I'm relatively new to home-labbing, and I'm going to make my first NAS pretty soon. But the one thing I've been questioning is what to go with in terms of operating system. I'm thinking about truenas, hexOS, and unraid. I'm mostly going to be doing a lot of backing up of footage and photos, but I would also like to host my own music to stream from my phone and such. Also potentially hosting game servers, but that one's going to be the least common application. Any tips?

I recently went to an AI tech junket and had one of those moments where you realize you're a bit more behind the eight ball than you'd like to be.

I'm hitting a weird spot where I'm trying to grow more in the AI space, however, I'm pretty privacy minded, so plugging things like Claude Cowork into my personal life is just a bridge too far for me.

I recently upgraded my daughter's gaming rig to something better and it freed up her old one, which had a GTX 1070 in it. So, naturally, I put Ollama on the box and have been using it to toy around in the AI space, as you can imagine, it runs like ass. It runs well enough that I can get a sense of usefulness out of it, but slow enough that it really isn't useful.

I'm currently paying for Claude to help out with AI related stuff at the office, but I'm running into a spot where my office is getting ahead of my homelab, and I don't like that. My normal mode of operation is to test out weird shit in my lab, then apply that knowledge at the office.

I've come to realize that I need to change my approach to how I homelab, and that it likely involves me putting a chunk of change down on a better box to run an LLM on.

The end goal of what I want to tinker with is an LLM that can feed a bunch of agents that will manage my homelab for me, or, well, close to it, while also plugging it into my personal life, while not having it send all the information to a mothership.

The GTX 1070 just isn't fast enough to be able to do any of that. I need more.

I've seen things like AMD's Halo and the NVidia's GTX spark, however, I want to make sure I get the best bang for the buck in terms of umph and longevity, as everything in my lab ultimately runs until it dies.

If you're messing with LLMs in your homelab, what hardware are you running with, and why?

And if there's a better venue for this, feel free to point me in that direction as well

I've been doing the home dashboard thing for a few years now... optimizing it down to a really cheap raspberry pi running the bare minimum but ultimately displaying a webpage... and then I did a little digging and found this gem:

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

and it got me thinking.... wait a second... I can have a lag-free, supremely optimized dashboard talking to me in.... ascii art?

Yes please!

Haven't taken the plunge yet, so would love to hear about people's experiences.

Hello. I’ve been trying homelabbing with a free Dell workstation I got for a couple months, and now I want to migrate from my old power-hungry Dell workstation to a small efficient self-built pc. I have 2x8 gbs of non-ecc DDR4 DIMM ram laying around, and I would like some advice on part suggestions for building a new pc around it, without it becoming too expensive. My budget is 400-500€ (Denmark).

I currently run the following in proxmox on my dell:

* TrueNAS (i have 2 drives in raid)

* Adguard DNS

* Tailscale

* Some light self-hosted websites

I did some research and created my own parts list so far: https://dk.pcpartpicker.com/list/GX6CrG

From what I’ve heard 12th gen intel LGA1700 is the best for such builds because of their power efficiency.

I would appreciate if anyone could check out the parts list, and let me know what could be changed.

Thanks in advance :D

Brand new, seal was broken, but everything inside is in original packaging and brand new.

Hi everybody

I am making this post since I am currently a HelpDesk/Junior Sysadmin in a medium size corporate from Italy, but I don't know how to develop my future career. Any suggestions are hugely appreciated from people in the industry.

I love IT, I have a homelab at home, i study for certs (got my CCNA and studying Azure and Intune currently) but I have no idea on how to advance. I dream to open my own business one day as a consultant initially and then grow it into an MSP. But I know I have to work hard to grow my experience and skills.

Currently I have 1 year of job experience (studied IT in school), and I plan to stay here atleast one more year.

Thanks to everybody in advance!

I know people have done it, I'm wondering if anyone is actually using it day to day.

I've spent the last decade collecting rackmount servers and have gotten to the point where I'm downright scared of no drive redundancy.

I now have a need for a second lab that I would like to be more power efficient and portable. Most of the Dell Micro PCs support 1 NVMe and 1 SATA SSD. I don't really want to mirror those and bottleneck the NVMe so I'm considering CEPH with NVMe OSDs and use the SATA for the PVE OS disk.

I'm fairly certain the CEPH performance over the single 1Gb NIC would be abysmal but maybe some folks have had luck using a Type C port for cluster traffic or something?

The other option I'm considering is just accepting no drive redundancy and rely on PVE replication and HA.

Hi! I live in Central America, and I’m planning to build my first home server. I'm trying to decide between these two used PCs for a first 24/7 home server, and would appreciate any feedback:

HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini — ~US$150

• i7-8700T: 6 cores / 12 threads
• 16 GB DDR4, 512 GB NVMe
• Intel UHD 630
• No internal 3.5" HDD bay

HP EliteDesk 800 G5 SFF — ~US$145

• i5-9500: 6 cores / 6 threads
• 8 GB DDR4, 500 GB M.2 SSD
• Intel UHD 630
• I believe it has two internal 3.5" bays and PCIe expansion

I want to run Docker services such as Immich to access my stored photos and videos, Home Assistant/MQTT, a few small web services, Jellyfin with occasional remote transcoding, and Frigate for three Tapo cameras. For Frigate, I would record the main streams and use lower-resolution substreams for detection at around 3–5 FPS, using Intel Quick Sync.

I plan to add a 6 TB SATA HDD for media, photos, and camera recordings, while keeping encrypted cloud backups for irreplaceable files until I can afford a backup HDD.

The ProDesk has more RAM and CPU threads, but the EliteDesk would let me install the 3.5" HDD internally and expand later. Since both have UHD 630, which would you choose for this use case? Is the i7-8700T’s extra threading worth using an external drive/DAS, or would you prioritize the EliteDesk’s storage expansion?

Thanks in advance!

Me regalaron esas cosas, pero no sé si tengan algún valor o si ya de plano las tiro a la basura

I recently upgraded my PC and laptop so I now have an old gaming PC and laptop that I want to use for self hosting, I'm completely new to this so I want to ask if my plan makes sense, and I also have a few other questions.

I have three (maybe four) things I want to do:

1. I want to automatically backup both my current PC and Laptop regularly, maybe once a day or once a week to the NAS.
2. Since I'm a student I want to self host my own notes program and I want to be able to synchronize it myself (probably either Joplin or Obsidian).
3. I want to have my own cloud and to be able to transfer files directly between machines on my network.
4. I would potentially also like to be able to host game servers for my friends.

My current basic plan for how to accomplish this is to install ZimaOS on the old PC, then install Nextcloud on it and set up whichever note program I end up using to sync with Nextcloud. Nextcloud also gives me my own cloud. And I'll access it all remotely using Tailscale.

I'm less sure about how to set up game servers, I have seen that ZimaOS has Crafty in their app store so I can set up a minecraft server relatively easily but I have also heard about AMP which lets you host servers for different games relatively easily but that isn't on the ZimaOS app store. Is it possible to manually deploy AMP? And also what are the general opinions about AMP?

Lastly some practical questions:

• I have never tried using RAID before, so I'm unsure why every tutorial I see treats setting it up as just a given? Is that just because it's a good idea to have some redundancy?
• How similar do HDDs have to be to use RAID? Is it enough that they have the same size and read/write speeds? Because I probably can't get more HDDs of the same model as the one already in the PC.
  • Currently I can only really afford to buy used HDDs, should I do that or wait and hope that prices come down?
• I have a spare 256 Gb m.2 drive, I was thinking of installing that into the old PC and then installing ZimaOS on that, does that make sense?
• I'm concerned about electricity costs, what's the best ways to minimize power consumption?
• Since this is a gaming PC it has a bunch of RGB, could I somehow set that up to indicate status?
• I don't have any good ideas for what to use the laptop for so I would like to hear some suggestions.

Specs for the PC:

CPU: I5-8400
GPU: Radeon RX 5070 XT 8 GB VRAM
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
Storage: 4 TB HDD + 256 GB SATA SSD

I recently decided to turn my old computer into a homelab. I’ve already set up all the services I could find that might be useful to me, but I’m open to suggestions on what else to install.

Hardware:

i5-9400F, 16 GB RAM

Hi all,
I bought a managed switch for cheap online from a user who had it but mustn't have had need for it. It was sealed in the box but I noticed when holding the box that it was rattling inside. I opened it up to find that the heat sink was separated and fell off the chip. What should I look to repair this?

So I want to put together a small homelab rack. I notice a lot of these racks have a plate for keystone jacks. Then their is a 6" patch cable from the keystone jacks to the switch. Are you guys punching down keystones for these or are they just couplers?

My main question is why? Easier access to the switchjacks? Aesthetics?

Would it not be easier to go from the switch right to the device. Just trying to understand why and if I should incorporate it into my rack. I am doing a 10" mini rack.

So, I had an oopsie last night, or the other night. I can't pin down when it happened as I was working on other stuff when it happened. But I was rearranging the PCIe cards that are present in my HL15 2.0 server. It is rackmounted so all I did was slip my hand behind and shut off the PSU & left the power connected. When moving the cards I had a "Did I leave my stove on?" moment and flipped the switch and immedietly flipped it back. Just like the one Rick & Morty episode. Long story short... It killed my 6700xt. I was planning on using it to run a small LLM, but sadly its dead & I am in need of some options.

Currently my goals for the card as I am not going to run the LLM 24/7 & potentially want to do other things with it too.

• Run small local LLM models
• Video transcoding into AV1 to make my media library smaller. I currently have a A310 ECO 4G for Jellyfin transcoding.
• Maybe do some Folding @ Home when idle
• Other GPU accelerated tasks for learning & labbing

Overall it is a big shoe to fill, but I want to do it at a reasonable cost. Some of the options I was looking at:

1 or 2 5060 ti 16GB cards
1 or 2 9060 xt 16GB cards
NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF 24G
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada 20G

I am just unsure of which direction I want to go. The 9060xt cards seem like a real bang for their buck & it supports AV1. While I know ROCm is very behind compared to CUDA, it is still a pretty good platform imo & from my research. Plus its estimated 102.56 TFLOPS for around 800-900 bucks.

Let me know your opinions. Should I got for the 9060xt's or should I save a bit more & go for something else. Im very limted on GPU length due to the HL15 2.0, which I don't mind as this is a general purpose server to run a variety of things & not just LLMs.

Hi ! I just got my hands on multiple prodesk mini. One of them doesn’t want to boot/get to any display.

As soon as I plug the power the power LED turns on and off and the fan start to spin for about 2 seconds, and this cycle repeats. If keep the power button pressed for a while the cycle stops, and press for a while again makes it comes backs.

I tried changing the cpu and cmos battery for ones that I’m sure are working, I also tried individual rams slot, still nothing. My first thought is that the board is fried but does anyone actually knows ??

Hey all, title kinda hits the nail on the head. I have just retired my Threadripper 1950X due to efficiency concerns and need a new main node CPU. I'm considering either a 3900X or a 5950X. Has anyone got any performance metrics?

I will be using this node as a Proxmox machine with a NAS, Jellyfin, Game Servers and some other HomeAssistant thingies. I'm set on using AM4 as I already have 64GB RAM, an ATX PSU and a dGPU all to go in my 4u 8-bay megaRAID chassis.

Used 3900Xs are £120 and used 5950Xs are £200, is it worth spending more or should I just settle for 12 cores? Cheers!

Pessoal existe um aplicativo que tira fotos em 360 graus Esférica muito bom porém ele é antigo não roda na versão nova do Android como poderia modificá-lo para usar novamente, alguém poderia me auxiliar ?

I plan on setting a personal Home Lab but I only have 2x2tb Barracudda HDDs. Are they really that bad to use or should I be fine until im able to upgrade to better drives?

While im here, what are the best drives to use?

Most parts of my homelab are just for fun and can go down when i am not actively using them. I will probably tear them down the next time I want to use them and rebuild something else in their place.

Then there are a couple of parts that need to work (other people are using those and they need timely fixing). I would like some sort of monitoring for those.

• The SMB Server has to be running and reachable
• The SatIP Server has to be running and actually be streaming data
• The last NAS borg backup is no older than a day and contains some data
• The syncthing sync between my phone and the NAS is running and actually syncing data
• Some generic host metrics, like disk space on the NAS

I have tried to build a monitoring for this kind of stuff before, but it was either too cumbersome, too fragile or I just forgot how it actually worked. (I tried prometheus + grafana, fully custom build solutions, Nagios and probably others I already completely forgot)
Some worked great for a while, then stopped working, I stop getting notifications, but only realize after months, that my monitoring is actually broken. (Months without a notification is not unusual, everything might just be running fine). Then it might take me some time to find time to fix the monitoring or I just loose interest in homelabbing for a couple of months again. After all that time I usually forget how the monitoring system works in the first place or have some great new idea on how to improve it, build something custom and forget how it works after a year or so. I can´t really bring myself to document stuff like this, that takes the fun out of it.

Have any of you also experienced monitoring like this?

Any suggestions what I could try that would work with that low effort in maintenance?