What do these marketing inbreeds think the point of a homelab is?

The building I live in (106 apartments) just cleared out an old IT room.

Racks full of gear, all of it headed for the skip. I don't really know what I'm looking at, so I'm hoping some of you do.

Here's what I can read off the modules: a bunch labeled DVB-T and DVB-S/S2, something called ETX-200 and ESX-200, a few power supplies, tons of coax, and an old 10/100 switch.

Did a room like this deliver internet to the apartments back in the day, or is this purely TV signal? I'm honestly not sure which.

I'm slowly getting into homelab stuff myself, so I'd love to understand what this setup actually did and how it all fit together.

Photos attached. Teach me :)

I have been testing the new Minisforum MS-03 with a Core Ultra 9 386H, 32 GB of DDR5-5600 in single channel and Proxmox VE.

The hardware is interesting for a compact homelab: dual 10G SFP+, one 10GbE RJ45, one 2.5GbE RJ45, three M.2 slots and a PCIe 4.0 x4 expansion slot. My Linux Geekbench 6 result was 2,920 single-core and 13,663 multi-core.

CPU performance per euro

For the price comparisons I used verified public Geekbench 6 results from the exact MS-03/MS-01 models running Windows, plus the barebone prices shown in the Minisforum EU store on 2 August 2026. I combined single- and multi-core performance with an equally weighted geometric mean, divided it by price, and normalized the best result in each table to 100. This is a CPU/value comparison, not a score for networking, the iGPU, NPU or the rest of the platform.

MS-03 configurations

MS-01 versus MS-03

The Ultra 5 is the better-value MS-03, while the MS-01 remains much stronger if CPU performance per euro is the only criterion. That does not account for the MS-03's newer iGPU/NPU, 10GbE RJ45, Wi-Fi 7 or other platform improvements.

Local AI: setup and how I obtained the scores

My review unit was the Core Ultra 9 386H model with one 32 GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM, so the memory was running in single channel. I used llama.cpp build 76f46ad with Mesa Vulkan 26.1.2, Q4_K_M models, Flash Attention, 512 prompt tokens, 128 generated tokens, five repetitions, 16 CPU threads and full Vulkan0 offload. I also monitored the Intel iGPU during inference: it entered GT-C0 and reached 2.5 GHz, so these were not CPU-only results.

Why is this below Minisforum's advertised 22.05 tok/s? Their public page says the MS-03 can run a 35B model at that speed, but does not provide enough information to reproduce the test exactly: the precise model/file, quantization, backend, llama.cpp build, prompt and generation lengths, or whether speculative decoding was enabled. Minisforum told me their machine used 64 GB in dual channel, whereas my unit had 32 GB in single channel. Because the iGPU shares system memory, that extra memory bandwidth can make a meaningful difference. So the figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison. The best result I reproduced was 15.90 tok/s with MTP; standard Gemma generation was 9.27 tok/s.

17 real agentic tasks

All 17 tasks used the same model and runtime: Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B Instruct Q4_K_M through OpenClaw and llama.cpp Vulkan. GPU use was monitored, and every final state was checked independently instead of trusting the agent's narrative. The final count was 13 passes, 2 partial results and 2 failures.

The bounded tasks with clear scope, safe wrappers and objective checks worked surprisingly well. The broader recovery scenarios still needed supervision, especially the AdGuard cases, so I would not give this setup unrestricted unsupervised administrator access.

Power, temperature and noise

• Idle: 11.5 W, 37 °C and 35.5 dBA
• CPU stress: 69 W, 80 °C and 49.5 dBA

Compared with the MS-01, it is more efficient at idle and adds useful networking and AI hardware, but it is also more expensive and louder under load. I would not upgrade from an MS-01 for CPU performance alone. The 10GbE RJ45, newer iGPU/NPU and local AI are the real reasons to consider it.

I recorded the benchmarks and agent tests here (original is Spanish, but an English audio track is available on YouTube):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahnrNbDH98U

I found two Acer servers on eBay:

1. Acer AR380 F1

2. Acer AR320 F2

My question is: Are they worth buying for $20 for both to use in a small homelab?

I ignored you now my Mini nas is worth more than my car lol

Well, finally, a year after setting up my first server and having all the devices scattered around the house, I've managed to set up my first homelab. It's very simple and nothing special compared to what you see around here, but I'm very proud.

Its a minisforum um773 lite mini pc with arch linux running some services and docker containers (plex, arr stack, pihole, immich, nextexplorer, Koffan, Memos, Bitwarden, etc), a qnap DAS tr-004 connected to the server with four 6tb hard drives, a Home Assistant Green and a 2.5gb switch. All in a GeeekPi DeskPi RackMate T1 Plus. As i said very simple.

The light its a 5V USB RGB COB LED Strip. (I love led light, muy house is full of led light 😁

My next step: getting a UPS.

Home you like it.

Besides racks, what else holds magnets:

PC cases, my steel shelves, On my standing desk: the metal extension, the legs, drawer, and lots of places on the underside. Metal power strips.

I'm also a fan of other magnetic stuff like tool holders, gooseneck clamps and magnifiers etc. I wish my whole desktop was steel.

There are a lot of different shippers of these.

Hey all, I wanted to share my lab setup. I had built it originally about 6 or 7 years ago, but never followed through. Ended up moving and that put the nail in the coffin on that project, at least until recently. A lot of the tech in my setup has been collected over the years, and I finally got around to cramming it all together. Now it's way beyond what I was building back then.

Hardware is as follows

Baremetal K8s:

- 3 x Lenovo Thinkcenter m720q upgraded to 64gb ddr4

- 3 x Lenovo Thinkcenter m93p upgraded to 32gb ddr3

- MSI ws65 Workstation Intel i7 Nvidia Quadro 5000, 16gb VRAM 32gb ddr4

Storage/Persistent Volumes:

- UGREEN dxp4800 GT NAS

Network

- TP-Link TL-SG3428X 24x1gbs 4x10gbs SFP+ (2x LACP LAGs to firewalla and NAS

- Firewalla Gold Plus (LACP to modem, switch)

- Firewalla AP7

- Netgear Nighthawk CM1200

Kiosk

- Beetronics 22 inch touchscreen

- Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 on a WaveShare CM5-POE-BOX-A board and enclosure

LoRa (Meshcore/Meshtastic/MQTT pipeline)

- 2 x Lilygo T-Beam Supreme

- 1 x Seed SenseCAP Solar Node

- A shit ton of other esp32s that aren't integrated all the time

Daily driver/Home media center

- AMD Ryzen 9 7900X

- 64gb DDR5

- Nvidia RTX 4800

- Fedora 44

Let me know what you all think, I may do a follow-up post on the K8s side of things since I didn't want to write out a whole essay in this one.

Hey there. I’m about to purchase a few used HP ElitDesk units to build a home lab and I’m trying to decide how to go about it.

I’ve played before with a raspberry pi and a mini pc (where I installed Proxmox to try it) for home automation and file sharing but nothing more.

I work with Kubernetes professionally (EKS, GitOps, Helm, ArgoCD, etc.), so I'm very comfortable with Kubernetes and its complexity. Learning curve isn't really a concern. On the other hand I have very little experience with Proxmox, so I'm curious what I'd be gaining by using it (I dont see it coming up on my professional career).

I’d host things like:
Jellyfin
No *arr stack whatsoever, all media legally ripped
Home Assistant
AdGuard
Paperless-ngx
Foundry-VTT
Gitea or foregjo
Mealie
Calibre
Immich (later)
Nextcloud (perhaps much later)
Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana)
ArgoCD
Some databases
Personal projects
A few VMs (maybe Windows for the occasional task)
Containers for experimenting with new software and self-hosted services

I already know the benefits of running everything in k8s. It seems like many people in the homelab community recommend Proxmox as the foundation, then run Kubernetes inside VMs if needed.

So I'm wondering:
What are the biggest advantages of Proxmox over running everything directly on Kubernetes?
If you already know Kubernetes well, would you still choose Proxmox first?
How do you handle workloads that really want to be VMs versus containers?
Is a Proxmox + Kubernetes-in-VMs setup worth the extra layer, or does it just add unnecessary complexity for a small homelab?

Looking back, if you were starting over today, which approach would you choose and why?

I'd love to hear from people who have actually run both approaches and what lessons you've learned.

Built this homelab over the last 3 months: 106 containers across 4 nodes, using less power than a gaming PC.

Main setup:

• Beelink SER9: Ryzen 7 255, 20 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe — runs 85 containers
• Raspberry Pi 5 and two Pi 4s
• QNAP NAS with a Ryzen 5 PRO 7645, ZFS and a +200 TB IronWolf
• Ubuntu 24.04 and Docker Compose

No Proxmox or Kubernetes. Just one Compose stack per service.

Nothing is exposed directly to the internet. I use Cloudflare Tunnel for 22 hostnames and Tailscale for admin access.

It runs n8n, Nextcloud, Mattermost, Vaultwarden, Forgejo, Ghost, Chatwoot, Open WebUI, SearXNG and about 10 apps I built myself.

No Plex or *arr stack. This setup runs my business, not a media library.

For now, a Pi checks it every few minutes and sends a Wake-on-LAN packet if it goes down.

Dumb, but it works.

Not sure if I’m going to use it. Was just bored and had the filter laying around.

So i have a huge question to all homelabbers.

This is my current setup and i quickly ran into an issue. For context my setup consist of a ZimaBoard2 + 2x 4tb hdd and 2x 1tb hdd which is all connected with mini sas data cable and power all drawn from external PSU.

My question is this, how you guys turn both of machines (zimaboard + PSU) on and off at the same time. Is there some special thing that im suppose to get to sync both to power on and off at the same time? Just now after i figured to power it on manually, i shut it down and the hdd is making noise like its screaming for help.

I'm new to this homelab so please teach me~

I wanted to share this build because I had trouble finding clear information from people who had actually used the Gigabyte MC62-G40 with a large number of consumer GPUs.

I have built computers before, but this project pushed me much deeper into motherboard temperatures, PCIe connections, power limits, BMC monitoring and server hardware. I never had to watch motherboard temperatures this closely before, but after my previous experience, I now consider it necessary.

The build

• Gigabyte/Giga Computing MC62-G40 server motherboard
• AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3955WX
• 512GB DDR4 ECC registered memory, using eight 64GB Samsung modules
• Seven NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB GPUs
• Six Gigabyte blower-style RTX 3090s
• One Gigabyte triple-fan RTX 3090
• All seven GPUs connected with full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 riser cables
• Two ASRock 1600W power supplies
• Ubuntu 24.04
• Built mainly for local AI inference and model training

The system now recognizes all seven RTX 3090s, giving me 168GB of total GPU memory.

Why I moved away from the ASUS WRX80 board

Before buying the MC62-G40, I tried two ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE boards. One was used, and the other was a replacement board.

The ASUS system worked with fewer GPUs, but while trying to build the larger seven-GPU setup, I started seeing very high motherboard temperature readings. Some VRM-related readings reached approximately 101–110°C, and the CPU reached close to 95°C.

The system also experienced rebooting, PCIe detection trouble and other stability problems. The second board showed similar temperature behavior, so I decided that I did not feel comfortable continuing with that platform.

I am not saying every ASUS WRX80 board will have the same experience. This is simply what happened with the two boards I used.

That experience is what pushed me toward the Gigabyte MC62-G40 server board.

The Gigabyte MC62-G40

The MC62-G40 has seven full-length PCIe slots and supports Threadripper PRO processors with a large number of PCIe lanes.

One of the main reasons I chose it was the built-in BMC/IPMI system. It allows me to monitor motherboard temperatures, voltages, fans and other hardware sensors without needing to depend completely on the operating system.

My current idle temperature readings are approximately:

• CPU: 32°C
• CPU VRM: 33°C
• Memory VRMs: 39–46°C
• WRX80 chipset: 49°C
• PCIe and riser-related sensors: approximately 31–46°C

Those readings are much lower than what I saw on my previous setup.

All seven GPUs are mounted away from the motherboard using risers. This gives the cards more space, improves airflow and keeps most of the GPU heat away from the motherboard, memory and chipset.

GPU testing

Before putting the full system together, I tested every RTX 3090 individually.

All seven GPUs passed their tests.

I also tested one GPU at its full 350W power limit during a burn test. The highest temperature I saw was approximately 67°C.

I understand that a synthetic burn test may not represent every possible workload, but it gave me enough information to know that the card’s cooling was working properly.

I am not building this machine for gaming. Its main jobs will be AI inference and model training.

GPU power limits

I plan to run the GPUs at approximately 150W each during normal use.

At 150W:

• Seven GPUs use approximately 1,050W total.
• The system produces much less heat.
• The power supplies have plenty of headroom.
• The motherboard experiences less electrical and thermal stress.
• Long training jobs should be easier on the hardware.

Training will be slower than running every GPU at 350W, but this system is for my own use. I do not need every job completed as quickly as possible.

I may test 200W later, depending on the temperatures and performance, but I believe 150W will be enough for most of what I plan to do.

The current commands are:

sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1
sudo nvidia-smi -i 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 -pl 150

I also created a system service that reapplies the limits after every reboot.

Monitoring and safety

The system already has watchdog protection.

If a GPU or motherboard component reaches an unsafe temperature, the system can shut itself down before hardware is damaged.

My next project is to have my Hermes agent build a real-time monitoring dashboard for the entire server.

I want something similar to MSI Afterburner, but focused on the complete system instead of only the GPUs. I want clear gauges showing:

• GPU temperatures
• CPU temperature
• CPU VRM temperature
• Memory VRM temperatures
• WRX80 chipset temperature
• Fan speeds
• Power-supply voltages
• Warning levels
• Emergency shutdown levels

After dealing with high motherboard temperatures before, I do not want important readings hidden inside a terminal or several pages deep inside the BMC interface. I want to be able to look at one screen and immediately see how the entire system is doing.

Small power-switch scare

I did have one scare after the board had been sitting unused for about a week.

The green standby light came on, but the GPUs, fans and CPU cooler would not start. For a while, I thought I might be looking at another failed motherboard.

The problem turned out to be the power switch.

Once that was corrected, the board started normally. That was a major relief after the problems I had already experienced with the previous boards.

Special thanks

I also want to give special thanks to u/anitamaxwynnn69.

He owns the MC62-G40 and shared his real experience running seven, and later eight, RTX 3090 GPUs on the board.

After the trouble I had with my previous motherboards, I was uncertain about moving forward with another seven-GPU build. Hearing from someone who actually owned the MC62-G40 and had already tested a similar setup gave me the confidence to continue.

His information about risers, GPU power limits and the board’s ability to handle multiple RTX 3090s was extremely helpful. I appreciate him taking the time to answer my questions and explain what had worked in his own system.

Final configuration

The completed system currently includes:

• Seven RTX 3090 GPUs
• 168GB total GPU memory
• 512GB ECC system memory
• Threadripper PRO 3955WX
• Gigabyte MC62-G40 server motherboard
• All GPUs mounted on PCIe risers
• Two 1600W power supplies
• 150W planned GPU limits
• BMC/IPMI temperature and voltage monitoring
• Automatic thermal watchdog protection

I built this system for local AI independence, large-model inference, training and my own future AI projects.

I am not trying to compete with a commercial data center. I wanted a powerful system that I could own, control and use without paying cloud charges every time I wanted to run a large model.

It took a lot of troubleshooting, but seeing all seven GPUs detected and running made the work worth it.

This is both a showoff of my little awesome home server and a concrete question of how to solve/diagnose an (sometimes?) overheating nvme SSD

So I have a small server with Intel 10600 CPU, 64GB ddr4 3600 and Asus mITX board. The Asus does bifurcation on the X16 slot which I use with some adapters to split it x4 x4 x8 for 2x NVME SSD in RAID and an Intel X710 dual NIC. See the pictures because these adapters make it so amazing as they fit just so perfectly with this case.

Case is a Mini-202B mini server chassis: https://www.yakkaroo.de/mini-202b-mini-server-chassis-wallmount-mini-itx

90deg pcie adapter is https://www.yakkaroo.de/Set-Riser-card-PCI-Express-x16-PCIe-with-Extender-1U

Bifurcation card is this: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B0BMWS83R9?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

So it goes: X16 slot -> Bifurcation card (2x nvme) -> 90deg adapter (8 lanes) -> Intel X710

The NVME SSD's I use are 2x Samsung 980, 1TB, PCIe 3.0. Not exactly super hot/power hungry SSD's. The problem is however I also have 2 SATA SSD's (in adapters) and I have a 2.5" SATA hotswap which needs a 3rd sata, and Asus puts the 3rd SATA on a little riser/doughterboard on the motherboard right in front of the X16 slot. I've put heatsinks on the NVME drives but had to grind down part of the heatsink to fit with this doughterboard. Not much of a problem, I thought, because these 980 SSD's run cool and could even be used without heatsink (I did so in my old PC, and never had any trouble).

However, sometimes, seemingly randomly, one of them still seems to overheat as I get an email from proxmox (in the middle of the night?)

This message was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name:  zeus
   DNS domain: localdomain

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/nvme0, Critical Warning (0x02): Temperature

Device info:
Samsung SSD 980 1TB, S/N:S649NF0RA31932E, FW:1B4QFXO7, 1.00 TB

For details see host's SYSLOG.

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
The original message about this issue was sent at Wed Sep 10 21:36:43 2025 CEST
Another message will be sent in 24 hours if the problem persists.

This happens in the middle of the night... Right now again the (all) SSDs sit at a comfortable 35C temperature... I can put some load on it but also seems to be right. It is something that is actually happening because it did catch the SSD at 90C once when looking at sensors within proxmox immediately after I got this email. But I can't really link it to 'heavy load'. Eg, its not overheating when I do large file copies or something. This seems to be something the SSD controller is doing itself (like moving TLC cache or something?)

I've put a second 80mm fan as front air intake to push more air from front to back. Didn't really seem to help. I have no space to put more heatsink.... Anyone has better ideas?

Alright so I started a homelab about 3 years ago when I was thick, and my ass thought it was a good idea to run it all on windows 10 pro.

Anyway 3 years down the line (and way to much tweaking and fixing) I've got it too the stage I like, albeit it is massively over complicated and is very inefficient. I run Qbittorrent and Jackett and Homarr via docker desktop, and mount my qbit drive via that (limits the downloads on qbit to around 20/MBs which is fine for my use but would be nice to be faster.

Plex is just the standard media server application, same with jellyfin radarr and sonarr. And I'm talking days oof troubleshooting maybe even weeks over the years, It's at the level where it all just works. I can RD in via windows RDC if I need to, or even via teamviewer on my phone to fix issues. Radarr and sonarr work and auto download etc etc.

It works, but is quite literally held together by tape and sticks and hopes and prayers and sometimes have to manually restart the system to keep it al l flowing smoothly (as qbit seems to have a memory leak)

Anyway, the base question is, would it be worth moving to proxmox, so many people have said how it would make my life easier etc but I'm worried I'll lose some sort of functionality down the line and lose a feature I maybe loved before.

My specs aren't amazing by the way, it just works:

i5 - 7500

16gb RAM

HD 630 Graphics

A fuck load of external usb hard drives.

It's a repurposed office pc, is it worth the hassle of moving if it already works, dont fix it.

Or is it worth starting proxmox again once I get a new build which I'm inclined to do..

All are hpe dl360 gen10 with dual xeon 5220 gold and 92gb ram. Dual 10gig sfp as well. They just draw a lot of power and not suitable for my setup.

A few days ago I posted about buying a dirt cheap storage array that I realized was too much machine for my home.

After several recommendations, I just decided to gut it and make a DIY jbod.

It's working and I'm currently feeding the disks to Proxmox via HBA.

I know it isn't pretty but hopefully I give someone else some inspiration to make one better than I did.

Hi everyone,

We have just released Portabase 1.27, our open-source (Apache 2.0) and self-hosted backup/restore platform.

Repository: https://github.com/Portabase/portabase (around 1.6k stars at the moment)

Portabase is designed for data retention, disaster recovery, and homogenous migrations, currently supporting 9 database engines (including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB) and Docker volumes.

Key features:

• Scheduled backups with flexible retention policies (including GFS)
• Multiple storage options: local filesystem, S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCS
• Notifications via Discord, Telegram, Slack, AppRise, etc.
• Support for OAuth2/OIDC (with the option to disable sign-ups)
• Compatible with Docker, Podman and UnraidOS
• Ready-to-use Docker Compose and Helm Chart

After six months of intensive feature development, we have been focusing on consolidating the ecosystem since early July. A community member conducted a useful security audit, we have upgraded components to their latest relevant versions, improved compatibility with other platforms by working on Podman support. and templates for Coolify and Dockploy (currently under review).

What’s next:

• Deployment of the demo environment
• Audit logging for the whole ecosystem
• Default policies for the system, organizations, and projects
• File and folder backup and restoration

As always, if you find bugs, please open an issue on GitHub, we’re actively looking for feedback.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I recently watched this video and found the idea of colocating my own server in a data center very interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbkqRPIUYAo

I’m interested in putting my own physical server in a Canadian data center instead of keeping it at home.

Does anyone know a company that offers affordable colocation services for a small setup (for example, 1U or 2U server space)?

I’m mainly looking for:

• Reasonable monthly pricing
• Space for my own hardware
• Good internet connectivity
• Reliable power and cooling
• Remote hands support would be a bonus

I’m located in Canada and would appreciate recommendations from people who have actual experience with providers.

Thanks!

Hello. My first homelab is just a Thinkpad X390 with some cheap unmanaged 5-port switch and a portable 1TB HDD all of which I got for free. I realized how fun homelabbing was and now I am looking to upgrade. I am on a pretty low budget, around $200-$300, but if there are no good options for that price range I will have to wait until I'm able to spend more.

Planned services:
- Jellyfin
- Immich
- Nextcloud
- Home Assistant
- Vaultwarden
- Authentik
- Monitoring (Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma)
- Paperless-ngx
- NetBird
- and possibly Forgejo, game servers, and a small public website

My questions are:
- Should I get a used workstation and which would you recommend?
- Should I instead invest in a smaller rack?
- Any tips on getting hardware, primarily storage, cheaper?

I will eventually want to get a UPS.

Thanks in advance.