I have an old-school physical steam link running Arch off a USB stick acting as a NUT server in my rack, since at this point my TV runs Moonlight and there is no need for a standalone device to buggily stream 1080p (as cool as it was at the time). What weird, repurposed hardware are you finding a use for?

This is mostly a general rant about software, but it also applies to homelab techniques and software setup as an end user. If you are a developer, PLEASE learn some lessons from this.

I'm not a complete noob with networking, homelab or computer science. But I am a self-taught amateur who's trying to set things up the correct way and learn how to do things to an industry standard. I like to read official documentation and learn how the creator intended the system. That said, I definitely don't know it all and I definitely experience trial and error setting things up. Eventually I prevail, or I move onto a system that actually works without much fluff.

I am getting incredibly frustrated with poorly or half-baked information.

How is it admissible to have documentation only understandable from the creator's perspective, if even that? From experience, the software I use at work (unrelated industry, but technical and closed-source software reliant) is horrendous. The official manual that comes with the software will quite literally reference a function ("explode" as an example) and the entire entry for the "explode" function will say: "explodes selection."

Yeah, I friggin know that, as that's what's on the hover tooltip.

You can extrapolate this across the entirety of the software, with nearly every function. What is not in italian (yes, even in the english translation of the manual, there are whole pages still in italian) is in broken english, and most of the english manual is like this, very terse self-references to the function or situation at hand. This software costs 5k+USD, and if you don't know something, you have to ask a representative from the company, who is very short with you because they're constantly on the phone with customers either fixing a software issue, or explaining things they could just put in the manual.

This is happening in homelab situations as well. "What goes in the IP ADDRESS field?" "The host IP address" "It's a router. The internal or external side?" "WAN" "Okay, what does the tunnel connect to on the other end?" "LAN"

great, thanks.

Made up scenario, but this is what I've been dealing with trying to get an understanding of some things, and every thread you go into for someone else asking a question has post after post of the poor OP saying "but.. but... but... but..." The lesson is, if you don't want anyone to ask questions and just "get it" in one post, give all the information. explain the thing, don't just list off terse facts you know and expect everyone to understand it like you do with no further explanation. If you're writing a manual, made it detailed and cover all the bases. I'm really tired of seeing "IP FIELD: IP of the host" when there is definitely more to it than that in some situations.

PLEASE, if you're writing a manual, documentation, tutorial, or a help post, PLEASE keep the details and don't just expect that people understand from your 20 years of experience and a three word post. The less questions people need to ask setting up, the better.

"read more." Read more what, other people saying the same one liners as you?

I know I'll get flak for this, don't care. I know I'm right about this one.

edit: removed some fluff.

Hello home lab community. I currently use Ubiquiti Edgerouter X as my home firewall/router. Had it for about 6 years. Love it and still wirks. It sits between ATT Fiber Modem and my Cisco 4500X 10G switch. I just acquired a Cisco ASA 5555 with perpetual licenses (VPN Premium, Encryption-3DES-AES, etc.) Being a Cisco guy myself, I wanted to get the community opinion about using Cisco ASA as home firewall and if anyone does uses it to share their experience.

Edit: Open thought of maybe putting the Opensense/Suricata before ASA and use as IPS/IDS pre-filter system since ASA EOL is 2023. This way the Opensense is the up-to-date protection between Internet and home network.

Thanks everyone.

Hi. I am using bell fiber internet -1 gbps (modem +router 4000)

Whenever I add dns ip of either pi hole or adguard running on my home server, it will run its queries but then it will stop the internet. I tried adding in my router settings dns too nothing helps. Any idea what should be doing now,?

Ps- adguard and pihole are running fine

My friend suggested I should get a new modem but is it worth it?

Hi all,

After a long time lurking and dreaming, I'm finally in a position in my life/career where I have some time and money to actually start building a homelab. Currently gathering parts for my first server/NAS. Plan currently is to use a Dell Precision 5820 I picked up for around $40. (It was stripped of the GPU, HD, and ram.)

Currently, I have the opportunity to purchase some hard-drives at a pretty decent deal. There are a lot of options. Brands that I'm able to choose from include Seagate, WD, Toshiba, and Hitachi. They are resells, hence a lower price. They seem to be entry level drives.

Thoughts on a brand of entry level? i.e. is an entry level WD better than entry level Seagate for example? Or does it even matter?

My thought is to just get started. I can add higher quality drives later, when money and resources can be devoted to it. And some of these lots have enough quantity to create a back up, and even a back up or a back up.

For example, one lot is 15 Seagate drives (model ST500DM002) 500 GB each for $25. VS
17 WD drives (model WD5000AAKX) 500 GB each for $30.

All lots are 3.5" HDD.

So.... for a newbie like me.... decent idea?
Thoughts? Considerations?
Thanks in advance!

Hey guys,

I want to completely replace my current home lab server on Unraid and I will only keep my HDD. My main goal is to handle Jellyfin transcoding for several users simultaneously, run VMs like a Cybersecurity VM and a Minecraft server, and host a lot of Docker services.

I prefer something quiet, so I'm leaning away from rack servers, despite how cool they look.

Here's the build I'm considering at the moment.

Does this look good? Will I be able to accomplish everything I want with this setup? Are there better hardware options for around the same price?

| Component Type | Component Name | Price |

| Chassis | Fractal R5 | $125 |

| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X DDR4 | $150 |

| Processor | Intel i5-13500 | $250 |

| RAM | 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3600MHz | $90 |

| Power Supply | GX2 600W PSU, 80+ Gold | $60 |

| HBA Card | LSI 9207-8i SAS (flashed to IT mode) | $110 |

And still if you have a silent rack server for around the same price, I would love to hear about it.

Hi,

I have a Dell PowerEdge R710, and I bought a TP-Link 150Mbps High Gain Wireless USB Adapter – TL-WN722N. I have downloaded Ubuntu Server on the server, but somehow I cant seem to find a link on how I can access my Wi-Fi with the TP-Link. Anybody with a good guide or a link on how to do this?

Thank you, and I apologize if this was asked before.

Hello everyone. I recently broke two SSDs in an apparently identical way, and I don’t know why.

I have a Zimaboard to which I connected with the official Y cable two SSDs on the SATA ports. I installed an M2 SSD in the pcie slot where I installed Proxmox, and created a ZFS pool (in mirror) with the two Sata SSDs.

The disk 1 of the pool, which still works, is a Silicon Power A55 SLC of 512GB.

Disk 2 of the pool was a 512GB Verbatim Vi550 S3.

I noticed recently that the Verbatim had become unavailable a couple of months ago. It no longer appeared in the list of available disks, nor in the outputs of the lsblk command. I also tried to connect it to a USB-Sata adapter (which works properly with other disks) and the situation has not changed.

Thinking it had burned, I decided to order a new SSD from another brand. I chose an Intenso. I connected it to Zimaboard and it was immediately recognized, so I added it to the ZFS pool and tried to resilver it to align the data. The operation produced a log in which many write errors were reported. Once the Zimaboard restarted, the new disk was also unavailable and I was unable to use it.

I’d like to ask your opinion on this.

1. Why did the Verbatim and the Intense break, apparently in the same way? Is this a matter of disk incompatibility for use in a ZFS pool? I started to assume that the Y-cable I’m using is defective.

2. Do you think there is a way to make these SSDs usable again? I find it difficult to think that they have finally broken down for a simple resilvering operation.

Thank you for your support.

PS I’m not sure this is the right subreddit for this topic. I apologize if I went off topic.

Regards!

Hello Homelabbers!

I moved house a while back, from my parents to my own (private rent) apartment. My fibre from my ISP comes in at a certain point of the building, and I want to run a network cable to the bedroom. Because it's a private rental, I can't easily run cables between the rooms as I would need to get permission, and the walls are all solid brick anyway

Are power line networking products still as bad as I remember them, or are they good nowadays? Are there any brands that are preferred over others? I have a 1Gbit symmetrical connection to distribute around the place so any product that can handle that or at least a high percentage of it would be good.

I'm still looking at running a cable between rooms as there' a 4 foot void under the floor across the various floor spaces, but it's not that accessible from above (I would have to use an RC car to get cabling in place!)

I am currently running a UDM Dream Machine Pro and was thinking about putting a transparent filtering bridge in front of it using either opnsense or pfsense. My question is.. does that add any value? Is the IPS/IDS they offer any better than the UDM implementation?

Im trying to figure out the best way to set up my server. Im running truenas scale and at the current moment just running a large plex library.

Current setup: pool jim, 6-14tb hdd with 1tb and 250gb ssd for cache

Pool kevin, 5-500gb ssd

Here's my dilemma. I have a headless computer running programs to gather (legally acquired media) automatically using private seeds. One of my requirements is to seed back above .3 but I prefer to hit 1-2 ratio.

My program runs to download to Kevin on a raid 0 then move to Jim who's mirrored. Right now Jim is starting to fill fast because qbittorrent can't hit the ratio set in the program. I want my system to be able to download 60-70 pieces of content at a time and still seed back. Should I get rid of Kevin and move those drives over to cache Jim? How could I set it up in truenas so it doesn't burn out my disks doing that many read/writes at the same time. Honestly kevin isn't the best accountant but he's still a great bar owner

Hi All,
I'm looking for a less power consuming and more quiet replacement for my HP A5500-24G-PoE+ EI switch.

I am willing to downgrade to fewer ports (16) and not all ports have to be PoE+ enabled, 6 PoE+ ports should be enough.

I still need four SFPs, however it is okay for me if this disables four Gigabit Ethernet Ports (same as currently on my switch).

A used HP Enterprise would be great, I am willing to spend 200 € max.

Maybe someone can point me to the right models as I am currently lost.