Currently just doing the ordinary hosting a pihole, transmission, DNS resolver, jellyfin, LLM and a webshare with the laptop desktop and half laptops as a node for my proxmox.

Why wouldn't laptops be the norm with the low power usage?

I think I’ve become a bit addicted to self-hosting / homelab stuff.
It all started with a simple SMB share on my Windows PC, just so I could listen to my music from other devices. That, and the desire to have all my music stored locally.
Then it evolved—first to kDrive (because yeah, once I had downloaded all my music, I started wondering what would happen if my PC suddenly went into spontaneous nuclear meltdown in the middle of the living room...) and then to an Asustor NAS.

The NAS opened up new possibilities: goodbye tower share, hello Jellyfin, Docker, Vaultwarden, and more.

Then I installed a WireGuard server on my ISP's router to access my services remotely. But since the Bitwarden Android extension only accepts HTTPS, I bought a domain name.
Still, I didn’t want to expose anything directly to the Internet, so I wanted jellyfin.mydomain.com to point to my Jellyfin server anyway, just to avoid typing IP:port.
So I set up an AdGuard server with DNS rewrites to point to the NAS IP, where I configured the reverse proxy.

But the NAS started showing its performance limits.
Also, I was about to become a dad, and I wanted a better solution for managing photos. Immich looked really appealing, but it required something more powerful than that NAS.

So I bought a used OptiPlex 7060 SFF and installed Proxmox on it.
I set up LXC containers for Immich and Jellyfin, migrated my Docker Jellyfin instance into an LXC, and kept adding services.
A Debian VM for the Docker services that used to run on the NAS, a reverse proxy (NPM) in an LXC...

Then my router nuked the AdGuard VM. I had to rebuild everything—not a big deal, but it was annoying.
So I installed another AdGuard instance as an LXC on Proxmox and set up failover using Keepalived and a VIP.

I also moved the WireGuard server into an LXC.

Meanwhile, I optimized some configs, secured the backups (basic Proxmox backup tasks to an NFS mount on the NAS, and then pushed to kDrive from the NAS).

Added notifications with Gotify, just because.

At this stage, things are working really well for my needs and mostly run on their own.
Sure, I’ve still got room for improvement—optimizations, configurations, backups—but overall it’s good enough for what I need.

But now... well, I still feel like tinkering, even though I don’t really need anything else.
I’m not into Nextcloud, and I don’t have any IoT gear for Home Assistant.

I installed a few things just to try them out—Cockpit, Netdata (which I uninstalled, then reinstalled).
I spent some time setting up Uptime Kuma with a nice, fairly complete status page… even though honestly, I don’t really care.

I installed a Minecraft server in an LXC, just for fun, even if I’m not playing right now. The map is pregenerated.

And now I’m just sitting here, kinda dumbfounded, wanting to install stuff but knowing I won’t really use it because I don’t need it.
I’ll probably set up a local Wikipedia with Kiwix, but again—I doubt I’ll use it much.

So yeah… I guess I’ve become a little addicted to this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care and I’d just be happy that everything works.

Well the next cool thing to me would be to buy my own router and to go deeper in network management. But I don't have the budget to buy it right now, it will be the next thing I'll dive into .

Hi-

Much has been written about whether you can get PCIe cards to work on Dell Poweredge servers. I got mine to work, it was non-intuitive, so I thought I'd document.

What I eventually did:

• Purchase
  • 10Gtek Dual M.2 NVMe SSD Adapter Card https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NKTYFHX
  • 2 x Samsung 990 EVO SSD 1TB
  • 2 x M.2 Heatsink 67x18x2mm PS5 2280 SSD Pure Copper Heatsink
• Put it in PCIe Slot 3 (any x16 slot will do, can't put it in a x4 slot because it's an 8x card)
• In BIOS (Integrated devices / Slot Bifurcation), chose x8x4x4 bifurcation for Slot 3 (for some reason, 4x4x8x didn't work for me)
• Presto both nvme0n1 and nvme1n1 appear as drives! I'm mirroring them, because, well, consumer drives.

Things I believe:

• You have to bifurcate. Others have told me they did 4x4x8x successfully, but it didn't work for me.
• You cannot boot from nvme no matter what (unless you put grub on a USB, so then, ok, yes you can). You can boot from a BOSS card, which is SATA under the hood.
• You do not need specific dell-approved NVMe drives in order to recognize them.
  
• Separately, the fans on the T640 and all poweredge servers suck, because Dell has removed the ability to manually control them since iDRAC 3.30.30.30 and downgrading is near impossible. Totally separate issue, but people should be aware to not get these or to avoid upgrading BIOS/iDRAC.

Hi,
I have a 16th-generation Dell T160 server.
I'd like to install a second PCIe 1gbe card, but once installed, the server turns the fan on full blast because it doesn't recognize a third-party device as secure.

Has this happened to anyone? Solutions or suggestions?

Thanks

Hello there !

I recently started homelabing thanks to a friend.

I work in IT so I know what I am doing more or less, I do IT support in logistics, I do a bit of everything here.

The goal of homelab is to train myself professionally for one day to have a position as a system administrator.

For the moment, here is what I have in my homelab:

- A truenas scale server mounted with components that I had in excess (i7 6700, Z170P, 16RAM, about 10 TB usable of SSDs, in a 3U case) I will put photos later.

- An Asrock Rack E3C236D4M-4L server (not yet used, 64GB RAM 4 x 800Ggb Intel SSD, i need to buy a cpu for it like a E3-1240V6)

Network side:

A Mikrotik CSS318-16G-2S+IN switch and a Mikrotik L009UiGS-RM router (ISP to router 2.5gig and 2gig LCAP between the switch and the router)

I use the truenas server mainly for my Jellyfin Streaming service, it is also an exit node of tailscale.

I don’t know what else to do with it.

The Asrock server will be a Plex but I don’t have any more ideas.

Can you help me?

Hey everyone,

I’m running a home server setup on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM, using OpenMediaVault (OMV) as the base OS. On top of that, I have Nextcloud running as a Docker container, along with a few other containers like AdGuard, etc.

The main issue I’m facing is painfully slow transfer speeds with around 6 MB/s, when moving files internally on my network. This feels off because:

The Raspberry Pi 4 is connected via Gigabit Ethernet.

My external network has a 100 Mbps internet connection, but network speed shouldn’t be the limiting factor for local transfers.

Storage is an external SSD, and I’ve tested its transfer speeds separately, which are within expected ranges.

I’m using WiFi 7 with a new FritzBox, and transferring from a newer phone (which shouldn’t be the bottleneck either).

So far, I’m scratching my head about where the bottleneck could be. Could OMV be limiting the speeds somehow? I initially set this up with OMV because I wanted a NAS, and only later added Nextcloud inside Docker. I’ve added multiple containers since, and it felt like a bigger hassle to completely tear down Nextcloud and all containers to start fresh.

OMV does provide a Docker Compose UI, so would switching the setup there help? Or should I consider upgrading to a more powerful system altogether? I have a budget of around €150 for upgrades.

Any ideas on how to diagnose this further or tips to improve transfer speeds would be really appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

This may not be entirely HomeLab related but would love to draw on everyone’s knowledge.

I plan on taking some trips on my motorbike where I won’t be at home for up to a week at a time. I’ll have a 360 cam and a GoPro recording the journeys. I want to be able to backup the SD cards once they’re full. I don’t want to bring my laptop in case it gets damaged and can be bulky. Can anyone suggest a portable, perhaps battery powered solution, that would fit this description?