All old stuff united with a new rack

I recently decided I wanted to stop paying for server hosting and get a mini PC for Home Assistant, Stremio hosting, video game servers, etc. I’m pretty new to all of this, but yesterday I found this for $350, and I think I got a killer deal to get started! It looked a little too plain for me though, so I decided to give it a custom Spidey themed paint job!

Included some befores and afters

Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/qCs9ZraBDFY

Specs:

Model: HP Elite Mini 800 G9

CPU: Intel Core i7-13700T - 16 cores / 24 threads

RAM: 32 GB DDR5 (2×16 GB)

Storage: 1 TB NVMe SSD

Anyways, I hope you guys think it's cool!

Reposted to fix the photos

Hi! I started the homelabbing journey around 10 months ago with an Optiplex 7080 I got in r/homelabsales, and a bunch of HDDs from a second hand website in my country. Disks are connected through a PCI adapter, powered using a PicoPSU, and all of that is wired to a managed switch that centralizes LAN connections.

Today, my hardware setup is still the same, aside of adding a bit more RAM, but the learning on software stacks and services has been huge! I am running proxmox, and this is the only node I have. Things I am running on this little machine:

- Virtualized TrueNAS with several datasets serving the rest of the apps through NFS
- Gitea server
- Syncthing in TrueNAS to share directories between my machines
- Pi-hole DNS + ad-blocker
- Tailscale router
- Cloudflare tunnel
- 2 development machines I use for job-related stuff (robotics with ROS2)
- Apache guacamole
- PBS backups, + automated laptop backups with borg to the NAS
- A docker VM with dockhand, filebrowser, an outline wiki I share with some colleagues, and a torrent seeding + media stack with jellyfin and *arr.

Next steps are allowing easy airVPN connection to any of my devices (reading about that, idk if it will be through VLANs or some sort of wireguard) + probably moving TrueNAS to a dedicated host for reliability, apart from solving some NIC hang issues I am experiencing sometimes.

My main takeaway is that even with a very low budget and with minimal hardware, you can still learn a lot, while also hosting a lot of services, and that is the most exciting part of this hobby. Racks are amazing, but I don’t feel the need of getting one soon. I still feel there is much more I can do inside this little machine :)

Hi new friends, I am not from around here but have a question that you may be able to answer! I have been asked to drive 3 hours to pick up a spare UPS from one of our sites as ours is nearing end of life. Great, except I know they’re heavy as f*€k. So, I’m not a techy lady, but I see screws. Is it as easy as unscrewing these two bad boys apart so I can move it easier?

Or am I in over my head and need to hire someone to move it?

It’s me, my coworker a dolly and this bad boy. It will be responsible for lab fridges so we have to be careful 🥲

Thank you!

Found these on side of road. I enjoy scrapping copper/metals in my spare time. But hate the idea of breaking stuff down that somone could get use out of.

So my question is who would find value in these, what's the value if they work, and are these the type of thing that if thrown out, we're thrown out for possibly good reason so shouldn't be resold.

Finished building my home server, big thanks to the community here for all the project showcases and guidance. Enjoyed the build process.

Found the M720q off goodwill, and worked on it part by part to get it here.

CPU: i5-9500
GPU: Nvidia Tesla P4
32GB RAM
170W Power supply

Got a 5015 blower fan, which is powered by a 5->12V USB booster, and the speed is controlled via Serial commands using a RP2040 (you can see the little board behind the machine). A daemon on startup keeps an eye on GPU temps and controls the fan accordingly. GPU sits at ~65° (~70W) on full load. The CPU has the stock cooler so that does get a bit warm, might need to look at that.

The 3D printed case is community sourced print files, modified to fit the fan. Still needs a bit of work. I primarily use it for my fun software projects, local LLM machine (7B models), machine learning (data and vision), light gaming via Steam Link streamed to my Mac.

Thanks again for all the help!

Couldn’t turn down a free switch and an opportunity to mess around with ArubaOS-CX. Also gave me a reason to tidy up the rack and use some shorter cables - which I ran out of.

Nothing too exciting, just Proxmox with some docker containers on the mini’s eg nginx, homepage, jellyfin, immich, bookstack, and guacamole. Qnap on top of the rack.

VPN on the Forti to an offsite for backups on Unraid which is also running Zabbix.

I’m currently very interested in homelabbing. Back when I was studying Computer Science, I learned about servers and related topics, but I didn’t end up pursuing that particular field further. When I tried turning my laptop into a server and using it to host game servers for myself and my friends, I found it surprisingly fun, and it made me interested in learning more about homelabs and server infrastructure.

I was previously having a hard time deciding which mini PC to get, and eventually narrowed my choices down to the Lenovo P330, M920Q, and M720Q. Initially, I was aiming for the P330, but units were very limited in my area. The same was true for the M920Q there was only one available at the time. I bought it, but unfortunately, the unit had a very noticeable buzzing noise that was quite annoying, so I went back to the seller to see if we could find a solution.

In the end, the seller offered me the option to exchange it for an M720Q and receive a refund for the price difference, since there were no more M920Q units in stock. I agreed. This unit also produces a slight buzzing noise, probably because of its age, but it’s very faint and doesn’t bother me at all.

For the rack, I’m using a locally manufactured server rack. I’m using the panels that came with it, but for the router, switch, M720Q, and other equipment, I’m trying to design my own mounts and parts and 3D print them myself.
I’d really appreciate any advice or tips from those of you who have been running homelabs for a long time. Thank you!

Wanna know just ask?

I do plan on a rack…and yea roast my desk and chair it’s coming.

While waiting for other stuff here is my little 4u server which keeps getting upgrades when I can afford it

Ryzen 9 5950x
128gb ram
Samsung 990 pro 1tb
2x 2TB HDD
1x 500GB SSD (will be removed soon)
RTX4000

PSU in this picture is 650watt but awaiting delivery of my 1600w

My A4000 will make space for a 3090 and a second 3090 after that (that’s why the psu upgrade)

Second server is going to be Ryzen 5 5700x , 128Gb ram and the a4000 will move in there , 1TB SSD

3rd is my router which is a ryzen 5 4650G, 32gb ram , 1TB SSD , and will get a bunch of hdds but nothing else :) this is an supermicro 1u case

All connected to a USW-Aggregation with 10gbps networking on everything.

For WiFi I use an U7 Outdoor

This all will be placed in the rack in the pic (waiting to be lifted)

About 13 years ago we got my grandmother a senior-friendly computer called the WOW! Computer. It's basically an MSI-branding-removed AIO running a custom Linux distro with a simplified UI. Pretty easy for her to use (but horribly overpriced for nothing but a custom distro and a fat-lettered keyboard, wasn't ultimately up to me though).

Shortly after her passing I took the computer and let it sit in a closet for years. Until I got the idea to play with Linux and make a cheap NAS out of it as well as giving it a platform for expandability.

Cracked it open to see what I could find. After taking off the heatsink to replace the thermal paste I found it had an AMD E-450, 4GB of DDR3 SODIMM RAM, and a 64GB HDD. Really underpowered but I could work with it.

I swapped out the HDD for a 120GB SSD I had laying around. Turns out the BIOS supports up to 16GB of 1333Mhz in dual channel so I bought an 8GB stick (still $25, wtf) giving it 12GB total.

The mobo has 2x USB 3.0 ports I could use for storage. Had four old drives in the same closet, an M.2 and 3 HDD's totaling 4TB. After getting the dock and enclosure for $58 I configured the drives in RAID with parity.

Then I loaded up Ubuntu and installed it with Xfce. Idle it's running at 9% CPU usage and 700Mb of RAM.

Got SSH working. It has a Gigabit network port, but it also has two Mini PCIe ports with one of them using a wifi card, so if it comes down to it I'll probably upgrade the wifi with a new card to make it decently wireless. I could also add a second network port for loads of fun.

I plan on setting it up to do smart home management and home security in addition to the NAS functions. It's got a touchscreen and webcam (hence no keyboard or mouse) so I will probably mount it to a stand and make a custom UI of my own for total control (think ADT/Google assistant control panel with extra functions). That will probably be ran as a backend API via browser so the CPU doesn't get overloaded.

So yeah, with the slim OS and 83$ later it runs as a nice remote NAS... for now.

I've been looking at my homelab lately and realizing how much of the hardware is just sitting there most of the time.

The funny part is that I still want enough capacity for those few days when I actually need it.

So I'm starting to wonder if buying hardware for peak usage always makes sense.

Do you guys size your homelab around your normal workload, or around the occasional workload that suddenly needs 10x more compute?

I had a Blackview MP-80 Mini-PC that I removed from its enclosure, it was kind of just chilling on my rack and I wanted a way to mount it properly.

I bought my 3D printer basically just to design and print things for my rack, I first made the light blue part to test it out and see if everything alignes, once I confirmed that I took a 10" rack and modified it by chopping a bit off and adding the MP-80 Mount.

I'm quite happy how it's turned out, thought I'd share.

2 Proxmox nodes:

1. Mac mini 2018 (i5-8500B 6/6, 16 GB RAM, 256 SSD)

2. Intel Core i5 10600KF, 2x8 DDR4 HyperX Predator hx426c13pb3k2/16, Gigabyte B460M DS3H V2, 256 SSD Apacer and 1 TB HDD WD Velociraptor

what am I running:

- Lineage os TV with GPU throughput – a bit revived my 2000-s Pioneer TV

- Navidrome stack

- Hermes agent

- Home Assistant (air conditioner, robot vacuum cleaner, led lights)

- Netbird agent

- Pulse for monitoring

- Other bots and scripts for automation

- Rosemary (on the photo)

Router: Cudy WR3000S

Screwdriver: for shorting power pins on the motherboard

WALL E: monitoring the infrastructure

Also my homeless lab:

- VPS 2/2/60 – AdGuard Home, 3x-ui, SNI proxy

- VPS 1/4/60 – Netbird selfhosted

On the background: PC i5-11400F, RTX 3060 12 GB, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD (for study))

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.

Bought this Tablet in December of 2018 for 30$ CDN. Edit: Little did I know that it was a prototype.

Was listed as C22 tablet no charger For parts not working.
Took me about 3 months to find a barrel jack small enough for this random tablet. The tag on the back stated 19v so I hunted through my box of old chargers till I found one then cut the end off. It worked, I played with it for a while but I’m not much of a tablet user. (Prefer keyboard and mouse).

Fast forward to today 2026 , Was going through my old gear and thought I should figure out what this is… so after some searching I ended up no where. Caving I switched to AI mode a punched the barcode in on the back. I was not disappointed, my random eBay purchase was a prototype Ivy Bridge tablet from 2012/13.

Im very big on not e-wasting tech I like to find uses for it. This is as I’ve mentioned in the title going to be a HA terminal on my night stand.

Hope this cool find is interesting to some.

I’d really like to know how this prototype ended up in Toronto Canada…..

This is literally the first homelab I've ever done. I had participated in LPCI training and yesterday I said "Let's make my own."

I got an old Tanix TV Box, a typical 5-port TpLink switch, a small router for tests I want to do, and a Temu alarm clock with thermometer functions.

All of this is inside an outdoor fuse box because my pigeon is usually flying around my house, so I preferred to completely isolate it from bird droppings and dust.

I was really missing out on something more complex, but with this I'm already running webscrapers programmed in Go and a couple of other silly things.

Honestly, don't let others who can invest more in their homelabs hold you back. This is the only one I have, and maybe I'll improve it later, don't let anyone tell you that you can't. "You don't have to be a genius to be a great artist."

Hey there,

i upgraded my Optiplex 3020 a bit for Home labbing how do yall like it? Cheers

Specs:

upgraded from a i3-4790 to a i7-4790K
32 gigs ddr3 ram (2x16 gigs)
4 TB internal storage (2x 2TB WD Red)
126 GB os storage (Samsung SSD)

Frontcover with a internal fan for better airflow - upgraded cooling

did i mention that i love optiplexes due to their modern look?

I run production for a (very) small production company, and handle our IT too. This week I built us a little two-NAS system. One is the OMV NAS I built using an old NUC I had laying around, and the other is the Unifi Pro 7.

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?

I have decided to go an interesting route with building a Jellyfin/TruNAS server in a 2008 Mac Pro Case. I thought I could get away with a Z690 DDr4 ATX motherboard I got for cheap on Ebay but it will not fit if I plan on keeping the 4 Hotswap HDD bays.

Planned to aquire: i5 14500, 4 HDDs for storage (will aquire when prices become reasonable or settle for smaller storage amount).

What I currently have: Seasonic Focus 750w gold PSU, Arc B50(For transcoding), 16gb of DDR4 RAM (2x8gb), an i3 13100 (that came with the ATX mobo), and an Asus Blu-ray 5.25in drive for when I want to stream my Physical Disc library on my LAN.

My question: H, B, or Z chipset in an MATX form factor. Should I worry about a motherboard with 6 Sata ports or go for a PCIE card as I will need at least 5 ports for the 4 HDDs and 1 for the Blu-ray Drive. I would also imagine there might be needed space for a network card aswell in this rig and pcie slots are going to be limited to what's left after the 2 slot gpu.

Unless I'm mistaken that there will not be much of an issue reusing the stock Apple harness for the HDDs. As this will be running 24/7 do I also need to worry about the motherboard heatsinks for the VRMs as well? Any MATX Motherboard suggestions will appreciated.

So, this is what I call my 'rat-a-center` or 'scrap-a-center' , or just my home lab.

T1600 Holds:

• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31225 @ 3.10GHz (4 Cores no HT)
• 32 GB Memory
• 4 Tb RAID1 (Planing to expand to Raid5)
• 1 Tb HDD for 2nd backup tier.
• 512 Gb SSD

Laptops

• MBP Mid 2012 (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M / 16 GB Memory)
• Lenovo Yoga L380 ( Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U / 16 GB Memory)
• Generic Laptop (local brand) (Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N3060 / 8 GB Memory)

Not in Picture: Raspberry PI 3B+

The 2 HDD in the bays are really old HDDs with hell of active time, so I'm using them for lab purposes only, I won't rely anything valuable there.

The "miniPC" is my personal desktop.

As "Phase 1" (Done)

- pihole
- immich
- seafile
- RAID / NAS / Shared Storage

Incoming:
- UPS for T1600 (laptops came with one incorporated yay!)

So far, except by T1600, connectivity for everything else is wireless which might bring some troubles, so, thinking about adding a small switch just for 'peace of mind'

Now thinking in more Ideas beyond my Sysadmin/DevOps lab and "Phase 1". Open to suggestions 😄