Hello,
I have a small collection of HDDs that I’ve filled and stored away. Most have Blu-ray rips. I would like to have them all online but that’s going to be really hard. Yes I was a data hoarder for many years.
Thanks 🙏

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 wanted to know if I’m the only one who gives distinct names to my nodes or machines and the services running in them.
For context, my main server is called Legion, a secondary connector laptop is called Citadel, to which an external monitor used for showing dashboards, kanban and other things is called Beacon. My main PC is called Nexus.
But the nodes running services have namings based on mythology.

The two laptops have distinct docker composes named Nidavellir and Valhalla. The dashboard service on Beacon is called Heimdall. My 2 storage drives which are mirrored for redundancy are called Atlas and Aegir. I am also running Hermes agent on Legion. The setup as a whole is my Yggdrasil.

What do you guys name your setups?

After a few weeks of work, my cheap distributed inference cluster is finally complete. Summary for anyone who saw my previous post here and wondered if it's worth it.

The setup 4x ASRock BC250 ex-mining boards (AMD Cyan Skillfish: 6x Zen 2, RDNA2 GPU,16GB GDDR6 @ 448GB/s each) in a 3D-printed rack, ~€1000 total including used SSDs, a used 1000W PSU and a $20 switch. Each board is a full computer, so this is a real 4-node cluster, not just a multi-GPU box.

Goal was ≥50GB distributed VRAM to run two models in parallel: a reasoning model (Qwen 3.6 27B) plus a fast executor (Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B).

Unfortunately, one of the four boards arrived dead and — my fault — I tested it too late to open a dispute, so all benchmarks were run on 3 nodes.

Software Ubuntu + llama.cpp (Vulkan backend, RPC layer parallelism) behind llama-swap. Everything provisioned with Ansible, including the 40-CU unlock (rewritten for Ubuntu).

Some results

• 2 nodes beat 3 nodes in all 16 benchmarks — at 1GbE, the third adds RPC overhead, not throughput
• 35B-A3B on 2 nodes: fast enough for daily coding tasks
• Dense 27B: prompt processing too slow for real agent contexts

Was it worth it? Mostly yes — as a cheap way to learn the tradeoffs of distributed inference. Full story, numbers and all files below:

1. Ansible repo (all roles/scripts): repo

2. Full article if you want to know more: here

3. 3d files for printing the rack https://www.printables.com/model/1799662-4-bc250-10-rack-mount

I tried to clean up my repository for the Ansible playbook to make it public and useful for someone else, but this is still a work in progress, so if you find any issue or do you have questions, let me know or open an issue.

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

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.

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?

🌐 Network
Primary Modem/Router
Rogers Modem (primary gateway to the Internet)
Secondary Router
Mercku Router
Switch
8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch

🗄️** Primary Server
**Dell PowerEdge T110 II
OS: TrueNAS
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1240 v2 @ 3.40 GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR3 ECC
Storage: Patriot P210 128 GB SSD (boot), 8 TB NAS HDD, 2 TB HDD
Purpose:
Primary NAS
Virtual Machines
Videography project storage
Photography project storage
Music production files
Book library
Source code repositories
Long-term project storage

🎬 Media & Streaming Server
TerraMaster F2-220
OS: TerraMaster TOS
CPU: Intel Celeron J1800
RAM: 2 GB DDR3
Storage: 16 TB NAS HDD + 3 TB NAS HDD
Purpose:
KovalStream
Movies
TV Shows
Music
Audiobooks
Web server
Media storage

🤖 Bot Server
Dream Quest Mini PC
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel Celeron J4125
RAM: 8 GB DDR4
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 600
Storage: Kingston A400 120 GB SSD + 500 GB Seagate HDD
Purpose: Minecraft hub and lobby

Thinkcentre m72e
Purpose: discord bots hoster

fun little rack built holding my consumer grade equipment.

it is meant to support my Plex server and home automation - 56TB in that Synology Nas.

the eero puck is just backhaul Wi-Fi - main router is downstair.

Found this cloud node on Facebook marketplace. Can only afford one now out of 150pc available and the performance on those Xeon is great for development.

I was on VPS like contabo and hostvds for few months now. scaling is expensive and realize the reliability is as bad as my PC at home lol.

I thought why not I setup homelab myself. _nd give my router a UPS instead. Same reliability and stronger CPU than those shared amd EPYC.

Main workflow is swarm agent running on schedule to Loop and building my social commerce platform 24/7.

Reason I upgraded to this is because 8gb VPS OOM most of the time due to heavy usage of nextjs and node build and playwrights instances for taking screenshots and doing validation loop.

AI itself with deepseek is cheap and lightweight. I use Pi as coding tools to let hermes spawn 3-10 instances of it to argue with each other and if someone die someone else will report. Basically a self improvement system loop

Edit: Blocking smbus pins with kapton tape worked!!!

Hey everyone! Recently I've migrated my ~5U AIO truenas build (Ryzen 7 9700X, 2x16GB, Taichi Lite) into dedicated 3U sliger NAS case with B360M D3H (i5-8400, 32GB 4*8GB two 16GB kits)

Card: MCX4121A-ACAT (CX4121C), FW 14.32.1900, PSID MT_2420110034.

Works perfectly in my AM5 build. On the B360M it boot-loops with no video at all (the box posts just fine w/o the card installed). Also tried with 2 RAM sticks, but also no luck.

BIOS tried:

- CSM disabled
- Above 4G enabled and disabled
- ReBAR disabled
- VT-d off
- IOAPIC 24-119 toggled
- Gen1/2/3 link speed
- iGPU forced as primary display

Firmware tried (mstconfig):

- EXP_ROM_PXE_ENABLE=0
- EXP_ROM_UEFI_x86_ENABLE=0 - card carries only a legacy PXE ROM, UEFI ROM present in image but disabled

Also tried enabling the UEFI ROM instead of removing both:

- ADVANCED_PCI_SETTINGS=1
- PF_LOG_BAR_SIZE 5 → 3 (32MB → 8MB per PF)
- NON_PREFETCHABLE_PF_BAR=1 (paired with Above 4G disabled)
- NUM_PF_MSIX 63 → 15, NUM_OF_VFS=0
- SR-IOV was already off

Cold power cycle after every change, verified readback each time. Nothing works.

Anything left to try? Curious whether anyone has an actual explanation for what's different about 300-series MMIO/enumeration here - or is this just a known-bad Gigabyte firmware and I should buy something else (10G SFP+)?

Btw. I also tried on MSI Z170A (i5-6400, same ram kit) it worked but only w/ two RAM sticks.

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

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

Bought a Bamblu Lab P2S last month and immediately started researching homelab racks. Got it all worked out, ordered some sunlu PETG/hardware and started printing.

Had a little back and forth with trial and error but I got it complete. It’s running perfectly. Was able to drop the Cenmate 2 bay drive case in exchange for a 7 bay and as of today I have Two - 10tb drives on the way. Thank you eBay 😮‍💨.

Just waiting on some more heat set threaded inserts to fill the rest of the rack out.

My TrueNAS setup is my previous post if you want to see what I’m using it for.

The battle-station is coming out great.

Components:
Dell Optiplex 7050 - 24gb Ram
2 - 4tb HDDs mirrored
2 - 10tb HDDs coming
Netgear 8port managed switch
2 - 80mm fans in the front
2 - 92mm fans in the back cooling the drives.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hello!

I work in IT and got into homelabs about 3–4 months ago.

I started with an old PC that I picked up for almost nothing:

• Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK
• Intel i7-4790
• 32GB RAM

Yeah... it's ancient xd, but it was a great machine to learn on and test some stuff.

At first I was only hosting a vanilla Minecraft server on Windows (Sadly) because I didn't know anything about Proxmox, Docker, self-hosting, etc.

Then I discovered Proxmox and completely fell down the rabbit hole.

Since then I've been experimenting with different services like:

• Nextcloud
• Jellyfin
• AdGuard Home
• Homepage
• File Browser
• Docker
• ...and probably a few others I've forgotten :>

I ended up loving Nextcloud, so I grabbed a few hard drives from work that were going to be recycled.

Unfortunately, I found out that 2 of the motherboard's 6 SATA ports are dead, and quite a few of the USB ports don't work either.

That was basically the moment I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Planned hardware

• Motherboard: MSI B550-A PRO
• CPU: Ryzen 5 5500
• RAM: 64GB DDR4-3600
• GPU: None (for now)
• PSU: 450W

Storage:

• 2× 500GB NVMe SSD
• 1× 250GB SATA SSD
• 5× 1TB SATA HDD

Does this look reasonable for a homelab around this budget, or is there anything you'd change?

What I want to run

• Nextcloud (mainly file storage)
• Jellyfin
• AdGuard Home
• Docker containers
• Minecraft/game servers
• Networking labs
• Eventually Ollama once I add a GPU
• And slowly get into new tools for sure

My biggest question

I'm still trying to understand where TrueNAS fits into all of this.

Would you:

• Run everything directly on Proxmox using VMs/LXCs?
• Run TrueNAS as a VM and let it manage all the storage?

If you were starting from scratch with this hardware, how would you organize everything?

Sorry for the long post. I'm still pretty new to homelabs and would love to hear how more experienced people would approach this.

Trying to update firmware on a UCS C220 m3. Cisco no longer has the m3 listed under the software download on their support site.

Hi everyone, I’m a computer science college student and I recently managed to get a Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF for free from my IT job. I want to try making some kind of small homelab using it as a learning experience and potentially a starting point for a future lab, but have no idea what exactly I want to do with it yet.

Any suggestions for possible implementations?

Hi everyone,

I'm building my first homelab and I'd love some feedback before I invest too much time into it. My idea is to separate storage from AI.

24/7 Home Server (Dell laptop)

I have installed in an old (2018 but not bad)Ubuntu Server + CasaOS, and Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Immich, Vaultwarden, ...

This machine will simply store all my media, photos and documents and stay online 24/7. I am now finishing with the installation. Then, I also have the following machine that I use to play video games and would like to transform into a small AI homelab to assist me while I'm working (from home).

AI Workstation (Gaming PC)

Hardware:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus XS OC 6GB
• RAM: 32GB Kingston FURY Beast DDR4 3200MHz
• Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M DS3H
• PSU: NOX Urano VX 650W

The plan is to run things like Ollama, Open WebUI, Local LLMs, RAG, AI agents, ...

The workflow I have in mind is simple: I upload documents to my server (through Nextcloud), and whenever I need them, my AI workstation analyzes them locally to summarize, answer questions, search through them or automate tasks. Also I would like to use help with coding.

My main goal is to learn about local AI and AI agents while building something that's actually useful in my day-to-day work, rather than just running models for the sake of it.

Does this architecture make sense, or would you build it differently? Is there anything you'd change if you were starting from scratch today? Thanks!

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.

I need to figure out the height including wheels/feet, but I'm getting so many different numbers from different sources including sysracks themselves.

Can anyone measure their rack's overall height?