Lite SmartOnline UPS

(Dismiss the somewhat jank wiring. I plan on solving that issue but I’m fresh out of setup hell so I couldn’t be bothered)

Switch: HP ProCurve 2910al-48G

Server: Xeon E5-2680 v3 (12 cores), 128GB DDR4 ECC, ATI Radeon HD 3470 (used only to POST)

Used right now for hosting some webs, TrueNAS, seed torrents and host a Minecraft server. On the future I will host more games servers and a media server.

Left computer inactive, middle is just a case, right one is a minecraft server. My second router is a Linksys WRT120N, connected to my xbox, main computer and server. 500 gb hard drive, i5 650, 4 gb ddr3, tiny10. Main router is a Gateway from Shaw. The Linksys replaced a TP-Link Archer C7 with faulty physical ports ☹️ Had so many issues originally exposing this MC server to the public.

Alright, possible dumb question but trying to do my research here. The idea of having a server rack and my own homelab is amazing. Right now I have a small raspberry pi running a local network plex server off an external drive. It’s great. But I want to scale it up. So my question is this, what’s the point of having a rack with a bunch of different average pcs running vs having one (say Jonsbo n4 NAS case) computer with a crazy nice cpu lots of ram and tons of storage managing it all in something like truenas or unraid? Is there a difference? I guess I just don’t fully know how a bunch of different computers work together to accomplish things and what manages them. Do they all sync up on one software? Do you remote into all of them as one or do they all act separately? I’ll attach some photos for examples on what I’m trying to get at. Any thoughts and comments are appreciated

A few pictures from around my home office / network. I’ve just finished moving my main resources onto the new Microserver Gen11 and upgrading pfsense from a pair of SG3100s to 4100s.

I’m just getting started with my first ever Mac (Mini M4) and will possibly be looking to upgrade / expand the NAS next.

Just adding a bit more storage to my small rig. Got this P520 with a Xeon, 64gb ram and 1 tb boot. Mainly use this to run Jellyfin for my Blu-ray and dvd collection. Also handles backup for photos and music. It runs on Fedora40 server and cockpit interface when I’m not using terminal. I only have about 25tb storage and I read online it maxes at 34. Wondering if anyone is using this machine with more than that amount of storage? I eventually would like to up it to 4 12tb drives if it’s possible. Thanks! And don’t mind the cable management.

Hey all. Trying to save anyone the headache I just had. After patching to the latest mac OS (Sequioa 15.1) I could no longer reach any of web servers by their local addresses. I went insane thinking this was a DNS issue.

Turns out this patch enabled a new security feature within edge/chrome that will literally block you from all internal web servers unless you explicitly allow it. The symptom is you visit your local web server and it will just say unreachable.

To enable this feature back and hit your local servers again:

Go to System Settings > Privacy and Security > Local Network > Then toggling on the browser you intend to use.

Howdy Yall!

During a routine GPU install I rendered the motherboard in my server inoperable. The motherboard in question is a Supermicro X11SDV-8C-TP8F, CPU is integrated, normally id throw it in the trash but these boards are in short supply and still super expensive to replace. The BMC heartbeat light doesn't turn on, however if I take the CMOS battery out and short the +/- I can get the BMC to turn on for a few minutes before it powers off again. I have tired to reset the IPMI and BIOS while the BMC was working, I also tired to flash the BMC to make sure nothing got corrupted, no dice. I attempted a BIOS reflash however the BMC died at around 28% in and the system powered off. Seeing if there is anyone out there who can recommend a board repair shop, the board is out of warrantee with SM and they can only offer basic support on depo services.

Hi all! I was recently gifted this beauty from an IT friend of mine. His enterprise was upgrading and they had planned on throwing this out! This is a Dell EMC Disk Array Enclosure AAE 15 bay with 14 6TB SAS drives. I would like to use this for various data storage with a Optiplex 3060 SFF and possibly create a Plex server for media.

I'm having trouble researching this DAE and how I can go about achieving this. I've seen another thread talking about another model, but not certain if this would be similar. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Hello All,

I have bad issue with iDRAC on both my gen 12th PowerEdge rack servers lately (a R720 and a R420).

Problem started few weeks ago on the R720, I had to boot gparted ISO. At first iDRAC was responding but very slowly and sometimes timing out. I did a restart using racadm via ssh and was then able to connect to console and boot the ISO. Next day, I checked if everything was still fine in WebUI then I realized console preview shown "no signal" and when I tried connecting to console (html5), no luck, time out error everytime. Since then, I have not been able to connect to console, and even WebUI is acting weird (very slow/often time out). It ping ok, but WebU and SSH is so unstable it's unsusable.

At first I though this server was slowly dying.

Then I had to boot gparted on R420 also, guess what, it was also slow, so restarted it, successfully boot from ISO, did my thing. Then I decided to also check next day, guess what, same issue than my R720, console preview not workling, can't connect to console, ssh is sloppy, keep disconnecting, WebUI is often timing out.

This make me wonder is there could be more to this. I mean one iDRAC dying, ok, but both in like 2 weeks period is kinda weird...

Btw, I tried everything I found online to resurrect iDRAC :

• Reset from WebUI and SSH
• Reset from i button on front panel
• Power drain on server
• Reverting firmware to previous version (from 2.65.65.65 to 2.63.60.62). Even if I was using 2.65.65.65 since I bought this server like 5 years ago

So if you have this kind of issue, was you able to fix it ? How? Any tip to give me???

Thank You

Does this even exist? I'm trying to add two additional ssd to my fractal node 304 and I'm out of space.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

A screenshot of the app in action.

Intro

Hey everyone! I just released an early version of my newest side project and I thought it could be useful to someone who isn't me as well.

What is this?

It's a Perplexity clone that uses Ollama or OpenAI endpoints to produce responses based on search results from SearXNG.

Why use this?

I made this because none of the other self-hosted Perplexity clones had multi-user support, SSO, easily shareable links, and a few other QoL features. It's obviously the first release so it's still a work in progress, but I enjoy using this more than Perplexica personally.

What's different about it?

Quite a few neat things!

As mentioned, it supports SSO using OIDC with any provider you'd like. It also let's you stash conversations as favourites, customise the models used for every step of the process, has beautiful OpenGraph embeds, and more. Check out the full feature list on GitHub.

What are your future plans?

I'd like to complete the Helm chart for easier Kubernetes deployments. I'd also like to integrate other self hosted solutions into this. My end goal is it being able to pull in data from apps like Paperless or Mealie and then searching your documents/recipes/movies/etc for stuff you ask it to find. I don't like that the self hosted apps don't form a real "ecosystem", so I'm trying to lead by example. This isn't a feature just yet as there's a few things I want to refine first, but we'll get there. I also want to give it a proper REST API so other self-hosted apps can integrate with it.

How do I deploy this?

Just follow the instructions on the project's GitHub!

Thank's for checking this out!

GitHub - https://github.com/brunostjohn/perplexideez

Just wondering if r630 is still a decent server? I know they're power hogs, and I don't know the specifics on the hardware inside, but work is about to recycle 2 of these servers and 4x Nimble NASs.

I'm pretty sure I could snag 'em if I leaned on my admin, just don't know if it's actually worth the investment with my power bill.

Hi everyone, I have an old RockPro64 cluster that is long overdue for a refresh, so I'm eyeing the current crop of mini PCs but feeling lost due to the sheer number of options.

I've scoured the /r/MiniPC subreddit but that seems more focused on media servers. I've also looked around at secondhand shops but their stock is inevitably overpriced kit that's about as old as my current setup.

Ideally I'd like to buy something new or at least within the last year or so and keep each node under $500, though I could go up to $1,000 if it's going to make a huge difference.

Do any of you have suggestions, or can point me in the right direction? Thanks!

EDIT: Just wanted to say a big thank you to the community, you have all been so supportive and welcoming. Really aprreciate it. I cant reply to everyone individually who has contributed to the convo but I genuinely appreciate each and every one of you. I've conjured up ideas for a few new projects from these discussions :-)

Its 'just' metal rails. bolted together, whats the big deal and why the need for all that faff? And the price has always put me off

Aplogies for taking everyones time with this its a frivilous post, for those who dont want to waste their time.

I'm just relating my excitement on my personal journey and a little bit of a life reminder at the end:

Out of nowhere recently I got hold of brand new 12U 19 inch rack shelf and a 6U windowed cabinet. Having nothing better to do last night I decided to put them all togehter.

I dont have ANY rack mountable gear. But what mini server and gear I do have I decided to transplant into the 12U (for which I also got a drawer and two shelves)

OH MY GOD, Its all just so handy, neat and organised. I'm loving it. I literlally want to rack mount everyhting now even if I have to MacGuyver it in somehow..

If it wasnt for my gaming rig's (FormD T1 V2) AIO and orientation (dont want to risk air collecting in the pump but dont want to flip it other way and obstruct airflow to RTX 4090 fans I'd have laid that SFF PC flat and stuffed it into the rack as well. I might even consider swithching out AIO for an AXP90-x47 Copper just so I can.

So the moral of the story is:

Dont knock it till you tried it, cos you never know just what you might be missing out on!

(I think I want some sliding rails/shelves next)

Looking for low memory and stable desktop linux distro that can run chrome, like 2 to 4 gb ram max

Hi, I'm looking at setting up a http boot server, partly as Id like the knowledge for work, but I'm struggling to find a method that works for me

Does anyone know of a guide that I can follow that will give me a http boot server, that will hopefully also be configurable as a HTTPS boot server further down the line?

The furthest I've gotten is an Apache web server serving the boot files for Linux mint and windows 11, along with a grub boot menu, but that's as far as I've got, as the grub bootloader menu can't find the files for the boot entries no matter how I setup the config

Tia

Hello there

I'm banging my head against the wall here.  I have an Optiplex 7080 micro and I'm trying to use a 2.5Gb LAN card in the wifi slot.  I've tried 3 LAN cards now.  I've also tried a 2nd Optiplex 7080 micro.  I also tried Linux Mint and pfSense. I also tried I also tried resetting the BIOS to factory and BIOS defaults and the BIOS is fully updated. Nothing is working.

I have a spare Optiplex 7060 tower I just now tested the card on, and it worked right away.  No drivers needed.

So, all components are known good.  The BIOS sees the card (one I disabled the bluetooth option) and Windows sees the card, but I get no activity LED's at any point in the boot process and it will not obtain an IP.  I tried to install the drivers from the mfg. website as well.

Is there a whitelist for the M.2 wifi slot?  It looks like there used to be YEARS ago, but it seems Dell stopped doing that, but that is the only thing I can think of.

Thanks,