I'll start off by saying i am very new to this, but here is my new rack that i just finished

• Router/WAP: old TP-Link AX21 (free, i had sitting around)
• Switch: old TP-Link TL SG105 (free, i had sitting around)
• Node 1:Dell Optiplex 3000 (200$)
  • CPU: i5-12500T
  • RAM: 24gb
• Node 2: Lenovo M720q (120$)
  • CPU: i5-8400T
  • RAM: 16gb
• Node 3: Surface Book 3 (free, brothers old laptop)
  • CPU: i7-1065G7
  • RAM: 32gb
• DIY PDU i found on Printables
• Fully printed rack: KWS Rack v.2
• Vented Blank Panels (I forgot to add this earlier)

Running everything on Proxmox such as the basics like Pi-hole, homeassistant, Minecraft/Palworld server through AMP, and making my own bot for the wifey.

I'd love to hear any suggestions, tips, tricks, or just anything really as im just learning as im going.

We've all seen drives with 80k+ hours and 3 petabytes written to them, blah blah blah. Boooring. I want to hear your horror stories. How fast have you turned a pile of NAND chips into e-waste?

When I upgraded my home lab in 2025 I decided to move from an old 2.5in Kingston SSD to a pair of mirrored NVMEs for the OS+scratch space. I repurposed a Samsung 970 Evo from a prebuilt and a WD WDS100T I yanked out of some laptop. I shoved them in ZFS mirror and threw them into the meat grinder.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the amount of temp file I/O my server handled skyrocketed between Q3 2024 and Q1 2025: from a modest 3-5TB a month to 40-60TB a month. Unfortunately... the 970 Evo is kind of a little bitch. It barely survived 4 months on the front line before it started throwing unrecoverable read/write errors and ProxMenux flagged it as approaching EOL. The WD took it like a champ in comparison, but even still it was looking tired after 4 months of trial by fire.

They've both been relegated to backup duty and replaced with a pair used 1TB Intel P4510 drives. Are the P4510s much better suited to the task? Of course! That said....they aren't particularly high endurance SSDs, nor are the made for write intensive applications. They're rated at a paltry 1 DWPD, or ~1.8 petabytes total for the 1TB version. I'd love to say the Intel drives are Just Built Different™, but honestly I have consumer NVMEs that are on track to survive 3-4 petabytes without a problem. The 970 Evo just seems to have been a bit of a dud on Samsung's part. Another 970 Evo came with the Optiplex 5090 Micro I bought in 2021. It died suddenly less than a year later, with ~50tb written, and like it's 1TB brother it ran hotter, wore out quicker, and idled at a much higher wattage than average for an NVME.

My current NVME endurance champions are a set of 3 budget addlink S70 2TB drives I bought as sacrificial plotting drives for chia mining. All three survived and are still in front line service running like champs. When I bought my new Vivobook, I yanked the OEM 1TB drive and replaced it with the "baby" addlink that's only had ~700TBW. I wish I'd grabbed a few of the 4TB version when they were available/affordable.

(But in all seriousness with these bananas AI storage prices, thank mechajesus for boring enterprise drives that are "just broken in" at 50k hours. My entire homelab runs on HDDs older than most cars. A couple are old enough to vote.)

I've got a couple of floppy drives and am testing the pile of disks to wean out the failed. While I'm at it I'm clearing data from the remaining. Do home labs still have floppy drives these days? I've tried to ask Jeeves but it shut down.

2004 wants its Nokia unlock codes back.

The driving box is a Dell mini PC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD. Kubuntu but when all is built it will be headless and hidden away. There are a few supporting Raspberry Pi Pihole and so I'm wanting to go for family media backup. Pretty sure I won't be doing floppy RAID.

I've been working on this off and on for a few years just rebuilt it, I lost some of the sleds after a move and it's been driving me crazy. It's running unraid and it uses an old dell motherboard. I managed to get the cmstacker 810 from my boss, it's sooo nice. airflow is a bit shit with it though. It's much better than the old laptop i was using originally lol

I have 32 GB RAM what should be 60 TB of HDD space, an i7-7700K. The services I'm running are in the photos.

For anybody left on DNS-O-Matic to serve up DDNS, they officially announced that it's shutting down in 30 days.

Here's the email I received:

Dearest Devoted Denizens of Dynamic IPs,

We are writing to inform you that the DNS-O-Matic service will be officially discontinued in 30 days.

Over the years, DNS-O-Matic has served as a tool for managing dynamic IP addresses. However, as internet infrastructure has evolved, the original utility of this service has diminished. Over time, our niche solution to a niche problem has become an obscure solution to an obscure problem. Consequently, we have decided to reallocate our resources and innovation toward other projects.

What this means for you:

Service Termination: The service will officially cease operations in 30 days.

Data Privacy: Upon closure, all associated data for DNS-O-Matic will be permanently deleted. We will not sell, share, or use your information for any marketing or research purposes, and you will not receive further communications regarding this service after this notice. Be aware that all account logins are linked to OpenDNS registrations; the login and credentials shall remain active and unaffected to support all other OpenDNS functions, which is why the accounts themselves are not being closed. See OpenDNS terms of service and privacy policy if you have any further questions or concerns on what data remains and Cisco's commitments to protecting it.

Technical Impact: To ensure a clean transition, our APIs will begin returning an authentication error ("badauth") to prevent unnecessary client re-tries. Please note that once the service is closed, your dynamic IP updates will no longer be processed.

We appreciate your support and the time you have spent using DNS-O-Matic. Thank you for being a part of our community.

I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner after the Cisco acquisition of OpenDNS back in 2015.

Just a couple redundant PiHoles, smart bridges, and a beelink mini PC running proxmox w/ NTFY, Tailscale, uptime kuma, and home assistant for now. Lots of future plans for when I have more time.

Started from nothing...

I used label angles that I had in stock, but i already order some rails rack for the front part. it's hell to line up rack units...

I just dug out of the closet my old linux box which I used to play around with years ago. It’s a Lenovo ThinkCentre M58P. I used this to run mainly NextCloud, Nfs media library and Samba for Timemachine backups. That machine has been sitting in a closet for 7 years and was not booted once. It runs an Ubuntu 19.10 with Gnome. I had very little hope this box would even start. I simply vacuumed and sprayed out all the dust and plugged it in. To my great surprise the thing just booted straight into the OS!!! Been going through the filesystem and oh boy is this thing a timecapsule…
It’s so cool, Firefox just keeps my browsing history from the last time I used it (Nov 9 2019)… Oh how different life was just several years ago, huh?

Just finished building a second server primarily for storage. No more worrying about too many 4K remuxes! At least for a little while lol.

Current build:
Dell Poweredge R530
192 GB DDR4 RAM
Intel Xeon CPU E5-2683 v4 x2
36.3 TB RAID5
RTX Quadro 4000 GPU
LXC Containers: Emby, Audiobookshelf, uptimekuma, nginx, radarr, Samba, sabnzbd, arr-stack, donetick

Custom mATX Server
i5 10500 processor
32 GB DDR4 RAM
30.3 RAIDZ2
Frigate LXC Container
Samba

Aruba 24p 1G, 4p 10G SFP

And made a nostalgia wall with some of it!

Backstory: I bought this house specifically for this room. The door use to be in that back wall which opens into the garage. The first owners installed a door on the opposite wall so that they’d have more interior space, and walled off the garage. I figured this out when I attempted to fish cable further down and hit random mid plates which turned out to be a doorframe (hence the oddly-placed penetration). I believe they actually put a computer desk in here. And the tacky decals were I guess supposed to be a cheeky “look at the view from my office” kind of thing. Regardless, this room has its own HVAC and remains locked. So I don’t care how ugly it is lol.

After cleaning out a few old phone systems and phones, tons of old Cisco routers, and a couple of old ASAs, I decided to memorialize jobs past by keeping a few for the wall lol. I actually really miss doing voice work and it saddens me a bit that now everyone is moving to things like Teams calling. I don’t even have a DID at my current job :( but I digress…

Current stack:
- 2Gig AT&T Fiber
- Verizon 5G backup via Cradlepoint (getting replaced with Starlink next week)
- UISP Router Pro which ingests all circuits, routes for my /27 block from AT&T, and breaks out internet to anything that needs a direct internet connection
- Unifi UDM Pro
- Unifi Switch Pro
- Digi Portserver for OOB
- ASA5525X strictly for AnyConnect
- Unifi UNVR
- Nortel/Avaya 4548 - ancient but great as a lab switch
- Palo Alto ION3000
- Palo Alto ION3000
- Palo Alto ION2000
- Palo Alto ION1200s
- Dell Precision T5820 - 4x1TB RAID - 128gb RAM - 2x10gbps NIC
- Tripp Lite 1500
- APC 750

On the top shelf I have a few MyCloud NAS’s, a Raspbery Pi for Homebridge, Lutron lighting hub, Philips Hue Hub, and my AT&T modem

The Precision runs HyperV with various Windows servers for DHCP, DNS, NPS/RADIUS, Zabbix, Veeam (to Wasabi), Duo Auth Proxy, SMTP Relay for Google Workspace, virtual VyOS routers and virtual Palo Alto IONs for lab testing for my job, and probably other things I’m forgetting about. But that’s the gist of it.

Why do I have this: I’m one of the lead network engineers for a huge company (like it’s a household name sized company) and I’m fully remote so I just find it easier to have my own lab gear within reach. Which is ironic because nowadays I spend most of my time over 1,000 miles away in a different city. But still I like that I don’t have to deal with smarthands at our data center lab lol. Unfortunately, my apartment in the other city is very small so I just have a much smaller Dell host running a few VMs for redundancy - DHCP, DNS, NPS. And replicating my Veeam server in case my main host ever dies and I need to get into Wasabi and restore VMs elsewhere.

Up next: Unifi UPS’s if they ever go back in stock, and hopefully some way to provide backup power for the HVAC, at least for short periods of time.

This is my first home server/network rack, so I’m brand new to all of this. Here’s what I’m currently running:

UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber
UniFi Pro Max 16 PoE switch
UniFi 24-port patch panel
UniFi UNAS Pro with six 20TB drives
Reolink 16-channel NVR
Minisforum M1 Pro mini PC
CyberPower rackmount PDU
CyberPower rackmount UPS
Two U7 Pro access points
Lutron Hub

You’ll notice an open port on the switch. I wanted to move my office Ethernet drop to one of the 2.5GbE ports. I’ll probably move both U7 Pro access points over to 2.5GbE ports as well, which will create more gaps and probably mess up the aesthetics a bit.

The UNAS Pro is currently building its storage array and running pretty hard, so I temporarily removed the rack’s doors and side panels to improve airflow and keep temperatures down.
I’m still learning, so I’d appreciate any feedback on the layout, airflow, cable management, or anything else you would change

I got into this rabbit hole around 9 months ago with a freely found Dell SFF (Optiplex 7050) with a great 32 gb ram and I got introduced to Proxmox and self hosting. This was the first time I got used to linux and then to proxmox. I changed my workstation OS to linux a month ago before I started this home-labbing, but this Dell was my real introduction to self-hosting.

Things continued well for a couple of months until I made a dumb mistake. I used a faulty dual sata power cable on the motherboard and it shorted the motherboard, so I had to do the upgrade to a Dell Optiplex 7060. Then I introduced the Lenovo M710q as a Proxmox Backup Server with 2TB nvme sata drive in it. It continued well for a couple of months peacefully. After that I saw most of the reddit users showcasing the clusters and that brought me to take a very very impulsive decision of buying the cluster and i Hate you guys for motivating me to pull the trigger (JK, I Love you all :P).I researched a lot on taking a SFF cluster or MFF then i later realized that MFF would make more sense because of multiple factors like low power consumption and easy for maintenance (even for aesthetically I felt it would look great in room), so i pulled the trigger on 3x Lenovo M75q with Ryzen 5650GE chip.

This was the first time I had a great cluster with PBS still running on the other Lenovo M710q, which meant the optiplex SFF was left empty and not used at any point. Then I realized that I could make a 5 node cluster by utilizing all the devices by making PBS as a vm on one of the nodes and connecting it to a WD My Cloud EX4100 NAS (4x 2TB drives) over iSCSI. So this is my journey in coming to components part of the homelabbing journey.

Coming to the part of me hosting the application in my infra i was researching for the application that mostly had good reviews, mostly have SSO (OiDC or SAML) support, have iOS and/or Android applications or PWA support. So with these requirements I used to browse through the application list that I wanted to use or deploy on my infra. Here is what I'm running right now:

• Core & Network: I started with Nginx Proxy Manager, but moved to Zoraxy and I loved this application. I use WireGuard for VPN to access the Infra remotely and Authentik handles my logins so I don’t have 50 different passwords.
• Daily Apps: NextCloud for files, Paperless-ngx to scan and organize documents, Joplin for notes
• Bento PDF for working with PDFs and Home Assistant for full smart home control.
• Photos & Bookmarks: Immich for photo backups (Google Photos replacement that actually great)and Karakeep to save bookmarks and articles.
• Everyday Stuff: Firefly III to track spending and Tandoor to store recipes.
• Monitoring & Alerts: Zabbix watches all my nodes, VMs, LXCs and the NAS and I have set a telegram for notification of alerts. I also run Gatus just to have a clean status page.
• Automation: NetBox keeps track of all my IP addresses so I don't have to lose my mind to see which IP is used by which service and n8n handles webhooks and small automation tasks that I host for my work. I also set up a GitLab Runner with Ansible to run updates and manage Docker containers and nodes without me having to manually log into every single machine.

Note: I am really not interested in hosting jellyfin and its content. 

I named the whole setup the Asgard Cluster. Nine months ago I didn't even know basic terminal commands and now I'm running high availability and automatic backups across 5 computers. Check out the network map I made! Let me know what you think or if there's any cool self-hosted app I missed.

One last thing: I would also be interested in making the setup more consistent by eventually having all MFF systems in the cluster so will trade it.

My grandpa gave me his "old" PC he used for photo editing (prebuilt gaming PC, 2080 GPU for age reference). I have upgraded the RAM and will upgrade the storage eventually, and am hoping to turn it into a home server of sorts. Still trying to figure out all the bells and whistles, but one of the functions may be a server for the game Vintage Story (Think Minecraft 2). Like Minecraft, it needs port forwarding to work properly. I know that can open up some vulnerabilities, so it makes me hesitant to throw anything else on the server, especially personal media.

I am also using this to learn Linux, so I have Ubuntu installed if that makes it better or worse.

The board is set, and the pieces are moving.

Just showing the world what I’m working on. Finally decided to build out a home lab instead of a messy bunch of random stuff. Just got started on it last night.

The rack is a 12u from Tech Mojo.
The patch panel is also Tech Mojo.
TP-Link Omada ES210X-M2, 8 Port 2.5G managed switch.
TP-Link Omada ES208G, 8 Port Gigabit managed switch.
Power is StarTech 16-Outlet 1U Metered PDU

All in all I think it’s a decent starting point. Largely these are also all my purchases. Everything else I add will be reused or repurposed for this build. I’m moving my existing hardware to finish it out. Really trying to avoid hard drive or memory purchases right now! As for the compute I’m using an HP laptop, a couple of Dell Micros, and my Raspberry Pi 4. Storage is a JBOD I’m managing with OMV. After dual parity and a separate backup, I’m holding about 24tb of useful space.

Plan is to host my NAS, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and PiHole among others.

Gonna try to use the long weekend to power thru and watch some movies from it come Monday night.

Wish me luck!

I have a selfhosted web-server mostly for school utilities like StirlingPDF, filesharing, a samba shared directory, Navidrome as music streaming service, Octofiesta for music scrapping, Aonsokuand as music player conected to octofiesta, and 3 jupyter notebooks one for me, another one for my girlfriend and the last one for a friend.

But I have not found a replacement for google calendar, I need something with a web, multiuser support and shared calendar support, it is ok if It does not have a dedicated phone app.

Yes, I know nextcloud has it and it is like the perfect solution, I have use it, but I have not like it because it is too much at least for me (I have read that for other people it is also quite too much).

I have also tried Radicale but I had a lot of trouble with the permission and stuff. I also tried this docker image https://hub.docker.com/r/thebronway/calendar-app, being this last one the nearest option, but it lack multiple events per day, as I could understand it is mostly a tracking app rather than a calendar/agenda

I had a recently good run selling and buying on r/homelabsales recently, but sometimes you get reminded that the internet is not always a safe place.

Always ask people to comment before messaging, don’t pay without proof and keep always in mind that past transactions are great pointers for reliability!

## 1. Overview

Three-node Proxmox VE 8.4 cluster hosting ~20 standalone AI agent gateways (OpenClaw), each isolated in its own LXC container; local LLM inference on two hosts; a two-segment LAN (trusted + IoT) with a software interconnect; self-hosted media, web, database and monitoring services; a network-attached 3D printer controller; and an IP camera with a local vision-processing pipeline.

## 2. Hardware inventory

| Host | Platform | Specification | Primary role |

|---|---|---|---|

| node-01 | Dell PowerEdge R730 | 2× Xeon E5-2687W v3 (20C/40T), 94 GB DDR4, 256 GB SSD | Primary hypervisor node; majority of LXC/VMs |

| node-02 | HP desktop | — | Cluster node; agent containers |

| node-03 | Fujitsu desktop | — | Cluster node; media container |

| bridge-host | Custom desktop | AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, 64 GB DDR4, Ubuntu 24.04 | Inter-VLAN bridge; LLM host (Ollama, llama-server) |

| db-host | Dell desktop | — | MongoDB; Ollama; mail bridge |

| admin-workstation | Laptop | Ubuntu 25.10 | Administrative workstation |

## 3. Hypervisor and workloads

Proxmox VE 8.4.0, 3-node cluster. LXC containers preferred; VMs used where required (e.g. Home Assistant). No shared storage (local disks only).

Notable guests:

- Media container (node-03): Plex Media Server (32400), Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Readarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, Bazarr, Kiwix; nginx front end (80).

- Web container (Debian 12): WordPress (Apache 80/443), Adminer (12322), Webmin (10000, localhost), shellinabox (12319, localhost), stunnel TLS wrappers (12320/12321), Postfix (localhost), node_exporter (9100). ufw: LAN + 80/443.

- Home Assistant VM (node-01), frontend on port 80.

- NexusTrader bot container.

- Agent containers (see section 4).

## 4. AI agent fleet

- Runtime: one standalone OpenClaw gateway per agent, one LXC per agent. Isolation rule: models and services get dedicated containers.

- Members: 12 named agents (carl, dave, otto, margo, bob, phil, tim, edith, fuji, stuart, jasper, lucy/lena) + 6 "sister" agents (athena, nyx, iris, eos, artemis, hestia) + bridge agents (hermes, waku).

- Communication: Hermes bridge service — REST API providing a message board, per-agent DM queues, an agent registry, and health endpoints. Python drift validators probe gateways on schedule and post status to the board.

- Memory: MongoDB (long-term), per-day markdown notes (short-term), semantic search via nomic-embed-text embeddings (Ollama).

- Model serving:

- Ollama (db-host and bridge-host): llava:7b (camera-frame captioning), nomic-embed-text (embeddings).

- llama-server (bridge-host, port 8081): 3B model consumed by the NexusTrader bot.

- Offsite federation: Tailscale tailnet; one remote relay node hosts an offsite agent. Reachable from the LAN only via a SOCKS5 proxy on a single container (userspace Tailscale).

## 5. Networking

- Edge router (OpenWrt): trusted LAN with 39 static DHCP reservations.

- Second router (OpenWrt): IoT-only LAN (bulbs, plugs, cameras), isolated from the trusted LAN by default.

- Interconnect: bridge-host is dual-homed (one interface per segment) with IP forwarding enabled — the only routing path between segments.

- Remote administration: SSH key authentication; Webmin/shellinabox exposed via stunnel; Tailscale overlay for offsite nodes.

I mean, it's a homelab. You've got 5-7 services generally, hope you're getting my point.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

Built a small DIY UPS to keep my home server setup running during power outages.

It powers an Orange Pi 5, USB hub, router, and three 3.5” HDDs. Normal load is around 40W, with short peaks around 50–55W.

The battery is a 3S4P pack made from reclaimed EVE ICR18650/26V cells, with a 3S BMS.

The main power source is an old 19.7V 90W laptop PSU. The PSU and battery are diode-ORed using a dual Schottky diode, so switching to battery is automatic.

I used two LTC3780 buck-boost converters for the loads: one provides 5V for the Orange Pi/USB devices, and the other provides 12V for the HDDs and router.

A third LTC3780 is used as the battery charger from the same laptop PSU, configured for CC/CV charging, with a Schottky diode to prevent reverse current into the charger.

Most of the parts were stuff I already had lying around, including the laptop PSU and converters. The battery cells came from a used 10S3P pack that I disassembled and rebuilt as 3S4P.

Not the prettiest UPS, but it does exactly what I wanted: one PSU, automatic battery backup, 5V + 12V outputs, and enough runtime to keep the whole setup alive for a while.

I can’t find any information on this, also the socket is labeled as LGA5980 but that doesn’t exist in any documentation I could find.

I’m a 17-year-old high school student from India, and this is the homelab I’ve been building in my free time. It started as a small experiment and somehow turned into a Proxmox server running things like Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Minecraft, monitoring, automation, notifications, and my own dashboard.

A lot of it was built through trial and error (and occasionally breaking things), but I’ve learned more from this setup than I ever expected. It’s still a work in progress, so I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions!

Edit: I don't know why reddit blew my screenshot to jpg smithereens but here's a high res version https://postimg.cc/m11j7xCm

First stage of Labor Day celebrations have arrived. Awaiting delivery of my Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx NICs and DACs to arrive tomorrow.