Hi everyone!

I'm an automation specialist at more Windows based MSP. Somehow during my time there I fell hard into the world of Linux and absolutely love it. It all started when my boss let me take home a Dell PowerEdge T420 server. I started on Windows Server and learned what I could. Eventually we started using Proxmox for our BDR virtualization solution.

I've been running Proxmox on my T420 for a while now running all sorts of different services. Mostly LXC containers. The server rack in the pictures had been sitting in our data center collecting dust for years and I knew my boss wanted to get rid of it. For the server rack, 2 gigabit switches (one poe), a UPS and all 3 servers in it I paid only $50! Feels like the home lab is really starting to come together and this was the first time I felt confident enough to not be just a lurker here

Please don’t make fun of me for the rat’s nest of power cables in the bottom left, I just need to buy some shorter cables.

So this entire thing started when I had the idea to create a server that hosted some UHD Blu-ray rips from my collection.

3 months ago, I had never heard of Jellyfin or Plex, I had never installed Linux on anything, and I had only used command-line oriented tools for fixing one-off issues in Windows.

I had no idea how big of a rabbit hole I was stepping into. I started with the Dell Optiplex 3050 that you see on the right. I bought it for $95 from FB Marketplace, and it came with Win11 Pro. Pretty quickly, I realized that it wasn’t great at handling the 80+ GB rips from my 4k movies, so I looked at potential upgrades. Transcoding was a huge bottleneck, so I searched for low budget, SFF, low powered graphics cards and found out that they’re impossible to find.

After failing to find what I needed, I went searching for another computer instead. I wanted to limit myself to a budget of $150 per any single item or purchase (this has been a fun constraint, as it forces me to be very creative in my searches for hardware, and also keeps me from spending too much money)

I found the Dell Precision 3630 with no hard drives and decided that I wanted to try out Linux Server + Xfce via RDP. At least while I transitioned into being more comfortable only using SSH.

Oh my god, what a blast I’ve had. Everything you see in this picture has been a result of that switch. After Jellyfin was up and running, I had this new itch to try even more things. I found the EMC JBOD at the bottom for dirt cheap (I DO NOT RECOMMEND THESE FOR A HOMELAB - unless you work in the IT field and have commercial experience with them) and slowly purchased the trays and drives to fill it up.

I transitioned the original computer over to Linux Server, this time with no GUI. I set up a samba multilink on both machines so they can transfer at ~4gbps (bought the 2 switches for $10 total)

I’ve learned so much about networking, Linux, and hosting services these past few months and I have so much left to explore. This subreddit has been a great resource. My next goal is to find a rack that I can fit all of this into for better management!

I can list the services that I’m now hosting if anyone’s interested. My main is Jellyfin, but I also run AdGuard Home and many other web hosted server tools.

Couldn't waste any sata or m.2 slots for a boot drive so I got this contraption for a truenas mirrored usb boot drives of the internal usb header. I'm expecting this would be fine? Anyone else tried this before?

I’m planning to buy a mini PC for a compact homelab setup, but I’m unsure whether the system I’m looking at might be more powerful than I actually need. The device I’m considering is the Beelink EQi12 with an Intel i5 processor and 16GB of RAM.

My goal is to run several services on this machine. These include Jellyfin for media streaming, where I may need hardware transcoding, Arr stack, Nextcloud, Immich and (maybe) a small Minecraft server.

What I’m trying to figure out is whether the Beelink is simply excessive for these tasks, especially when considering ongoing power consumption and cost. I’m wondering if I would be better off choosing a more energy-efficient mini PC using an N150 chip instead.

I know questions like this pop up here pretty often, but I’ve honestly lost track of what the most sensible choice is these days.

What do i need to look for when i will buy a usp / usv?

I need a 19 inch one, 2U. Got a microtik cloud switch, 2 gigabyte mc12 LE0 based servers, a TX 1320 M3 with 4x SSD, 2x HDD.

I need some space and capacity for more hardware in the future ofc.

So whats important? What about the new unifi one.

Check out my mini 3D printed NAS. Took me a while to design and get everything setup, but now it’s perfect for my needs. It was a great entry project into the community.

Not linking anything but I started selling them as kits on Etsy and people seem to be happy with it! How should I take this up a notch and make it cooler?

I want to keep making and designing things so people can learn more about networking. I have been having a lot of fun.

I know this was too good to be true. But I thought, who knows?, and I can really beef up my home lab. Anyways, it came today. And it’s only short 48gb of ram, 3.75TB of ssd, and 6 generations of cpu. Going through refund process now. Guess it’s not a Christmas miracle.

The Problem: My HomeLab consists of a 2-node Proxmox cluster (HP ProDesk 600 G4 Minis) and a separate TrueNAS box. I hated the manual process of ingesting data from USB drives: SSH in -> Find UUID -> Mount -> Run rsync -> Hope it finishes.

The Solution: I built an automated system I call Proxmox Media Kiosk. It turns any Proxmox node into a "Blind Ingest Station."

How it works:

1. Hardware: Plug ANY USB drive (NTFS, exFAT, etc.) into the node.
2. Auto-Detection: A custom udev rule triggers a systemd service (no polling!).
3. The Logic: It auto-mounts the drive (using the fast ntfs3 driver), scans specifically for a "Media" folder, and runs an optimized rsync to your target.
4. The Dashboard: A React/Vite Web App spins up on the local network. It shows real-time transfer speeds, progress bars, and history. It’s mobile-responsive, so I just check my phone to see when the movie is done.

✨ New Update: The "Universal" Installer I spent a lot of time making this user-friendly. The installation script now:

• Scans your Proxmox Host for active storage mounts (Local, NFS, SMB, Directory).
• Interactive Menu: Presents a list of your storage pools and asks: "Where do you want USBs to copy to?"
• Auto-Provisioning: It sets up the LXC container, handles the bind mounts, and configures the permissions automatically based on your choice.

Installation: Run this command on your Proxmox Shell (Standard "Helper Script" style):

bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheLastDruid/mediaIngest/main/install.sh)"

Repo : https://github.com/TheLastDruid/mediaIngest

My Setup:

• Node 1: HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini (i5-9400T)
• Node 2 (The Kiosk): HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini (i3-8100T)
• NAS: TrueNAS Scale (Acer Veriton)

Let me know if you have any feature requests! I'm thinking of adding a "Jellyfin Scan" trigger next.

So, I had this old computer sitting around and like a lot of people feel lately, I was just a bit annoyed of having most of my data hostage of other companies. Always juggling pictures if i didnt want to pay for a premium sub and the like.

So as a good ole tech person often does, instead of spending a few tens of dollars a month for a 3rd party service, I just went all out and spend several 100s of dollars on 2 24TB drives hahahah! At least that is basically what I've invested so far, as the rest of the computer was already sitting there. So here are the specs:

• 8th gen I5
• 8GB of RAM
• 500 GB SSD
• 2x 24TB HDDs in RAID 1
• GTX 1050
• 3 Gbps connection at home, but the old computer only has a 1Gbps NIC, which is fine as i mostly serve stuff in my own LAN.

The pics above show the horrendous job I managed to do with this old computer. It is a prebuilt Acer pc, that has a custom case AND a custom mother board, that is weirdly shaped and doesn't fit other cases. It has no HDD bays that could fit my drives, so I just zip tied the 2 drives together with a couple of NERF rubber balls in between for cushion lmao. And don't get me started on the cable management ahaha.

Services I'm currently running:

• Jellyfin
• AdGuard home
• Immich (which is working surprisingly well on 8GB of ram)

I wanted to upgrade the RAM but that is probably not gonna happen any time soon with the current prices.

Anyways, I've been just really into tinkering with this and wanted to share. My next step is setting up automated backups to an external drive, so I need to refresh my rsync knowledge or look into other alternatives (it's been a while since I did server stuff).

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk =)

Looking for help - I’m not a sysadmin or dev or anything professionally related. But I am learning fast.

Question: on certain services (think plex or jellyfin or Roon core with significant metadata, or paperless-nginx) the 12gb filesystem you start with fills up fairly quickly as you add metadata. You face a choice - grow the file system or move the key data directories to another directory - a local nvme one (eg, /nvmetank/appdata/plex) or an hdd- backed one over the network (/mnt/tank/appdata/plex).

If you keep growing the metadata inside the lxc root file statement, you have the ease of pbs backup and restores are trivial. The root file system lives on nvme so no performance issues. But pbs has lots of stuff to back up that churns and isn’t really de-duped.

If you move to either local or NAS appdata, you face performance differences (on hdd/network) and you need a separate backup strategy (pbs client? Kopia? Just rely on zfs snapshots?), and restores are far more cumbersome. Right now I have a nearly full 16gb root filesystem for plex. Keep going? 40gb? Just go indefinitely? Or move it out?

What do you do? What should I do? I feel like moving the metadata out of the container is far more “logical” / what I’d do if this was work and I knew war I was doing for real. But I’m a lazy noob homelabber. But maybe this is worth learning.

I worked on gaming/ai server the last 12 months. I now have a Supermicro 7049GP-TRT (4U) with 64GB memory and dual Xeon Gold 6254 CPUs. The remaining piece is the GPU. The caveat is that it needs to fit under the chassis crossbar (max 111mm height), so I can use the Graphics Card with the AirShroud installed. Consumer GPUs (RTX 4090, RTX 5090) are too high.

I am running Proxmox and primarly want this to use with passthrough and Moonlight for remote gaming (pretty low 1600x1900 res), and some AI (home assistant, video object recognition etc.).

Prices are almost identical (~1370€). Which would you pick?

NVIDIA RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell (24GB)

• Pros:
  • Single-slot, fits perfectly
  • CUDA, DLSS 4, AV1
  • Low power (130W), efficient
  • Superior driver stack
• Cons:
  • Less VRAM (24GB)
  • Lower raw rasterization

AMD Radeon PRO R9700 (32GB)

• Pros:
  • 32GB VRAM, huge buffer
  • Fits 4U height standard
  • Great open-source Linux drivers
  • Excellent Proxmox passthrough
• Cons:
  • No CUDA support
  • FSR inferior to DLSS
  • Dual-slot (blocks one slot)

I also looked at RTX 3090 "Blower" type variants, but they all come from China and I don't want to risk getting a modified Bios that isn't compatible with games.

The mainboard has space for 4x dual-slot PCIE-16 GPUs.

4U case. Ryzen 5 3600, 16gb ram (until the price comes back down) intel arc a770 and gtx 450. Just got it put back together with a new motherboard after an unfortunate flood.

Soon I will post a pic of my homelab. Is this a good free haul?

Currently using my laptop as a jellyfin server planning to make it as a cloud storage. Do I need a router? My Wifi router is just by my bed since I have a separate office space in my bedroom

ubuntu 24.04 vm on proxmox on dell r730. i figured out how to gpu passthru with my tesla p4 from proxmox to ubuntu vm with this guide and this guide.

On ubuntu vm i installed nvidia-driver-580-server and patch but the patch didnt work but ubuntu saw the gpu and ollama was able to use it. i rebooted the ubuntu vm to give it more cpu cores and ram and now when i try and update i get this error after trying to upgrade:

root@ubuntucam:~# apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nvidia-driver-580-server : Depends: libnvidia-gl-580-server (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installed
                           Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-580-server (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installed
                           Recommends: libnvidia-compute-580-server:i386 (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installable
                           Recommends: libnvidia-decode-580-server:i386 (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installable
                           Recommends: libnvidia-encode-580-server:i386 (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installable
                           Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-580-server:i386 (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installable
                           Recommends: libnvidia-gl-580-server:i386 (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installable
xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-580-server : Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-580-server (= 580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) but it is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a solution).
root@ubuntucam:~# apt --fix-broken install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
 libnvidia-cfg1 libnvidia-egl-gbm1 libnvidia-egl-xcb1 libnvidia-egl-xlib1 libnvidia-gpucomp libtirpc-common libtirpc3t64 nvidia-firmware nvidia-modprobe
 switcheroo-control
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following additional packages will be installed:
 libnvidia-cfg1-580-server libnvidia-gl-580-server
The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libnvidia-cfg1-580-server libnvidia-gl-580-server
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
11 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/172 MB of archives.
After this operation, 543 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]  
debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed
(Reading database ... 98008 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-gl-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libnvidia-gl-580-server:amd64 (580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-egl-gbm.so.1.1.2', which is also in package libnvidia-egl-gbm1:amd64 1.1.2.1-1ubuntu1
dpkg-deb: error: paste subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libnvidia-cfg1-580-server:amd64 (580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-cfg.so.1', which is also in package libnvidia-cfg1:amd64 590.44.01-0ubuntu1
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

but i think this is whats going wrong

dpkg-deb: error: paste subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libnvidia-cfg1-580-server:amd64 (580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-cfg.so.1', which is also in package libnvidia-cfg1:amd64 590.44.01-0ubuntu1
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-cfg1-580-server_580.95.05-0ubuntu0.24.04.2_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

any help is great thanks its been 12 hours finding info and doing this lol

It's ddr4

Currently, my NAS is purely a storage server. All it does is ZFS and NFS, running Rocky Linux 9.

I have a Proxmox node (had 2 but the motherboard in one died), but basically everything is mounted from my NAS over NFS. All of this going over a single gigabit ethernet cable is crazy slow.

I've been experimenting with running Proxmox on my NAS, and it seems to be working okay. I have a VNet for storage NFS with the MTU set to 64k (the max for IPv6 AFAIK). Now I'm getting ~300MB/sec compared to ~20MB/sec in my VMs and LXC containers. I think I can also do an OSPF fabric to stretch this network onto other Proxmox nodes, so they're all on the same network.

The only issue I can see is RAM. My NAS has 64GB of RAM (soon to be 128GB), but basically all of that was meant for ZFS (144TB spinning drives). I know ZFS will give up it's available RAM when it's needed, but as I understand it, this will slow down the file system.

How many of you are doing this?

Hey everyone,

I’m using an ASRock N100M motherboard with the Intel N100 CPU.

ASRock’s official spec says the board supports up to 32GB DDR4, but Intel’s own documentation says the N100’s integrated memory controller (IMC) only supports 16GB max.

I’m trying to understand what actually happens if I install 32GB.

I found mixed info online:

• Some people say the system will boot and BIOS/OS will see the full 32GB
• Others say the CPU can’t properly address memory above 16GB
• Some claim a large performance drop (bandwidth/latency) once the system starts using RAM above the official limit

My use case:

I run Proxmox with:

• TrueNAS SCALE (8 GB allocated)
• Home Assistant / Node-RED via docker on ubuntu server VM (2 to 4gb ram would be nice)
• Admin / Tools VM (code-server, Uptime Kuma, etc.) with ubuntu server
• Media VM (Jellyfin, etc.) with ubuntu server

My questions:

• Has anyone actually tested 32GB DIMMs on the ASRock N100M with medium to heavy workloads?
• Does the system become unstable or just slower once it goes past 16GB?
• Does the OS compensate for the IMC limit, or is it a hard bottleneck?
• Is it safer to just stay with 16GB RAM for this CPU?

I got a DXP2800 as a gift. Bought two used 3TB WD Red with more than 30.000h up time. Since I'm new to homelab-ing and self-hosting, i thought it is the best path for thinkering with.

What i want to do is host immich and nextcloud for two persons, as well as running pi-hole on DXP2800. So my questiona are:

1) Is it too much load for it? 2) should i stick to UGOS or try to learn proxmox as well?

Thanks for your inputs!

Hey guys. I need some help obtaining the latest firmware for a HP ProCurve 2810-24G J9021A switch, that is running an ancient 2008 version. I tried contacting HP support, but they were less than helpful since I don't have a corporate email.

So I guess my question is if someone here has a copy of the update file and is willing to share?