@@iAlbert180 True. My homelab is a cheap mini PC that has a couple of SSDs and 32 gig of ram. It runs Proxmox, and hosts several VMS running various versions of Windows and Linux so I can experiment with things without riskiing breaking a PC I actually need. No 10 gig network. No 200TB RAID array. No CPU with dozens of cores. That said, if any server manufacturer wants to send me a server with a 200TB RAID, 5102G of RAM and multiple Xeons (or Ryzen Epics) with dozens of cores, I'd be happy to use it.. :)
A Thinkpad T440p $100 Replace the optical drive with an optical drive to 2.5” hard drive caddy $10 Slap in 16gb of RAM $20 Install a 1TB M.2 2242 SATA based SSD as well as a heat sink for it $70 And two more 2.5” 1TB SSDs from a reputable manufacturer $100 For $300 you get a server in a tiny footprint, a built in battery backup (with replacement batteries readily available) and a lot of ports for additional attached storage for future use
@@iAlbert180 How can you say that this is realistic build when guys says that most basic homelab needs UPS. When power is out, you kinda dont care about movies and photos at the moment.
@@lVlegabyte This is exactly, what I plan to do. Not with Thinkpads, but rather with couple of fairly recent Fujitsu Lifebooks I scored for next to nothing from a polish auction site, including a dock (AKA a free extra network card). The only thing I need to solve is the storage situation, as the laptop doesn't have any eSATA or PCIe connections.
My homelab server is a Dell Precision T3500 workstation I quite literally found abandoned outside in a parking lot... I took it home, cleaned it up, put some memory and storage in it, and installed Debian and Docker. It's been running for a year already, without issues. So no, a home lab server does not have to be expensive...
I’ve got a 5820, and it’s sick. Less than $200 on eBay for it plus 64GB RAM, and it’s got so many PCIe lanes and slots, and 8 RAM slots. Only 4 3.5” bays though, but if I need more I can do a janky jbod I figure.
T3500s were beastly. A bit of an old platform nowadays but I managed a bunch of them as developer workstations at a software company back in the day. Lots of RAM capacity and expansion with the PCIe slots!
I bought a 14TB WD drive directly after watching your recent vid sponsored by Server Part Deals. It was a MASSIVE saving over a retail drive and it's working perfectly so far. Was about £127 in total. Tip for fellow UK buyers.. Keep the total cost (Inc shipping) under £135 and you will not be charged import duty.
The hard part about setting up a home lab is that you really don't know what you need until you start using it. I like your channel and methods in particular because you demonstrate what is possible with low power and repurposed hardware. I'm still on the Supermicro/Gen4 i3 setup you built on the first video of yours I saw, and it remains the backbone of my home lab.
Homelab budget decoder: MAKE DO: just happy to have something as you have FOMO WILL DO: spent a few bucks, got something that works, not satisfied THAT'LL DO: you spent money, you have capacity BILL'S DUE: overkill on the config and the budget, coolest kid on the Discord.
My first larger purchase was a mini pc to use as a router, as I wanted to have a vpn on it, and have an OS that has a more recent than 2015. I am now running tailscale on the router and sharing the subnet, to have easy/safe access from the outside and not needing to put tailscale on any home LAN devices.
Windows 11 has made me jump back into looking at alternatives [Windows 8 was the first time I dabbled with Ubunt] and having 3-college kids with full phones is pushing me toward a nas accessible somehow online for them away at school instead of giving Apple more money to hold their cat videos. However, I have no idea what I am doing and your channel is a part of me doing my own research. Thank you for putting out your fantastic content.
Homelab: “enterprise” environments without enterprise budgets. I’d love to just build homelab environments for others. Kinda defeats the purpose, but it would be fun.
Not really: It would get that "someone" started by "hitting the ground running," with a working (small) homelab. If you knew what you were doing, it would be built well and correctly. You could tier it up with security, networking (switch/router), etc. It's a good side business for you. Just a thought.
After building up my own homelab setup, one thing that I've come to the conclusion that I differ from the majority on is running services on a NAS. I really like having my services on a separate physical machine from my NAS that's holding my virtual machine/container backups. As such, I feel it's really hard to beat an SFF machine with a couple drives for a NAS and a separate one or 1L PC running Proxmox for all the services.
I get you and go back and forth on this. I initially kept services completely separate from the NAS. ATM I have a couple of lite services running on a 2 bay Synology NAS, and most running on a compute server (repurposed i5 SFF business system with 64GB), and a few running on my backup server (a repurposed low power desktop). Then I have a few other systems I power up for experimentation as needed. There isn't any one "right" answer, there are many valid approaches. About the only one I wouldn't consider is to run enterprise rack mounted servers as they are just too noisy and power hungry.
That’s an arbitrary line in the sand that you’ve drawn. NAS is just another service. The only real reason not to is if the NAS machine doesn’t have enough resources. Otherwise you’re adding unneeded complexity to your setup.
@@hypnotico7051 I disagree. By having all my backups on a separate machine, restoring something after a failure is very easy. When my backups were on drives passed to a VM the process of recovery was more complicated.
The meaning of words can change over time, depending on how people use them. So it is with the word homelab which now pretty much just mean selfhosting services in your own home. That said, to me, a homelab is still something you use to tinker and experiment with. As soon as your wife is depending on jellyfin running, your friends on a minecraft server or your lights not working if home assistant goes down, that is no longer a homelab to me, that's a production environment. So I don't actually consider my setup to be a homelab. I do have a couple cheap PCs that I use as homeservers, to run the services that I depend on in my daily life. It almost looks like what you describe. A cheap desktop for storage, and a mini pc for compute. But I'm not going to argue how other people use the word homelab, it's fine either way.
I think this is a good point. I work from home so my networking is now critical network infrastructure so I've been very conservative on what changes I make.
worth noting that a virtualization environment is a place to tinker and experiment with, since you can easily rebuild/snapshot/backup a VM and restore it to go back
I never thought of my equipment at home as a home lab until recently. When I moved house a couple of years ago I had a general idea what my home office would be: it would be both a place for me to work from home if and when my day job required it and a place for me to simply hang out or chill when I wasn't at work or otherwise engaged. I started setting up and hosting services etc. at home long ago; nearly two decades I think. It started out small. And as all hobbies do, it grew and grew and grew... Until it grew out of proportion and I had to stop and think on what I really needed. That resulted in the consolidation of many of the things I had been running on separate systems and my "donating" a bunch of stuff to the local scrapyard (some of which I now regret ;-)). It was brought down to running everything home lab related on four systems: two machines running a hypervisor, one machine running linux as a NAS/SAN and one machine running Linux for backup purposes. While this greatly reduced the number of dust particles being blown around my home office (I still thought of it as an office, not a home office-slash-hobby-space), it was still quite clunky as a setup. However I lived with it until the right before the move, when I decided it was once again time for a change. This was the moment that I had both the time and budget (within reason of course) for setting up a proper home office / hobby space. I would have one desk for work / gaming and one desk for my hobbies. And all the things that were at that time spread around the room and fell into the categories of 'servers', 'networking' and such, would be in a 19" rack. So that is what I did. The "work" desk and the rack were setup pretty quickly and I would build out the contents of the rack over the course of two years: three proxmox hosts in a cluster, one server with most of the storage and one server running a backup solution, as well as the networking equipment needed to run this. No multigig stuff though, just link aggregation where I need it. And no UPS (yet). My hobby space was a different matter. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do with it, but I was only able to finalize it a couple of months ago. That consists of two computers in the 'retro' category, another small rack to put in a KVM switch and some other stuff and a Linux PC to allow for video capture of those retro systems (and the only way to view the video output of these systems, which spared me a monitor). Just before the move I also picked up another hobby: electronic design, for which the hobby space is ideally suited. Push comes to shove I can simply clear out (most of) the desk and have space to tinker with electronics. The first thing I ran on one of the retro systems and captured a video of? Well, Second Reality of course! I lost track of how much money went into this a while ago (just me; Excel did not ;-)). And it really does not matter. It shows that if you have a goal and you set your mind to it, you can achieve it, even if it takes you over half a decade to get there.
If i had to remake my homelab now, it would be much, and i mean much simpler, one of the shelf nas, one of the shelf firewall solution, and one nuc-like pc for vm's containers and all the stuff. Scrap all those ancient servers that i hoarded, over years scrap those normal sized pc's that make noise and make my electricity bill big serving one thing at a time, scrap my diy firewall that barely works and the speed is atrocious. The big thing is that now, i don't have that much time to tinker with stuff.
I set up a home lab for my mom, who wants it to just work. It has a ReoLink NVR, 5 ReoLink cameras, a SonicWALL firewall, and a cheap TP-Link Wi-Fi router. It just works, and it is straightforward. I have her on my Microsoft 365 family plan, so she has OneDrive to store her files.
@@zandermcnabb7779 The server is the ReoLink NVR. It is an off-the-shelf product, but it works easily and can be checked in on a phone or computer. It is simple to set up. I have set up a Proxmox server for several people, not my mom. No one thinks they need a server until you install Home Assistant. To set up Google Drive like OneDrive, you can download Google Drive desktop software, which will sync or mirror your local files to Google Drive.
My goal for my homelab is to be self-sufficient mostly for privacy reasons. It is good to see this kind of video when, it seems, everyone is having a 3000W server rack in their living room. Thank you for your work.
@WolfgangsChannel recently made a video in which he reacts to his viewers' Homelab setups. None of them had anything like a rack. Many homelabs just where wall-mounted and pretty janky. So I think we all are in good company.
Don't worry, most people don't have a rack. I have an 5yo hp small desktop, and I'm trying to run everything I need on it. I'm about 75% of the way, the system draws 27W (I think I can do better once I replace the old drives I have in it that refuse to spindown) and it's absolutely fun to thinker with. Sure, I'd love to be able to afford a full size rack with 57 machines on it, but this is what I can afford and it's absolutely enough for me.
Thanks so much for making this. My current lab is running on an old server that a company was getting rid of for $30. I couldn't believe it! It's nothing too special but it definitely does everything my small business needs it to :)
I agree with some of the other comments I've seen on this video where your "homelab" isn't really a lab anymore per se as much as it is a self hosted production environment. That is becuse your homelab its not a testing ground but instead a setup that if it encounters downtime would cause you or your family issues. I would consider it more of a home server for doing self hosting than a homelab. Well that's based on my understanding for the term "homelab" anyway. For me what fits that testing ground environment is my ThinkPad T450 and Dell Optiplex Micro PC where I would test hardware & software on since I could wipe or roll them back if necessary while not being my main system.
For me, the importance is on the backbone, the network. This is for 2 reasons. Reliability, and protection. Regardless of what I do, I need to be secure, and reliable. So even if I don't put a lot of effort into the server hardware, making my network sound, and secure, to me, is paramount. Good video.
When using your own router, you don't necessarily need to buy your own access point. I used my own router for decades now, I plug the WAN port of mine into one of the LAN ports for there crappy router. Depending on what you are running and how your ISP allocates IP addresses you might be able to configure port forwarding to get access to your network from outside, or just use a VPN service. So, basically, I'm using the provided router/modem/whatever from my ISP as noting more than a simple modem.
I just realized you live in the OKC area (I live in Yukon). My ultimate homelab would include a 'solar shed' with some decent battery backup to keep our essentials up and running during the inevitable power outages that happen year-round. My immediate projects are bringing voice control out of the cloud to local servers and tweak a custom LLM and voice model for interaction. Great content, man. Let me know if you ever do a meetup.
I’ve been considering a solar shed as well! I’ve wanted to grow the “devils lettuce” since it’s legal where I am, and would love to have a system that interfaces with my homelab to run a automated plant maintainer
@@zandermcnabb7779 Well, you can trade the "strength" of your HW for time. That means, you can wait for the answer. I did some tests, also bought a Tesla K80 for that, but man, that is a pain in our lower parts to get it work. Actually I could not succeed so far. But on my main PC, with an RTX 2070 and an i7 4770k, it is quite fast, but the answer quality is not the best. I use ollama for now.
looking forward to the OpenWRT video... I just bought that exact router and put OpenWRT on it and I'm in the process of testing before switching over to 'production'
This is perfect timing for me! I currently have a fairly robust homelab setup with a rack mount server, switch, patch panel, firewall, etc. but have lately been thinking about what I'd do if I had to start all over knowing shat i know now. I think I'd actually have a much more minimal setup and have a NAS for storage and get 2 or 3 mini PCs to run services on via Proxmox. My next thought was: "I wonder how some of my favorite TH-camrs would do it?" Great content as always!
i used to use dd-wrt in the past but took the plunge into the unifi deep end with a udm pro (which led to a couple u6 lites and a usw 16 poe lite), and now am setting up a second site (family office) with a ucg ultra and its nice when everything in the ecosystem is unifi and all meshes together nicely. ubiquiti is starting to put out good hardware for pretty cheap, not saying the the rackmount poe switches are that cheap, but the plastic body lite switches are good value for money.
My homelab is a custom built PC in a new old stock case from 2005 or so. Erying Polestar G613 board with an engineering sample i9 on it, 64GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, 10gig ASUS NIC, and 4x4TB drives in RAIDZ1. Not ideal drive config but it works. Runs Proxmox and does everything I need it to and more. I would love to experiment with GPU passthrough and stuff with it but I’m using the x16 slot for the network card. Haven’t really found a need to expand it more than that so far!
Currently I've got an elitedesk 800 sff to run 3 18 tb drives with a Truenas bare metal with jellyfin, homeassistant and Immich. A little lenovo m910q with proxmox for tinkering, pihole, arr stuff, a little secondary nas for my family and a few spare pcs without a use (for now) other than the gaming one. Edit: a lot or these things are hardware haven's fault. 😂
I think a home lab fundamentally is a "lab". So it's a test bed for stuff you want to experiment with. What you're talking about is self hosting I think. Homelab is such a good and useful word. It's a bit sad that like many other good words it's semantics change over time.
10" Rack: Use 3030 or 3060 aluminum extrusions to build a sturdy, custom rack. These extrusions are perfect for mounting servers or network equipment because they align well with the rack ears. Combination Rack (10" and 19"): Build the rack to be 19” tall and whatever width you need for your 10” and 19” gear. Extrusions allow for easy mounting of both sizes.
for me, time to start with homelab was when I had multiple computers/laptops with multiple various systems I needed centralized storage, that time it was a LAN-only setup (terribly slow internet), so I started with a 4-bay Synology NAS (918+), it's a flawless device+DSM basically "set and forget", then since new ISP provided about 100x faster internet (seriously), I slowly started looking at better routers (to serve more devices), got WiFi 6 ASUS router (AX86S), set up own VPN too, it's a "set and forget" too, then I realized a potential of proper Proxmox rig for VMs/Docker would be better done separate and found some old SFF PC (4th gen i7, 32GB ram) to use, mainly testing Windows updates and examining OpnSense networking, now I'm experimenting with AI stuff, deciding between used Apple Silicon rig or used nVidia RTX rig, and also whether to use Docker or not - but that would be all just for tinkering...
I started out with Raspberries I had lying around. Now, I'm acquiring these cool Lenovo M715q, I think. With the Ryzen 5. Two of three are existing. Slowly being upgraded. An old Mobo+CPU combo with 64 GB RAM is hosting my NAS with TrueNAS, here I plan to upgrade my networking (specifically to my PC). Currently, I'm hosting a couple of game servers for me and my friends and I'm hosting - of course - Home Assistant, Jellyfin, immich, paperless... You name it. :D Ubiquiti Equipment with their self hosted controller. Next step overall will be a router build. I'm still deciding on what type of router I would want to have since I'm interested in tinkering but I also just have 1 gig... Not like it needs that much power overall. If my main gaming Mobo + CPU are replaced, I will definitely repurpose them, too :D (As you can already read: I'm really on the tinkering side with Homelabs... :D)
Hey bud you KNOW I'm right there with ya on the tornado business.... that one you had the newsclip for had us up at 1AM. And it reminds me I desperately need to run a backup of my homelab LOL😊. Great content as always, Colten!! BTW, Just found out fiber is coming to my neighborhood next year - 1Gbps symmetric - I am STOKED!!
Hi, my current homelab consists of two physical locations connected via site-to-site vpn. In the house I have a cameras, NAS, SIP phones, smart home (home assistant) and mini server with N100 chip - it’s a “prod” env. In my apartment I have a Fujitsu Futro S920 where I play all the time and only if tested all I need I am moving services/devices to the “prod”. I really like the style and spirit of your videos. I’m an old boy and remember the smell of dust on the old hardware - I really like repurposing old devices. Today I have the only one issue in my homelab - I need a powerful enough and power efficient server to host local LLMs which I will need for the HA Voice Assistant (to replace ChatGPT). Videos from your channel don’t cover this problem but they give me an inspiration for my own researches 😎
My homelab consist of my old PC, that I repurposed into a backup PC/server after I built a new PC for gaming. I also have an old AsRockRACK ITX server board that my boss gave to me for free, so I put it in a Fractal R5 I got a good price on, and I'm in the process of turning that into a NAS. Only lack the drives, and since you mentioned serverpartdeals I'm definitely going to take a look there and see if I can't find something that fits my budget.
I've been running a Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF for more than a year now and it's been perfect. Self hosting a couple websites, home assistant, blue iris, radio streaming server, SMB share for file share across the home network, batocera for some retro gaming, amongst some other VMs running docker for testing and tinkering. Cost me less than £100 to get started (second hand from eBay) and it's perfectly upgradable as you mentioned. It's crazy to think that this machine was at some point 'limited' by only running windows when it's now running all sorts of things and it has plenty of resources left.
You can also do a combo and run Pfsense/OPNsense and buy an off-the-shelf router that you then set in AP-mode. The bonus with this is that if your main router ever dies, you can easily set up the "AP" to be be the router while you sort things out.
My homelab is a $20 office surplus hp prodesk 600 g1 (4th gen i7) with a couple of 4tb iron wolf, and an ssd, with an apc ups on a crappy isp router. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I am planning on swapping it to a better case and eventually upgrading the internals, but for now it works for home assistant, small media library, nas, and backup
Excellent presentation. Thank you. I think something that a lot of people overlook is that even if you’re willing to pay for the electricity and watts, the heat the stuff puts out can really make a difference on your HVAC system. I think noise is my second biggest issue. If you could put everything in a basement or attic, fair enough, but otherwise it’s going to room and that can be an issue that you need to consider. That all said, 10g networking is a minimum.
I would probably like something like this: a cluster of 2/3 mini (RYZEN) PC's for VM's (and/or containers) using something like Proxmox or XCP-NG, an extra mini PC with a HDD box attached for backups, one of those small weak fanless mini PC's with a few network ports as firewall Cheap switch and a Ubiquiti access point (with the control software running on a VM/LXC container) and keeping the switching a 1Gbit
Nine Nine! So, replace all of the nicely-thought out NAS, SFF, and PC/servers with a bunch of RPi's and the router with a used Netgear running FreshTomato and that's basically my cut-rate, low-powered homelab. I do use an UPS (a splurge) but I'm probably in $600 total with storage and it just works. Does it works amazingly well? Fast? Expandable? Well, no. But it does meet my current requirements. That said, I used to have a rack loaded with gear and that cost $600 every few months in electricity alone and the spouse was not happy about the electric bill, the noise, or the heat. Happy spouse: Priceless.
Love seeing all these fellow Okies in the comments. I'm a transplant, but I love it all the same. As far as a homelab, I don't think anyone does it for just one reason. I love being able to provide services to my family, but also it's very useful to practice and test things for my work.
This is pretty much what my homelab is about to look like, except I am purpose building the main NAS box myself with new parts for (hopefully) longevity/reliability, and then using a repurposed desktop recycled from my work as my backup, and then everything else is gonna be just stuff I tinker with as I acquire it.
I bought the i5 MS-01 - seems pretty damned good so far. Also bought a 4000 SFF and ordered a single slot cooler for it from N3rdware, because want trumps need. Also in the middle of upgrading a Gen7 Microserver with a 12450H MoDT ITX board, to make a monster 8 bay SFF NAS server.
I also bought the ms-01 i5 in April. A few days ago it just died after a simple shutdown. Won't turn on again. Seems to be a manufacturing fault with a lot, if not all units, that kills it once the CMOS battery dies. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this huge flaw. You should research ms-01 CMOS battery, read the bad Amazon reviews and check your backups. Would love to see a video about this underreported flaw. MS-01 is way overhyped, at least that's what I learned the hard way...
11:27 Yes there is plenty wrong both from a security standpoint (you have no say in the firmware on the box or the services that may be run-- like open wifi on a second radio) and the fact that internal services and bandwidth will be lacking in all likelihood (Let's face it unless you pay extra to lease a higher-end box from them you're going to get model that is just good enough to get you up and running).
These tiny HP EliteDesks are really nice, I have two in Proxmox high availability cluster that run HA and PiHole. And each was like $80 on Ebay. Then just an old desktop tower with another Proxmox on it for tinkering and experiments. The only thing I changed from old PC is MB so it supports 128GB of RAM and added couple SSDs for a ZFS.
My homelab almost looked like this. Then the cost to operate was increasing as well all just for one user, me. Turns out all I really needed was a personal home server. So I just scaled up my one Thinkcentre M70q Tiny and put all I need there. Containers, VMs, and shares. Just focus now on a robust and diligent backup.
10:00 - I would recommend trying for a UPS at an ecycling facility and replacing the batteries. A lot of organizations just depreciate them out, or otherwise don't know nor care that the batteries can simply be replaced and its good to go again.
Seeing as this is a good introductionary video, explaining acronyms and what each program does would be ideal. TrueNAS and UN-RAID, for example. And why you would run them (to manage X, or to access Y). My main obstacle with getting started is knowing what one system could get me, and when getting multiple pieces of hardware would be better.
Great video! Thanks for sharing your though process. I'm actually in the process of renewing most of my homelab. Most of my stuff is currently quite noisy, big and powerhungry. And not that fast. So yeah: I'm gonna renew quite some stuff.
Regarding the mini PCs you mentioned at the end, I got a few on ebay that have a full size PCIE expansion slot on the outside! The model is Acer Veriton N4640G, and I don't know if they *all* come with the slots but when I saw them I just had to get some. Planning on using them for a few projects because that's *crazy* expandeable. There are some caveats like the internal m.2 slot is sata only and not nvme. BUT! they can be modded to support up to 9th Gen Intel CPUs (they ship with 6th Gen) which is just absolutely wild to me
My homelab is mostly running on an old MacBook from like 2017 I wasn't using anymore. Going the Laptop route is pretty nice for the fact that it has a built in battery in case of power loss. Also if the Intel CPU is not super old, it can do pretty efficient media encoding using Intel QuickSync in Jellyfin. Also for backup you can use any sort of cloud storage you might have anyway. I got a Proton subscription and it comes with Cloud storage although I did not want that. Now I am using that with rsync to backup important folders from my homelab (Documents, Pictures, Home Assistant config etc.)
We all know you're squirrelling away your acorns to instead buy a Ford Triton V10 F-750 to use as your daily driver / grocery getter 😂 Great video again 👍. Specifically, I enjoyed listening to you talk about a wide range of usage scenarios mated to a variety of hardware options. Well done. Kindest regards, neighbours and friends. P.S. I thought that this video would be only a shameless money grab with affiliate links. But it wasn't. May you have many great successes.
“This video is a bit darker than I thought it was going to be” I was worried that you might’ve been hit by one of the many hurricanes recently, so I actually found it a lot lighter than I was expecting.
My Homelab Server is a Raspberry Pi Model 4b+ running Raspbian and OpenMediaVault. I have 3 external Disks connected to it each in a SMB configuration. It’s probably not the best solution, but it works fine for what I use it for.
The MS-01 is a great value for what it is. I have the i9-12900K version powering a 120tb jbod via hba in the pcie slot. I was able to pass through the Unraid usb and hba within Proxmox no problem. The one downside is that only one of the m.2 slots is gen4 x 4; the other two are gen3 x 4 and gen3 x2.
So, when I started working from home due to health issues, my homelab got a major upgrade. I'm running Two Dell Precision 3420 SFF running XCP-NG virtualizing, home assistant, Ubuntu as a samba fileserver, xen orchestra, omada sdn, pufferpanel for Minecraft server, Debian 12 for docker and I just added a windows server vm. I've got a knock off rpi running pi hole, and OMV and a couple of real raspberry pi's built up to be pikvms. A fan-less n100 pfsense router, a managed switch and a couple of WIFI APs all managed by the SDN. All of this is sitting in a 9u rack. The rack just makes everything neater and organized plus my cats like it and everything put together runs quieter then my air filter.
The homelab space is an ever moving goal post. The only real hope you can have is that once its set up, you can manage it all with relative ease. I ended up moving a bunch of services to many machines because an unreliable single service would often require rebooting the host and thus taking them all down. I un-consolidated for the reliability. I can say dont make my mistakes with some relative confidence.
My ideal setup is quiet, power-efficient, and resilient, ideally in a small footprint. So something like 3 modern mini PCs and a managed switch is all I would need outside of my main computer. I'd spin up a Kubernetes cluster and some replicated block storage and call it a day.
~ Decent setup for about 110$ and 33$ on 3TB HDD: (btw liked this video) ~ I just bought a pc for homelab, and here's my setup and recomendations, which will fit more people in my oppinion, I would get a dell optiplex, or an elitedesk with an i5-8600 or 8500 instead I found these on really good prices, and most people don't need 12GB*2 HDD setup, more like 2*3-6GB, or a single 3-6GB HDD. I'm just buying this exact setup for myself (8600 optiplex, 256GB ssd, and a one year warrenty because of ebay refurbished, also 3TB of HDD renewed storage that I bought seperately on amazon). I would recommend though to get two or more if you get renewed for using raid also getting an intel gen 8 means you have the option to get windows 11 in the future, which is a nice to have
Thanks for sharing what you are going through . My lab , electronics computer engineering , robotics and automotive machine shop , Beowulf cluster for AI and cad cam , burned down it filled a whole 2 story house .
I simply have 2 computers networked via Windows Workgroups, a SFF Dell Optiplex desktop, running Windows 11 Pro, a Dell Latitude laptop, running 11 Home, both bought refurbished in the past year so one can say, I have a homelab of sorts. Mind you, the laptop is currently networked via WiFi, interruptions not withstanding and I can zip audio files back and forth, what I mostly at this time utilize them for, outside of internet use. Both are 6-7 year old computers, running the basic Core i5 processors, with the desktop having a low profile/low power discreet GPU (Nvidia GT 1030) and I edit on that desktop, with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It'll do, for now. I plan on early next year to upgrade that Dell desktop with a full ATX box, running an i7 processor of either a 13th or 14th gen and 64GB of DDR5. The SFF will be a capture box mostly for analog video, perhaps as a side hustle gig but will be networked as well. Eventually, a NAS for video editing/storage.
I bought a used Dell R720XD as my first home lab computer when I was starting out. It's still running today after a number of modifications. Maybe a bit overkill to start but for about the same price as some of the mini pcs out there it could be worse. There are definitely down sides (the noise, size, and power usage of these things) otherwise it was a no brainer for me. If you don't have a good place to put your home lab where you can't hear it then I wouldn't recommend it.
Just wanted to say thanks for making these videos between you and Raid Owl i recently just started getting into the hobby. I’ve always loved tinkering with computer stuff but never really knew where to go. I recently found someone selling an old i3 6th gen gaming PC for $30 that i turned into my NAS. Dual 6tb mirrored drives on TrueNAS for a simple Jellyfin and Photo backup. Looking at upgrading the cpu to 7th gen for hardware transcoding and will likely pick up something smaller like that 1L elite desk or something to play around with some virtualization and other stuff using Proxmox
I'm currently rebuilding my homelab, similar to what you've done, and I have a question. I'm planning to purchase a Chinese X540-T2 card (like the one you used when upgrading to 10Gb). Could you share some feedback on its stability, temperature, speed, power consumption, and any other relevant details? Also, does it support SR-IOV?
Very to overspend. My Setup is 2x Pi 4, one OMV for Nas and Docker, another Pi4 Home Assistant. 1x Unifi AP AC Pro that secondary port bridge to AP AC LR. 1X Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra and DVR CCTV with 8 Cameras and. I’m running Frigate addon to Home Assistant with addition of Coral TPU. Very simple setup.
Hi, you should look in to bypassing your ATT Modem/router. You can plug in your Fiber connection from ATT modem and plug it straight in to a SFP port. I've completely gotten rid of my ATT modem and plugged in the SFP plug to my OPNsense PC and it runs amazing with lower latency.
It makes me feel a bit old knowing that I've had a 'homelab' now for almost 30 years that has evolved as my needs and technology have changed. I'm quite happy, though, that hardware cost and size has come down a lot over the years. Most of my servers are mini pcs these days using network storage which makes it easier to scale out as needed. A far cry from when I had multiple rack mount servers living in closets and other unused spaces over the years consuming lots of power and creating lots of noise.
Just a wild guess: a 2 Bay NAS with a N100 will be almost ever enough for reliable home usage and power efficiency. I merged 3 older machines into a n100 NAS with dual 2.5G, two m2 and two 20TB drives. The hardcovers still saturate the 2.5G link and well… homeassistant and backup doesn’t need that much power. Also when hdds spin down, power goes down to 11w and with jellyfin transcode to a merely 20w.
Is that CyberPower UPS compatible with Unraid? I have my homelab on an old Optiplex with Unraid and was looking for a compatible UPS which Unraid could integrate with and start the shutdown procedure in case of power outage.
I've been thinking about this. My homelab is hodgepodge, and i plan on redoing some of it. First, I think you need storage as the base. My thoughts have been to go Epyc and some 40gb networking to direct connect other systems to it.
Any chance you have an STL file for that 2.5GB adapter bracket? Recently picked up one of them EliteDesks and was going to try the same upgrade but don't really want it dangling out the back. Cheers!
Depending on what you put pfSense on, you may not need a separate access point. If you put it on a small form factor computer, you can add a wireless card and set that up as the AP.
10:44 you should still be able to use your ISP's router if it's not hard locked. A double NAT shouldn't be a problem in most cases. Only becomes a problem if you are hosting things that can be reached through the public IP.
Where do you find the model for a 3D printer drive? Have a old Optiplex similar to one featured in the video, but don't have enough drive bays. Hope you can share! Thanks!
I'm gonna soft-disagree with the router comment for one key reason: If you expect to do *any* outbound stuff, or are maxing out at no more than a small handful of containers (probably no more than 5-6), there's a good chance the existing router is going to get in your way, and *keep* getting in your way. for plugging in a raspberry pi server for the first few weeks it might be fine, but modern modem/router/ap combos have bucked the trend and keep getting worse instead of better. Often they will start failing to route with only a small collection of connections, and especially in the US, some of the major ISPs have been known to knock out port forwards for "efficient routing" without ever asking or giving the option to opt-out. If you aren't going to do your own router (which is completely fair, networking is complex), at the very least picking up a separate route/AP combo unit (like a Linksys unit or something like that) and using that for the actual routing is something I strongly recommend. If you're using a service that allows you to get your own modem, I also suggest doing so if you can afford it, since that *greatly* reduces any friction you'll get over setting up outbound stuff, and you can better avoid connection limits due to existing modem hardware being too low on ram. Heck, if you have more than 3-4 people using the same network, I recommend it even if you aren't doing homelab stuff due to how easy it is for those combo units to get overwhelmed. As someone who has been doing budget homelab for a while, the biggest frustration I ever ran into that was easily solved was watching my network die nearly daily as the combo unit ran out of ram and crashed. EDIT: wanna clarify that I'm disagreeing with the first part about just using the service provided combo. I just wanted to emphasize that those are reaaaaallly terrible, and you should expect multitudes of problems when using them for anything more than 2-3 people doing "normal stuff".
It's fun to think about what you'd do differently. It seems likely that I'll need to be replacing part of my personal set up soon. I'm going to go with lower powered mini PCs. In fact I have one HP Prodesk that's ready for deployment. Thanks!
The Lenovo P340 Tiny's are great too. You get a full PCIe slot you can find the riser for on EBay for cheap along with the mounting brackets. Little Mini PC with 64GB RAM that can do 10Gig with almost low profile NIC.
My homelab is an older Dell R720. Off Ebay. Being a 2U rack mount it's not loud as it only runs a few modded minecraft servers and jellyfin. I did buy into the Unifi ecosystem. USG Ultra and U7 Pro access point. But those were incremental purchases.
Off topic, I wanna know if a old smartphone could be reprogrammed to be used as a stream deck (not the gaming one, but a pad used for shortcuts for productivity)?
Mine is one of those HP elite minis, with an i7 and 64fb ram. I put a 1tb ssd in it and that runs proxmox with things like Adguard, Jellyfin and some windows servers for testing. I also have a 4 bay qnap nas for storage. My network is all Draytek for the router, 2 WAPs and 2 switches. All works well and very minal.
Hey a homelab is what ever you want it to be. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am the same way always tinkering with all kinds of cool hardware and software. Like right now I have a 24 core server running proxmox. It's pretty cool what you can do now days. Love the videos. Keep them coming. You neighbor to the north. (Kansas) Sean
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It’s actually nice to see a TH-camr with a homelab who doesn’t seem to have five or six figures to spend in one server.
realistic builds are way more fun to watch than the six figure ones
@@iAlbert180 True. My homelab is a cheap mini PC that has a couple of SSDs and 32 gig of ram. It runs Proxmox, and hosts several VMS running various versions of Windows and Linux so I can experiment with things without riskiing breaking a PC I actually need.
No 10 gig network. No 200TB RAID array. No CPU with dozens of cores.
That said, if any server manufacturer wants to send me a server with a 200TB RAID, 5102G of RAM and multiple Xeons (or Ryzen Epics) with dozens of cores, I'd be happy to use it.. :)
A Thinkpad T440p $100
Replace the optical drive with an optical drive to 2.5” hard drive caddy $10
Slap in 16gb of RAM $20
Install a 1TB M.2 2242 SATA based SSD as well as a heat sink for it $70
And two more 2.5” 1TB SSDs from a reputable manufacturer $100
For $300 you get a server in a tiny footprint, a built in battery backup (with replacement batteries readily available) and a lot of ports for additional attached storage for future use
@@iAlbert180 How can you say that this is realistic build when guys says that most basic homelab needs UPS. When power is out, you kinda dont care about movies and photos at the moment.
@@lVlegabyte This is exactly, what I plan to do. Not with Thinkpads, but rather with couple of fairly recent Fujitsu Lifebooks I scored for next to nothing from a polish auction site, including a dock (AKA a free extra network card). The only thing I need to solve is the storage situation, as the laptop doesn't have any eSATA or PCIe connections.
Next episode: Upgrading my rebuilt Homelab
Next episode: Moving my homelab to the cloud
Next episode: Rebuilding my house
Next episode: Build a remote homelab for backup.
Sounds like an infinite loop. Typical homelab.
Here we go again 😂
My homelab is a phone with a cracked screen running ubuntu with an open source firmware
that is probably the best homelab i've heard of
curious, which phone can do that? Thanks.
Sirma homelab 🗿
Can we get a Phone Model and guide/link please?
@@electricjuice5627 any of them if you try hard enough, but my advice would be to check the lineageos supported device list and go from there.
My homelab server is a Dell Precision T3500 workstation I quite literally found abandoned outside in a parking lot... I took it home, cleaned it up, put some memory and storage in it, and installed Debian and Docker. It's been running for a year already, without issues. So no, a home lab server does not have to be expensive...
Meanwhile the dude who left his workstation unattended on a parking lot for 5 minutes:
I’ve got a 5820, and it’s sick. Less than $200 on eBay for it plus 64GB RAM, and it’s got so many PCIe lanes and slots, and 8 RAM slots. Only 4 3.5” bays though, but if I need more I can do a janky jbod I figure.
T3500s were beastly. A bit of an old platform nowadays but I managed a bunch of them as developer workstations at a software company back in the day. Lots of RAM capacity and expansion with the PCIe slots!
I bought a 14TB WD drive directly after watching your recent vid sponsored by Server Part Deals.
It was a MASSIVE saving over a retail drive and it's working perfectly so far. Was about £127 in total.
Tip for fellow UK buyers.. Keep the total cost (Inc shipping) under £135 and you will not be charged import duty.
Comment I was looking for! How long did they take to come? Also how much was the shipping?
@gvasilakis from memory, it was about a week to arrive. I think it shipped from Florida.
The drive was £106, shipping was £21.
@@miker13 Not bad at all, thanks for the info:) - What shipping did you go with?
@@gvasilakis UPS. I think it was the cheapest option.
The hard part about setting up a home lab is that you really don't know what you need until you start using it. I like your channel and methods in particular because you demonstrate what is possible with low power and repurposed hardware. I'm still on the Supermicro/Gen4 i3 setup you built on the first video of yours I saw, and it remains the backbone of my home lab.
Homelab budget decoder:
MAKE DO: just happy to have something as you have FOMO
WILL DO: spent a few bucks, got something that works, not satisfied
THAT'LL DO: you spent money, you have capacity
BILL'S DUE: overkill on the config and the budget, coolest kid on the Discord.
FUSES BLEW: you tried HA'ing everything and now your 8 redundant servers draw 6000 watts at startup.
My first larger purchase was a mini pc to use as a router, as I wanted to have a vpn on it, and have an OS that has a more recent than 2015. I am now running tailscale on the router and sharing the subnet, to have easy/safe access from the outside and not needing to put tailscale on any home LAN devices.
Tailscale is amazing, I run mine on qnap to access my home network
Windows 11 has made me jump back into looking at alternatives [Windows 8 was the first time I dabbled with Ubunt] and having 3-college kids with full phones is pushing me toward a nas accessible somehow online for them away at school instead of giving Apple more money to hold their cat videos. However, I have no idea what I am doing and your channel is a part of me doing my own research. Thank you for putting out your fantastic content.
Homelab: “enterprise” environments without enterprise budgets. I’d love to just build homelab environments for others. Kinda defeats the purpose, but it would be fun.
Not really: It would get that "someone" started by "hitting the ground running," with a working (small) homelab. If you knew what you were doing, it would be built well and correctly. You could tier it up with security, networking (switch/router), etc. It's a good side business for you. Just a thought.
After building up my own homelab setup, one thing that I've come to the conclusion that I differ from the majority on is running services on a NAS. I really like having my services on a separate physical machine from my NAS that's holding my virtual machine/container backups. As such, I feel it's really hard to beat an SFF machine with a couple drives for a NAS and a separate one or 1L PC running Proxmox for all the services.
I get you and go back and forth on this. I initially kept services completely separate from the NAS. ATM I have a couple of lite services running on a 2 bay Synology NAS, and most running on a compute server (repurposed i5 SFF business system with 64GB), and a few running on my backup server (a repurposed low power desktop). Then I have a few other systems I power up for experimentation as needed. There isn't any one "right" answer, there are many valid approaches. About the only one I wouldn't consider is to run enterprise rack mounted servers as they are just too noisy and power hungry.
That’s an arbitrary line in the sand that you’ve drawn. NAS is just another service. The only real reason not to is if the NAS machine doesn’t have enough resources. Otherwise you’re adding unneeded complexity to your setup.
@@hypnotico7051 I disagree. By having all my backups on a separate machine, restoring something after a failure is very easy. When my backups were on drives passed to a VM the process of recovery was more complicated.
The meaning of words can change over time, depending on how people use them. So it is with the word homelab which now pretty much just mean selfhosting services in your own home.
That said, to me, a homelab is still something you use to tinker and experiment with. As soon as your wife is depending on jellyfin running, your friends on a minecraft server or your lights not working if home assistant goes down, that is no longer a homelab to me, that's a production environment.
So I don't actually consider my setup to be a homelab. I do have a couple cheap PCs that I use as homeservers, to run the services that I depend on in my daily life. It almost looks like what you describe. A cheap desktop for storage, and a mini pc for compute.
But I'm not going to argue how other people use the word homelab, it's fine either way.
I think this is a good point. I work from home so my networking is now critical network infrastructure so I've been very conservative on what changes I make.
worth noting that a virtualization environment is a place to tinker and experiment with, since you can easily rebuild/snapshot/backup a VM and restore it to go back
I never thought of my equipment at home as a home lab until recently. When I moved house a couple of years ago I had a general idea what my home office would be: it would be both a place for me to work from home if and when my day job required it and a place for me to simply hang out or chill when I wasn't at work or otherwise engaged.
I started setting up and hosting services etc. at home long ago; nearly two decades I think. It started out small. And as all hobbies do, it grew and grew and grew... Until it grew out of proportion and I had to stop and think on what I really needed. That resulted in the consolidation of many of the things I had been running on separate systems and my "donating" a bunch of stuff to the local scrapyard (some of which I now regret ;-)). It was brought down to running everything home lab related on four systems: two machines running a hypervisor, one machine running linux as a NAS/SAN and one machine running Linux for backup purposes. While this greatly reduced the number of dust particles being blown around my home office (I still thought of it as an office, not a home office-slash-hobby-space), it was still quite clunky as a setup. However I lived with it until the right before the move, when I decided it was once again time for a change.
This was the moment that I had both the time and budget (within reason of course) for setting up a proper home office / hobby space. I would have one desk for work / gaming and one desk for my hobbies. And all the things that were at that time spread around the room and fell into the categories of 'servers', 'networking' and such, would be in a 19" rack. So that is what I did.
The "work" desk and the rack were setup pretty quickly and I would build out the contents of the rack over the course of two years: three proxmox hosts in a cluster, one server with most of the storage and one server running a backup solution, as well as the networking equipment needed to run this. No multigig stuff though, just link aggregation where I need it. And no UPS (yet).
My hobby space was a different matter. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do with it, but I was only able to finalize it a couple of months ago. That consists of two computers in the 'retro' category, another small rack to put in a KVM switch and some other stuff and a Linux PC to allow for video capture of those retro systems (and the only way to view the video output of these systems, which spared me a monitor). Just before the move I also picked up another hobby: electronic design, for which the hobby space is ideally suited. Push comes to shove I can simply clear out (most of) the desk and have space to tinker with electronics.
The first thing I ran on one of the retro systems and captured a video of? Well, Second Reality of course!
I lost track of how much money went into this a while ago (just me; Excel did not ;-)). And it really does not matter. It shows that if you have a goal and you set your mind to it, you can achieve it, even if it takes you over half a decade to get there.
If i had to remake my homelab now, it would be much, and i mean much simpler, one of the shelf nas, one of the shelf firewall solution, and one nuc-like pc for vm's containers and all the stuff. Scrap all those ancient servers that i hoarded, over years scrap those normal sized pc's that make noise and make my electricity bill big serving one thing at a time, scrap my diy firewall that barely works and the speed is atrocious.
The big thing is that now, i don't have that much time to tinker with stuff.
I set up a home lab for my mom, who wants it to just work. It has a ReoLink NVR, 5 ReoLink cameras, a SonicWALL firewall, and a cheap TP-Link Wi-Fi router. It just works, and it is straightforward. I have her on my Microsoft 365 family plan, so she has OneDrive to store her files.
Is it a Linux based server or windows based? Also love the 365 plan but I wish I knew how to implement something like that but with google drive
@@zandermcnabb7779 google docs?
@@zandermcnabb7779 The server is the ReoLink NVR. It is an off-the-shelf product, but it works easily and can be checked in on a phone or computer. It is simple to set up.
I have set up a Proxmox server for several people, not my mom. No one thinks they need a server until you install Home Assistant.
To set up Google Drive like OneDrive, you can download Google Drive desktop software, which will sync or mirror your local files to Google Drive.
My goal for my homelab is to be self-sufficient mostly for privacy reasons.
It is good to see this kind of video when, it seems, everyone is having a 3000W server rack in their living room.
Thank you for your work.
@WolfgangsChannel recently made a video in which he reacts to his viewers' Homelab setups. None of them had anything like a rack. Many homelabs just where wall-mounted and pretty janky. So I think we all are in good company.
Don't worry, most people don't have a rack.
I have an 5yo hp small desktop, and I'm trying to run everything I need on it. I'm about 75% of the way, the system draws 27W (I think I can do better once I replace the old drives I have in it that refuse to spindown) and it's absolutely fun to thinker with.
Sure, I'd love to be able to afford a full size rack with 57 machines on it, but this is what I can afford and it's absolutely enough for me.
@@andreas.grundler I think I'm just spending too much time on reddit... :)
Jeff from Craft Computing is catching strays here
Thanks so much for making this. My current lab is running on an old server that a company was getting rid of for $30. I couldn't believe it! It's nothing too special but it definitely does everything my small business needs it to :)
I agree with some of the other comments I've seen on this video where your "homelab" isn't really a lab anymore per se as much as it is a self hosted production environment.
That is becuse your homelab its not a testing ground but instead a setup that if it encounters downtime would cause you or your family issues. I would consider it more of a home server for doing self hosting than a homelab.
Well that's based on my understanding for the term "homelab" anyway. For me what fits that testing ground environment is my ThinkPad T450 and Dell Optiplex Micro PC where I would test hardware & software on since I could wipe or roll them back if necessary while not being my main system.
For me, the importance is on the backbone, the network. This is for 2 reasons. Reliability, and protection. Regardless of what I do, I need to be secure, and reliable. So even if I don't put a lot of effort into the server hardware, making my network sound, and secure, to me, is paramount. Good video.
When using your own router, you don't necessarily need to buy your own access point. I used my own router for decades now, I plug the WAN port of mine into one of the LAN ports for there crappy router. Depending on what you are running and how your ISP allocates IP addresses you might be able to configure port forwarding to get access to your network from outside, or just use a VPN service. So, basically, I'm using the provided router/modem/whatever from my ISP as noting more than a simple modem.
Colton always the minimalist. Enjoyed your take. Cheers.
I just realized you live in the OKC area (I live in Yukon). My ultimate homelab would include a 'solar shed' with some decent battery backup to keep our essentials up and running during the inevitable power outages that happen year-round. My immediate projects are bringing voice control out of the cloud to local servers and tweak a custom LLM and voice model for interaction. Great content, man. Let me know if you ever do a meetup.
Have you ever done a video on getting the most from your ATT router/modem with passthrough (I'll do a search).
I’ve been considering a solar shed as well! I’ve wanted to grow the “devils lettuce” since it’s legal where I am, and would love to have a system that interfaces with my homelab to run a automated plant maintainer
How’s the whole “Local LLM” idea coming along? I’ve considered it as well, just don’t have strong enough hardware (yet)
@@zandermcnabb7779 Well, you can trade the "strength" of your HW for time. That means, you can wait for the answer.
I did some tests, also bought a Tesla K80 for that, but man, that is a pain in our lower parts to get it work. Actually I could not succeed so far. But on my main PC, with an RTX 2070 and an i7 4770k, it is quite fast, but the answer quality is not the best. I use ollama for now.
El Reno here
looking forward to the OpenWRT video... I just bought that exact router and put OpenWRT on it and I'm in the process of testing before switching over to 'production'
My homelab still consists of a stack of hard drives. We've all been there I guess
Thanks for hardware guide. We love to see your lab setup in beginner friendly environment.
This is perfect timing for me! I currently have a fairly robust homelab setup with a rack mount server, switch, patch panel, firewall, etc. but have lately been thinking about what I'd do if I had to start all over knowing shat i know now. I think I'd actually have a much more minimal setup and have a NAS for storage and get 2 or 3 mini PCs to run services on via Proxmox. My next thought was: "I wonder how some of my favorite TH-camrs would do it?"
Great content as always!
i used to use dd-wrt in the past but took the plunge into the unifi deep end with a udm pro (which led to a couple u6 lites and a usw 16 poe lite), and now am setting up a second site (family office) with a ucg ultra and its nice when everything in the ecosystem is unifi and all meshes together nicely. ubiquiti is starting to put out good hardware for pretty cheap, not saying the the rackmount poe switches are that cheap, but the plastic body lite switches are good value for money.
My homelab is a custom built PC in a new old stock case from 2005 or so. Erying Polestar G613 board with an engineering sample i9 on it, 64GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, 10gig ASUS NIC, and 4x4TB drives in RAIDZ1. Not ideal drive config but it works.
Runs Proxmox and does everything I need it to and more. I would love to experiment with GPU passthrough and stuff with it but I’m using the x16 slot for the network card.
Haven’t really found a need to expand it more than that so far!
Currently I've got an elitedesk 800 sff to run 3 18 tb drives with a Truenas bare metal with jellyfin, homeassistant and Immich. A little lenovo m910q with proxmox for tinkering, pihole, arr stuff, a little secondary nas for my family and a few spare pcs without a use (for now) other than the gaming one.
Edit: a lot or these things are hardware haven's fault. 😂
I think a home lab fundamentally is a "lab". So it's a test bed for stuff you want to experiment with.
What you're talking about is self hosting I think.
Homelab is such a good and useful word. It's a bit sad that like many other good words it's semantics change over time.
10" Rack:
Use 3030 or 3060 aluminum extrusions to build a sturdy, custom rack. These extrusions are perfect for mounting servers or network equipment because they align well with the rack ears.
Combination Rack (10" and 19"):
Build the rack to be 19” tall and whatever width you need for your 10” and 19” gear. Extrusions allow for easy mounting of both sizes.
for me, time to start with homelab was when I had multiple computers/laptops with multiple various systems I needed centralized storage, that time it was a LAN-only setup (terribly slow internet), so I started with a 4-bay Synology NAS (918+), it's a flawless device+DSM basically "set and forget",
then since new ISP provided about 100x faster internet (seriously), I slowly started looking at better routers (to serve more devices), got WiFi 6 ASUS router (AX86S), set up own VPN too, it's a "set and forget" too,
then I realized a potential of proper Proxmox rig for VMs/Docker would be better done separate and found some old SFF PC (4th gen i7, 32GB ram) to use, mainly testing Windows updates and examining OpnSense networking,
now I'm experimenting with AI stuff, deciding between used Apple Silicon rig or used nVidia RTX rig, and also whether to use Docker or not - but that would be all just for tinkering...
I started out with Raspberries I had lying around. Now, I'm acquiring these cool Lenovo M715q, I think. With the Ryzen 5. Two of three are existing. Slowly being upgraded. An old Mobo+CPU combo with 64 GB RAM is hosting my NAS with TrueNAS, here I plan to upgrade my networking (specifically to my PC).
Currently, I'm hosting a couple of game servers for me and my friends and I'm hosting - of course - Home Assistant, Jellyfin, immich, paperless... You name it. :D
Ubiquiti Equipment with their self hosted controller.
Next step overall will be a router build. I'm still deciding on what type of router I would want to have since I'm interested in tinkering but I also just have 1 gig... Not like it needs that much power overall. If my main gaming Mobo + CPU are replaced, I will definitely repurpose them, too :D
(As you can already read: I'm really on the tinkering side with Homelabs... :D)
2:04 lol thats how we lost our first homelab in 2011, we lived in Alabama back then.
Hey bud you KNOW I'm right there with ya on the tornado business.... that one you had the newsclip for had us up at 1AM. And it reminds me I desperately need to run a backup of my homelab LOL😊. Great content as always, Colten!! BTW, Just found out fiber is coming to my neighborhood next year - 1Gbps symmetric - I am STOKED!!
Hi, my current homelab consists of two physical locations connected via site-to-site vpn. In the house I have a cameras, NAS, SIP phones, smart home (home assistant) and mini server with N100 chip - it’s a “prod” env. In my apartment I have a Fujitsu Futro S920 where I play all the time and only if tested all I need I am moving services/devices to the “prod”.
I really like the style and spirit of your videos. I’m an old boy and remember the smell of dust on the old hardware - I really like repurposing old devices.
Today I have the only one issue in my homelab - I need a powerful enough and power efficient server to host local LLMs which I will need for the HA Voice Assistant (to replace ChatGPT).
Videos from your channel don’t cover this problem but they give me an inspiration for my own researches 😎
My homelab consist of my old PC, that I repurposed into a backup PC/server after I built a new PC for gaming. I also have an old AsRockRACK ITX server board that my boss gave to me for free, so I put it in a Fractal R5 I got a good price on, and I'm in the process of turning that into a NAS. Only lack the drives, and since you mentioned serverpartdeals I'm definitely going to take a look there and see if I can't find something that fits my budget.
If you want to shave cost of external KVM, you could try pick up vPro variants of these office PCs.
I've been running a Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF for more than a year now and it's been perfect. Self hosting a couple websites, home assistant, blue iris, radio streaming server, SMB share for file share across the home network, batocera for some retro gaming, amongst some other VMs running docker for testing and tinkering. Cost me less than £100 to get started (second hand from eBay) and it's perfectly upgradable as you mentioned. It's crazy to think that this machine was at some point 'limited' by only running windows when it's now running all sorts of things and it has plenty of resources left.
You can also do a combo and run Pfsense/OPNsense and buy an off-the-shelf router that you then set in AP-mode. The bonus with this is that if your main router ever dies, you can easily set up the "AP" to be be the router while you sort things out.
My homelab is a $20 office surplus hp prodesk 600 g1 (4th gen i7) with a couple of 4tb iron wolf, and an ssd, with an apc ups on a crappy isp router.
It doesn’t have to be fancy. I am planning on swapping it to a better case and eventually upgrading the internals, but for now it works for home assistant, small media library, nas, and backup
Excellent presentation. Thank you. I think something that a lot of people overlook is that even if you’re willing to pay for the electricity and watts, the heat the stuff puts out can really make a difference on your HVAC system. I think noise is my second biggest issue. If you could put everything in a basement or attic, fair enough, but otherwise it’s going to room and that can be an issue that you need to consider. That all said, 10g networking is a minimum.
I would probably like something like this:
a cluster of 2/3 mini (RYZEN) PC's for VM's (and/or containers) using something like Proxmox or XCP-NG, an extra mini PC with a HDD box attached for backups, one of those small weak fanless mini PC's with a few network ports as firewall
Cheap switch and a Ubiquiti access point (with the control software running on a VM/LXC container) and keeping the switching a 1Gbit
Nine Nine! So, replace all of the nicely-thought out NAS, SFF, and PC/servers with a bunch of RPi's and the router with a used Netgear running FreshTomato and that's basically my cut-rate, low-powered homelab. I do use an UPS (a splurge) but I'm probably in $600 total with storage and it just works. Does it works amazingly well? Fast? Expandable? Well, no. But it does meet my current requirements. That said, I used to have a rack loaded with gear and that cost $600 every few months in electricity alone and the spouse was not happy about the electric bill, the noise, or the heat. Happy spouse: Priceless.
My definition of a homelab is a bunch of devices or one that host stuff. Also running 20 Minecraft servers is very relatable
Love seeing all these fellow Okies in the comments. I'm a transplant, but I love it all the same.
As far as a homelab, I don't think anyone does it for just one reason. I love being able to provide services to my family, but also it's very useful to practice and test things for my work.
This is pretty much what my homelab is about to look like, except I am purpose building the main NAS box myself with new parts for (hopefully) longevity/reliability, and then using a repurposed desktop recycled from my work as my backup, and then everything else is gonna be just stuff I tinker with as I acquire it.
I bought the i5 MS-01 - seems pretty damned good so far. Also bought a 4000 SFF and ordered a single slot cooler for it from N3rdware, because want trumps need. Also in the middle of upgrading a Gen7 Microserver with a 12450H MoDT ITX board, to make a monster 8 bay SFF NAS server.
I also bought the ms-01 i5 in April. A few days ago it just died after a simple shutdown. Won't turn on again. Seems to be a manufacturing fault with a lot, if not all units, that kills it once the CMOS battery dies.
Wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this huge flaw. You should research ms-01 CMOS battery, read the bad Amazon reviews and check your backups.
Would love to see a video about this underreported flaw. MS-01 is way overhyped, at least that's what I learned the hard way...
11:27 Yes there is plenty wrong both from a security standpoint (you have no say in the firmware on the box or the services that may be run-- like open wifi on a second radio) and the fact that internal services and bandwidth will be lacking in all likelihood (Let's face it unless you pay extra to lease a higher-end box from them you're going to get model that is just good enough to get you up and running).
These tiny HP EliteDesks are really nice, I have two in Proxmox high availability cluster that run HA and PiHole. And each was like $80 on Ebay. Then just an old desktop tower with another Proxmox on it for tinkering and experiments. The only thing I changed from old PC is MB so it supports 128GB of RAM and added couple SSDs for a ZFS.
My homelab almost looked like this. Then the cost to operate was increasing as well all just for one user, me. Turns out all I really needed was a personal home server. So I just scaled up my one Thinkcentre M70q Tiny and put all I need there. Containers, VMs, and shares. Just focus now on a robust and diligent backup.
10:00 - I would recommend trying for a UPS at an ecycling facility and replacing the batteries. A lot of organizations just depreciate them out, or otherwise don't know nor care that the batteries can simply be replaced and its good to go again.
Seeing as this is a good introductionary video, explaining acronyms and what each program does would be ideal.
TrueNAS and UN-RAID, for example. And why you would run them (to manage X, or to access Y).
My main obstacle with getting started is knowing what one system could get me, and when getting multiple pieces of hardware would be better.
Great video! Thanks for sharing your though process. I'm actually in the process of renewing most of my homelab. Most of my stuff is currently quite noisy, big and powerhungry. And not that fast. So yeah: I'm gonna renew quite some stuff.
This video was a reminder you don't need to transform your house into a data center. Take it slow, tinker and grow with your interests. Thanks HH
Sure, it's ideal as it works for what you need .. you just made my day 😅 Tnx for this awesome content
Greetings from Tripoli, Libya
I would be interested in seeing/learning about how you would make the backup server startup, do its work, and shut down on a schedule.
Regarding the mini PCs you mentioned at the end, I got a few on ebay that have a full size PCIE expansion slot on the outside! The model is Acer Veriton N4640G, and I don't know if they *all* come with the slots but when I saw them I just had to get some. Planning on using them for a few projects because that's *crazy* expandeable. There are some caveats like the internal m.2 slot is sata only and not nvme. BUT! they can be modded to support up to 9th Gen Intel CPUs (they ship with 6th Gen) which is just absolutely wild to me
OpenWRT should be able to mount external storage if a router's storage isn't enough for things like AdGuard.
Man 3D printing your own NAS is frightfully appealing. I had never considered that.
My homelab is mostly running on an old MacBook from like 2017 I wasn't using anymore. Going the Laptop route is pretty nice for the fact that it has a built in battery in case of power loss. Also if the Intel CPU is not super old, it can do pretty efficient media encoding using Intel QuickSync in Jellyfin. Also for backup you can use any sort of cloud storage you might have anyway. I got a Proton subscription and it comes with Cloud storage although I did not want that. Now I am using that with rsync to backup important folders from my homelab (Documents, Pictures, Home Assistant config etc.)
We all know you're squirrelling away your acorns to instead buy a Ford Triton V10 F-750 to use as your daily driver / grocery getter 😂
Great video again 👍. Specifically, I enjoyed listening to you talk about a wide range of usage scenarios mated to a variety of hardware options. Well done.
Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.
P.S. I thought that this video would be only a shameless money grab with affiliate links. But it wasn't. May you have many great successes.
“This video is a bit darker than I thought it was going to be”
I was worried that you might’ve been hit by one of the many hurricanes recently, so I actually found it a lot lighter than I was expecting.
My Homelab Server is a Raspberry Pi Model 4b+ running Raspbian and OpenMediaVault. I have 3 external Disks connected to it each in a SMB configuration.
It’s probably not the best solution, but it works fine for what I use it for.
The MS-01 is a great value for what it is. I have the i9-12900K version powering a 120tb jbod via hba in the pcie slot. I was able to pass through the Unraid usb and hba within Proxmox no problem. The one downside is that only one of the m.2 slots is gen4 x 4; the other two are gen3 x 4 and gen3 x2.
So, when I started working from home due to health issues, my homelab got a major upgrade. I'm running Two Dell Precision 3420 SFF running XCP-NG virtualizing, home assistant, Ubuntu as a samba fileserver, xen orchestra, omada sdn, pufferpanel for Minecraft server, Debian 12 for docker and I just added a windows server vm. I've got a knock off rpi running pi hole, and OMV and a couple of real raspberry pi's built up to be pikvms. A fan-less n100 pfsense router, a managed switch and a couple of WIFI APs all managed by the SDN. All of this is sitting in a 9u rack. The rack just makes everything neater and organized plus my cats like it and everything put together runs quieter then my air filter.
His wife told him to cleanup his tech shit. 😂
This was a good video in that it helps to figure out home lab scale. Thank you!
The homelab space is an ever moving goal post. The only real hope you can have is that once its set up, you can manage it all with relative ease. I ended up moving a bunch of services to many machines because an unreliable single service would often require rebooting the host and thus taking them all down. I un-consolidated for the reliability. I can say dont make my mistakes with some relative confidence.
What is he using a 3:58 to manage his Minecraft server/instance ?
My ideal setup is quiet, power-efficient, and resilient, ideally in a small footprint. So something like 3 modern mini PCs and a managed switch is all I would need outside of my main computer. I'd spin up a Kubernetes cluster and some replicated block storage and call it a day.
I enjoy your videos, helped me out this year and good inspiration. I started over on my homelab.
Can you point to the video (url) with the Optiplex from minute 8:00 ? Thanks!
~ Decent setup for about 110$ and 33$ on 3TB HDD: (btw liked this video) ~
I just bought a pc for homelab, and here's my setup and recomendations, which will fit more people in my oppinion,
I would get a dell optiplex, or an elitedesk with an i5-8600 or 8500 instead I found these on really good prices, and most people don't need 12GB*2 HDD setup, more like 2*3-6GB, or a single 3-6GB HDD. I'm just buying this exact setup for myself (8600 optiplex, 256GB ssd, and a one year warrenty because of ebay refurbished, also 3TB of HDD renewed storage that I bought seperately on amazon).
I would recommend though to get two or more if you get renewed for using raid
also getting an intel gen 8 means you have the option to get windows 11 in the future, which is a nice to have
Thanks for sharing what you are going through .
My lab , electronics computer engineering , robotics and automotive machine shop , Beowulf cluster for AI and cad cam , burned down it filled a whole 2 story house .
I simply have 2 computers networked via Windows Workgroups, a SFF Dell Optiplex desktop, running Windows 11 Pro, a Dell Latitude laptop, running 11 Home, both bought refurbished in the past year so one can say, I have a homelab of sorts. Mind you, the laptop is currently networked via WiFi, interruptions not withstanding and I can zip audio files back and forth, what I mostly at this time utilize them for, outside of internet use.
Both are 6-7 year old computers, running the basic Core i5 processors, with the desktop having a low profile/low power discreet GPU (Nvidia GT 1030) and I edit on that desktop, with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It'll do, for now. I plan on early next year to upgrade that Dell desktop with a full ATX box, running an i7 processor of either a 13th or 14th gen and 64GB of DDR5. The SFF will be a capture box mostly for analog video, perhaps as a side hustle gig but will be networked as well.
Eventually, a NAS for video editing/storage.
I bought a used Dell R720XD as my first home lab computer when I was starting out. It's still running today after a number of modifications. Maybe a bit overkill to start but for about the same price as some of the mini pcs out there it could be worse. There are definitely down sides (the noise, size, and power usage of these things) otherwise it was a no brainer for me. If you don't have a good place to put your home lab where you can't hear it then I wouldn't recommend it.
Just wanted to say thanks for making these videos between you and Raid Owl i recently just started getting into the hobby. I’ve always loved tinkering with computer stuff but never really knew where to go.
I recently found someone selling an old i3 6th gen gaming PC for $30 that i turned into my NAS. Dual 6tb mirrored drives on TrueNAS for a simple Jellyfin and Photo backup.
Looking at upgrading the cpu to 7th gen for hardware transcoding and will likely pick up something smaller like that 1L elite desk or something to play around with some virtualization and other stuff using Proxmox
I'm currently rebuilding my homelab, similar to what you've done, and I have a question. I'm planning to purchase a Chinese X540-T2 card (like the one you used when upgrading to 10Gb). Could you share some feedback on its stability, temperature, speed, power consumption, and any other relevant details? Also, does it support SR-IOV?
Oh man! Looking forward to seeing your soho router "jailbreak"!
You are scratching an itch I've had for thay for a while now.
Very to overspend. My Setup is 2x Pi 4, one OMV for Nas and Docker, another Pi4 Home Assistant. 1x Unifi AP AC Pro that secondary port bridge to AP AC LR. 1X Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra and DVR CCTV with 8 Cameras and. I’m running Frigate addon to Home Assistant with addition of Coral TPU. Very simple setup.
Hey Hardware Haven, could you direct me to where i can get a pc case that fits many HDD, like the one you have at 5:56 timeline of your video
Thanks
Hi, you should look in to bypassing your ATT Modem/router. You can plug in your Fiber connection from ATT modem and plug it straight in to a SFP port. I've completely gotten rid of my ATT modem and plugged in the SFP plug to my OPNsense PC and it runs amazing with lower latency.
It makes me feel a bit old knowing that I've had a 'homelab' now for almost 30 years that has evolved as my needs and technology have changed. I'm quite happy, though, that hardware cost and size has come down a lot over the years. Most of my servers are mini pcs these days using network storage which makes it easier to scale out as needed. A far cry from when I had multiple rack mount servers living in closets and other unused spaces over the years consuming lots of power and creating lots of noise.
Just a wild guess: a 2 Bay NAS with a N100 will be almost ever enough for reliable home usage and power efficiency. I merged 3 older machines into a n100 NAS with dual 2.5G, two m2 and two 20TB drives. The hardcovers still saturate the 2.5G link and well… homeassistant and backup doesn’t need that much power. Also when hdds spin down, power goes down to 11w and with jellyfin transcode to a merely 20w.
Is that CyberPower UPS compatible with Unraid? I have my homelab on an old Optiplex with Unraid and was looking for a compatible UPS which Unraid could integrate with and start the shutdown procedure in case of power outage.
Somehow you touched on every options I was consdiering for my homelab lol
I've been thinking about this. My homelab is hodgepodge, and i plan on redoing some of it. First, I think you need storage as the base. My thoughts have been to go Epyc and some 40gb networking to direct connect other systems to it.
Any chance you have an STL file for that 2.5GB adapter bracket? Recently picked up one of them EliteDesks and was going to try the same upgrade but don't really want it dangling out the back. Cheers!
Depending on what you put pfSense on, you may not need a separate access point. If you put it on a small form factor computer, you can add a wireless card and set that up as the AP.
You probably still need one, the WLAN compatibility of pfSense/OPNSense is awful
And the rest of the BSD systems are in the same awful state
10:44 you should still be able to use your ISP's router if it's not hard locked. A double NAT shouldn't be a problem in most cases. Only becomes a problem if you are hosting things that can be reached through the public IP.
Where do you find the model for a 3D printer drive? Have a old Optiplex similar to one featured in the video, but don't have enough drive bays. Hope you can share! Thanks!
I'm gonna soft-disagree with the router comment for one key reason: If you expect to do *any* outbound stuff, or are maxing out at no more than a small handful of containers (probably no more than 5-6), there's a good chance the existing router is going to get in your way, and *keep* getting in your way. for plugging in a raspberry pi server for the first few weeks it might be fine, but modern modem/router/ap combos have bucked the trend and keep getting worse instead of better. Often they will start failing to route with only a small collection of connections, and especially in the US, some of the major ISPs have been known to knock out port forwards for "efficient routing" without ever asking or giving the option to opt-out.
If you aren't going to do your own router (which is completely fair, networking is complex), at the very least picking up a separate route/AP combo unit (like a Linksys unit or something like that) and using that for the actual routing is something I strongly recommend. If you're using a service that allows you to get your own modem, I also suggest doing so if you can afford it, since that *greatly* reduces any friction you'll get over setting up outbound stuff, and you can better avoid connection limits due to existing modem hardware being too low on ram. Heck, if you have more than 3-4 people using the same network, I recommend it even if you aren't doing homelab stuff due to how easy it is for those combo units to get overwhelmed.
As someone who has been doing budget homelab for a while, the biggest frustration I ever ran into that was easily solved was watching my network die nearly daily as the combo unit ran out of ram and crashed.
EDIT: wanna clarify that I'm disagreeing with the first part about just using the service provided combo. I just wanted to emphasize that those are reaaaaallly terrible, and you should expect multitudes of problems when using them for anything more than 2-3 people doing "normal stuff".
i watched you from the beggining of your channel. love your content ❤
It's fun to think about what you'd do differently. It seems likely that I'll need to be replacing part of my personal set up soon. I'm going to go with lower powered mini PCs. In fact I have one HP Prodesk that's ready for deployment. Thanks!
The Lenovo P340 Tiny's are great too. You get a full PCIe slot you can find the riser for on EBay for cheap along with the mounting brackets. Little Mini PC with 64GB RAM that can do 10Gig with almost low profile NIC.
My homelab is an older Dell R720. Off Ebay. Being a 2U rack mount it's not loud as it only runs a few modded minecraft servers and jellyfin.
I did buy into the Unifi ecosystem. USG Ultra and U7 Pro access point. But those were incremental purchases.
Off topic, I wanna know if a old smartphone could be reprogrammed to be used as a stream deck (not the gaming one, but a pad used for shortcuts for productivity)?
Mine is one of those HP elite minis, with an i7 and 64fb ram. I put a 1tb ssd in it and that runs proxmox with things like Adguard, Jellyfin and some windows servers for testing. I also have a 4 bay qnap nas for storage. My network is all Draytek for the router, 2 WAPs and 2 switches. All works well and very minal.
Hey a homelab is what ever you want it to be. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am the same way always tinkering with all kinds of cool hardware and software. Like right now I have a 24 core server running proxmox. It's pretty cool what you can do now days. Love the videos. Keep them coming. You neighbor to the north. (Kansas) Sean