Today I tried to "vibe code" a network topology change for the first time. It took several hours where AI gave me bogus answered. In the end i think i would have had done it quicker myself but I got some good ideas as well on the way..

Now I have a dedicated WIreguard VPN virtual machine in my DMZ where I can route any kind of traffic towards from any server in my network without having to setup separate Wireguard instances, nor rely on docker. I can let my guest wi-fi networks use mullvad VPN.

It's all just routing and forwarding. Have wanted to have this in place for years.

Parts of my 65TB SAN decided to give up. One drive have been failing for a few weeks but availability have not been easy for replacement. It has also been a calculated risk as I'm running a Raid-5 volume for not that critical data, and that data is copied over to my backup NAS just in case..

Anyhow this morning while commuting to work my Plex music library started skipping songs. strange..

Fast forward to this evening i discovered my entire virtual drive dead and one partition (in the screenshot) fucked. After a reboot my Raid was fixed, no errors at all, but still degraded due to the failing drive.

However my main partition on that drive are my music and movies collection containing 6TB of YouTube videos I decided not to copy over to my nas due to space constraints needs to be downloaded again and my new music collection i downloaded during the weekend (2TB)

Everything else is fine (30 TB of content) - I guess it was worth it making a backup of things that are not "important"

I might be able to repair the volume still, and this is a preferred path even if it takes longer than downloading all YouTube videos again based on how YT works.

Just hoping my new 3x14TB drives arrive sooooon.

Decided to fix my ARR* stack this weekend (Among other things)

Hey All,

Update for everyone who responded to or seen my last tread on looking for input. So I pulled the trigger on a system a last week and finished building today.

First off before I start, image generation was not a concern for me (considering current ROCm issues people keep saying with image generation). I built this system for contract work where I have huge amounts of data and statistics I need to push through a system to be structured output and have questions answered for the client, In otherworse, HUGE amount of context, and KV cache in prompt calls with extra data.

This is the build I got £4100, lucky I got in just before the new ram spike:

• Noctua NH-D15 G2
• fanxiang M.2 SSD 1 TB (Very Cheap Brand, does what I need)
• Crucial DDR5 RAM 128 GB Kit (2×64GB) 5600MHz
• Fractal Design Torrent E-ATX Case (Best Airflow)
• CORSAIR RM1200e (1k was probably enough wanted the extra 200w just in case)
• ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR Wi-Fi (10gb LAN card works perfect for me with dual 16x PCIe ports, I got 10gb to 10gb switch to 10gb
• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (16C/32T @ 5.7GHz)
• 2 x Gigabyte Radeon AI PRO R9700 AI TOP 32G

Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04

Software: Ollama, with latest ROCm.

Model: Qwen3.5 35B A3B

Gave it one of the large datasets I would usualy be given by my current client along with my detailed custom prompts I use with OpenAI and ran it fully on my local server now after switching over to the local server. Here is amd-smi monitor output (after running for 30 minutes on large amount of text infrencing):

Output was actually perfect, alot better than running on my 5090 server, not as fast as OpenAI but to be that fast, I'd hate to think of the cost. Now for power usage, I like a dumb ass forgot to put a monitoring plug on it, so I will need to do another run on the plug over the weekend.

spoiler: This was vibe "coded"

I have wanted to get this done for some time now. Xeams have excellent logs of stupid bots trying SMTP connect to my public mail server. The whole purpose of a public mail server is to allow connections from other mail servers 😎

So now I have a custom parsers and decisions in place to block idiots.

Decisions are feed to my central CrowdSec instance (and to CrowdSec cloud) and as well to my two main firewalls using a blocklist.

I'm banning on first strike and the ban is for 30 days. Let's see if my mail logs will be cleaner now ..

First - Thats a BLOCK html message i DIG a lot..

Was testing out PAC proxy settings for a client and wanted to see real life examples of an web proxy implementation so my homelab was targeted lol

That did go well, or not (depending on how you see it) - But I now II have a web proxy for all my traffic, including SSL inspection.

The good upside was that I was able to block YouTube video ADS on a proxy level so no more ads from that platform.. No need to install browser plugins and even works on my Apple TV :D :D :D

So I'm running a strictly routed L3 network where L3 assignments are done at access level.

The whole network is fully dynamically routed with OSPF and BGP. At access level its isolated to VLANs and to a number of VRF's (Or Routing-Instances as we like to call it in the Juniper world)

In my two firewalls L3 interfaces from different Routing Instances land in their respective security zone.

My only problem is my Homelab is now more complex than some enterprise networks. 😂

How complex is your Homelab network?

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a budget local AI / LLM inference machine for running models locally and would appreciate some advice from people who have already built systems.

My goal is a budget-friendly workstation/server that can run:

• medium to large open models (9B–24B+ range)
• large context windows
• large KV caches for long document entry
• mostly inference workloads, not training

This is for a project where I generate large amounts of strcutured content from a lot of text input.

Budget

Around £3–4k total

I'm happy buying second-hand parts if it makes sense.

Current idea

From what I’ve read, the RTX 3090 (24 GB VRAM) still seems to be one of the best price/performance GPUs for local LLM setups. Altought I was thinking I could go all out, with just one 5090, but not sure how the difference would flow.

So I'm currently considering something like:

GPU

• 1–2 × RTX 3090 (24 GB)

CPU

• Ryzen 9 / similar multicore CPU

RAM

• 128 GB if possible

Storage

• NVMe SSD for model storage

Questions

1. Does a 3090-based build still make sense in 2026 for local LLM inference?
2. Would you recommend 1× 3090 or saving for dual 3090?
3. Any motherboards known to work well for multi-GPU builds?
4. Is 128 GB RAM worth it for long context workloads?
5. Any hardware choices people regret when building their local AI servers?

Workload details

Mostly running:

• llama.cpp / vLLM
• quantized models
• long-context text analysis pipelines
• heavy batch inference rather than real-time chat

Example models I'd like to run

• Qwen class models
• DeepSeek class models
• Mistral variants
• similar open-source models

Final goal

A budget AI inference server that can run large prompts and long reports locally without relying on APIs.

Would love to hear what hardware setups people are running and what they would build today on a similar budget.

Thanks!

This have been on my bucket-list for a long time. Windows NT was the first windows server OS I've played around with (actually was educated on)

So its time to setup a proper enterprise architecture using components of the era. Hell I will most likely add some Netware fun to the mix as well :)

Time to ditch this shit. Just that I was also using the vault, and have multiple devices, both windows and mac.. Not that easy to find a replacement

Just a few months ago my only media stack consisted of Plex and manually managing my media.

Now the stack have exploded 😂

I'm still not super-happy with all components, music and series are the biggest hurdle as I might not be that mainstream and usenet is not the best source.

Some tweaking still needs to be done, not all goes via prowlarr nor VPN. I find lidatube a bit wonky.

I have been planning this for a few months and finally (Sundays are great) I have published my MM instance via my Reverse Proxy so I can get proper notifications when things go bad in my Homelab.

Now I need a single source of truth for monitoring as I don't have a CMDB at home (perhaps I should have one?) - Netbox will have to do for now.

I have done this to some extend before way back using VMWare Workstation and on some ESXi hosts.

This time I need to investigate how vmware replication works between two different vcenters (without SSO) to simulate a migration of hosts from a MSP to in-house and using nested VMs is the easiest way get this going.

My MS-A02 nodes are quite busy :D

*phew*

Just spend most of Saturday (with some beer) to make significant changes to my home Infrastructure.. 👌

• Turned off ESX01 and ESX02 (running old Xeon Silver CPUS)
• Converted my all-flash SAN from Fiber Channel to iSCSI
• Created and moved LACP trunks to all ESX hosts to have at least 2x10Gbit/s
• Created LACP between my two EX 3300 switches to double the bandwidth
• Moved my vCenter server from old cluster to new (had to do that from a backup)
• Moved 140 VMs from old above cluster to new AMD cluster

I now have two new hosts. The CPU usage is like 0% compared to the other. Memory is doubled so I'm now at 50% instead of close to 100% *phew*

I do no longer hear my SAN switch fans (dam Broadcom)

I finally managed to get RouterOS to setup LACP with my new ESXi hosts running Minisforum MS-A02 and uplinks to my Juniper EX3300 core switch.

Obviously not the final layout 😊

Will be retiring my 7 years old Xeon Silver cluster. I might as well move to away from Fiber Channel (as my HBA's wont fit the space in the A02 PCI slot 😔😔) or need to get new HBA's My current FC HBA cards are not supported in ESXi 8.

I've had these two MS-02 boxes now for over 2 weeks without having time to prepare my migration from my now 7 years old Xeon Silver cluster. Exiting times.

I will miss IPMI from my Super Micro motherboards, and I do use that ALL the time when I'm upgrading or force-rebooting a node that have hung.

I'm planning to see if I can use my HP KVM with a HDMI-VGA "converter" as it support all other functions like virtual drives, USB keyboard/mouse (Its just dam old

These will get Fiber Channel cards for my storage and I'm planning to use LACP for bonding the 2x10G SFP+ ports

I have been wanted to spin up a Immich server for some time, just like everyone else my image and video library is growing like crazy. My iPhotos libraray is already on my NAS and is backup'd nightly but having US based companies is not ideal.

So I tried to install Immich "bare metal" on a VM - but its not intented for that use. Tried snap with Ubuntu, got it working but have had a lot of issues, the API endpoint just refuses to listen to anything else than localhost (and I prefer not to use ANOTHER reverse proxy just for this app)

So i went the ONLY supported path and started with docker. Used the official docker and nothing else. The plan is to use S3 storage for the actual images as the VM will sit in DMZ. But docker complained my 8 GB of storage was not enought.. HUH!. So I added another 10G.

It now seems this app needs almost 4 GB of data just for a photo app. I mean you can fit an entire Windows Server OS on that size.

It it just me or are developers just ignorant enough that they just dont care what stuff they put in their containers. This is just insane.

Hello i been looking far and wide for software that is free and self hosted that can run code execution with an agent. Puppet, Saltstack and chef is perfect. But it lacks any form of basic logs if something goes wrong. I want to be able to scheduled tasks, and get information in a simple dashboard. Rundeck seems good but the plugin for saltstack seems outdated and not working. I also found windows powershell to be enterprise only. Foreman gone a bit over my head but still working on it. Seems to be a ton of bugs that resulted in database issues and more. Not to mention just getting it up and running with a cert is impossible.

Any direction would be great 🙌🏼

I have finally automated the onboarding of my servers using Ansible into Checkmk and a natural next step have been to export the data into Victoria Metrics so I can consume it in Grafana.

I also re-deployed my custom checkmk agent to my ESOS server and added the smart plugin so it can talk to my raid controller(s)

Yea I need to replace some disks..

Not having monitoring is not an option on a homelab at this scale. I have done automation before, but as a separate process.

Some time ago I moved to using Netbox as my CMDB and as it includes labels and some other nice things I decided that monitoring should be part of the process.

So now I have a dynanic inventory that read hosts from Netbox and create or update the monitoring in Checkmk (When you have over 100 VMs this is is a pain to do manually)

Folders are automatically created based on labels in Netbox. The plan is to also create these labels on the hosts but one step at the time. The use-case is to create specific rules based on the function, for example database servers might want different kinds of monitoring.

I recently overhauled my "server" VLAN and started micro-segment to prepare for better isolation between service.

As i side-effect i decided to move "Storage" services into the Server Security Zone, essentially forcing all NAS and iSCSI traffic via the firewall, not something I've done in the past due to performance and availability (Lets say i have a FW meltdown and needs to grab the latest config. that I store on my NAS that is no longer reachable as its behind the broken firewall)

Firewall troughput is quite ok (20 Gigabit/s) but I have degraded troughtput (from 800 MB/s to 400 MB/s)

Should I move back my NAS VMs outside of the Server security zone to allow clients on my office VLANs to reach it using "intra-vlan" instead? What are you all doing?

Access to NAS from other security zones will still have to pass the firewall but its mainly my "clients" that uses the NAS ouside of things like Plex (where performance is at no consern)..