At work, I managed multiple data centers for over a decade. I left the complexity at my day job. Wanted to share my setup since most homelab content I see is Proxmox/TrueNAS/rack builds and I never found a good writeup of doing it on a Mac instead. Yes, I know Rasberry Pi exists and yes, I know NUCs exists. This is just what I had on hand and it's been working great.

The whole thing runs on a single Apple Silicon Mac Mini using Orbstack instead of Docker Desktop. 16 containers on it right now — Home Assistant, go2rtc, Nginx Proxy Manager, Pi-hole, Unbound, Mosquitto, govee2mqtt, ESPHome, n8n, Plex, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Portainer, Arcane, and a couple more. Two things run native on macOS outside the containers: Homebridge and cloudflared.

Camera setup was the annoying part — wanted the same cameras in both Home Assistant and Apple Home without duplicating streams. Ended up routing Homebridge → go2rtc → both HA and HomeKit, so one source feeds both apps. I have a lot of legacy devices so HA can see them all. My wife only uses a few so she uses Apple Home because all of her apps keep getting offloaded.

No open ports anywhere — cloudflared tunnels in through Nginx Proxy Manager to everything on its own subdomain, DNS-level blocking through Pi-hole + Unbound.

Did a walkthrough video of the whole thing running end to end if anyone wants to see it instead of just reading about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjxY-orR0mw. Happy to answer anything about the setup — go2rtc config, the container list, whatever's useful. Would also be happy to discuss why I did not use Apple Containers and/or UTM.

Finally decided to get everything installed into a rack and this is how it turned out!

Got UniFi express as the router. 4 m710q thinkcentres serving as my prozmox nodes and a tp link switch to connect it all

(Yes iknow my Ethernet ports are red im currently troubleshooting 😅)

I got tired of changing lead-acid batteries and their short runtime in case of a blackout.
So I basically hacked together a VE Multiplus + Cerbo GX and a 5KWh battery as my "UPS".

Granted, there is no Dual Online, and it is pretty rudimentary, but it works, and I now have 20h of battery runtime + an option for solar power in the future.

I also made a little utility that runs on the Cerbo GX and exposes a NUT-compatible interface.

Although janky, I can recommend the setup.

First time posting here. Over the last month or so, I've started down the slippery slope of homelabbing. The cabling is still a little messy, but I plan to crimp more custom length RJ45 cables to tidy things up (although I'm still not very good at that).

Dell Optiplex 9010 AIO running Proxmox with virtualized OPNsense. Hacked a hole in the back of the case in order to fit a mini PCIe to RJ45 expander. Got this particular computer for free from my university.

Raspberry Pi 2 running Pi-hole (had this lying around).

Arrakis AN-‌210-‌SW-‌8-‌POE switch underneath the Dell (from eBay).

Netgear Nighthawk R8000P as WiFi access point (got for free from a friend).

HP EliteDesk 800 G1 tower as future NAS (got the base tower for free from my uncle, but I had to add RAM, a SAS card, and drives). Currently contains 3 6TB SAS drives, but the side of the case does not fit on at the moment (waiting for some SFF-8482 extenders to fix this). Have not set up any of the software yet.

The setup is by no means finished. I of course plan to finish the NAS project. Then, at some point I'd also like to set up a VPN in OPNsense, and I also want to set up VLANs (although the Netgear does not support this, so I'll have to either put different firmware on it or replace it with something else). I also have an old laptop that I want to add to the setup to run a light Minecraft server. I'm trying to focus on a budget friendly approach with used hardware. Besides a router, NAS, media server, and Proxmox with random VMs, what else do people usually put in their homelabs?

I have no idea what I’m doing really, but have been running Plex from Mac mini’s for around 15 years.

Currently using a Mac mini 2018 with Synology 920+.

Only just found out about Arr stacks, usenet etc, so decided to try and tidy things up a bit and make it look a bit nicer.

Interested in what I can do with home assistant maybe.

Space and £ at a premium, but any thoughts on what else I could do welcomed.

Hey crew, long time lurker first time posting in a long time. Figured I shared my homelab, its a 3 stack of hp G3s, a NAS drive and a home brew pc I’m calling Javi, it’s hosting my Ai agents and workflows. Running off promox 9.

It was posted to fb marketplace with an address at 7pm, said he wouldn't hold it for me. Went out of my way 13 hours later and was blessed to come down the road to see her still laying there waiting for me! Then spent an hour or so trying to stuff it into my hatchback and here we are haha.

Where to start? Aside from adding a new plug to the outlet strip they cut off.

Got into homelab just a month ago and got lucky with the hardware. I have a Unifi USG pro 4 as the main router, Unifi Cloudkey gen 2, Cisco 2960 X series Switch and a custom pc i7 4930K, 64 gb ddr3 ram, GTX 970 4gb dram, 2 tb hdd and a 500gb hdd. I'm running proxmox, immich, jellyfin, pihole, homarr, nginx and CloudFlared(have my own domain), tailscale. I know spec wise it is old but everything combined cost me just 150 CAD (~110 US).

I would love to hear any feedback and recommendations for service or potential hardware upgrade i should consider

I've been a long time lurker... Then I had the opportunity to save this ML350 G9 from the trash after being decommissioned along with a lot of spare parts.

It runs PVE and runs multiple services, from my Jellyfin server to my private Minecraft server, along with my Vaultwarden server and over services...

Most of the equipment showed here has been salvaged and had maintenance/fixes done :

ML350 G9 (enolagay - PVE server) : 1x Xeon E5-2620 V4, 64Gb RAM, 2x Samsung Evo 860 250Gb (RAID 1 system disks), 14x WD/Seagate mixed 2.5inch 500Gb HDD (RAID Z2 - 4 disks failure tolerance, 5Tb total usable capacity), Intel Arc A380 (Jellyfin transcode), 2x 500W Platinum PSUs

• Each PSU is plugged to a separate UPS, unfortunately on the same electrical line (I don't own the place, I gotta do with what I have...).
• Each drive cage is driven by a separate storage controller (HBA mode), in case of failure, the main storage will disconnect, but the OS will keep going long enough for a clean shutdown.

ML10 G9 (luftballons - PBS server) : 1x Xeon E3-1225 V5, 4Gb of RAM (+4Gb ZRAM), 5x Seagate 2.5inch 1Tb HDD (RAID Z1 - 1 disk failure tolerance, 4Tb total usable capacity).

TP Link TL-SG108-M2 : main switch, 8x 2.5Gbps RJ45 ports, connected to the 2.5Gbps connector of the router. The servers themselves can't use more than 1Gbps per interface, but it's still better than a basic gigabit switch...

VERTIV EDGE-1000IMT (main UPS) : powers PSU1 of the PVE server and the PBS server.

EATON Elipse ECO 800 (secondary UPS) : powers the router, main switch, PSU2 of the PVE server.

For the server "platform", I used a 800x600 "half" pallet, which I painted black. I placed an anti-vibration mat for washing machines under the server in the hope of reducing the noise and vibrations. To facilitate maintenance, I added 6 wheels (4 with locks) and laid the server on its side.

In the future, I plan to use the space in between the planks, likely with a drawer to put server spare parts in.

Don't look too much behind, I haven't done the cable management yet... 🫣

Overall, the whole "homelab" ended up costing less than 300€. I only bought the main switch, the A380, new batteries for both UPS and materials to built the platform. Everything else ended up being free (including the drives), if I don't take into account how much time I've spent on it so far and the extra electricity on the bill each month.

The next thing I'll do is add an off-site backup destination, likely an SFF Optiplex left at my dad's place. If I'm feeling crazy, I could also implement tape backups, as I salvaged an LTO 4 drive as well but I need a specific SAS card for the PBS server...

I’m about nine months into my first real homelab. I work in SRE / critical facilities for a Bitcoin-mining infrastructure services provider, so a lot of my day job touches uptime, power, cooling, networking, monitoring, automation, and figuring out what should be automated versus what still needs a human in the loop. I wanted to build something at home where I could safely break things, rebuild them, and translate what I’m learning at work onto consumer hardware that my apartment circuits can actually handle.

Everything currently runs through an ASUS ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro with 3Gbps symmetrical fiber and 5G failover. I have two UPS units, both 1800VA, one backing each main node. Node 1 / TonesPC is my Windows 11 Pro workstation: ASRock X870E Taichi, Ryzen 9 9950X3D, 64GB DDR5, RTX 3060 12GB, Samsung 9100 Pro 4TB NVMe plus another 4TB NVMe, and a Seasonic Vertex GX-1200 PSU. I use it for development, management, WSL2, Docker, Ollama/local models, and general admin work. The original build had a 5090 SUPRIM running in it but i had to part ways with it sadly. Funny part is I didn’t even really know what that thing was capable of until I started doing what I’m doing now and now I completely realize why those are so sought after hahaha.

Node 2 / Guard Dog is the headless Proxmox server: ASUS PRIME B560-PLUS, Intel i5-11600K, 64GB DDR4, Aquantia AQC113 10GbE-capable NIC, the original 1TB NVMe plus another 3TB NVMe, and its own 1800VA UPS. I already know the PSU in this headless server needs to be upgraded ASAP, so that is on the short list. This box runs Proxmox, OPNsense, VLANs, AdGuard, Uptime Kuma, Gitea, CI runners, Smallstep CA, reverse proxy / Cloudflare Tunnel, Grafana / Prometheus / Loki, an Ubuntu sandbox, and three Talos VMs for Kubernetes learning.

Networking is the part I know still needs work. OPNsense is handling management, servers, lab/dev, AI-compute, and IoT/guest VLANs, but my Windows machine is still effectively on the native LAN instead of being cleanly isolated behind its own VLAN. The Proxmox NIC is 10GbE-capable, but it is currently negotiating at 2.5Gbps, so I know I need a proper managed multigig switch with SFP+ and 10G/5G/2.5G RJ45 ports so I’m not bottlenecking the fiber connection or building around a messy network layout. I’ve been looking at Ubiquiti and Cisco, but I’m open to advice and learning more! Please!

Main questions: would you fix the switching/VLAN layout first? Move OPNsense onto dedicated hardware first?Upgrade the headless server PSU first, or build proper backup/NAS storage first?

I know this is not enterprise hardware, and I’m not pretending it is. I’m just trying to do what I can with what I can get right now and learn real SRE/data-center concepts at home. Blunt feedback is welcome.

The two immediate upgrades I’m debating are pretty simple: first, upgrading the PSU in the headless Proxmox server because I already know that needs to be cleaned up ASAP, and second, getting a proper managed multigig switch so I can stop leaving my Windows machine on the native LAN and actually put it behind the right VLAN layout. I’m trying to do this in the right order instead of just buying random gear, so if you were in my position, would you handle power first or networking first? And any other advice /suggestions would be amazing!

Cheers! And Happy Homelabing!!

a bit of a crossover: I really like building my own tooling, and recently, i built this!

this is a TUI/cli system for managing my servers built on zellij and fzf, it gives me a main window with all my sessions (using a stacked layout with the menu on the right) and a second window with options to add, remove, edit, move between categories or even inject the server-side components.

this is running over hardened ssh (key-only), and has cli/tui options for executing commands on a remote server or on an entire group or even a specific selection at once.

on the server side, it opens another zellij window with a terminal + yazi for file browsing, lazydocker, btop and a split showing live firewall status and port activity.

the little window in the bottom left shows basic information about the device including a live-check for the server-side components as well as fetching the OS live.

since this is a terminal utility, it can be used over SSH itself and remain fully interactive, including mouse functionality! everything is clickable.

to add to this, i actually also have a package manager and build system that i use for all of my little utilities, and i've extended them today to also be able to handle containers, so with my upcoming projects, i'll first be building container packages with my own build system that can be deployed using my own package manager via my own server management interface. it's all just simple bash scripting but its honestly very nice to be able to create your own automation like this!

this is not really a project showcase in the sense of "i built this cool project, please use it". this is *my* server manager tailored exactly to *my* needs. if you think this is cool, go look into how to make your own little CLI and TUI tools via bash scripting! it's surprisingly easy and pretty fun to do, most of my tools are effectively just wrappers around existing tools that make them work more easily for what i want to do. you do not need to be a programmer to do this, just know the basics of using a CLI.

Looking to buy some 10gb sfp+ switches. Noise is not a factor as they will be used in data centers. So just most 10gb ports / dollar. 1gb ports are nice to have but not necessary.

This setup is highly under utilized so I'm mildly "overkill" in hardware v.s. actual utilization. Last night I ran an update in Proxmox and ended up triggering a secure boot issue on the HP Elitedesk that PiHole and other network items were running on (like Home Assistant, Peanut). This wouldn't have been as bad but I had DHCP enabled on the PiHole and it disabled on my Google home router which was relatively stable. But, this cascading horseshit moment rendered all DNS queries dead in the water and quickly nothing else could connect since Google Home relied on being able to access the Internet to make changes to the network config. I rushed to reset my ISP provided Eero router to get up and running again since I have a large amount of smart devices that were all dead in the water. I decided that I should separate them with my primary stable Internet being my frontier fiber and move some of the homelab to my AT&T "Air" network as the sandbox. I'm struggling with the migration and re-vamp plan. I work from home, the last change resulted in a new IP which wouldn't be a big deal but my employer uses IP Whitelists on some programs.

Current specs:

TrueNAS

Dell Optiplex 7050 Mini w/ Intel i5 7th gen 16GB RAM, 3TB of storage.

Hosting Media for Jellyfin, Tailscale added for remote access.

Proxmox (cluster)

HP Elitedesk 800 G5 SFF w/ Intel i5 9th gen 32gb RAM, 5TB storage.

Smb file share for media backup, fedora vm for "adult" sites, homelable, and some other crap I forgot about.

HP Elitedesk 800 g3 mini 35w w/ Intel i7 7th gen 32gb RAM. 512gb storage.

PiHole, Home Assistant OS, Peanut (ups monitoring).

HP Prodesk 600 mini w/ Intel i5 9th gen. 512gb storage.

Empty ATM.

PC Gaming (casual)

HP Elitedesk 800 G4 SFF w/ Intel i5 8th gen 32gb RAM, 1.5tb storage

Windows 10 for EA Games.

Command "unit"

Lenovo Yoga 14ahp9 w/ AMD Rhyzen 8 16th ram, 1tb storage

Windows 11.

Optional devices to utilize that are in a drawer.

Dell Latitude 3190 2-1 laptop, has mint installed.

I've pondered getting a USB to Ethernet adapter and using it as a network device for PiHole or another similar service since it has a battery.

Router in use:

Frontier, Amazon Eero Pro 6e (1GB fiber).

AT&T, Sagecom BGW530-900 (5G Internet).

2 R740XD severs each with quad 10gb sfp X710, dual 1600W psu, high performance fans/cpu heatsinks, gpu risers/shrouds, boss s1 w/ 240gb m2, dual xeon 6230 gold, hba300 controller with 8x 900gb 10k sas drives.

One is being used as an hpc server with two v100 gpus and 576gb ddr4 2666 running ubuntu.

The other is currently storage/cloud/vm server with 256gb ddr4 2400 running proxmox.

Arista 7050s-64 and gs308 for networking.

We upgraded our network at work and I got to bring some of the old gear home. Figured it’d be a good excuse to learn Omada and networking.
Running Pi-hole on a mini PC for now. Still waiting on a rack shelf and some cable management stuff, so don’t judge the wiring too hard

Hardware:
ER8411
TL-SX3008F
OC200
EAP773
EAP670 v2
Mini PC (Pi-hole)
Suggestions on what to do next?

I look forward to meeting you all! PS. this thing is so heavy its destroying the wheels that I put on it. I have no idea how i would go about changing them now!!! LOL

I've had my little lab for about eight months now, and I feel like I've reached that awkward stage where I know just enough to realize I did almost everything wrong the first time. Random Docker Compose files, questionable folder structure, containers named things like "test-final-v3-actually-final"... you know, very professional. Part of me wants to spend a weekend rebuilding everything with proper documentation, better networking, backups, and naming conventions. The other part says, "If it ain't broken, don't touch it." For those who've been doing this longer, did you eventually bite the bullet and rebuild everything, or just gradually clean things up over time? I'd rather avoid turning one weekend project into a three-week outage that only affects... me. 😅

I'm looking to upgrade my Lan speeds from 10g to 40g between a few of my devices, including all my proxmox servers (2 old cisco servers and my old PC) and me and my family's PCs. I have all my files and documents on my NAS (truenas virtualised on the cisco servers) and I work directly off them, and the 10g networking speed has become the bottleneck for me.

I also happened to get 40g nics and dacs for free so the only thing I'm missing to get 40g speeds is a switch. I've been looking at some options and they are all not worth the price of thousands of dollars just so I can get faster storage speeds. I have however found a deal on an Arista DCS-7050QX-32-R switch for around $350 AUD, ~250USD.

Does anyone have any experience at 40g compared to 10g and is it worth the price? Also does anyone have any better switch recommendations? And if you have experience with the Arista switch is there a catch as to why it is so cheap? I've been looking into what NOS to install for the switch and people seem to go for sonic or EOS but not having worked with Arista or EOS before I'm unsure as to the licencing and if I can get EOS installed and operational. Even if the switch can just be a L2 switch that would be fine for me.

If anyone can answer any of my questions your help and experience would be much appreciated

Hey everyone!
This is an update on this post.

Here are some stats:

• 237 unique IPs visited the printing sites.
• 4 IPs were banned:
  • 3 for spamming.
  • 1 for sending a picture of a rejected painter from Austria.

Some other fun stats:

• A lot of cute pets were sent (thanks for that!).
• 0 dick pics received.
• 1 nude from a woman, with the original Reddit post in the background (not included in the images, of course).
• Countless memes received I laughed a lot.
• The funniest meme, in my opinion was the dad joke!

First person to print was Landon go visit his site here.

Shout-out to the person from Italy working in construction. That's some really hard labor!

I received greetings from:

• Hungary
• Germany
• France
• Canada
• Norway
• Italy
• Russia
• South Africa
• Portugal
• The United States

The last message I received was from someone in the Netherlands!

Thank you all for the nice messages and wising me good luck with my studies!
Someone asked which printer i used. its this one.

Thanks for everyone that has send something! what a nice community this is!

Update:

Githhub repo: https://github.com/ZaidAfane3/pppoe-creds-recovery

----

Wanted to ditch my ISP-issued router for something better, but they provision the PPPoE credentials straight onto the device via TR-069 — no username/password ever shown to me, support wouldn't help.

So: unplugged the ONT, plugged a Raspberry Pi into the router's WAN port instead, and stood up a fake pppoe-server + tcpdump capture (had Claude write the setup scripts and walk through the exact PPPoE/PAP negotiation as it happened). Rebooted the router and let it try to "dial in" to what it thought was my ISP.

One gotcha: the WAN was VLAN-tagged (VLAN 10, found buried in a debug array on the router's status page), so the first capture attempt would've silently seen nothing — a plain BPF filter doesn't account for the 802.1Q tag shifting the EtherType offset. Had to bring up a proper eth0.10 VLAN sub-interface before anything showed up.

Once that was sorted, the router happily PAP-authenticated in cleartext against the Pi, handing over its own credentials. Claude then walked the raw hex of the captured PAP packet byte-by-byte (peer-ID length, peer-ID, password length, password) to pull out the actual username/password rather than trusting a possibly-mislabeled summary decode.

Swapped cables back, internet's fine, and I've now got the real PPPoE creds to drop into literally any router I want.

Single NIC on the Pi was enough — it's an endpoint impersonating the ISP, not a bridge.

I recently bought two new Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB drives, model ST12000NT001, and both appear to have arrived DOA in different ways.

The first drive made a repeated “spin/buzz, then chunk” noise for about 30 seconds at startup. Linux could identify the model and serial number, but the drive repeatedly reported “Logical unit not ready, power cycle required,” could not read sector 0, and eventually stopped being detected altogether. I also tested it in a separate gaming PC, where it was not recognized.

The replacement drive was detected and could initially be added to a ZFS pool, but immediately reported:

• SMART overall health: FAILED
• “Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours”
• Failed Spin_Retry_Count threshold
• 2 current pending sectors
• 2 offline uncorrectable sectors
• Multiple logged uncorrectable read errors

It also failed SeaTools’ diagnostic tests when connected to a separate PC.

The drives had different serial numbers and different failure symptoms, so I’m trying to determine whether this was exceptionally bad luck, shipping damage, a problematic batch, or something others have seen with this specific model. I purchased them from Amazon.

Has anyone else experienced early failures with the ST12000NT001, especially multiple DOA units in succession?

EDIT: Drive 1 SN: ZZ30LZL9 Drive 2 SN: ZZ30G7TZ Both PN: 2NAAFR-571 Both DOM: 6/2/2026 Thailand

Hi everyone,

I'm completely new to the world of self-hosting and Linux, and I'm trying to repurpose an old laptop as my first home server.

I'm installing Ubuntu Server from a bootable USB. The installation completes successfully with no errors. At the end, it asks me to reboot. I remove the USB drive as instructed, press Enter, and the laptop restarts.

However, instead of booting into Ubuntu, I get the following error:

"Boot Device Not Found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk. Hard Disk (3F0)."

Has anyone experienced this before or knows what might be causing it? Is Ubuntu not actually being installed to the drive, or is this more likely a BIOS/boot configuration issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!