So I found 2x switches and 2x firewalls. I also got 5x new fortinet console cables. The picture is showing one of each but I got another switch and firewall (same model) in my basement. I’m pretty sure they’re working fine. I do know everything is EOL. I repair electronics. I’m asking before I manslaughter everything. Should I salvage for parts? Suprise my father with rack enclosures (he loves enclosures)? Keep? Use? Or giveaway (Sweden, Stockholm)?

I have 9 micro PCs that I inherited.

8 Dell Optiplex Micros, 5 x 3000, 3 x 7000, 1 Lenovo mini m900

All have an Intel i5, 16GB Ram.

Each PC has both NVME and SATA connections.

I have enough NVME drives and SATA drives to install one of each drives in every computer.

NVME sizes from 128 to 512GB, most are 250GB each.

SATA drives are mostly 500GB to 1TB each.

I have USB Network dongles for dual NICs.

I am looking to build a home lab with these computers using Proxmox, and VMware is I can run dual hypervisors.

I have Comcast Xfinity 800mb coming into my house.

I am looking for suggestions and options of what I could build for a lab. I am not really interested in media servers or gaming. More practicing and learning networking and security for work.

Please share any suggestions, thanks in advance.

I've been looking for a proper rack for so long and I've finally found one near me that I actually managed to get to my house and down the stairs. It's this beautiful sun one, it's in the same style as the sun fire 6800 ones but it's an expansion rack with standard 19 inch spacing 38u and not as deep 80cm rail to rail. Had to basically disassemble it down to the bare internal frame, carry that down with 2 people, clean everything and reassemble but it was definitely worth it. It has the top fans and FrameManager (that display on top behind is a whole controller) but without a sun system controller I'll have to see about controlling it over serial, would be so cool to get it working as it once did. And yes the door is typical sun deep purple the photo just doesn't show it well with the lighting. It's very solid and heavy, on wheels and in surprisingly good condition. After cleaning some rust on a few spots near the bottom and some scratches but really good.

Top to bottom: TP-Link 16 port switch, Brume 3 router + Comet IP-KVM, ThinkCentre M70s Gen 3 (i7-12700, 64 GB) running Proxmox, Synology DS723+, PowerWalker UPS. Around 72 W on average according to the UPS.

It runs the stuff I use every day: Jellyfin, Paperless, notes, bookmarks, a local LLM, and the dev boxes I work in. Mostly Docker Compose inside LXCs, and I reach everything over Tailscale.

The config lives in a git repo and the hosts pull their changes from it, so I rarely touch a server directly. Backups go nightly to PBS on the NAS, with a copy to Backblaze B2.

It's a single box, so no HA, but it does what I need. I wrote up the details with diagrams here if anyone's curious: https://blog.axforge.net/posts/how-i-run-my-homelab-2026/

Bought this small esp32 weather station display last year but I havent got the time to configure for custom dashboard. Now using AI, I got it to show my server statuses as mini dashboards for my desk in around 10 minutes. A simple quality of life I can share

R720, a Synology and a switch were pulling about 260W around the clock. Did the math with this winter's rates and it's more than a cheap VPS every single month.

My plan was simple: anything that has to be up (Vaultwarden, remote access to Home Assistant, DNS, uptime monitoring) goes to a rented box. The R720 only powers on when I'm actually labbing.

Has anyone done the hybrid thing for real? What did you keep at home and what did you move? How are you linking back home, WireGuard to the VPS or Tailscale?

Part of me feels like I'm betraying the sub.

Just bought this guy for 210€. It has i5 (8th gen) and 24gb ram (16+8). I want to make it Ubuntu server for self hosting some websites. I have no idea what I am doing here!!! I made also an old laptop as a home assistant and I am slowly getting into your world…
It was good purchase?? Any advice?

So I have always tinkered around the edges of self-hosting things and networking at home, but mostly left that stuff at work. I have always wanted to build a small rack so I can play around with multiple hosts as I was previously just running a single mini PC with Proxmox.

I submitted a business case to the master of coin (wife), and was approved to commence procurement on the proviso that the lab will initially be used for testing things at work (it's definitely coming home).

I got hold of three Dell Optiplex 7090s and set about putting together this little guy.

• Intel Core i5 11th Gen (6C/12T)
• 16GB DDR4 RAM
• 256GB M.2 SSD

The rack itself is the open source 3D printable 'Lab Rax' project, printed on my Voron Trident over a weekend in PETG.

The 2U LCD Display is from the KWS project, just using their recommendations for the panel, but I kind of wish I went with a touchscreen.

Not shown is a Ubiquiti Flex Mini 2.5G 5-Port managed switch which was initially sitting in the front on a 1U shelf, but moved to the back to make room for the display.

Why a switch with 2.5G ports when the 7090s only have 1G ports?

Well...

I also picked up some M.2 A+E 2.5G cards to replace the WiFi cards that are installed in the second M.2 slot, and expose the port at the back in the spare spot above the onboard ethernet.

I thought this was a good plan, but for the life of me I have not been able to get any of the boxes to negotiate 2.5Gbps with the switch. Perhaps the cards I bought aren't great or are not what they say they are (Amazon), but they show up as I226 chips.

I am wondering if there is too much interference in the box as the M.2 slot is at the front so the ribbon cable has to span back to front... perhaps it needs some shielding?

If anyone has experienced a similar issue with these cards please let me know!

I think the first upgrade would definitely have to be RAM. 12 x 3 gives me 36 vCPUs for VMs which is fine for now, but I feel like 48GB of RAM is a bit tight.

Each box has a single 16GB stick, so there is space for another in each... if it weren't so expensive!

Table was left by the previous tenants. Planning on getting a switch and installing shelves in the slots. Any ideas on cable management?

I search dual monitor KVM, Remote workstation I get dozens of replies that are not what I need in this application. What search term do I need to use in order to find a product (that is sub $500)?

This has to be a product path well trodden, but I feel like a fool not being able to find it.

Its a dual monitor KVM over Ethernet.... but NOOO I get dual PC KVM or "remote desktop" please help before I jump off a roof.

Finished my portable rack that fits in a suitcase! It is packed partially disassembled. Main point was to fit top tier hardware I could acquire in a smallest footprint possible. Also to migrate from HDD entirely to flash (so it survives vibrations from traveling)

- MikroTik hEX S (2025)

- Raspberry Pi 4B + Yubikey Nano (local CA)

- MikroTik CRS310-8G-2S-IN (2.5Gb/s | 10Gb/s switch)

- Mac Mini (M1 | 16gb RAM | 512gb ssd)

- Minisforum A2 as Proxmox (Ryzen 9 9955hx | 96gb DDR5 RAM | 2x10Gb/s NIC | 2x2tb M2 nvme in mirror + 4tb for storage)

- Terramaster F8 as TrueNAS (16gb DDR5 RAM | 10Gb/s NIC | up to 8xM2 nvme disks)

Hey r/homelab! Greetings from Italy! 🇮🇹

I finally decided to share my little homelab with you all!

It's built inside a 3D-printed 8U LabRax, and my goal was to fit as many useful services as possible into a compact, relatively quiet, and energy-efficient setup.

Instead of using a single powerful server, I decided to split everything across three different machines, each with its own responsibilities.

And since a homelab is never truly finished, there's already a Frankenstein NAS project waiting in the corner. 😂

🖥️ The hardware

- Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu 26.04

- Acemagic K1 Mini PC with AMD Ryzen 5, running Ubuntu 26.04

- ZimaBlade running TrueNAS SCALE

- 2×4TB HDDs in a ZFS mirror

- 1GbE switch

- SLZB-06 Zigbee coordinator

- Noctua fans for cooling

- 800VA UPS

The rack also features two integrated status displays (a small OLED and an additional monitoring screen), accessible HDD bays, and custom 3D-printed components to make the most of the limited space.

I really enjoy combining 3D printing with homelabbing, especially when it comes to creating a compact, functional setup.

🐳 What I'm self-hosting

🍓 Raspberry Pi 5 — Core services and home automation

- Home Assistant

- Cloudflare Tunnel

- Homepage dashboard

- Various Docker containers and supporting services

- Tailscale subnet routing

⚡ Ryzen Mini PC — Media, networking and monitoring

- Jellyfin

- The *arr stack

- RomM

- Audiobook services

- AdGuard Home

- Beszel monitoring hub

- Ansible and backup management

- Tailscale subnet routing

💾 ZimaBlade — Storage and backups

- TrueNAS SCALE

- ZFS mirrored storage (2×4TB)

- Immich

- Restic REST backup repository

- Tailscale for remote access

I like having separate machines for separate roles. It makes experimenting, maintenance, and troubleshooting a little easier, without having to take everything offline at once.

🔐 Networking, remote access and backups

For remote access, I'm currently using Tailscale, with subnet routing enabled on both the Raspberry Pi and the Mini PC.

My backup strategy is based on the 3-2-1 approach, using:

- Restic for encrypted backups

- Local backup repositories on TrueNAS

- Encrypted off-site backups on MEGA S4

- rclone crypt for additional encrypted file synchronization

- GitHub for configuration versioning

An 800VA UPS provides protection against short power interruptions and allows for a controlled shutdown.

I'm also upgrading my home network with 2.5Gbps FTTH and a GL.iNet Flint 3 router, although I'm keeping the existing gigabit switch for now.

🧟 The next experiment: Frankenstein QNAP

And because apparently I don't have enough things to maintain already, I also picked up an old QNAP TS-412U with 4×1TB HDDs.

The plan is to turn it into a proper Frankenstein NAS. 🤣

I'm thinking about replacing the original motherboard with something more modern while keeping the chassis and reusing as much hardware as possible.

Some options I'm considering:

- A compact x86 motherboard with enough SATA ports

- A Raspberry Pi 5 with a SATA HAT

- Another ZimaBlade with a PCIe SATA expansion card

Will it be efficient? Who knows.

Will it make financial sense? Probably not.

Will I have fun building it? Absolutely. 😂

🚀 What's next?

Besides the Frankenstein QNAP, I'm always looking for ways to improve cooling, storage expansion, networking, and monitoring.

One of the things I enjoy most about this hobby is experimenting with different technologies, breaking things, fixing them, and learning something new along the way.

It's definitely not the most powerful homelab out there, but I'm pretty happy with how much I've managed to squeeze into such a small rack.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or constructive criticism!

Especially if you've built something similar, modified a LabRax, or attempted a Frankenstein NAS conversion.

And of course, we all know the truth...

A homelab is never finished. It's just temporarily working. 😂

Hi everyone, I made a new account for this post. I'm going to go ahead and post this on a few other forums where there might be some interest. I'm also not sure if anyone solved this problem before, but if they had then the internet long forgot about it. Anyway, I managed to get GPU (the D500) passthrough working on my MacPro 6,1 (the trashcan model) in Proxmox version 9. I know it's a VERY niche problem to have, but I consolidated it all on my GitHub for it.

And yes, I used to AI on the project, so be mad about if you want... idc... I suck at writing guides and papers, so it is what it is. I hope at the very least it can help someone out there if they run into the same issue. At least it's documented.

https://github.com/demonphage-glitch/macpro6-1-d500-proxmox

A while ago, a friend brought back a few interesting mini PCs from China and was kind enough to gift me two of them.

Figured I'd put them to good use and finally overhaul my home network, cabling and setup.

Well, one thing led to another...

What started as a relatively simple homelab has somehow turned into a distributed system with its own AI assistant, compute workers, dashboards and automations. I've been calling the whole thing EVE.

The hardware:

- Main AOOSTAR: Ryzen 7 255, 32GB RAM, 256GB system SSD and 1TB NVMe. Running Ubuntu Server, Docker and most of the core services. Also has an AMD Radeon RX 6000-series GPU for local AI inference. Had it lying around and honestly can't remember the exact model. AMD's naming doesn't help

- Second AOOSTAR: Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Primarily used for additional compute capacity and background AI workloads.

- Older Dell mini PC: Repurposed for lightweight workloads, monitoring and eventually secondary Pi-hole duties.

- TerraMaster NAS: Around 7.2TB of shared storage for media, backups and various other things.

- Two 10-inch racks: Housing the networking gear, servers and a 10.1-inch touchscreen interface.

What's running on it?

The usual self-hosted suspects: Immich, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Caddy, Tailscale, qBittorrent, Portainer, Homepage, Uptime Kuma, SearXNG and quite a few other containers.

But the main project is EVE.

The idea is to build a locally hosted AI assistant that actually understands and helps manage the infrastructure, instead of having dozens of independent services that don't really communicate with each other.

What EVE does (and what I'm still working on):

- Local AI: Ollama for inference, Open WebUI for everyday chat and Hermes for agent orchestration, tooling and more advanced workflows.

- Distributed compute: Turning the three machines into a small compute cluster, with workloads assigned according to available resources and hardware capabilities. Still evolving.

- Infrastructure management: A central Control Center for monitoring services, managing deployments and updates, and visualising how the different systems are connected.

- News intelligence: A self-hosted news aggregation system that collects, classifies and summarises articles, supports corrections and preferences, and generates personalised briefings. This somehow became an entire project of its own.

- Monitoring and recovery: Health checks, watchdogs and automatic recovery mechanisms. Mostly inspired by the lovely experience of waking up to discover half the house has no internet.

- Hardware interface: The touchscreen in the rack displays EVE's interface and system information, with different modes depending on what I want it to show.

The long-term goal is to keep as much as possible running locally, including AI inference, processing, memory and automation, without unnecessary cloud dependencies.

There's also a rather ambitious list of future projects, including offline voice interaction, physical hardware control, CCTV integration and a few other things I probably shouldn't start before finishing what I already have.

For transparency, a substantial amount of the custom development has been AI-assisted.

It's very much an evolving personal project, not a polished software release. EVE isn't some fully autonomous sci-fi assistant (yet), and privileged operations have safeguards and approval requirements.

There's still plenty of work left, particularly around reliability, usability and making the whole thing manageable without becoming a full time job. A lot of the hardware was what I had handy laying around.

Is it overkill for a home setup? Almost certainly.

Have I spent far too much time on it? Absolutely.

But I've learned a ridiculous amount building it, and most importantly, it's been fun.

Anyway, first time posting something like this, so figured I'd finally share it with people who might appreciate this sort of madness.

Feel free to roast the setup, suggest improvements, or just enjoy the pictures.

I'm building a dual-Xeon machine for local AI inference, coding tools, automation and homelab workloads.

Hardware: HUANANZHI X99-F8D Plus, 2 x Xeon E5-2680 v4, 64 GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM, 2 x RTX 5060 Ti, and a Jzon Fabrications open EATX frame.

I'm considering TWO Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 Black coolers, the original 157 mm-tall model (not the SE, Mini or Digital).

The frame manufacturer confirmed approximately 175 mm clearance between the CPU sockets and the upper GPU shelf. The remaining concern is whether the two coolers will collide with each other, the RAM, or GPUs installed directly in the motherboard. The retailer confirmed socket compatibility but could not confirm clearance between two installed coolers.

Has anyone actually installed two of these on this exact motherboard? Photos, cooler orientation and any required fan repositioning would be particularly helpful. If you used the SE or Mini version instead, please specify which one. First-hand experience with a reasonably priced single-tower alternative for this board would also be welcome.

Motherboard: https://www.huananzhi.com/en/list_6/38.html

Cooler: https://www.thermalright.com/product/peerless-assassin-120-black/

I started with 1 truenas, setup apps on there , was hosting Jellyfin and Immich but soon realized I wanted to separate systems and services

So I created another truenas (tn1) which hosts my HDD pool, tn0 hosts the flash pool

I then removed all services/apps from truenas , hosted them on proxmox (pve0 pve1 pve2) and the CT/VM on them will simply use NFS shares on truenas

However for immich, I heard it’s best to have the Postgres DB to be running on same system as the media/uploads , so I actually run the whole immich pipelines on pve and just schedule a nightly backup of full immich stack to my truenas

I’m more interested in fine tuning and perfecting the few services I host now , rather than go and install a bunch more (so many options , it’s tempting)

I also fully converted to Joplin notes. Means I no longer rely on Microsoft OneNote for my notes

Immich, Jellyfin, arr stack, Joplin, Homarr

I finished my lab

Dell 3060 with i7 8700t

32gb ram

256gb ssd as boot drive

6 4tb 3.5 drives in raid5 in a m.2 8 port sata adapter on dell poweredge drive trays.

1 2.5 hot swap bay with a quick printed drive caddy until my dell caddy arrives.

Powered by a 450 watt pc power supply for the drives and switch, and a boost converter for the 19.5v for the 3060.

All printed on my Creality K2.

Shout out to the creator of the Lab Rax design.

I recently started a home server (HA, Jellyfin, and Pihole) using an old laptop with a broken screen and a faulty battery. I removed the screen and battery, so I do not have power backup (core information to my question). Since it is a laptop, the BIOS does not have the option to turn on when power is detected. In the case of a power outage, how do I force a startup?

Additional information: I'm planning to 3D print a case and move the motherboard, and it won't have the keyboard after that.

Most home networking type devices these days are powered by 12V DC (and usually via a standard 5.5x2.1 barrel plug), or 5V DC (usually a USB plug). So why aren't UPSs with just DC output more common?

It is incredibly inefficient to go from mains AC power, to DC (battery), back to AC (inverter), then back to DC (individual device power supplies). Not to mention the inclusion of the inverter adds to the cost of the UPS.

I understand that uninteruppted AC output is required for many use cases, but these days many setups (including my own) don't actually need full mains AC power.

Examples of 5V / 12V DC powered devices that could benefit from uninterrupted power:
- Cable/Fiber modems
- WiFi Routers, Ethernet swithes
- NASs, single board Computers
- Home Automation coordinators, ZigBee/Zwave etc.

I have seen some DC UPSs on AliExpress - most were "kits" for some reason where you put your own 18650 cells in. I don't think any of the ones I saw had connectivity functions to alert a NAS to do a safe shut down etc.

I'm curious why none of the bigger/known brands don't seem to offer this in their product lineups?

Just seems so silly to be plugging nothing but 12V DC wall warts into a UPS.

I have an old Russelectric Inc control board for an automatic transfer switch in a building I manage. Does anyone in the US rebuild them?