This started as a small project I'd been wanting to do for over a year. Something always came up, and I knew once I started, I wanted to take the time and make the investment to do it right the first time.

I spent about four months collecting equipment and planning, then completed the physical build over three weekends — entirely as a one-man job.

The Goal

The main goal was to hardwire as many devices as possible and build a proper foundation for my home network, media server, storage, self-hosted services, and future lab environment.

That meant much more than mounting a cabinet. I ran Ethernet through the walls, added wall jacks and a 6-port Ethernet faceplate in the bedroom, and used paintable raceway along the baseboards where in-wall runs weren't practical.

I also installed cable-management boxes in the closet and above the cabinets to keep everything clean.

Cable management was a huge priority. My philosophy was basically:

Cry once and do it right the first time.

Everything is routed, secured, and clearly labeled so I'm not tracing mystery cables six months from now.

The Build

I originally planned on one Tecmojo 12U wall-mount cabinet, but quickly realized the NAS was too tall and consumed too much valuable rack space. Rather than cram everything together, I pivoted and added a second 6U cabinet.

I mounted plywood to the wall for additional support and painted it to match the room — luckily I still had paint left from a few years ago.

12U Main Cabinet

• Rapink 24-Port Cat6A Inline Keystone Patch Panel — 10G support
• UniFi USW Pro Max 16 PoE
• UniFi UCG Max
• Dell OptiPlex Micro 7010 — 13th Gen i5-13400T
• CyberPower OR700LCDRM1U rackmount UPS
• 9-outlet rackmount PDU / surge protector

6U Cabinet

• MINISFORUM N5 Air 5-Bay NAS — AMD Ryzen 7
• Netgear CM2000 modem
• Philips Hue Bridge

The network is now built around UniFi, with separate VLANs for production servers, Lab/testing, IoT, trusted devices, and guests.

Storage + Production Server

I have a large media library, so I specifically wanted storage and compute separated rather than having one machine responsible for everything.

The N5 Air runs Unraid and serves as the NAS/storage platform. The long-term goal is to keep it focused primarily on storage, shares, backups, and core data-related services.

The Dell OptiPlex runs Proxmox VE and is the production compute/application server. Its i5-13400T also gives me Intel Quick Sync for Jellyfin hardware transcoding.

The philosophy is simple:

Storage owns the data. Compute consumes the data.

That separation also means I can maintain or upgrade applications without unnecessarily messing with the machine, protecting my data.

What's Running

Proxmox currently handles:

• Jellyfin Server via LXC
• Production VMs/LXCs
• Future application and utility workloads

Unraid currently handles/supports:

• Centralized storage and network shares
• Proxmox backup/storage targets
• Immich
• Nextcloud
• MariaDB
• Nginx Proxy Manager
• Homepage
• Uptime Kuma
• Beszel monitoring
• Tailscale

Some of those applications will eventually move to Proxmox as I continue separating storage workloads from compute workloads.

What's Next?

The next addition will be a cheap sub-$100 mini PC dedicated entirely to the Lab VLAN.

That's where I can experiment with Linux, Docker, LXC, VMs, networking, VLANs, automation, Kubernetes, and new self-hosted applications without experimenting on production.

Basically:

Production stays stable. The Lab gets permission to break.

I'm also planning a dedicated Home Assistant setup running Home Assistant OS. I haven't decided on the hardware yet, but the Hue Bridge is already in place and will eventually become part of the larger smart-home environment.

Longer term, I'll continue improving backups/off-site protection, monitoring, security, authentication, documentation, and disaster recovery.

The Little Things That Made a Big Difference

Some of the least expensive parts ended up being just as important as the servers:

NBTORCH hook-and-loop roll • CrocSee cable sleeves • paintable raceway • Trilancer cable labels • 4/6-port Ethernet wall plates • cable-management boxes • plywood backing • and a ridiculous amount of patience.

What started as “I want to build a NAS and clean up my network” turned into two wall-mounted cabinets, structured Ethernet, UniFi networking, VLANs, Unraid storage, Proxmox compute, Jellyfin, self-hosted services, monitoring, UPS protection, and the foundation for a dedicated test lab.

Three weekends. One person. Lots of planning. Even more cable.

Still a work in progress, but the foundation is finally where I wanted it.

Hi everyone! I’d like to introduce my first homelab rack and overall setup as a sysadmin / network engineer, and I'd love to hear your feedback.

Rack Setup:
Rack: 10" 8U GeeekPi
Display: 2U GeeekPi touchscreen display
Firewall: FortiGate 40F
Switch: UniFi 8P 60W PoE
Patch Panel: Digitus CAT6
PVE 1: Dell OptiPlex / i3-10100T / 128GB DDR4 / 512GB NVMe SSD / 1TB 2.5" SSD
PVE 2: HP ProDesk / i3-4570T / 16GB DDR3 / 500GB 2.5" SSD
NAS: Synology located in the bottom U. Since it couldn't fit into the rack out of the box, I disassembled it and fabricated custom mounting brackets.
PDU: 2x Digitus

Cabling & Power:
Custom-length patch cords color-coded by VLAN.
All power and data cabling is neatly routed inside the rack.
Only a single power cable exits the entire rack.
Total power consumption: ~70W

Software & Services:
Running Proxmox VE hypervisor with various LXC containers and VMs:
Hosting ~20 WordPress sites including databases
Zabbix + Grafana integration for system monitoring
Windows Server 2025
UniFi Controller
Nginx Proxy Manager
Homepage dashboard (displaying PVE and PBS metrics directly on the rack screen)
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) for automated backups
AdGuard Home
Vaultwarden
Personal wiki for documentation / internal know-how
Private cloud storage infrastructure

Project Goal:
The goal of this build was to merge my personal hosting environment for a small business with a home lab testing environment. Combined with a custom desk, Lenovo ThinkVision monitors, and a Lenovo Docking Station, the target was to connect everything to my laptop using just one Thunderbolt cable for full connectivity across the entire infrastructure.
What do you think of this setup? Anything you would improve or change?

I have decided to let me registration of the domain expire in a few weeks and not renew. I ended up not using it. It’s basically 192.168 in hexadecimal and I was going to use it for my homelab network.

I will coordinate to transfer the domain FREE to you if you’re interested. The only cost to you would be to renew it. Ideally it would be easiest for me to transfer it to someone already using Cloudflare since that’s where I have it registered.

My apologies if this is against the rules. I just would hate for this to get parked or squatted when someone wants to use it for their homelab.

UPDATE: Sorry, it’s been transferred!!

It’s been a multi month rabbit hole updating my network for 10G backbone while building out my NAS and compute node (100G direct link). Sourcing was almost all second hand on [r/homelabsales](r/homelabsales), FBM and eBay (plus random finds at home!).

I mainly wanted to play with serving NVMe over RDMA using both NFS or direct NVMe serving.

That’s working well and after I got Immich and plex setup, I’ve been toying with VMs. Got a windows VM running fusion360 and blender for some mechanical projects now.

Pictures show my two towers where they live under my desk where I work every day. The NAS was a fresh build but I repurposed a threadripper tower and watercooling system and put an EPYC 7H12 and a 3090 Ti in there.

There’s a small N355 sitting on top which serves as DNS, MQTT, and lab dashboard fallback if NAS is down. It also scrapes Prometheus from everyone, including a colocated node for data redundancy.

The networking at the desk is a bunch of microtik switches (mainly the one with 8 SFP ports, CRS309 but I have hex for all the IPMIs). And finally there’s a legrange/onQ nook where the core UniFi network lives.

Overall, I’m pretty happy. Runs quiet - I can turn everthing off all the way with the Shelly switches. It’s been a fun platform for random side projects and websites. Probably gonna sit tight on the hardware side unless I look at upgrade the UniFi switches to the Flex POE++.

Edit: also, one fun build challenge was that the Mellanox cards ran hot! Especially the 100Gb ones. Nothing a zip tied fan couldn’t handle tho

Been slowly rebuilding and migrating my media server over the last few weeks from Windows to Unraid. Finally starting to feel finished — if we’re ever actually finished.

I originally ran the media server on Windows... on my gaming PC. Eventually I got to the point where a single media folder was almost as large as my biggest HDD, so something had to be done.

Luckily (I tell my wife), I still had my old gaming PC and all of its components conveniently lying around, so that became the foundation for the new Unraid server.

I’m by no means a technical genius, but over the years I’ve learned a lot from building gaming PCs, troubleshooting software, and generally just figuring out how to make things work.

Setting up Unraid, migrating my media stack, and configuring Plex, all the *arrs, etc. was surprisingly straightforward — and honestly a lot of fun.

The only major problem I ran into was discovering that one of my old RAM sticks was faulty. Unfortunately, I figured that out after wasting about two days transferring data.

So for anyone thinking about going down this route anytime soon:

Run extensive MemTest86 tests before you start transferring data!

The hardware:

• Fractal Design Define R5
• Intel i9-10900K
• Intel Arc A310 (new)
• 32 GB DDR4 RAM (new)
• LSI 9300-8i HBA in IT mode (new)
• Gigabyte Z490 AORUS Elite AC
• Mix of new/refurbished HDDs — 102 TB usable + 28 TB parity
• 2.5 GbE networking
• EVGA 850 GQ PSU

It’s been a fun journey so far, and I have a feeling it’s really only just starting.

tl;dr: fell down the rabbit hole

- Mac mini 2014 500gb hdd
- Aluminum heatsink just sitting on it
- usb dock to easily plug keyboard and stuff
- smol switch
- hue bridge
- Apple TV for the TV
- 3x hdd 500gb

Hdd rack connected and mounted with random aliexpress part. I still haven’t a power cord for the psu.

It runs on macOS cause I’m too lazy to install and use linux.

Services :
- Odysseus (with api)
- Jellyfin
- Adguard
- Navidrome
- Dawarich
- Home assistant
- Monica

So that means on subscriptions I save per month :
- Spotify : 0$ idk who was paying for my account
- Anthropic : 100$ gave up on some token hungry projects. Now using nemotron 120b
- Netflix 20$
- Crunchyroll 10$

Currently working on a way to connect my phone in Lora to my own antenna to cancel my mobile internet plan (40$). After that it would come to a total of 170$ saved per month

Cost of what I had to buy :
- some cables ~5$
- psu, rack and connector for hdd ~ 20$
- power cord and adapter for psu ~20$

Before you mention it, I hate cable management, I hate cables, might randomly zip tie it all.

I found an old ssd from a retired pc from work and put it in my R230.

Proxmox saw the EFI/NTFS partitions so before wiping it I figured… why not?

Created a new VM, passed the entire SSD through as a SATA disk, and hit start.

Windows showed “getting ready” for a min, while I was thinking no way is this about to boot….

Then straight to the windows login screen! Lmao

I generally cannot believe it worked the first try haha.
I was so excited I didn’t take a picture of the login screen so you’ll have to trust me lol.

One of the rules of homelab is: do not host mail. What about outbound emails though?

What about some services that can send emails? This is mostly about invites, notifications, links, etc. I invited a friend of mine to my tailnet, and just want to send him a link to reset his password on my authentik instance. Or, seerr has invitations.

I know that serving mail is PITA, so I'm trying to avoid it. But mail providers range from huge email providers (Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES) to small-ish ones (SMTP2GO, Brevo).

What are you using and why?

EDIT (after 30 minutes): I have 50 answers now, and I swear, there are no two recommendations that are the same!

Todo comenzó por una cuenta simple.

En octubre de 2025 tenía que renovar Microsoft 365 por unos US$105 al año. Cuando pensé qué usaba realmente en casa, la respuesta era principalmente OneDrive para guardar fotografías.

Y desde que nació mi hija, esas fotos valen oro.

Al mismo tiempo tenía varios discos duros guardados, así que apareció la pregunta:

¿Por qué seguir pagando almacenamiento todos los años si podía construir mi propia nube?

Los primeros intentos no resultaron: un PC reacondicionado murió a los tres días, una Raspberry Pi 4 terminó limitada por la cantidad de discos USB y un notebook usado como servidor comenzó a mostrar problemas de temperatura.

Ese notebook finalmente lo vendí por US$260

El 16 de abril de 2026 llegó el equipo que realmente inició todo: un HP ProDesk 600 G4 SFF, i5-8500, 8 GB de RAM y HDD de 1 TB, comprado por US$105.

Lo llamé Mateo.

Le instalé un SSD que tenía guardado, amplié su RAM, agregué discos y, sobre Windows y Docker, instalé Immich.

Objetivo cumplido: mis fotos estaban en casa.

Pero aparecieron nuevas preguntas.

¿Cómo acceder desde fuera? Tailscale.
¿Qué pasa si falla un disco? Backup.
¿Y si falla el equipo completo? Otra copia fuera de casa.

El 6 de mayo llegó un segundo equipo: un Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny comprado usado por US$90.

Lo llamé Tomás, porque sería el laboratorio: ver para creer.

Con ambos equipos aparecieron Proxmox, máquinas virtuales, Docker, PostgreSQL, Python, automatizaciones y Beszel.

Y el 27 de mayo llegó probablemente el cambio más importante: Hermes Agent.

Desde Telegram podía pedir revisiones, instalaciones, investigaciones o comprobaciones sin tener que sentarme frente al servidor.

Pasé de operar el HomeLab a administrarlo por objetivos. Con el tiempo Hermes se convirtió en nuestro Jarvis.

Después simplifiqué la arquitectura: las VMs estaban consumiendo demasiada RAM en sistemas operativos y reservas innecesarias, así que migré a Debian bare-metal + Docker.

Finalmente, la electricidad definió los roles.

Hoy Mateo es el Lenovo Tiny: i5-9500T, 16 GB RAM, NVMe de 512 GB y Debian. Es producción y permanece encendido 24/7.

Tomás es el HP ProDesk: i5-8500, 32 GB RAM, NVMe y varios discos. Es respaldo, almacenamiento y laboratorio, por lo que no necesita estar encendido todo el día.

El costo eléctrico estimado de ambos ronda los US$53 al año, aproximadamente la mitad de la antigua suscripción.

Y económicamente tampoco fue una locura:

• Notebook vendido: +US$260
• Monitor vendido: +US$10
• ProDesk: −US$105
• Tiny: −US$90

Antes de mejoras posteriores, todavía quedaban US$75 a favor.

Todo comenzó intentando ahorrar una suscripción.

Terminó convirtiéndose en una infraestructura propia, prácticamente sin inversión inicial neta, con menor costo recurrente y con algo mucho más importante:

las fotos y recuerdos de mi hija están bajo mi control y respaldados.

Al final, eso era exactamente lo que quería conseguir.

TL;DR: Learned how to automate SSL certificates in my homelab. Read on if you’re bored haha.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to showcase my very normal homelab

I recycled my dad's old computer (2011) which originally had

FX-4100

gt - (forgot) so old that it couldn't be used for hardware acceleration

ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0

8gb of DDR3 RAM

at the time I got it I harvested a 480gb SSD from a laptop

it ran fine for a while and then I noticed I needed to know what it felt like. I needed to know why ollama would time out. I needed.. power

2026 upgrade

Ryzen 5 5600

GTX 1660

thermal right peerless assassin 120 SE

Asus b450 (maybe I'm not sure)

didn't change original 500W PSU

added 2 hard drives which might be failing

I need to know how to get cheap hard drives and quickly ..

Hey guys I Googled this phobos and was linked to this sub sorry if I'm breaking any rules, I got all these switches and phobos thing for free. They all work, I don't know anything about home labs I only have a small gig switch for connecting extra stuff into my Internet. If you were given this what would you do ? What can I do ? Picture edited to hide messy house

If I do get it, gonna rip out all the parts and just use the case

The Cavium CN6640-SNIC10E is a dual-port 10GbE PCIe card that shows up on eBay for ~$15–20. It's an OEM "SmartNIC," an 8-core Octeon II SoC meant to run Cavium's vendor LiquidIO firmware. Problem: the stock liquidio driver basically doesn't work with these OEM boards (its flash-handshake boot model doesn't match), and secondhand cards tend to have bootloaders in a rough state. There's a good writeup of people hitting a wall on this back in 2021 on the OpenWrt forums. Both PCIe BARs would read back all-0xFF and the board looked architecturally dead as anything but LiquidIO.

Turns out that "BAR wall" is just unprogrammed PEM inbound registers, not a hardware limit. You can program them from the card side with plain u-boot write64 (no firmware needed) and open a full bidirectional PCIe channel.

On top of that I built:

- an OpenWrt image that runs on the card from RAM (nothing flashed, fully reversible)

- a reverse-engineered PCIe BAR2 shared-memory datapath between host and card

- an out-of-tree host kernel module (octnic) that registers the card as two independent Linux NICs, oct0/oct1

Result: line-rate 10GbE, TX at 9.7–9.8 Gb/s (zero-copy), RX at 8.1–8.8 Gb/s (DMA via the Octeon DPI engine), both ports live simultaneously on a DAC. Boots with no serial cable after a one-time provisioning step. A systemd service brings both NICs up automatically at boot, so day to day it's just a normal 10GbE card as far as the rest of the homelab is concerned.

No vendor NDA firmware anywhere in the stack, host OS untouched, and the whole thing is undoable if you want the card back to stock.

Repo (driver, boot tooling, docs): https://github.com/nicologiuliani6/cavium-cn6640-snic10e-octeon-ii-nic

Docs cover architecture, first-time flashing/provisioning over serial, usage, and full performance numbers if anyone wants to reproduce this on their own card.

Happy to answer questions. This took a fair bit of reverse engineering to get past the BAR wall so ask away if you're stuck on one of these boards.

If you want to help out (test on your own board, contribute code, whatever) open an issue or discussion on the repo. If you'd like to support the project, GitHub Sponsors is enabled there too. https://github.com/sponsors/nicologiuliani6

Tried out self hosting on an old Lenovo thinkpad a few weeks ago. Things escalated quickly. Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber coming tomorrow along with 2 Unifi U7 APs to replace the current deco mesh

Yo, I've currently got a HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF running as my home server, I upgraded it with 16GB RAM, and it currently has 2.75 TB of storage. Currently being used as a NAS, Media Server and Minecraft Server (via pterodactyl)

I wanna ask what I can use it for other than that. I really love this stuff and I wanna do more. My current plan is to add an RTX 3050 that will be powered via only the PCIE slot. Gonna use that to run this little AI I made. Got any recommendations on what to self host? Already replaced Google Drive, Netflix and Paid Minecraft Hosts.

But I wanna do more. Thx Reddit

I wanted to share a prototype 5.4TB build I put together using parts I had in the office.

I have a collection of photos 2.7TB, stored across old offline external drives. Recently, one of those drives suffered corruption and bit rot. I wanted proper bit rot protection and an organized archive, but running a full 24/7 RAID array felt like overkill and too power hungry for family photos only access occasionally.

After reading an article on HackerNoon about using archive tiering for cold data and ransomware defense, I found HuskHoard an open source archive app, it has a bit rot detector built in! And it works with SMR drives. r/huskhoard I decided to test a low power, automated tiering prototype on a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Hardware Setup (The Junk Drawer Special)

Compute: Raspberry Pi Zero W (ARM 32 bit Fast/Active Tier: 250GB SATA SSD via USB adaper Cold Storage Tier: 4x external 2.5" drives connected to a powered USb hub:

Pi Zero W 2.0 TB CMR 2.0 TB SMR I bought this and was unable to return it 800 GB CMR 600 GB CMR Total Cost: $0 (all spare components)

How the System Works

1. Frontend / Active Tier The Pi exposes a standard directory on the 250GB SSD where all files logically appear to live. I have it set up as a SMB share server.
2. Automated Tiering: HuskHoard monitors file access and activity. When cold data passes an inactivity threshold, the payload is transparently moved from the fast SSD to one of the spinning 2.5" drives.
3. File Stubbing: When a file is migrated a lightweight metadata stub remains in the filesystem. To the OS/user, all 2.7TB of photos look locally resident. When a cold file is accessed, it pulls from the archive on demand. So it looks like 2.7Tb of files on a 250Gb drive!
4. Power Efficiency: In typical day to day use, only the SSD is active, and only one mechanical drive spins up at a time when reading/writing cold data.

Technical Hurdles and Lessons Learned

1. Custom Pi OS Kernel (fanotify)

The archive relies on Linux fanotify filesystem monitoring to track file activity and handle transparent recalls. The stock 32 bit Raspberry Pi OS kernel didn't have all the required fanotify features enabled by default, so I had to rebuild/compile a custom kernel on the Pi to get it running.

1. USB Hub Brownouts & Migration Throttling

While the archive normally writes from the SSD to one drive at a time, bulk ingesting my initial 2.7TB library forced multiple drives to spin simultaneously. The generic powered USB hub suffered voltage drops/brownouts

workaround: I wrote a staging script that copies batches to the SSD, pauses to let the power settle, and stages the migration to the archive drives sequentially. (A beefier 12V/5V power supply is already ordered).

1. 32 bit ARM File Size Limitation

I ran into a hard file size limit of 2.4GB on the 32 bit ARM architecture. I tested the same configuration on an old x86 64 laptop, and the limit disappeared completely. If you are archiving large 4K video files, stick to 64 bit systems.

What’s Next

This Pi Zero setup served as a successful proof of concept. I've since tested the setup on an old x86 64 laptop with zero issues. My next plan is to build a permanent, proper disk array with a dedicated backplane and 3.5" drives to serve as my permanent cold storage home vault.

Happy to answer any questions about the setup, the kernel compile, or how the archive behaves in practice!

Party in the front Chopped in the back. Gonna setup 3 proxmox nodes( bottom 3) , 3rd node will own the jbod zfs. core switch with 3 vlans Managment data and WiFi. That trendnet switch is for zfs data which I need to add sfp+ nics to the servers and a DAC cables to the trendnet switch. In the middle I’m not doing anything with that Cisco switch but above it I plan to play around with the asa see what I can learn from it. Lenovo for an end device. Idk what imma do with the pi yet. Above that is my true Nas server for personal storage. And that at the top is my router I use when I need to plug the homelab into my home router,with nat setup, for updates and downloads.

Hi! I have been struggling with cpu fan configuration for the past week, trying to stop it from ramping up randomly.

Right now the cpu is idling at 27-30 degrees, and this causes ipmi to freak out, because noctua fan is going as low as 200 rpm. I am running proxmox ve on the nas, with truenas scale set up as a vm with nextcloud inside.

I tried lowering the threshold for the fan failure with ipmitool, setting it to 0 100 200 for lnr lcr lnc but I still get the occasional ramping up of the cpu fan. It’s not as bad as it was with default thresholds but still annoying and spams in the logs. It’s happening every hour or so.

I’ve noticed that when this happens, FAN1 reports as 0 rpm briefly. Does that mean the fan itself is faulty?

The system specifications are:

Xeon E5-2697Av4
Noctua NH-U12DX i4
Supermicro X10SRI-F
Random Hynix ram I had 32 GB DDR4 ECC @ 2400
Fractal Design Define R2 XL
2x WD Blue 2TB
1x Teamgroup 1TB ssd

EDIT: I ultimately chose the https://github.com/petersulyok/smfc and it works wonders!

My homelab is a Fortigate 90G, Fortiswitch 110G and a 108F.
HP Microserver gen10 which I love. Cheers have fun

It finally happened to me. Ordered 2 drives and got 4 instead. About $25/TB turned into $12.6/TB. 5 year warranty on all of them. Being added to my 140TB server :)

I'm extremely new to the homelab journey, but here are some photos of my progress so far. I have built a Tecmojo 12U rack on top of an end table with a 4U rack mounted desktop, which is going to become my NAS, above that is a 1U CAT 6a patch panel, above that is my Unify 24-port non-POE switch from Ubiquity, then I have a 1U PDU and that's it. The rack mounted desktop is an old Dell Optiplex 7010 that has a 3rd gen i7 processor, 32GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB SATA SSD. My goal is to get the system running for now, and then eventually upgrade some of the equipment. I am also going to run a Raspberry Pi 5 for Piehole and I have a laptop with Ubuntu, and another one that I'm installing Proxmox onto. I also plan on setting up Kiro on a machine so that I can experiment with AI. I'm also running a dedicated line of GFiber into the room to experiment with networking as well. I'll post updates and questions as I go, but so far things are working out fairly well with the set up.