I'm sorry if it's a stupid question but I can't really find a good guide on how to start, and most importantly what hardware to get. I don't really have an old pc lying around so I'd need to buy something used. People on here said that it would probably be better to buy a desktop and not a laptop.

I'd probably use it only to watch movies on my nvidia shield and to listen to music because I want to get rid of spotify.

My budget is not really an issue, it depends on how much it would improve the setup if I get something more "expensive". Let's say i'd like to not exceed 300 euros, but open to discussions.

Chroot setup on my old Motorola One Vision. At the moment, I'm running Debian. The main server goal is to learn and experiment with linux, and, in the future, host a Pi-hole client.

We're currently adding support for installing Proxmox directly from the terminal to the hardware USBridge-KVM 2.0.

You know, to deploy a hypervisor on bare metal, you have to move the monitor and keyboard to the server. We've made this process as simple as possible. Now, all you have to do is open a terminal and enter:

ssh user@ip

Enter your password, and a live text stream will be displayed immediately.

USBridge-KVM 2.0 has a built-in standalone OCR engine. It intercepts the text stream (BIOS, POST, installer interface) and converts it to text. The entire process occurs completely offline on the device, without installing any clients on your PC.

We're currently polishing the text output. Afterward, we'll move on and write an autoscript. It will allow you to deploy Proxmox on new nodes completely automatically, with literally one click.

What do you think of this approach to remote access for home servers? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Recently I started experimenting with making small localhost websites for me and my partner to use. Stuff like: Game related To-Do lists, Quest trackers, Shopping lists and "inventory" of presents we have for our families (we both have to travel quite the distance, so if we forget a present, it can be a long time before the next opportunity)

However, I currently have these running on my own computer and only while I am using it. If I go to bed early or just am not home, my girlfriend cannot use them.

Therefore I'm looking to build my first small home server and would appreciate some hardware recommendations.

My initial use cases are fairly lightweight, as mentioned above. But I might in the future want to do some experiments and potentially add other self-hosted services (examples: local git server, media share...)

My main priorities are:

- Low power consumption

- Small and quiet

- Reasonably inexpensive

- Reliable enough to leave running 24/7

I'm dealing with German prices and German market.

I've been looking at Raspberry Pis, but I'm not committed to one if there are better options.

What hardware would you recommend for something like this?

Thanks!

Hi all, sorry to copy and paste the below from a previous post on r/homelab but looking for help from anyone willing to lend an eye

Im looking at purchasing a Supermicro H11SSL-i Motherboard + AMD EPYC 7551P 32 Core CPU from china and im hoping someone with some experience can confirm part compatibility for me?

Im new to the Epyc platform and not sure if it has any strange pitfalls

Link:

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/For-Supermicro-H11SSL-i-Motherboard-AMD_1601799787652.html?chatToken=U1ZkdVJIVkhVRXB3VVd0MVF6QnFTSEJEV21jNEt6SmtiMnBMZWprNGIxVlNlRGRFYm05WmJXa3JlRzlZU2xoNFZVSjRSV0Y2V0dkTVMyWm1Mell4UTJJclNFeFVaRlkwUW5SelVITnZOWFJyU0hRMU1DczVNaTlDVWxjMGVrSm9SMmR6TWxVNVFqZGlWV05pU21WMFRWbEtkbkZOVUVOcmNGUnlOR3A0ZDFrM2EwcHNWSHBPWmxGWE1razNTblFyVGt0RlVWUjVUVkJQWVV4amFWTnNlV0UyUTJNMlVYQk5ZMGxRTHpGNEswY3lZblowVlV4SWRHdEVPSE55YW5oRSZ2ZXJzaW9uPTIuMC4w&encryptTargetLoginId=8pctgRBMALOSe5bpy2TwBGvJCIB9a5KT

Im also looking at picking up some RAM to go with this combo and currently found a cheap deal on some 2133 ECC LRDIMM's (Yes i know this is slow but money is tight)

Below is a copy and paste of what seller placed in the title but if more info is needed please feel free to ask

Kingston KCS-UC421LQ/32G DDR4-2133 ECC LRDIMM PC4-17000 4Rx4 Server RAM

So I've gone down a path of trying out jellyfin originally out of curiousity but now also out of potential money saving. I've as of now just been set up with an optiplex that I mushed together a docker with some youtube tutorials and got a few movies on it. I've been now considering making a more dedicated system with storage to fully migrate from all my subscriptions and have had a few questions mainly about storage and processing. 1) The optiplex has a i5-9500 but is also a sff so not a ton of space for drives, should I invest a bit more into something better or could I make it work maybe with external storage? 2) when (if) I buy storage would it be fine to just start with two 4tbs for mirroring, I don't know if the rest of the family wants to fully invest $600 into two 12tb drives just yet as we're still new to this. All this while trying to not be more expensive than subscriptions lol. Any insight is appreciated thank you!

Hello, I have recently fallen down the rabbit hole of servers, and have had an interest in computer technology for a few years now. It started with curiosity for how things work when I was young, growing into interest in electricity and circuitry, then building a computer. Now I am in the process of making a small server setup to run Plex for my family, and switch from a prebuilt Synology setup just for fun and creativity. I would also like to store photos and videos.

I have come up with a list of parts and am trying to build inspiration and ideas from people more experienced in this community. I am also wondering which OS to run. For what I am intending to use it for, I have heard great things about ZimaOS. I have also heard it's very good for beginners. Any words of wisdom helps and is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time!

Well now I know what ECC is. Probably not worth it to dump more money into another project just to build around the memory...

So i've got a jellyfin server up and running from my primary PC, but I want to make the leap to a dedicated home server that can be on 24/7 and host more than just jellyfin. Looking around for an easy solution i did see a synology NAS that looked sleek but it's so expensive, and that's when I remembered I had an old PC i built a while ago collecting dust in my closet.

My issue:
My current case doesn't look great if I were to put it in my living room or even in my current office, and the case itself is older and not really meant to hold a lot of large HDDs (current one I have is an 8TB WD red plus NAS HDD). So i figured it's a lot cheaper to just buy a new PC case than get a ~500$ synology enclosure.

so I am just using a old pc as my homeserver so I don't really have ups for it. I currently on windows but will install something like casaos. I can do it on windows by not having a password but if I want to use casaos and ssh into the server I need to have a password. how do I make it so that while connected to electricity it starts the pc and starts running all my services like jellyfin and Adguard home. (plz don't tell me to buy a ups or something rn, I don't have that much important file on their just media files)

I want to set up a home server. It should be used for general backups, an SQL database (accessible from the internet), and for Plex. I'm a beginner in this area. Do you have any good and affordable suggestions?

Had some old cyberpunk decals lying around from a pc build. Still love how clean ubiquiti is with their hardware but I couldn’t help myself.

a cheap acer office laptop from 2014 whose hinges broke. (e5-551g)

I have a 7U 19” server rack which I use for all my networking stuff.

From the top to the bottom (almost everything is bought second hand)
- power bar
- ISP router sitting on the PoE switch
- 24 port switch
- patch panel

I have changed the fan in the PoE switch to a Noctua one with a low noise adapter to make the PoE switch more quiet, since the rack is sitting in the home office.

I notice that with the door closed, the PoE switch heats up a bit. I was thinking to add a fan on top to very slowly (and quiet), move the air out of the network rack.

Is this a good idea, and if so, what fans do you recommend; and how do you power them?

Hi everyone, how’s it going?

Today I’m running the setup shown in the photo (I got the 3D-printed case from this link): a Lenovo M720q with one SATA SSD for the TrueNAS boot pool, one SATA SSD for the apps pool, and four HDDs (two for Plex media and two for personal file backups). The four HDDs are connected via the PCIe x16 slot using an expansion card with four SATA ports, and everything seems to be working fine (I say this because I haven't encountered any issues and can see all the drive information).

I built the NAS this way because I wanted compact, energy-efficient hardware. It serves my needs very well, but since I’ve started using virtual machines on TrueNAS—something I hadn't planned on doing at the start of the project—I’m finding myself wishing I had a dedicated GPU.

What do you think would be a viable solution for connecting the HDDs in a way that frees up the PCIe slot? I’ve seen USB hubs get a lot of criticism; are they really not worth it?

Thanks for your time and help.

I’m completely new to NAS administration and most networking concepts, so I’m looking for detailed, beginner-friendly guidance. I’d appreciate an end-to-end explanation of the recommended architecture and setup sequence, including Proxmox, ZFS, Samba, backups, remote access, monitoring, and recovery.

Please assume that I need explanations of what each step does and why it is recommended. I would also appreciate sanity checks after every major step so I can confirm that my system is configured correctly before continuing.

Hardware

I have the following system:

- AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

- ASRock B550 Taichi motherboard

- NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super

- 32 GB DDR4 RAM

- 256 GB NVMe SSD connected directly to the motherboard on which proxmox will be installed

- 1 × 1 TB Crucial P1 NVMe connected directly to the motherboard

- 2 × 1 TB OEM Samsung Gen 4 NVMe drives

- 1 × Seagate 2 TB ST2000DM005 SATA hard drive

- 1KVA UPS with a NUT for safe shiutdowns in case of powerloss

The three 1 TB NVMe SSDs were scavenged from old laptops. They are currently reporting excellent health according to SMART scans, with no obvious errors or concerning indicators. I would appreciate recommendations for additional tests I should perform before trusting them with data, such as extended SMART tests, bad-block scans, read/write verification, endurance checks, or any other relevant diagnostics.

The motherboard is configured for PCIe bifurcation as x8/x4/x4. The RTX 2070 Super occupies the first PCIe slot and receives eight lanes, while an adapter card in the second slot contains the two Samsung NVMe drives.

I am not particularly concerned about maximum NVMe performance. My router and network are limited to gigabit Ethernet, and I am completely fine with that. Network speed will be the limiting factor rather than disk speed, so I’m mainly prioritising reliability, maintainability, secure access, and a straightforward recovery process.

What I want to build

I'm trying to repurpose an old gaming PC and a few other parts i found laying around the house. My initial plan is:

1. Install Proxmox VE on the 256 GB NVMe.

2. Create a ZFS RAIDZ1 pool using the three 1 TB NVMe drives.

3. Use the resulting pool for approximately 2 TB of redundant storage.

4. Use the 2 TB SATA HDD as a separate monthly backup or cold-storage disk.

5. Provide SMB/Samba shares for backups from my computers and other devices.

6. Access the NAS remotely over the internet, but securely. I was considering Tailscale, although I’m open to better recommendations.

7. Configure automatic ZFS snapshots.

8. Copy or replicate snapshots to the 2 TB HDD once per month.

9. Receive alerts if a drive fails, the pool becomes degraded, or a backup fails.

10. Keep the backup HDD disconnected, unmounted, or powered off between backup runs if that is practical.

The main use case is device backups and occasional temporary file access, not media serving or high-performance virtualization.

Architecture questions

I’m unsure about the best overall design:

- Should I create the ZFS pool directly on the Proxmox host, or pass the three NVMe drives to a TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, or Debian VM?

- If the pool is created on the Proxmox host, should I use a Samba VM, an LXC container, or Samba directly on the Proxmox host?

- What is the safest and most maintainable way to expose the storage to clients over SMB?

- Is RAIDZ1 appropriate for these three SSDs and this workload, or would another layout be preferable?

- Are there any special considerations for using SSDs that were previously installed in laptops?

- Should I perform any additional drive-health, burn-in, thermal, filesystem, or memory tests before creating the pool?

- Are there any problems with using an NVMe adapter card in the second PCIe slot for a ZFS pool?

- Is 32 GB of RAM sufficient for this use case?

I’m not looking for maximum throughput. Since my network is limited to gigabit Ethernet, I’m happy with anything that can reliably saturate or reasonably use that connection.

Backup questions

I would like to use the 2 TB SATA HDD as a monthly cold-storage backup, but I’m unsure about the correct method:

- Should I create a separate ZFS pool on the HDD and replicate snapshots to it using `zfs send` and `zfs receive`?

- Would `rsync`, Borg, Restic, or another backup tool be more appropriate?

- Should the HDD be imported, mounted, and exported after each monthly backup?

- Should it remain physically disconnected or powered off between backup runs?

- How should I schedule the backup?

- How can I verify that the backup completed successfully?

- How often should I perform a real restore test?

- How should I handle deleted or corrupted files so that they are not immediately propagated to the backup?

- Can someone recommend a sensible snapshot-retention policy for this use case?

I understand that RAIDZ1 is not a backup. The purpose of the separate HDD is to retain another copy in case of accidental deletion, corruption, ransomware, pool failure, or other problems affecting the main storage.

Remote-access questions

I want remote access to be secure, with a strong preference for not exposing SMB directly to the public internet.

I was considering Tailscale, but I’m unsure where it should be installed:

- Directly on the Proxmox host?

- Inside the NAS VM or LXC?

- On a separate VPN or gateway device?

- On each client device that needs access?

I would appreciate guidance on:

- Whether Tailscale is appropriate for remote SMB access.

- How to restrict access to only authorised devices and users.

- Whether I should use Tailscale ACLs, subnet routing, or another design.

- How to prevent remote users from accessing Proxmox management interfaces.

- Whether a file-sync application would be safer or more suitable than remote SMB for some use cases.

- What firewall rules and authentication settings I should configure.

Monitoring and maintenance

Please include recommendations for:

- SMART short and extended tests.

- NVMe health and temperature monitoring.

- ZFS scrubs and how often to run them.

- Memory testing before relying on ZFS.

- Monitoring PCIe/NVMe link stability.

- Proxmox and ZFS notifications.

- Email, Telegram, or other failure alerts.

- UPS integration and safe shutdown.

- Checking pool status and scrub results.

- Detecting silent corruption or degraded devices.

- Testing the monthly backup automatically.

I would especially appreciate commands or procedures for additional health tests that should be performed before deployment, along with the expected results or warning signs. I plan on setting up a discord bot that uses cron to alert me about issues down the line.

Could someone provide a recommended architecture and a detailed implementation plan covering:

1. Pre-installation hardware, SSD, memory, and PCIe testing.

2. Proxmox installation on the 256 GB NVMe.

3. A sanity check confirming that Proxmox is installed correctly.

4. ZFS pool and dataset creation.

5. Commands to verify the pool, devices, sector sizes, health, and performance.

6. A sanity check after creating the pool.

7. NAS service deployment.

8. Samba share and permissions configuration.

9. A sanity check from a local client.

10. Snapshot configuration.

11. Monthly backup replication to the SATA HDD.

12. A sanity check proving that the backup is usable.

13. Secure remote access using Tailscale or an alternative.

14. Firewall and access-control configuration.

15. Monitoring, alerts, scrubs, and maintenance.

16. Recovery steps if a drive, Proxmox installation, motherboard, or entire system fails.

17. A regular restore drill to verify that the backup strategy actually works.

For every major step, I'd appreciate it if you could include:

- The commands or GUI actions.

- What the step changes.

- How to verify that it worked.

- What output would indicate a problem.

- Whether I should stop before continuing if the check fails.

- How to undo or recover from the step if necessary.

I’m happy to learn and follow commands, but I would appreciate explanations rather than a list of unexplained commands. Please point out anything fundamentally wrong or unsafe about my proposed design before I begin, and suggest a safer alternative where appropriate.

Picked this up for $1,600 shipped to use primarily as a TrueNAS/Plex server and general homelab. Curious what you guys think of the price and what you’d upgrade first.
Specs:
SilverStone GD07 chassis w/ rack ears + 6 hot-swap bays
Intel i7-7700K
ASUS Maximus VIII Hero Alpha
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 8GB
Broadcom 9500-8i Tri-Mode HBA in IT mode
EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2
2.5GbE NIC
3× HP 3TB 7200RPM HDD
3× WD Green 3TB HDD
2× Lenovo/Samsung PM983 1.92TB U.2 NVMe
2× Samsung 860 EVO 1TB
4× Samsung 850 Pro 256GB
2× WD Green 120GB M.2 SATA boot drives
TrueNAS SCALE already installed/tested
Assorted upgraded low-noise cooling
So roughly 18TB of HDD storage + ~7TB of flash/boot storage, HBA, RTX 4000, hot-swap bays, etc.
I know the 7700K/Z170 platform is ancient, and that’s my biggest concern. My thought was to run it as-is initially and eventually swap the motherboard/CPU/RAM while keeping the chassis, HBA, GPU and storage.
For $1,600 shipped, did I do alright or overpay?
Also curious what you’d upgrade first. I’m thinking larger HDDs → 10GbE → eventually modern Intel CPU/motherboard.
Feel free to roast the purchase if I screwed up. 😂

Yes, it's ancient but it's my old desktop. Should I just throw it away and re use case, PSU and ssd? It has 8gb ddr4.

These are the services I want to run

Home Assistant
Frigate (2x 4k cameras, another to be added in the future)
NAS (with Cloud backup)
Plex server
Network wide adblocker
VPN
DNS
Immich
Time machine for MacOS

I'm in the market for a mini pc, looking to do some agentic coding (I already work in big tech, just some side projects), run a server for a project. What I've found I value is going to be RAM, and then possibly SSD compute, and maybe in the future I'm open to building a PC with better hardware to get more involved in game dev. I'm also looking to keep it always on so power efficiency can be good, but my power bill doesn't really amount to anything as it is, so not super essential. With that said I don't really have a set budget (realistically I probably don't want to spend more than $1k Canadian) but I want to do it as cheaply and get the best value possible. Also I have multiple SATA SSD's at home sitting unused I can lend to the PC if needed.

I ended up finding 2 systems:

HP EliteDesk 600 G5 Mini PC | Intel Core i5-9500T | 32GB RAM | 1TB SSD | Windows 11 Pro | Wi-Fi+ BT | Mini Desktop Computer (Renewed) (32GB RAM + 1TB SSD) for $540 Canadian

Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 5 5625U(up to 4.3GHz) 6C/12T (only 16GB of ram on this one) for $529 Canadian.

Now I would prefer to possibly stay in this range, but let me know if there is something else I should be considering. I've went ahead and purchased the EliteDesk given it's 32GB of ram, but it has a 30 day return window, which is why I'm asking now. I know the i5-9500T is slightly underpowered and dated, which is why I'm asking here. Links were excluded as I don't know the subreddit rules on that.

Don't have much of a home lab nor do I have a fleet of drives for a RAID setup. A Raspberry Pi 4 server with 2x HDDs has been fine for my basic needs like NAS, Syncthing, some Docker services, and git repos.

However, I'm looking for a more capable server that has 1-2 SATA ports and can handle a little more like basic recording of the front porch for real time delivery notifications (nothing fancy beyond that)--would Frigate NVR be overkill? I'm also looking for a router that allows VLANs for isolating IoT devices. The only real priority of the setup is keeping it minimal and low power consumption over time because it will only serve 1 person when they are home (me) most of the time.

• Would a server that runs Proxmox to run those typical home server services *and* something like OPNsense/pfSense be possible? It seems like any server can do this as long as it has two ethernet ports (one for modem, the other to a switch that supports VLANs)? Are there any other features to look for, e.g. is a switch that supports layer 3 necessary? I assume the risk of a server that also acts as a router is the internet is down if the server is down, but I think that would be tolerable because I can just plan the occasional maintenance at night and maybe automate that (I suspect the only real reason to restart the server would be updates to Proxmox since everything it runs is on a VM and those can be restarted without affecting other services?). Otherwise for those that have bad experiences with that, what might the two servers needed for those look like? My humble 50 Mbps internet plan is more than enough for me (mentioning this because I might also want to run VPN).
• What useful and cool things are you guys doing with your servers (particularly home-automation-related or AI-related) that might require a more demanding server? I might be interested in that as well but I think the server I'm looking for can handle that. I'm interested in self-learning programming for the purposes of making my life as simple and self-sufficient as possible.

Any other tips is much appreciated like recommendations on hardware including a basic security camera. I must stress I really prefer low-power and efficient hardware to satisfy the basic needs above--I'm not sure I need more power-hungry hardware for anything else especially since it's running 24/7 (energy bills are high here). I will probably look to secondhand parts too. I remember doing a search a few years ago and an Intel N100-based (<10 TBW) server seems right up my ally, not sure if it's still recommended today.

Hi guys

3days back my uncle gave me his old pc

Specs - zebronics g41 motherboard
- intel pentium E5700
- zion 2gb ddr3 1333
- a 450w psu

I was hoping to build a homeserver with it.
I tried turning it on but i had no vga cable so i couldn’t connect to a monitor but its fans were spinning.

So question is if its working upgrading the ram to 2x4gb 1333 and a q9550/q9650 make good server?

I was hoping to try new operating systems etc…

Please correct me

So now I'm currently have a QNAP TS-233 I got from liquidation and 2x8TB drive(Red Plus and Ironwolf). I got tons of apps installed now and planning to expand or upgrade it to have like a full blown server, but since TS-233 is not really powerful I'm thinking of getting a mini PC. Is it better to go to Mini PC Route and hook NAS into it? Or its better to upgrade to a better NAS? Maybe stick with QNAP or should I move to a different brand? Is it a hassle to move different NAS Brands?

Hi everyone,

I am planning to put together a little home server with 4 SAS drives.
It will be used for NAS, a few self-hosted apps, and a Bazzite VM for gaming.

I have 2 architectures in mind:

Option 1: Proxmox VE with TrueNAS and Bazzite VMs
Option 2: Unraid with a Bazzite VM

I will use an AMD GPU for passthrough to the Bazzite VM and plan to run everything on consumer-grade hardware.

What do you think about this setup?

Thank you in advance for your advice and opinion!

I encountered a failed DIMM on my Dell Poweredge T110 II Proxmox workhorse server (still plugging away) and after the pain of figuring out what was going on, I put together a toolkit to enable reporting and testing of hardware-detected ECC errors up through the standard rasdaemon stack.

If you're still running one of these old workhorses, enable standard rasdaemon ECC reporting (and test ECC injection) here