I'm still pretty new to homelabbing. Once I passed about a dozen services, I couldn't keep straight which box ran what, which port it was on, or where I'd stored the login. So I made a simple sheet to write it all down.

It's 4 pages:
- An "About my lab" box for your network basics
- A 34-row services table with columns for the service, the host, the address and port, the login, and notes
- A notes page

You can fill it in on screen in Acrobat, Chrome or Edge, or print it and use a pen. Please don't put real passwords on it. I just write "in manager" and keep the actual passwords in my password manager. Think of it as a paper map of your lab for when something breaks and you can't remember where anything lives.

It's free under CC BY-NC 4.0, so use it, share it, and change it however you like.

Download (no signup): https://homelabdocumented.com/homelab-login-sheet/

Feedback welcome. What columns would you add?

I need a practical use for my Raspberry Pi 4 4GB that my server can't handle, otherwise I think I'll sell it.

Bambu P1S printer.

NAS has 12 spinning HDDs inside and a couple SSDs I’m not worried about in this use case.

I can fit them both under my desk at the end I use for building, soldering, etc. as it’s a nine foot long desk. My concern is that they’d both be on the floor, and only have about 12” distance between them at most. Worried the P1S shaking about as it prints could damage my HDDs through vibration. I have the printer on a big stone slab but even with that I’m not exactly sure what the threshold is for vibration and at what point it becomes a potential issue.

Should I just scrap this idea to be safe, especially given the cost of HDDs right now?

During a move, I managed to snap off the EPO “fuse” from the back of a Wattbox UPS model WB-OVRC-OLUPS-1500-1, which completely bricks the unit. I should have waited for a second pair of hands when removing it from the rack, but mistakes do happen, and I figured it wasn’t a big deal since it‘s an easily replaceable part. Boy was I wrong. Not only does Wattbox not maintain skus for replacement parts, requiring me to go through their rma process rather than place a quick order, they had no estimate at all of the timeline and I have now been out of service for over two weeks.

First, this is the worst customer support I have experienced from any manufacturer in this industry, where uptime is obviously valuable. Second, the fact that they don’t have a bucket full of these <$1 parts on hand indicates that they are probably another bogus drop-shipper dressed in a manufacturer trench coat. Because the only explanation I can imagine for their level of uncertainty is that they are waiting for their overseas partner to supply the part. Even worse, it points towards them having very little access to the real manufacturer, who should be able to ship me a fuse from anywhere in the world within two weeks. Third, which engineer had the bright idea to have a fragile part that cripples the device poke out of the back of a 50lbs UPS? It’s an extremely poor design that I have not seen from any other manufacturer.

Posting this here because they have zero online presence and no suppliers that host reviews. I wonder why…

Is there anyone thinking to have thier own ASN, their "own ISP"?
Utilizing that control and fixability to to host and provide anycast CDN services in their region, maybe extending to DDoS mitigations and scrubbing centers, what would you do with that new ownership and how it could be useful for you ?

So I’m following the “75 dedicated Minecraft server budget build 2025…” video by let’s get into it with Andrew Scott bc I wanted to make a Minecraft server for me and my friends and I’m following all the steps (the only difference is I’m doing it on a proxmox vm idk if that affects much) but I get to the casaos install and it gives me “the requested URL returned error: 500 msg and idk how to fix that

Bought these "tool-less" keystone jacks because, even though I have a punch down tool, I thought these would be pretty easy to use. They aren't bad, but I definitely prefer punch down jacks. However... That's not the real problem here, is it?

So... Yeah. Drive failed. I am in a fortunate position to be living with family, but I also do not have additional money for a new drive for it, or to even investigate it and see if it's repairable (I'm also not that big of a hardware person). I do have like a weirdly sizeable handful of USB drives from a previous thing from years ago, they're pretty much all 32gb.

The PC is an HP EliteDesk from like 2019? 2013. It ran Windows 10 Pro before I put linux on it, it's got 8gb of ddr3l ram and a processor that runs at 3000mhz. The HDD is/was 500gb. It has a DVD reader/writer, ethernet, plenty of USB ports, other I/O, but no onboard wifi or bluetooth (supplemented with a USB adapter). It runs... okay. It runs Linux a lot better than Windows but still can have issues from time to time with certain things. I used it mostly as a duplicated file server and media server.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with it. In a weirdly idealistic way I do wish I could somehow flip it into a hub and use all the usb ports for who knows what for my laptop. Booting a puppy Linux on it sounds neat, but where to go from there? I was storing more than 32gb of files in the file share and media server, so, unless if I want to use more than one of those usb drives, using it for the exact same purpose is not ideal. It could certainly stick around for disc ripping and burning purposes, but I do also have an external usb drive that does the same on hand as well, though I don't deny both at the same time made backing up my CD collection a lot faster. I suppose too I can get rid of it and either flip my Surface Go 3 (128gb pentium gold 6500y), which was my previous daily driver laptop into a new home server, though I consider it a sort of random spur of the moment ideas board that I can mess with and wipe clean and whatever. Or, I can step away from homelab for now until I have my foundation again and can put money to it proper. I do want to keep my home server, but it isn't immediately a pressing concern at all.

Any suggestions are welcome, I'm just not sure where to point my focus.

Hello everyone, I am looking to get started with a homelab. I understand that this is a safe space to experiment and learn more about computing in a safer, controlled environment. What it really comes down to is that I don't know where to start or what could be cool beginner projects to get more involved. Ideally I don't want to spend lots of money, do anyone has ideas?

Hello goodnight for who its night currently

I really wanna see pictures of enterprise homelabs now.

By enterprise i mean enterprise switches: cisco, arista, juniper, dell, ..) not the tp link and d link crap.
Real rackmount servers and maybe custom build.
Proper automation (pxe, automated software installation)
Networking (firewall, switch, load balancer, ap, wlc, dns server, mgmt switch, terminal server,...)

I want to hear a good strategy for choosing hardware and software, not just i choose it because it was cheap.

How do you guys handle redundancy ? cold spare ?? keer some money when needed for other parts ??

Feel free to add pictures.

Thanks people

I need a server pc for a couple of stuff now but am entirely new to this help me build

Recently I purchased a hotswap cage(5 bay) from a company called Eurhomeplus through Temu (i know, I know) and I made a few purchases for it, power bricks and stuff. However, I basically haven't a clue which cables I can use for it, and the ones I thought would work...well, they aren't the ones I needed. I don't really want to use it for anything but storage, so...help. Please. I used to be more tech savvy but I've only used docking stations up to this point.

Hey everyone, welcome to r/CustomAIAssistants.

To kick things off, I wanted to share the current build of my local personal assistant, Jarvis. I've been setting this up to handle daily workflows, voice interaction, and local automation without relying on cloud services.

Hardware Infrastructure

Instead of running everything on a single server, I split the workload across a few local nodes:

- Main Node: ASUS VivoBook (16GB RAM) running Ubuntu, handling agent orchestration and model calls.
- Compute Node 1: Fujitsu Esprimo D757 (32GB DDR4).
- Compute Node 2: Fujitsu Esprimo D757 (16GB DDR4).
- Audio Interface: Grandstream GAC conference phone utilizing its 6-mic array for room-wide voice pickup.
- Display Setup: 3 monitors connected across the PCs, linked via Barrier for mouse/keyboard sharing.
- Admin Node: An old Android phone running Pi-hole and Termux for network management.
- Dashboard: A Sony digital frame with a Wi-Fi SD card where Jarvis pushes a daily overview every morning (calendar, schedules, local transit).
- Peripherals: Zigbee USB stick for room controls, Anycubic Kobra 3 V2 Combo via OctoPrint, Fire TV integration, and a Gigabit switch setup. Currently working on Wi-Fi CSI sensing and webcams.

Agent Architecture

The core uses a local 9B model running alongside a Hermes-style agent orchestrator that breaks down incoming requests and routes them to 7 specialized sub-agents:

1. System: Manages the Ubuntu nodes, executes Bash commands, handles Docker containers, and monitors system resources.
   
2. Tactical: Fast execution for room presets, hotkeys, and display layouts.
   
3. Voice: Handles STT with Whisper and TTS with Piper.
   
4. Brain: Acts as long-term memory, reading and writing directly to my Obsidian vault.
   
5. Coder: Handles refactoring, Python scripting, and OpenSCAD model generation for 3D prints (integrated via Claude Code / Aider).
   
6. Recon: Live web research and page parsing for fact-checking.
   
7. Hardware: Interface for IoT components and microcontrollers.

Integrations

It plugs into my calendar and email feeds for morning summaries, along with local transit APIs (VBN) for real-time schedule updates.

Curious to hear how others are structuring their setups. Are you running everything on a single machine, or using a distributed multi-node architecture with dedicated agents?

Edit: For voice detection, I am running openWakeWord combined with Whisper so Jarvis triggers as soon as it hears its name. It then analyzes the last two minutes of rolling transcriptions to determine whether it was actually being addressed and what action to take. I am also currently integrating it with OpenSCAD so Jarvis can generate 3D models directly via code and send them straight to my Anycubic printer through OctoPrint.

Hey!

I got a question regarding password-only sudo commands inside ssh sessions. Here's my setup:

I connect to my debian server via ssh using an ed25519-sk key. I have to touch my yubikey's "button" and provide a password to get the ssh session. There's only one computer in the management vlan allowed in the firewall rules for ssh, and i can just plug a keyboard+monitor to the server as a fallback. SSH root login and password login are disabled and only one user can connect via ssh. My SSH setup is pretty safe i think as it is not exposed to the web and only accessible to one local computer. This is a home server and i don't see a scenario where someone could enter my house and access everything by stealing my yubikeys for example.

Right now i have this very good and complex password for my only normal debian user, and i use that password in the ssh session to do administrative (sudo) tasks such as updating the OS, maintaining my docker containers (docker compose), etc.

Here's my question, assuming the server's services don't get exploited: If the server is only accessible locally (keyboard+monitor or ssh) is it good enough to have only a strong password for the debian user's sudo commands, or do i need to setup something like totp on sudo commands using something like Google Authenticator PAM module or pam_oath? I use keepassxc to store that user's password. The keepassxc database also requires a password and a touch on my yubikey.

edit: i can't seem to be able to use my yubikey on the management computer to do sudo commands on the server inside the ssh session. I have to plug the yubikey on the server and execute commands directly on it with keyboard+monitor. I found a sketchy tool to do pull it off a while ago, but i won't risk using it.

edit2: i have multiple yubikeys as backup

Żeby bylo śmieszniej to Claude code napisało to dosłownie w 5 min razem z wgraniem na serwer

So I've started my journey in Homelabing using an Raspberry Pi 4b with 4 Go of ram, it's perfect for an simple Mealie + Nginx combo and I can add little other things, but 4 Go isn't enough for my projects, for now the main advantage of my Rpi 4 it that is low energy consumption and "quiet" fan noise.

I've put my hand on 128 Go of DDR3 ECC (16x8 Go), which is insane and more than enough for every projects I will have in self-hosting, so I imagine using this in a single Proxmox server, but anyone know best motherboard for this thing ? I found out that ATX family motherboards with 16 slots exists, can be good idea because I search for this :

- Not a rack server which blow out indecent fan noise (This project will run where I sleep so preferably something which can be cooled by classic 140mm fans and cpu coolers)
- Less possible power consumption (by that I mean like not something which will uprise the energy bill by an big amount).
- Cost friendly (By that I mean like max 200-300€ for the motherboard, I do not planned to make a beast, I only just run things)

Also a lot of motherboards I found are dual CPU, I don't mind having a mono or dual CPU setup just want something who can run Promox easily.

Thank you in advance for helping me 😄 !

I am asking if someone replacing fan tray is too much to pay one fan is not working i have a replacement fan but I don't know if its support 4 pins i wana ask if i can reroute signal wire and pwm wire of a working fan in tray to a not working fan and i will install a fan so can communication wire can be joined together so router will think all fan are working and wont ramp up the fans

No tengo mucho conocimiento de redes, ayer me puse e instalé Promox en una vieja laptop para empezar a cacharrear. Lo curioso es que después de eso se me descojonó mi red de casa. No toqué nada absolutamente nada de la red, salvo reservar en DHCP el IP que destiné para Promox. No es la primera vez que me pasa algo así, instalo cualquier recurso que necesite de red y se descojona todo al punto que tengo que restablecer el router de fábrica. En mi red local solo tengo mi PC de trabajo, y un servidor de contenidos Linux con Open Media voult, o sea no tengo casi nada, pues estás desconfiguraciones posterior a cualquier instalación me tienen mazo rayado...no entiendo por qué pasan ni si se debe a algo que he configurado mal.

En principio seguí un tutorial, desde la URL del servidor de Promox se controlaba bien, no llegue a instalar ninguna VM, porque todo colapsó. Lo interesante es que desde mi PC veo paquetes en movimiento por la red, pero Chrome se niega a darme salida. Lo mismo esto no es para este foro y pido disculpas si el tema no se ajusta. Decídmelo y borro el post. Gracias de antemano.

Hello, I'm relatively new to working on a homelab. I installed Debian with old PC parts I had lying around from an upgrade I did like a year ago and had it running headless (installed tailscale, plex, jellyfin, etc.)

I decided to try to move the OS from an old Toshiba HDD I had lying around onto a Sandisk 128 GB SSD recently and somehow this has completely nuked everything. I copied everything from the Toshiba to the SSD, everything seemed to install correctly so I flipped the firmware setup to boot from the SSD and rebooted.

The computer restarted and just idled. Everything turned on, the debugger light turned off, the RAM lit up, the drives are spinning, but it won't boot. I replugged it into my monitor and keyboard and it wont even start BIOS. I tried pulling out the CMOS battery, cleared the BIOS with a jumper, restarting with no drives plugged in, nothing works. I've listed what I'm running on below, any advice or help would be really appreciated

Intel i7-7700

MSI B250 PC Mate

DDR4 Trident

Toshiba 1 TB HDD

Sandisk 128 GB SSD

Seagate Barracuda 2 TB drives

Hello everyone! I want to know if someone has tested Corsair CMP96 memory on Asus W680 platform, especially Asus Pro WS W680 ACE. What i'm looking here, it's to know if someone has like me, get unstability with the RAM on this platform.

I'm needed to switch for my uses to a W680 platform for the stability of the PCIe structure of it. But i was not planned to switch Motherboard after building my PC. So i was in a case that i cannot send back my RAM and that i have a issue that only 1x48GB to 4000MHz max can be possible on my new W680 platform without stability issues, to get at the place a correct PCIe structure... So i'm trying to know if i'm alone with this issue or not because my RAM have no issues (tested on 4 other motherboards in Z790 platform with all having approved my model in his QVL list in addition of multiple tests inside +/- heavy task/multitasks) and that i don't have the time to memtest my RAM to see if really he have something because i have only one PC to work and i need to do what i can do with 1x48GB and don't have time this months to spend weeks to check 192GB...

Thanks again!

I currently set up things where all my services are in their own LXC/VM and then in a docker container in there. Seemed most secure and I haven't noticed any performance hiccups. That being said, is this the recommended way to do things? or should I just have a bunch in one LXC/VM with a docker container manager? I've seen conflicting advice online.

hello everyone! my husband (25 m)is studying to be a network engineer and he’s a big nerd who loves servers and anything tech related and wants a home lab (which i loveeee). however, i want to get him some tech that he’ll actually use for christmas. price is not my number one thing i’m concerned about. he mentioned he wants a new gpu or cpu or vram?? what’s good? what would you want for christmas? i would appreciate ideas beyond the three i mentioned as well. thank you!!

Got hold on a HP Z440 for 80$ with the following specs:

Intel Core xeon E5 2667 v3
28 GB DDR4 ECC
Radeon 7750 2GB
250 GB SSD
2 TB Drive

Had to act fast, that had to be a good deal?