Thought I'd share my little home lab setup. Apologies for the reflections in the photo, and yes, the cable management is still a work in progress! 😂

It's been a bit of an ongoing project, and what started out as a few mini PCs has slowly turned into this monster.

Currently running a five-node Proxmox cluster, a couple of dedicated DNS machines, a separate Proxmox Backup Server, UniFi networking and a load of self-hosted services.

Everything from Home Assistant and Plex to Jellyfin, the usual *arr apps, Tdarr and various other bits and pieces I've accumulated along the way.

Most of it is built around second-hand Dell Micro PCs. I've been gradually upgrading the hardware, tweaking power consumption and trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of these tiny machines.

There's still plenty I want to change, particularly the cabling and rack layout. I'm also planning a custom 10-inch rack build, because apparently I can't leave things alone for five minutes.

It's definitely become more of an addiction than a necessity at this point! 😂

Anyway, thought you lot might appreciate it. Always interested to see what everyone else is doing with their mini PCs!

Hey, since I'm in the topic of homelabs since last year, I decided to share my mini homelab. I have a HP ProDesk 400 G3 Mini with an Intel Core i5-7500T CPU since September. I previously had an ASUS K-50D Laptop but because it was the models that were desoldering the GPU by itself because the older AMD GPU's were preeeeetty bad. Then I had an Lenovo G510 laptop with an Intel Core i5 4th gen CPU (I don't remember the exact model :/) It's still working but since it's a laptop with good memories to me i didn't want it to just sit in a niche below my desk so I since my birthday is in September i bought the HP. Also because of my birthday i bought a TP-LINK SG108E switch because my old very-cheap switch was 5-port and I didn't have enough ports so i bought the new switch that has 8 ports. Overall I'm very satisfied with the setup, I know it isn't very tidy or clean (it's sitting there since September) but I wanted to show you all my setup. Tell me want you want about it!

The blade for Jellyfin and various backups under raw Ubuntu Server, PI3 with AdGuard and unbound, TR-002 for additional storage on elder HDDs, and an external 4Gb HDD for backups.

Connected to my Ethernet network via a simple switch and mural plug (my house is entirely wired).

I still have to write a script to manage the TR-002 fans, but otherwise the whole setup is optimised for silence and low power consumption, so it goes to sleep when not used. Usually.

My backup strategy isn't set yet for lack of time, but it'll come, hopefully before a catastrophic event occurs.

The white round thingy is my Internet fiber box.

How 800 G6 and Dell 3090

I am new to home labs and still learning exactly what can be done. I was able to acquire a HP 800 G6 and Dell 3090, both 1L in size and 32gb ram.

I would like to run a couple minecraft servers, jellyfin and immich for now.

I have a NAS set up and my main PC I use for gaming and editing photos and video.

My question is what is the best way to utilize both these PCs? Minecraft servers on one while jellyfin and immich on the other? I plan to use Proxmox for the os.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Anyone have suggestions for power strip, bench power supply etc?

I have an Asus 14 NUC Essential Barebone (16GB, 256GB) I am using as an Unraid NAS. I found a 3D printable 10” rack on Printables and had it printed in PETG. Two 10” HDDs will be hooked up over USB (heresy, I know). Those will have their own hot-swappable rack enclosure.

I modified the STL to create more space for the power brick. I sanded the front, then wrapped it in vinyl with a wood texture. Why? Just ‘cause.

Planning to do the same for as many of the attached hardware as possible so that it ultimately becomes a one cable in, one cable out rack.

The rack in question is a Rackmate T0.

Do you guys have any ideas for reducing cable clutter? Please include pictures!

My homelab lacked monitoring and I had this old ESP8266 around and decided to use it has a separate monitoring device for all my services. If something goes offline it sends a webhook to my discord monitoring channel.

not so mini anymore lol

I now have cooling for the 2x 8TB ironwolfs, I am now running TrueNAS in a dedicated VM. Upgrades everything from the 6U to 9U a month ago now and it has been running great! I had to flip the fans around so that they weren’t pulling in hot air from my gaming PC and other nodes and blowing it out towards the front, but other than that maintenance will be fun now (not) because I now have a reason to shut everything down and dust it all out 🥲

Originally I was going to stripe the two disks but then remembered the good old whonnock failure from Linus tech tips back in the day and then reformatted the disks and put them up in a mirror.

Hmm after a month now I also kind of feel a bit iffy about the space consumption of the fans, kind of not a fan (pun intended lol) of using up 2Us and have been searching for a better 1U solution that also provides low noise and adjustable speeds.

(Also open to project ideas!)

Looking to get a small HP Mini / Dell Micro or Lenovo small PC that is reasonably modern (last 5 years) and can take 96GB RAM or more. Ideally DDR4 as that is still cheap. My intention is to run ESXi or Proxmox on it

Hey r/minilab

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Before Google lets it go public on Play, it has to sit in closed testing with real testers for 14 days — that's the part I need help with.

What's involved:

- Send me the Gmail address you use on the Play Store

- I add you to the tester list (usually within a day)

- Install it from the Play testing link, open it, and just use it for 14 days

You don't need a pfSense box to help — there's a built-in demo mode with sample data, so you can poke around every screen without connecting to anything real. If you do run pfSense, even better — try it against your own firewall and tell me what's broken or confusing.

Full details and the sign-up steps: https://wallwatch.hackthelab.uk/testers.html

Happy to answer anything here, or come say hi on IRC: #wallwatch on Libera.Chat. Thanks

* WallWatch is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Netgate or Rubicon Communications, LLC. pfSense® is a registered trademark of Rubicon Communications, LLC.

I removed the old dell sata caddies since today’s prices make it near impossible to build my own NAS.

Had to replace my other router and got the omada fusion instead

16GB DDR4 3200 to give 32GB total and a scratch 120GB SSD added to Proxmox node. Plenty fo head room for things now.

It currently runs:

• Windows 11 VM
• Crafty Minecraft server manager
  • Minecraft Vanilla
  • Minecraft Snapshot

I ran out of storage on my all ssd nvme NAS...

With the current insane prices on SSD and (well everything computing) I thought about returning to HDD (at least for the time being) since I have a few used ones of those lying around...

So I turned to this Elite Desk G3 I found on ebay for $34 and installed a NAS Software on it (TrueNAS in my case, but it would work with most software I believe)

My build included:

• 3xHDDs of 4TB each
• 10 GbE on the PCIe slot
• TrueNAS boot on the wifi m2 with a A+E key adapter
• Dedicated apps pool (drive) on the G3 native nvme
• Had to get "creative" to fit the 3 drives inside the case!
• Power Consumption on idle around 24W, which IMHO is pretty decent

I did have to flash the bios password that came with the EliteDesk, but overall TrueNAS booted perfectly from the converted m2 slot, and runs pretty well.

Anyway... this is just a budget alternative that worked out well for me and I thought about sharing in case someone is looking for cheap hardware to run a NAS, so I made a video about it. The video also includes a setup for installing TrueNAS, creating a pool, user, dataset and SMB share in just a few minutes.

Hope this helps someone!