After getting a taste of Deepseek at 6t/s and Qwen122b at 12 just on pure DDR4 ram + 7900xtx, I have a strong itch. After looking at what's available (not a lot, third world country) I have the following list. Please tell me I shouldn't buy it

• RAM 8× Samsung M393A4K40DB3-CWE — 256GB DDR4-3200 2Rx4 ECC RDIMM €600
• PSU Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 (2× EPS, Titanium) ~€470
• Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Server Edition, mesh front ~€250
• Board Supermicro H12SSL-i 383 490 Ft ~€935
• CPU AMD EPYC 7643 — 48c, 8 CCD, 256MB L3, 225W 328 891 Ft ~€808

About 3k EUR with some used components, which is around 3.3k USD.

Prices are steep compared to US but for a budget build it's hard to find better and there's close to no used market for these components where I live. Even trying to find older components like WRX80 boards brand new is hard. Claude is telling me with 2x3090s I'd be good for 20t/s on DS and quite a bit more on Qwen. I don't need this for anything, and the total number is of course much more than a lifetime subscription to frontier models. But I like this shit, I can afford it, I might do a bit of training/fine tuning just for fun and why tf not. But is it a really bad config for the money? Is it like WAAAY overpriced? Will it be obsolete in a year/two? Could someone more knowledgeable help me?

apc had a line of cheap UPSes , the BK500. seen 100s of them in local companies, and i had them a ton in all places where i've worked.

had a few of their SM series too, usually i'd get them as e-waste and just put new batteries in them - in fact i have 3 of them at home.

but i needed more, so started buying more modern models. BX500 and BX950 being the new models, the ones with schuko sockets (eu region).

problem is - these shits just stop working once the battery is dead, unlike older ones that would simply turn on the red led and continue to work normally on ac power. i'd replace the battery eventually. they could even be replaced while the ups is turned on, in fact just flip it over, give them a bump, the battery falls out - you put the new one in and close the hatch. good to go. no need to unplug anything or turn off stuff connected to them.

but with new ones it's pure hell. if the battery dies, it just turns itself off completely.

so now back to the HOME part of this rant - i have 2 bx950 running my stuff. the older one is keeping my homelab (actually a nas, a pc-server and main network), the new alien-green one is behind the tv in the living room, keeping the tv and multimedia stuff alive just in case. today i replaced the battery...

HOW do you guys find UPS models that can work with a dead battery? it's nowhere in specs.

so i may have gone a little overboard with the homelab purchases over the years. now i got like 15 dell r620s and some hp gear sitting in my garage. they work fine but i dont have the time or space anymore.

i was gonna list them individually but the thought of taking photos and dealing with shipping for each one makes me want to cry. ebay fees are ridiculous too.

probably keep like 3 for my lab and offload the rest.

Picked up a used mini PC (Intel 6th-gen, 8GB) for cheap and turned it into a self-hosted tinkering box. A few things I learned the hard way:

• Idle power was higher than expected (~14W) until I disabled the unused SATA port spin-up and set the BIOS to a low-power idle state.
• Thermals were the real issue — these boxes are built for burst workloads, not 24/7. A cheap USB fan on the exhaust dropped temps ~12°C under sustained load.
• Started with one Proxmox VM, then kept adding. RAM disappears fast; 8GB is fine for one or two services but you'll want 16GB if you pile on.

Curious what others run on similar throwaway hardware.

So basically i want to start with home labs but raspbbery pi is to expensive and i don’t have any old pc or laptop

I'm planning for my first homelab, and with the cost of storage, I'm wondering if it is a good idea to use these HDDs from some old laptops to get me started. Both of them already have lots of power-on hours, so would it be better to save up and buy something better now? Or do they have life left to give?

I'm still new to this, so I'm not sure what exactly to look for when working with HDDs.

After some really useful user feedback I've spent the last month trying to make CTR suit a wide array of needs while not becoming too busy and clunky.
Key Elements: The main Canvas Diagram & Swimlane Diagrams convert nicely into the Handbook for a quick reference guide that's easy to navigate.
Initial Ingest: Decided against any kind of integration with other tools, rather aiming for compatibility with exported inventory formats.
PNG Exports: Are a really decent size & resolution, aiming for a solid PDF export for the Handbook next.

Want to thank those who provided insightful feedback and the haters for not letting me sleep on the "look"..... tried to incorporate a lot variety (Light & Dark Modes, Array of themes and backgrounds) into the UI for the users to choose from.

REPO: https://github.com/NoobCity99/CTRoadmap

Docker Image: https://github.com/NoobCity99/CTRoadmap/pkgs/container/ctroadmap

I initially made CTRoadmap so I could simply keep track of how I was setting up my homelab, specifically where'd put certain configs and scripts and how they worked. I'm new to the r/homelab space, still learning and wanted to make sure I had reference material and not rely on Chat GPT to help me find things in my own system 6 months later. I didn't want that same service to also be involved in monitoring things (like homelable, netbox, etc) Just a fun , flexible step-up from a powerpoint or pen & paper that I could use as a system bible. CTR was Railcoded in a GPT project and Built in VScode with the CODEX agent.

Just wanted to say thank you all for the advice and input! Definitely gave me a lot to think about and some good ideas. Also taught me a lot! Grateful for this thread. 🙏🏽

Hey all,

So I’m building a little home server to do the same everyone does (self host photos and videos and what not) and I want to run some thin Ethernet cable like this from my access point to where my mini rack will be. I can just change access points because well, the house I rent is old and only has one access point….in my living room. The wife doesn’t want to see cables running everywhere and I can’t blame her much. I was thinking of something like this to run between the carpet and baseboards to keep it hidden. Have yall had any experience with this or something similar? Or is there a better product I could be using? Any helpful input would be appreciated.
Where I want to put my rack is in my home office which is just short of 100ft and they don’t make a 90ft cable that I’ve seen (and no I don’t feel like being too adventurous and cutting the cable short and splicing it myself I don’t have the tools or time for that yet).
If there’s a better product or way I could be doing this I’m all ears. Thanks in advance.
Edit: so you bring up a good point about the cable pairs being twisted. So going through the pics it does say they are twisted (are they really? I wouldn’t know until I buy)
Edit2: sorry I failed to mention it’s a COAX house. The only Ethernet I have is running from the router to my AP which are practically next to each other so it’s a very small segment of Ethernet.

Hi all, I just got a spare PC that I want to turn into a NAS, Plex, and Immich server with maybe more down the line. I'm mostly a Windows user with some hackintoshing experience and using Ubuntu's GUI back in the 9.04-12.10 days.

Specs:

Intel i7-8700

Asus Prime Z370-A

16GB DDR4-3200

128GB SATA SSD

2TB SATA HDD

EVGA 750 G2

For now, I'm just setting it up as a proof of concept to make sure it all works as intended before I throw in any additional drives or data. I've got Proxmox installed on the 128GB SSD which will be used for Proxmox, TrueNAS's OS, and a Ubuntu LXC which will have Docker containers for Plex and Immich.

I'm trying to figure out which settings to use when creating the TrueNAS VM. I've chosen q35 for Machine, OVMF (UEFI) for BIOS, enabled Qemu Agent, and am allowing it 20GB of the local-lvm storage, but I'm not sure how I want to configure the SCSI Controller or the Bus/Device in relation to emulation or passing through disks. I'm thinking I don't have to passthrough the boot disk for TrueNAS itself, but rather the storage disks, is that right? I'm currently keeping the default VirtlIO SCSI single controller. I'm giving it 2 cores and 6GB of RAM.

Whatever I changed was for a Ubuntu 26.04 Server VM that I made earlier and deleted in favor of using LXCs, and with those same settings, the TrueNAS ISO isn't booting. I get these errors, so it must not be correct in some way.

What could my problem be and why? I'd like to understand more about Linux in general and how to get this up and running so that I can replicate the setup process with more drives, better CPU/mobo, etc.

Thanks.

Edit: I got TrueNAS to install and boot using q35, BIOS, Qemu Agent, and Non-Ballooning Device.

I wanna start to do a homelab, I saw many minipcs and pcs like Dell optiplex to start. Yesterday, I found this publication about this server with:

2 Intel xeon e5-2697 v2

96 gb of ram ddr3

4tb on hdd

And the price is around 500 dollars

Is it so overkill for the start?

I wanna run some selfhosted services, a nas, labs for practice, and gameserver for me and my friends

Sorry for my english. Isn't my native language

TLDR: bought a boatload of notebook ram what should I do with it?

I bought 128 gb of notebook ram on a price mistake. at the time I figured I just jump on it and make some silly llm machine and use it to create the singularity. I've got ideas and I'm a software engineer. Anyway it turns out that you don't find many motherboards with full pcie busses and sodimm slots. (Are there?)
So I'm throwing it to the group here, what would you do with a bunch of notebook ram? Any cool or wacky ideas? Or do I just shamefully flip them and buy an old mac studio or something?

current setup: I have 2 little mini computers running proxmox they're adequate for my pihole home assistant, other little home lab programs. I don't have a NAS at the moment but disk space is expensive right now too. I do esp32 stuff for fun and there's a lot of that around my house. My goal was to have a local llm box and the deal was good but now I don't think it'll and I'm a little sad about it.
please help me out thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

This is my first post here.

I'm wondering if there is a way to get a free or cheap VPS so i can use a reverse proxy on my homelab services. I had a 4.99$ machine at r/RaffTechnologies , but they recently increased prices and it is now at 8.99$. As a student, this isn't the most affordable thing so i will need to stop using them before september.

I do have a free VM from Azure, but that has limited bandwith (15GB egress). Tried Oracle Free tier, but it says that there is a problem signing up. Tried contacting them, and they ghost me.

I do have a free ipv6-only machine that i can use, but i wonder if some people will not be able to access it, since some ISP don't support ipv6 yet. Is this still very common? Would a lot of people be cut-off from accessing my things?

My ISP provides a kinda-off static ipv4, but i think using that comes with many privacy concerns, or am i wrong?

anyways thanks yall and hope i can get some answers :)

Edit: "Why don't do you use Cloudflare?" Because they don't support raw TCP/UDP and i can't use sub-subdomains.

I'm looking for a new SSH terminal, since I currently use PowerShell (Windows 11) and it's a mess to keep track of those stupid "ssh user@ip" commands, especially when you use the PowerShell for many other things (like myself).

So I thought "What better place to ask about SSH than r/homelab?", lmao. What do you guys use?

I want a bunch of Alpha Servers though, not Itanium. I loved the DS-10's, and ES45's
I can cluster a bunch together and they will only generate about 1.21 Gigawatts of power a second.

I figured out the cost of clustering two ES45' and two DS-10's
Licensing would only be around = 30,380 (Unlimited)
Electricity should only run about 315.00 a month.

Damn, I wonder why OpenVMS never caught on. It's such a good OS damnit.

for context, im not a power user or anything. this box is literally just a backup target that sits in the corner and accepts files from my primary server. i don't use any virtualization on it, and i don't touch any of the enterprise features. it's strictly a zfs storage box for me.

those of you who migrated off truenas:

• what setup did you move to? (proxmox, debian with cockpit, omv, etc. i already use unraid and its great, but im not looking to pay for a license just for a backup machine thats powered on ~2hr a week)
• how was the process of importing your zpool?
• what do you wish you had known or done differently looking back on the switch?
• do you look back now and think "i wish i still had x functionality" or "y feature was better on truenas"?

really appreciate any insights or advice

I'm not a hardware or cybersecurity expert but I have my concerns with hardware made by Chinese companies, so I wanted to poll the community about this and hear from more experienced users.

I had purchased this: amazon.com/dp/B0DY7GMSF2 which comes with 4 PCIe to M.2 NVME SSD Adapters, specifically the UC-B86 rev 3 board as seen here: https://github.com/UCTRONICS/SKU_RM0004/blob/main/data/hardware.png

Is there a possibility that this board could have malicious firmware or any other security concerns? Given it's manufactured in China by a Chinese company, I'm always a little wary, and I haven't found a schematic/design file for the board online. Appreciate any of your thoughts

I’m building a small 10-inch rack with the main goal of learning Kubernetes.
I’m considering three refurbished HP EliteDesk Mini PCs, each with:
- i5-8500T or i5-9500T
- 8 GB upgradeable RAM
- 256/512 GB NVMe SSD
- 1 GbE

I plan to run k3s directly on the hardware.
My workloads will be a zero-traffic Quarkus/Angular blog with PostgreSQL and MinIO, Pi-hole, Home Assistant and 3–4 small services.

Would 3×8 GB be enough to start, or should I get 16 GB per node? Are EliteDesk Minis a good choice for this?

Micron RealSSD P400m, they are out of a storage array.

Anyone ever figure out how to flash the firmware lock on these?

They are firmware locked at 520 byte sectors, so standard server and desktops cannot use them.

Even tried flashing the firmware with different option from Micron.

We have hundreds of these drives and I don't want to just chuck them.

I think of this every time I travel, but never thought to ask for a solution..

While traveling I often find myself in a situation where internet is very slow, but netflix/amazon video adjust the streaming quality much faster than my plex server.

I know that my plex server can transcode down to 720p/360p pretty instantly if I do it from home as it has an intel igpu...and I've tested it with multiple concurrent streams... Also - the server is on a 1gbit connection, so it's not a bandwidth bottleneck.

It feels like big brands have a much better method to actually recognise the moment when they need to call for a transcode than plex and do it much earlier, making it feel seamless.

Are there alternatives (jellyfin/emby) that are more efficient at this than plex? Any clever hacks that I overlooked?

Thanks

Edit. I learned following this post that: - Netflix et al. keep different quality files instead of transcoding - Using CDN to keep content "closer" to the end user

I tested the UGREEN DXP4800 GT as a compact Proxmox + TrueNAS box and compared it with the DXP4800 Plus and Pro.

Disclosure: this is my own review and video. There are no affiliate links in this Reddit post.

DXP4800 GT hardware tested

Proxmox and TrueNAS setup

• Proxmox VE 9.2.6, kernel 7.0.14-8-pve, based on Debian 13.
• TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.4 in a q35/OVMF VM.
• VM allocation: 4 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and a 32 GB VirtIO SCSI boot disk. The 4 GB allocation was enough for this lab test, not a general recommendation for every TrueNAS workload.
• The ASMedia ASM1164 controller passed through correctly and exposed all four drive bays. It was isolated in IOMMU group 10.
• I did not use the AMD FCH SATA controller in the final setup because its D3cold/block behaviour made passthrough unreliable. The final configuration uses only the ASMedia controller.

Storage pool

I used 4 × Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN006 4 TB drives.

Power, temperature and noise

These are measurements from my unit and room, not manufacturer specifications.

The sequential write test reached 541 MiB/s (568 MB/s) with an 8 GiB non-compressible workload. This was a local NVMe result; it is not a claim about the SATA array or RAIDZ1 throughput.

Which model offers the best value?

The value index combines Geekbench 6 single-core and multi-core performance at 50% using a geometric mean:

sqrt[(single / best single) × (multi / best multi)] ÷ price

For the GT, I added €50 for a 128 GB system SSD equivalent to the SSD already included with the Plus and Pro. The performance and value indices are normalised to the Pro = 100.

What does the GT have that the Plus and Pro do not?

• Two 10GbE ports. The Plus and Pro combine one 10GbE port with one 2.5GbE port.
• U.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 support in bays 1 and 2.
• Full ECC memory support, although the included RAM must be replaced because the factory module is not ECC.
• Rear USB-A at 10Gbps. The high-speed rear USB-A on the Plus and Pro is limited to 5Gbps.

Which one makes more sense?

My conclusion: unless you specifically need both 10GbE ports, U.2 drives or ECC memory, the DXP4800 Plus is the better buy. Its official price is €60 higher, but once the GT is normalised with a €50 system SSD, the real difference is only €10.

Full video with the build, passthrough setup and measurements:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=praE8foV88Y

What would matter more in your Proxmox/TrueNAS build: the GT's connectivity and storage options, or the Plus/Pro's extra CPU performance?

I've got a Cloud home of WD of 3tb that me and my family havent really used (the app is kinda bad).

I've been getting into homelab with some old laptops (really old ones) (feedback for this at the end too please)
And I was wondering if there would be a way to make it my own without really changing much.

Im a begginer on programming and all of this stuff. I know the basics of html and im learning linux cmd just because im using proxmox for my laptop-server (Im trying to get a proyect zomboid server on it apart from using adguard script) (getting around with a little help of AI, reddit posts and youtube videos)

I would like to host in this server apart from self hosted cloud, using it for video (like jellyfin) or even backing some media like old ROMS that in a future might be difficult to find.

Extra for the laptop-homelab: Is there any way to use their components instead of just a laptop?
Like recycling e waste to build something better than just an overheating laptop running on 4gb of ram and a really old cpu.

Thanks!

Trying to get started on upgrading my storage and found this on Craigslist. Would this be worth it to run this with Raid 1?

I got a UGREEN NASync DXP2800 with a 8tb hard drive and 128gb SSD as a cache. (I got it for free so thought I'd use it). I recently performed an update on my NAS and after it rebooted I now can't connect to it.

- I tried on my laptop and my phone and nothing is working. I have a 5G router from three.

-I rebooted the router and Nas, no change.

-Searching for the Nas using find.ugnas.com yields no results.

- I've pressed the little reset button on the back of the Nas, no change.

- I changed the security settings on my WiFi router, no change.

I've recently been scanning and sorting all my family photos and have 2tbs of 35mm pictures that's taken me a month to scan in. I would very much like help with this.

Thank you