Below, a picture of my small rack, which is located in my home office. Due to the selected components, it is virtually silent and still bobs along at only 26 - 28° C.
The hardware is divided into two Proxmox clusters. The first consists of the three Lenovo M920qs shown here and is home to my publicly accessible services and VMs, the second consists of the two Beelink EQ12s and is responsible for the internal services or those accessible via VPN.
Not the greatest or best Homelab, but for me, it fulfils all my needs and at the same time keeps the electricity costs down to an unimaginable level.
I host the following services on the public Internet:
Ghost CMS
Mastodon
Pixelfed
PeerTube
Lemmy
Rallly
Nextcloud with Collabora Office
Rustdesk
Umami
Uptime Kuma
Vaultwarden
Whoogle
Minecraft Server (for my son)
Internally, I also provide the following services:
This is a custom built mini PC, with a mini-ITX motherboard and an Intel N100 CPU. It gets powered by a power supply that I got from an old computer. Also, it needs no active cooling, just a heatsink. It almost never gets above 60°C.
An old HP laptop with Debian hosting Klipper and Home Assistant. Waiting for an OTG cable so I could replace the laptop with a phone for less power and heat
was going through some old pictures and decided I'd post a retro setup. pretty sure I took this picture with my android g1....so 2008ish?
here is a pic of one of my first selfhost setups. I began selfhosting for music and have never stopped. this iteration was stuffed behind a bar that was built in to the basement at my old house
the old fashioned was custom built and was running some flavor of windows server. the one on the floor was the first Linux server I had run to do something useful...torrents and subsonic IIRC. I pieced that server together with random parts, mostly donated from old family PCs. two UPS units were on the bottom rack of that metro shelf to battery back the servers and the tomato router out of frame.
I just got 10 Gbit internet last week so I had a chance to tidy everything up. The ThinkCentre is the 10 Gbit router, the Synology actually hosts everything.
Also finally labeled all the mystery cables. Also replaced the proprietary 20V/12V bricks for the ThinkCentre and 10G Fiber ONU with USB-C adapter cables to keep things tidier.
mostly runs jellyfin for a group of about 30 users (2 or 3 on at most times). runs alpine on bare bones. the box was originally filled with foam cutouts from storing iPads in a school district I worked at. I figure it's 20tbs of storage and 16gb ecc is a welcome upgrade. it stays cool cause I cutout half the side and put an AC fan in there. future upgrades involve the Nvidia k40 card I have, but I need to design an active cooling system for it before it can be installed as that thing gets HOT
The disks are the most uggo part. They’re a bunch of old disks of varying sizes with a RAID+LVM setup to make the most use of them while still being redundant.
Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 that I bought refurbished for ~€130
i5-6500T (Passmark score 4792)
8GB RAM
512GB SATA SSD + 128GB SATA SSD (completely used for swap)
Buffalo DriveStation™ HD-WLU3 that I bought second hand for €10
2 × 2TB SATA HDD's in RAID 1
~20W
New setup:
Custom build
ASUS Prime N100I-D D4 (Passmark score 5501) (~€100)
16GB RAM - Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A (€28)
512GB SATA SSD
4 × 4TB SATA HDD's in RAID 5 using mdadm (€160)
M.2 NVME to SATA 6x (ASM1116 for C-states) (€17)
17.8W
(Not the Proliant Microserver Gen8 on top, the device below)
The antennas are from a Sonoff Zigbee dongle and a bluetooth dongle for Home Assistant.
I've mostly focused on power usage, price, and reliability since I'm a student and don't want to spend a month's worth of income on a "home lab".
It's running the following:
Forgejo
Grafana
Home Assistant
Jellyfin
Kopia
Nginx-proxy-manager
Paperless NGX
Photoprism
Syncthing
TimescaleDB
Uptime-kuma
Vaultwarden: As backup
Watch Your LAN
Arr stack (currently disabled)
Homebox: Still up for testing, like it has been for the past couple months. It's a great concept but the execution ain't great (does anyone happen to know an alternative?)
It's using about 10% CPU and is running below 40°.
Bottom NUC: General compute
Top NUC: Proxmox with homeassistant, windows server and debian
Raspberry Pi4 inside N64 case: PiHole
Access Point: Unifi Pro
PC for gaming: R7 7800X3D + Nvidia 3070 inside Fractal North
NAS: Ugreen 4800+ with 4x 15TB drives for a total of RaidZ2 30TB usable storage. Used as NFS storage for proxmox.
How it started: 2 8TB external HDDs connected to my bottom NUC.
Primary applications:
*arr Suite, Jellyfin, several minor apps.
Can't but join in the fun. Meet the Egg Mini. Does all sorts of humble servitude, but the coolest thing is a webserver only accessible via Wireguard through HAproxy running on a Digital Ocean droplet.
Lenovo m910q w/Proxmox (cluster node 1) running 2 VMs for docker hosting: Ubuntu for media stuff (arrs, navidrome, jellyfin, calibre, calibre-web, tubesync, syncthing) and Debian for other stuff (paperless-ngx, vikunja, vscodium, redlib, x-pipe webtop, fasten health, linkwarden, alexandrite), 1 Win 10 VM for the very few times I need to use windows, some Red Hat Academy student and instructor RHEL 9 VMs, and an OPNsense VM for testing
Shelf 2:
HP Elitedesk G5 800 SFF w/Proxmox (cluster node 2) with an Nvidia GT 730 passed through to a Debian VM used primarily as a remote desktop via ThinLinc, but also runs a few docker containers (stirling pdf, willow application server, fileflows)
Shuttle DH110 w/Proxmox (cluster node 3) with 1 VM running Home Assistant OS with an NVME Coral TPU passed through as well as a zooz 800 long range zwave coordinator (the zigbee coordinator is ethernet and in a different room) and two LXCs with grafana and prometheus courtesy of tteck (RIP)
Shelf 3:
WIP Fractal R5 server to replace the ancient Ubuntu file server to the left (outside the rack, sitting on the box of ethernet cable) that is primarily the home of my media drives (3 12 TB Ironwolf drives) and was my first homelab server.
The new box will have a Tesla p4 and RX 580 GTX, i7-8700T and 64GB RAM in addition to the drives from the old server. I'll be converting the Ubuntu drive from the old server into an image and will use it to create a Proxmox VM on the new server, with the same drives passed through.
Bottom:
2 Cyberpower CP1000 UPS with upgraded LiFePO4 batteries. The one on the left is only for servers and only exists to give the servers time to shut down cleanly when the power goes out. The one on the right is only for network devices (firewall, switch and the Ruckus R500 out of shot mounted higher in the closet)
My main server cabinet at my parents house. I have one old Synology for backups, one home built Xpenology for streaming and one small server with old gaming hardware for steam link, but its barely running anymore. Theres one HP server with 2x Xeon E5 and 128GB missing in the photo that I got for 100€ at an auction, which I use for occasional game server hosting.
At home I have this setup, my main synology NAS and a thinkcentre with an i7 and 16GB of ram for Minecraft and FiveM.
Running TrueNAS with 4TB usable mirrored storage, 32GB RAM, and an i5-7600. Mostly holds backed up files from my switch from Windows to NixOS. I've got it running Frigate with a Coral TPU, Gitea, Homer, Unifi Controller, and Uptime Kuma. I was managing some helm charts on the TrueNAS k3s cluster with flux but conveniently dialed back to only using their built-in apps right before they removed it in favor of docker only.
For the network I'm running OPNSense on a Protectli device with Ubiquiti Unifi for the wifi. The native WireGuard integration on OPNSense is pretty nice.
Ryzen 1700 in a giant case sitting on my desk (desktop PC is on top of that in a mini-ITX case); 2x 8TB HDDs, connected to network over Wi-Fi; hope to cut the size significantly once one of our ITX boxes need an upgrade (both Ryzen 5600s)
Mikrotik router (5 port) and Ubiquiti AP sitting next to my bed; Mikrotik handles my local static DNS for my public services
Running:
Jellyfin, as well as Samba and some other NAS stuff
HomeAssistant (nothing monitored though, but I plan to add my Sensi thermostat soon)
Actual Budget
Nextcloud
Vaultwarden (currently unused, plan to switch soon)
I also have a VPS to get around CGNAT, and I have a Wireguard VPN configured so communication is encrypted.
Plans:
upgrade NAS to either a mini-ITX motherboard or a mini-PC w/ external USB-C enclosure
actually run Ethernet - have been putting off for years
configure my Sensi thermostat in HA and maybe get some other smart home crap
use Nextcloud more - want to get SO using the notes app so I can finally kill Google Notes for shared shopping lists
port my PF spreadsheet to LibreOffice and actually learn to use LO Calc (currently using Google Sheets); I use GoogleFinance func for stock quotes, so I need to replace that with some other workflow (mostly rebalancing investments)
replace our TV or at least have an alternative for Jellyfin - the config disappears whenever our TV WiFi screws up, which is like 2-3x/month; screw you LG...
So yeah, somewhat simple. My family likes Jellyfin, but I haven't really gotten them on board with anything else.
Used it for Minecraft server for a week then never used it again. Don't know anything it would be good for that my computer can't already do better tbh
Switch, which also powers 2 Ruckus APs and 2 other switches.
Mikrotik RB5009 router.
Raspberry Pi x3 all running Debian Bookworm. I have too many pis right now, running Home Assistant, LibreNMS, Log collection, and a read-only NUT server that orchestrates shutdowns and startups on power loss. I need to consolidate these.
1L PCs. One is on Debian serving media and files. The other is a test server where I'm trying out Immich on openSUSE. I'm considering moving to that and rootless podman for services. To that end I have another of these 1L boxes on my desk trying other options (MicroOS, Fedora IoT, maybe others).
HDs. These are backup drives for the 1L server. I keep them powered off except when needed.
UPS and a managed, switched PDU.
Everything is set up for low energy consumption (~90w), remote administration, and automatic recovery from power loss.
So mines a weird hodge-podge of a HP Proliant (running my modded Minecraft server and Plex) under a bistro table that I use as a standup desk.
A HP Thinclient that I run lighter services like my Pi-Hole and Homebridge.
and a laptop
Some context shots. This is in my garage which is directly below my living room. Everything leads back here and the cat cable from the fibre ONT leads here from the other side of the garage also. I have 2 redundant gig links to a switch in the living room where it was weirdly easier to go outside the garage, up the outside wall and then back in to the house.
There is a rack mount standard desktop with a 4 port Intel NIC and an IT mode HBA, 6 spinning HDDs, an SSD and 2x NVME drives. This is my main Proxmox server running Opnsense and a whole host of other services, including email. On to of it I have a monitor, 3 external HDDs used for backups and another desktop I picked up cheap which runs as the Zoneminder CCTV box.
At the very top there is a cheap POE dumb switch that powers the CCTV camera and then a Netgear 24 port switch with VLANs configured for various networks - Main, IoT, VoIP, CCTV... I have the same switch up in the living room also.
At the very bottom almost invisible is a Belkin UPS and a strip adapter that has several smart plugs in which I use to power my backup drives. That way my backup drives are off, not just unmounted unless a backup is running. The aim was to avoid any attacker / system wide issue taking down the backup drives. I sleep a smidgen better at night for that.
Not pictured is an Odroid HC2 that lives upstairs and that I had hoped to rig up as a remote backup device, but I've never really got around to setting it up properly or putting anything other than a small capacity HDD in. It does run HomeAssistant though so that's pretty useful.
A bit more context
More guts showing the mess.
Lets just appreciate how damn lucky I was when I picked up this server rack. It doesn't fit with the carpet down, so had to peel that back. Millimetre perfect.
I only own the gear marked A and B, which lives above the couch I call home.
A is my web services 24/7 Proxmox box, an Intel 8500T; 2 routers; an 8TB HDD; and a Back-UPS Pro so old its ethernet surge protection is rated for 100bT, with a brand new LFP battery in it. The UPS powers both A and B.
B is my personal Proxmox box, an AMD 5750GE, which I use for development and running desktop OSes which I remote into, plus a GL.iNet Slate AX router. These come with me if I stay someplace other than the couch (not pictured). That's why they're on different shelves. Also, there's a USB wifi dongle w/antenna connected to B which I used when some stupid website demands I drop my VPN (all traffic from everything pictured is routed thru 24/7 private VPN endpoints, aka a $2/mo VPS or three).
A simple homemade NAS, mostly for hosting my Plex library, VPN+torrent and cloud.
The synology needs to be emptied, removed and sold.
The m2 Mac mini was hosting some docker like pihole and actual budget but those are now on another Mac mini used as a workstation, so this one will be sold as well.
My dirty data diddler. 10+ yr old amd octacore black running at 4ghz. 4TB of writeable space in it. HD and SSD mix. Old sb xfi audio running to a BT5.0 USB dongle for my games and music. Pioneer CD/DVD writer. Yes I still burn CDs and DVDs for my music and backup purposes heh. White cable on the right hanging vertical is a USBC data/charging cable. The squirrely wires lefttoright are a power line for a digital clock I'm gonna hang on the wall soon.
The cable modem is no longer in use, finally got fiber in my neighborhood but the ONT/GW is in the basement. Beelink is my single (for now) proxmox node, HP is running Plex w/ Intel iGPU for transcoding. DS220+ NAS w/ 2x 16TB drives. Unifi switch 8 and USG-3P (fiber ONT/GW passes through to that and it's soon to be replaced with a Palo Alto 410, thanks to work) and then another Unifi 8 port lite in my basement office where the ONT/GW lives. Nothing special, very ugly but I hope to upgrade the wired network to 10g in the future to support a proxmox cluster and my ISPs 5Gbps offering. Also plan on converting my old desktop into an Unraid box since I can get a lot of drives from work and don't really want to stick with the Synology.
Mines nothing special, i5 10400 with 16GB of RAM and a 1050ti for video encoding. System runs TrueNAS Scale for Plex and Immich and has 44TB of drives running through a Dell H310 PERC SAS card. I desperately need more storage but I've been lacking the funds for new drives, I'd also need a 5.25" drive bay converter to hold the 2 additional drives I need in this case since all the bays are full, and another SAS card since this one's used up.
I'd like to move to Jellyfin but from what I've read it doesn't do as well for streaming from outside the network compared to Plex and half the users of my server are outside my network. So it works for now.
Also have a Raspberry Pi 5 running PiHole
Also a buddy 3D printed a fan mount for the H310 to make sure it doesnt overheat when doing file transfers and I slapped a Noctua on it
Synology NAS running media server + live document editing server + seedbox. Plans to eventually build a proper server for it. Can't wait until my setup looks like the rest of yours.
The alebrije on top protects from bad torrents (only linux isos :v) and viruses.
Not in picture: My UPSes, RIPE Atlas probe and an Odroid N2+ running my Home Assistant instance
The server runs Proxmox with a bunch of LXC containers running a Docker Swarm cluster.
There's too many services running so I'm not listing them all. Let's just say my phone is not going to be thrilled if it goes down. Also, this post was posted through said server.
What I took from this post is that every living room / home theater setup needs a server rack instead of a HiFi rack. Dudnt matter what you thrown in it, it looks badass.
A bit concerning that it is propped up on a night table and sitting right next to a doorway. There's only two of us in the house but I would never place electronic equipment like that near a doorway where I myself could just knock it over (because I've done stuff like that in the past). Get it on the floor or on the opposite side of the room where no one including yourself can walk or move around near it.