Been slowly cleaning up my homelab and getting everything into a setup that makes more sense. The office side is finally pretty close to where I want it.

Current hardware:

• DeskPi RackMate T0 4U rack
• 2x Lenovo M720q
  • One running Proxmox
  • One dedicated to OPNsense bare metal
• UniFi USW-Lite-8-PoE in the office
• UniFi USW-Lite-16-PoE in the garage
• 2x UniFi U7 Lite APs — one upstairs and one downstairs
• HPE DL380 Gen9 in the garage running Proxmox Backup Server
• Raspberry Pi 3 running a secondary AdGuard instance
• CyberPower GX1500U UPS
• WD Elements storage
• Spectrum 1Gb

The M720q running Proxmox is currently at 3 VMs and 3 LXCs, so I still have plenty of room to add more.

Currently running AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Overseerr, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, qBittorrent, NGINX Proxy Manager, Uptime Kuma, UniFi Network, Mealie, Tailscale and Proxmox Backup Server.

One of the more interesting parts of the setup is the networking. The Spectrum modem and basically all of the Ethernet runs for the house terminate in the garage, but I wanted OPNsense and the rest of the small rack in my office.

There is only one Ethernet run between the garage and office, so I use VLANs to carry both WAN and LAN traffic over that same cable. The modem connects to an isolated WAN VLAN on the 16-port UniFi switch in the garage, which gets trunked over to the 8-port switch in the office and handed off to OPNsense.

The LAN side of OPNsense then goes back into the office switch, and the LAN/VLANs are trunked back over the same cable to the 16-port switch in the garage. From there it feeds the Ethernet runs throughout the house.

Basically the one cable between the office and garage carries the WAN to OPNsense and the LAN back from it, while keeping them separated with VLANs.

Wi-Fi is handled by two U7 Lites, one upstairs and one downstairs.

The DL380 is way more server than I need running 24/7, so I have it set up as my PBS box. It automatically powers on every night, runs the backups, and shuts itself back down afterward.

I also put together the Homepage dashboard in the second picture so I can see most of the important stuff in one place.

Still a work in progress. Next thing on the agenda is to build a NAS so I'm not relying on this external HD.

Pretty happy with how it's coming together so far. Anything you guys would change or add?

I want to drop the floor of it so it can stay under the 1u height at the bottom. Has anyone else ever tried something like this? Needed to take off the corner posts from the bottom to put the tray in, but it fit!

Been rebuilding my setup for days. Cheapest way possible.

Full review here: https://www.igorslab.de/en/waveshare-homerack-review/

I'm working on the next release of CageMaker PRCG - version 0.7 - and did something to it that the minilab community might like...

I managed to get a mount working for small SBCs in the Raspberry Pi form factor. It should fit any 85x58mm SBC with mounting holes on 49x58mm centers with holes 3.5mm in from the corners and 23.5mm from the edge where the USB/network sockets are mounted, which is most of the RPi family and a number of other SBCs, e.g. Odroid C-series, Pine64, etc. Mounting holes are through-mount, sized for M2 thread-cutting/tapping, and can be bored out to M2.5 if/as desired - 6mm long should be about perfect.

The update will have horizontal orientation and two vertical orientations based on socket positions relative to PCB, right and left, and sufficient gap for cooling. Horizontal will stack three wide within 1U on a 10" rack, and vertical will stack seven wide within 2U on a 10" rack, so the clustering crews out there can get their rackmounts on.

CageMaker treats these as faceplate modifications so they can be moved around on the faceplate, combined with ventilation grids, etc. etc. etc. There's also a new provision in this build for having a solid faceplate with mods with a cage so it'll be possible to make a ventilated rack enclosure with Pis stuffed into it and still have tons of space for heat removal.

Picture time!

Test rack generation in OpenSCAD
Size checking in Blender with reference RPi boards for dimension checking
Test rack generation in OpenSCAD Playground on Firefox
And just for shiggles, a preview of CageMaker PRCG 0.7

This will be part of the version 0.7 update (which is going to be another big one!) to CageMaker PRCG, and the Github repo has a test build up on the experimental branch if anyone wants to play around with it.

Hey I am working on software in the lighting and entertainment industry. And one of the goals is to also have a headless server mode.
I want to have a small (thinkcentre tiny) pc with a lp quad Ethernet card ( I have one laying around) and I want to know how to look out for thinkcentre Tinie’s that are pcie compatible.

How do I know? I am currently looking at a used M720Q, which seems compatible. I do not really care about ram or ssd capacity, I just need a cpu and at least 4 Ethernet interfaces. Any suggestions?

Looking around it seems like most of you are just placing an Unify dish style AP on top of your rack and calling it a day.

Is anyone aware of a better alternative designed around the 10 inch 1U form factor?

I’ve been looking for a UPS that can fit inside my 10 inch rack.

I found a candidate that seems almost perfect:
Eaton Ellipse ECO 650 USB DIN.
Dimensions: 81 × 235 × 263 mm

Power-wise, it seems good enough for a small rack setup
The annoying part: it almost fits, but I’m missing about 4.5mm on each side.

I’m thinking about designing a custom 3U bottom frame for it, with the UPS shelf and front panel built into the bottom of the rack. Weight stays low, side plates could handle airflow/fans, and the UPS would hopefully still be removable.

The weak point is the side fastening area. Because of the UPS width, the nut depth may leave only around 2.7mm, which feels very tight for a printed structural part.

Questions:

- do you think it worth designing around?
- Any better ideas for the side/leg/nut structure?
- Any better UPS alternatives that actually fit inside a 10-inch rack?

I know I can just put the UPS next to the rack, but I’m trying to keep the whole thing clean and self-contained. Curious how others would approach it cuz I know that its an ongoing issue..

Just got my 2nd HP mini in today. I read online that I could use a raspberry pi as a QDevice/3rd vote for a 2 node HA cluster. Or should I just get another HP mini and have a triple stack HA cluster? That would also look more aesthetically pleasing.

I have to buy the 3rd device for whatever I end up choosing. Does one have a benefit/drawback over the other? The first node is a HP Elite Mini 800 G9 i7 12700T 16GB DDR5 ram 512gb, second is a HP ProDesk 600 G6 i5 10500T 64GB DDR4 ram 256gb. Right now I have them setup as a 2 node cluster but don’t want to start doing anything until the 3rd device.

Main Router - JCG Q20 OPENWRT

Main Switch - Netgear Pro Safe Plus GS108E

Dns - Orange Pi One (not in the stack yet)

I've been rebuilding my home for the past few days to practice networking and to prepare for some job interview finally graduated lol.

Total cost btw = 1540 php (orange pi excluded)

Currently im running;

Intel NUC with i5 processor and 32gb of memory: this used to be my game server. Right now its just sitting in my Rack because im now running;

Custom mini pc with ryzen 7 5700g. 32gb of memory and 40tb of storage running an AMP server on proxmox: this has become my new game server but I feel like its not enough cpu and memory for any other images besides amp considering amp is also running containers of game servers. But 40tb of storage is crazy.

My synology nas 9xx 4 bay with 16gb of memory and about 30tb of storage. This is my plex media server running a bunch of ARR apps and sabnzbd. Homepage and proxymanager.

I feel like maybe the custom mini pc is doing too little with too much or maybe has too much overhead with proxmox to really be a VM server. Depending on what game servers I put on it (palworld is the most intense so far) but would running a second plex server be a bad idea? Or should I still keep it for running vms and just add more memory to it?

I want to put my M4 mac mini in my 10" rack BUT... the mac mini power button in at the bottom of the unit so it would become basically impossible to reach. Has anybody done this? What are your recommendations?

Hey, I have fallen down the rabbit hole that is minilabs. Coming from a non-tech background (I'm a bedside RN) so I've been trying to learn more about healthcare informatics/Linux and start to self-house some stuff. I am putting together a plan and making this post to get feed back on my plan.

Network / rack

• I think i am going to use a 10 in Tech Mojo 6U Rack with various 3d printed device mounting plates
• Unifi Express 7 
• UniFi Switch Flex 2.5G 8 PoE + Flex Mini
  • Planning on getting cameras and APs eventually (2+ years away)
• JetKVM access to the headless Macs during setup/troubleshooting
• Apple TV 4K, 

The “offline” learning environment 

• 2018 Mac Mini (Intel, i5/i7 6-core, w/ 16GB+ RAM / 500GB SSD) that I have laying around
• My plan was going to flashing Linux onto it via the t2linux project
• This will have to two main jobs: run something like Project Nomad
  • want it mostly for fun and when the kids are older eventually teach them computer stuff without a full internet connection
• Second job: a VM sandbox to learn SQL and basic data analytics using something like Synthea for synthetic patient data 
  •  I'm considering a Master's in nursing informatics, so this is a low-stakes way to see if I actually enjoy that kind of work before committing to a degree

For the home server part

• Mac Mini M4 (holding off buying — looking for a good used one on facebook marketplace or ebay)
  • I would like to stay in the Apple ecosystem if possible just due to everyone in the household already runs MacBooks/iPads/iPhones, 
    • It would also doubles as a Time Machine target
• Docker containers: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Pi-hole/AdGuard, Immich
• Storage: starting with 2x Samsung T7 Shield SSDs as DAS (poor man's NAS via macOS File Sharing), planning to move to 2x4TB NAS-rated HDDs in RAID1 in a proper DAS enclosure once I outgrow that — at which point the T7s get repurposed as network Time Machine backups for our laptops

Equipment that is just sitting on the bench

• Spare Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) — undecided, thinking about making it into a retro gaming system using RetroPie OS
• Pi Zero 2 — have no major plans for it yet. 

Any feedback on the following or anything else be greatly appreciated

1. Anything dumb or inefficient about running Jellyfin/Home Assistant/Pi-hole/Immich all in Docker on one M4 Mac Mini with T7 storage in the short term?
2. Any "wish I knew this before I started" advice for someone this early in the learning curve?

Thanks for reading the wall of text, just trying to get as much right as possible before I start actually pulling the trigger on some of these bigger purchases.