Guide Home Lab - Thread

[DigitalDude]

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

 

[mantheman]

These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.

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

 

[papul]

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.

 

[rajneeshrana]

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

 

[burntwingzZz]

These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.

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

you can pickup old cases from forum or old cases from kbaadi wala , atx & matx would fit in

 

[karanwk]

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.

 

[Ankit Manchanda]

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.

 

[bluefog68]

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

Software details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 2

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

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).

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

 

[papul]

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

Software details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 2

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

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).

View attachment 223139

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

Ohh wow! You have a proper homelab set up. Why don't you get a static IP? Then you can port forward certain ports and access them directly.

I have static IP and run a mail server which I use to sign up to newsletters.

 

[DigitalDude]

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

Software details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 2

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

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).

View attachment 223139

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

wow that is a neat setup and pretty good documentation. I read it and understood a lot of things

What do you think about using ECC RAM on old supported asrock AM4 mobo and ryzen 5600? is ECC RAM that beneficial if it's just personal data (mostly old files/photos that are not frequently accessed) and some VMs

These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.

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

I have a more than a decade old (my then desktop pc case) Lian Li PC-9F aluminium case lying around. I will be using that.

Those cases look badass though ngl.

 

[mantheman]

Here is my homepage dashboard and some services that I run. I am moving house so I guess I'll update the full setup when I am done.
Lost of my stuff were bought from this forum

 

[thetechguy]

These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.

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

This is fantastic, looks much practical than other commercial cases. Thanks for sharing.

 

[bluefog68]

Why don't you get a static IP?

I deliberately avoid exposing these services to the wider internet, as I don't want to deal with the complexities of securing this setup for public access.
I use Tailscale to create a VPN for these services along with all my personal devices so I can access them from everywhere without needing a static IP setup.

wow that is a neat setup and pretty good documentation. I read it and understood a lot of things

Thanks! This has come from a long process of collecting information from various sources (YouTube, Reddit, TrueNAS/Unraid forums etc).

What do you think about using ECC RAM on old supported asrock AM4 mobo and ryzen 5600? is ECC RAM that beneficial if it's just personal data (mostly old files/photos that are not frequently accessed) and some VMs

ECC is always good to have if you can get it, if you value data integrity highly. If you have separate backups for this data elsewhere, you can do without it as the chance of corruption is pretty small.

 

[jdp861]

Excellent thread.

Yesterday, I thought of converting my desktop machine to run Proxmox and virualize my windows and linux machines.

The question is, I want to store data on 1 SSD, fomatted as exfat. So that I can remove it anytime I want and use it with different machine anytime.
Is there anyway to achieve this in proxmox?

I want to do this beacuse i don't want to play with my data right now. Once I get more familiar with proxmox, I will see what can be done.

Also, what is the preferred way to install proxmox these days? If I remember correctly, earlier used to be installed on a USB.

Currently, I am running:
Pihole on a Pi zero W.( running continously since 2019)

Intel J4025, 16Gb, 1TB SSD running:
Docker containers: Adguard, Immich, Transmission, Portainer, Calibre, Trilium, Jiotv, Vaultwarden, Samba, Traefik(reverse proxy)

Zero-Tier to access these services from anywhere.
All apps are accessible using: app_name.domain.com

If I convert my machine to Proxmox then I also plan to start documenting my setup on youtube and a website too as I can easily create Test machines.

@bluefog68 You just inspired me to create a dashboard, was just too lazy to do it.

 

[akaash]

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

Software details

State of my Homelab: 2024H1, Part 2

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

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).

View attachment 223139

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

Haha nice! Brings back memories of my Xeon Unraid server. Was runing a lot of the same stuff.. radarr, sonarr, jellyfin, deluge.

 

[papul]

I deliberately avoid exposing these services to the wider internet, as I don't want to deal with the complexities of securing this setup for public access.
I use Tailscale to create a VPN for these services along with all my personal devices so I can access them from everywhere without needing a static IP setup.

Unless you port forward on your router, your server(s) will be behind the NAT and thus not exposed to the public internet unless you specifically want to expose them.

 

[akaash]

Unless you port forward on your router, your server(s) will be behind the NAT and thus not exposed to the public internet unless you specifically want to expose them.

I'll second this. I had a few things manually exposed through router (Tomato / DDWRT is handy for this stuff), and everything else happily behind the NAT.. no issues for multiple years of running it 24x7

 

[bluefog68]

Unless you port forward on your router, your server(s) will be behind the NAT and thus not exposed to the public internet unless you specifically want to expose them

Yes, agreed. What I meant above is that I have no special use case of a static IP with my setup, as with Tailscale I can connect to my servers from anywhere.

Additionally I run one ingress on port :443, which handles all services in hosted here, routed via different subdomains. So its pretty much exposing all or nothing in that case, unless I start doing some extra filtering based on origin subnet etc, which is the complexity I want to avoid (along with things like setting up portforward etc). Some of these services don't even have auth (!), or can have CVEs that I don't patch very religiously so keeping everything non-accessible makes most sense to me.

no issues for multiple years of running it 24x7

Yeah, I have done a similar setup in the past for some game servers I ran in this setup temporarily. But for most things I just keep it simple by keeping it within my VPN.

 

[KAKAN]

These guys are offering budget homelab cases, they can modify it as per request too.

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

Ordered their 4U and 1U cases, as well as 24U floor rack
1U was in good condition, 4U was a bit dented and bent on one end and 24U arrived perfectly fine as well.

Oh, I also ordered their tray thingy and the PDU, both of them work fine too. No problems there.

For my next build, I'm considering downsizing to a 10inch rack. Kinda cute and would be very cool if I also get access to a 3D Printer. A truly "mini" home lab haha

DeskPi RackMate T0 Rackmount, 10 Inch 4U Server Cabinet for Network, S

Descriptions: 10-inch 4U rack External dimensions: 280mm*200mm*274mm Internal dimensions: 222mm*200mm*241mm The maximum installation depth of this 10-inch rack is 20cm Easy to install: 4U rack is shipped assembled, saving you the trouble of installation Aluminum pole structure: The rack adopts a...

deskpi.com

Mini Rack - 10" Rack Stand 3U + 6U - 10 inch - Rack Magic

10" mini rack stand These low cost rack stands are a professional and attractive solution where only a small number of light weight 10 inch devices are in use. 10 inch mini rack stand These low cost rack stands are a professional and attractive solution where only a small number of light weight...

www.rack-magic.com

Haven't looked at how it'll be shipped to India, or if it's available in Robu or other electronics store yet. Hopefully it is

 

[ibose]

Haven't looked at how it'll be shipped to India, or if it's available in Robu or other electronics store yet. Hopefully it is

Here, feast your eyes and lighten your pocket -

Project Mini Rack - compact and portable homelabs | Jeff Geerling

www.jeffgeerling.com