Guide Home Lab - Thread

DigitalDude

DigitalDude

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WARNING: Do not proceed further if you are trying to save money.

That said, I'm looking to put together a small home networking setup. Every time I search about a related topic I get lost in a rabbit hole and am completely paralysed with options. So started this thread to learn about having your own homelab esp. in our local context and not go bankrupt.

I've seen veterans here posting on different related topics. So as a beginning, please post your homelab setups (in detail), what hardware you run, what services you self-host/run, where all do you procure parts, do you make money with it or benefit professionally or is it just a hobby, when did you get into this etc
 
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These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.
www.amazon.in

XtremeMiner

ExtremeMachines was established in INDIA in the mid of 2016 , All the products are designed and developed inside the Country, ExtremeMachines is the sister concerns of Fourdot Coolings, Gaming Species, XtremeMiner, Stylones Power Circuits and having lots of experience in building Computer...
www.amazon.in

 
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I bought a used Dell Optiplex 3060 SFF PC with Core i3, 16 GB ram and 512 GB SSD storage. I am running several docker containers on it with Debian 12 as host. It costed my around 14k.

As your 1st foray into self hosting, you can try this.
 
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The best option to get started is to get 8th or 9th gen intel cpu tiny machines from Dell, HP or Lenovo(all refurbished)
These can support 32Gb or 64GB RAM, nvme and Sata SSD, Lenovo also support PCie expansion.

These are the best and you can get 2-3 machines in 30-40k which would be sufficient to start setup with proxmox cluster or Linux VMs
 
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mantheman said:
These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.
www.amazon.in

XtremeMiner

ExtremeMachines was established in INDIA in the mid of 2016 , All the products are designed and developed inside the Country, ExtremeMachines is the sister concerns of Fourdot Coolings, Gaming Species, XtremeMiner, Stylones Power Circuits and having lots of experience in building Computer...
www.amazon.in

Click to expand...
you can pickup old cases from forum or old cases from kbaadi wala , atx & matx would fit in
 
I have a r5 3600 and a x570 board (8 sata ports) with 8gb*4 3200cl16 ram.
Case, I used a second hand corsair 550d obsidian for a while and after I had more than 3 hdds, got the silverstone cs380
I use Unraid because being able to add more drives down the line while having some form of disk fail protection was important to me.
I have it for work and hobby. I save all my client files, drawings and images on the server and use tailscale to access it at sites on the phone or ipad.
i use immich and pi hole as docker.
Mostly used space invader one's guides on youtube.
It all didn't make much sense while researching, but once you jump in, it sort of starts fitting together in your head.
 
Hi

Nice thread.. something that I am interested in as well..

I am using my old laptop i5 8th gen processor as a homeserver plugged in with SSD to boot up and main storage of 16tb HDD via usb external HDD.
My main purpose pi hole, 24x7 seeding and media server.
 
I documented my setup here, in a couple of blog posts:

Hardware details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 1

A walkthrough of my homelab setup, focussed on the hardware components.
blog.shkhr.dev blog.shkhr.dev

Software details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 2

A walkthrough of my homelab setup, focussed on the software components.
blog.shkhr.dev blog.shkhr.dev

I use it for 2 things
1. Self hosting certain services. The list is pretty long, here is a snapshot of my dashboard right now (it does not have all services but most of them).

1738700559901.png


2. As an experimentation ground to learn about new technologies.
 
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