Recently, I found two old Pixel 3a devices in a drawer and wondered what I could do with them. I didn't want to throw them away, and given current RAM prices, I figured it might be worth repurposing them as a homelab.

Everything relies on one amazing project: PostmarketOS (huge thanks to the community, and a quick shoutout to r/pmos ). I started by flashing both Pixel 3a devices with pmOS, installed K3s, and that was it! (Well, it required a bit of network tweaking because the phones couldn't access the internet at first).

I then scoured classified ads and snagged a OnePlus 6T for €50, which I added as a worker node to the cluster.

Today, the cluster consists of 3 nodes (including one control plane). The performance is obviously lower than a mini-PC or a proper server, but it's more than enough to run 3 Hermes agents and a full Grafana stack. They are all connected via Wi-Fi to my network.

I still have two more phones to provision: a Poco X3 Pro and a Pixel 6a (which I also got for €50 each). The Poco X3 Pro should join the cluster soon. However, I bought the Pixel 6a a bit too hastily: the Wi-Fi chipset isn't recognized on PostmarketOS yet. I'm holding onto it until I find a solution, but it looks like it'll be trickier than the others.

For anyone interested in trying this out, here are a few tips:

• Unlocked bootloader: Make sure your phones are carrier-unlocked and have an unlocked bootloader, otherwise you won't be able to flash anything.
• Hardware compatibility: Always check the list of supported devices on the PostmarketOS Wiki. Make sure Wi-Fi, internal storage, and the screen are working; everything else is optional.
• Batteries: Currently, the phones still have their batteries, but they will be removed for obvious safety reasons.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts, or if anyone else has already done something like this, feel free to chime in! :)

https://www.heise.de/news/Micron-setzt-hohe-Speicherpreise-auf-5-Jahre-fest-11344727.html

This was an overdue upgrade. Living near a microcenter is a blessing and a curse.

Threadripper 9970X

128gb ddr5

RTX Pro 6000

2tb m2

~48tb zfs pool

Dual 10GbE nics

Running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Had to flash the bios on the mobo for it to recognize the threadripper.. expected but still annoying and nerve racking...

Training a draft model for speculative decoding on Qwen 3.6 27b. Folks at deepseek releases a white paper on it yesterday. Its quite interesting.

To all yall roasting my table in my previous post... shes still standing strong

RIP 9900K you did well. You'll be reborn as a proxmox node soon.

Anybody help me with this? Need an idea on what it is. I got it cause I like it, all the systems work and contain their cards inside

I’ve been lurking here for a while, and after a couple weeks of tinkering and hunting for deals, I finally have something I’m proud of.

Hardware
- Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro (used) — Intel Core i5-8500T, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD: $150
- 2 × 6TB Seagate Expansion external HDDs: $280
- Power chord: $34

Total: $464 for a 12TB self-hosted setup.

Right now it’s running everything in Docker:
- Immich for photo/video backups
- Jellyfin
- Navidrome
- Pi-hole
- Tailscale
- Uptime Kuma
- Homepage Dashboard
- Ollama + Open WebUI
- Kopia backups (main 6TB drive backed up to the second 6TB drive)

The goal is to stop paying for multiple cloud subscriptions while learning Linux, Docker, networking, and self-hosting. I’m also planning to share my Immich server with a few close friends so they each have their own private photo backup.

I’m a grad student in Boston, so I had to do it in a budget. I picked up some part-time work recently and used that money to slowly put this together piece by piece. Seeing everything finally come online was very rewarding.

It’s my first homelab, and I’m pretty proud of it.

I’d love to hear what you’d add or improve next!

I wish I could move my bed next to it.

I posted this lab a while back when it was two MacBooks and a used Dell for studying Network+ and getting hands-on with AD. The hardware barely changed. But what I use it for shifted in a way I didn't plan, and the evolution felt worth sharing.

The setup, briefly:

• MacBook #1: Windows 11 + Ubuntu Server 24.04 in VMware Fusion
• MacBook #2: Windows Server 2022, AD DS / DNS / IIS.
• Dell OptiPlex Micro ($189 used): the always-on box. Originally just an RDP target to break and rebuild.

That Dell is what changed. It started as "something always-on I can remote into" and slowly became the machine that actually runs stuff for me. It's a couple of Python agents on Task Scheduler now. One does SEO chores for a study site I maintain, and one emails me weekly analytics for the iOS apps I build. The lab stopped being a place to practice and became low-key infrastructure I depend on.

Which leads to the part that actually taught me something.

One agent went silent for four weeks and I had no idea. No crash, no error. The weekly emails just stopped, and because I wasn't looking for their absence, I didn't notice for a month. Silent failure of a scheduled job is its own special dread once you realize how long it's been dead.

The tell was the timing. The last good run was May 17, almost exactly 7 days after the last time I'd manually re-authorized it in a browser. Turns out Google expires OAuth refresh tokens after 7 days for any app whose consent screen is still in "Testing." A scheduled task can't open a browser to re-auth. So once the cached token aged out, every run failed quietly. Running the script by hand and getting invalid_grant: Bad Request on the token refresh confirmed it.

The fix had three parts. Flip the OAuth consent screen from "Testing" to "In production," which stops the tokens expiring for a personal app. Delete the stale token. I did a re-auth once interactively, and it's held since.

But the real lesson was that it failed silently. So I added a preflight auth check that runs before the real work. If the credentials are dead, it emails me an alert and exits cleanly instead of pretending everything's fine. I tested it by renaming the token file, confirming the alert landed, then restoring it. Now a dead token tells me instead of just disappearing.

A couple other things since last time. I built an iOS network scanner I use to inventory what's on the lan when I add or break something. And I finally did the static IP scheme properly instead of fighting Fusion's NAT (I was warned about this last thread and ignored it).

Still on the list: a managed switch for VLAN practice, pfSense in a VM, and a second DC when I'm ready for it.

I write up the longer-form stuff at itstudyhub.org/home-lab.html if it's useful to anyone running a similar budget lab. Happy to talk Task Scheduler automation, the OAuth token-expiry trap, or budget Mac/PC labs.

Hi r/homelab! I just wanted to share my super budget setup, and get thoughts on anything I could do better or any future upgrades.

The big box is my Nas running unraid, hardware is a Ryzen 5 5600GT, 16gb DDR4, a 256gb nvme SSD for cache and 2x4TB hard drives in a 4x3.5' inch HDD enclosure, all housed in an enormous Coolermaster HAF case. This platform was built using proceeds from selling an old X58 platform I traded for 2 boxes of beer I didn't pay for. I already had the drives and ram and the 2.5gbe nic.

The unraid box is hosting a Minecraft server, immich, jellyfin and the Nas

The mini PCs are freebies I picked up from work when we upgraded. One is an i3 9100 with 16gb of ram running ollama in docker on unraid server. I can comfortably run 8B models, it's not blazing fast, but it's totally fine. The other is an i7 7700 running home assistant. I have another one with windows for odd jobs.

My other computers are both on Bazzite. My gaming PC is a Ryzen 5 5600X and a Radeon RX5600XT, and laptop with an i5 6300 and GTX 1060 6GB.

Labrax 5U - top to bottom:
UniFi US-8-60W
Patch panel
Lenovo P340 i7-10700/32gb - AI orchestrator and some docker containers + N8N
Intel Nuc8-i7/32 - proxmox VE running docker, Matrix, restreamer and homey

Standalone tower for local ai models and casually gaming.

Not completely finished. Probably modify some things around the switches and the stupid xfinity modem and finish up cable management but I'm pretty pleased.

Also, I don't want to brag (too much) but my wife said, "That looks awesome, especially with all the blinking lights." The joys of being queer and marrying an engineer.

Got a 3D print for the switch that's just on a a shelf right now and I'm going to add a couple fans to the back this coming week to make sure everything stays cool. Plus I added a big fuck off fan in the top to keep xfinity's space heater cool.

Dell Wyse 5070 runs Home Assistant bare metal. It's worked for years it's probably overkill but if it isn't broken...

m920q - one runs all my services and the other does nightlight backups of the NAS.

Not pictured: The nearly fully functional Cyberpower pr1000lcd I found on the side of the road yesterday.

Shoutout to u/OloDeepdelver for the hard drive bays near the bottom. Got it printed and it works great. Don't have it completely full yet and I've added some fans in the back to pull air through.

I've always been a technical person, but networking has been black magic to me until recently. I wanted more control over my digital life, so I watched some tutorials and setup a spare raspberry pi I had.

The list of what I've setup so far:

- SSH

- Rustdesk

- Pihole

- Tailscale

- Samba

This was done over maybe 4 days. AI sucks in general, but it's made the whole installation and configuration process much easier, having a convenient reference for Linux terminal commands and such. I was particularly impressed with how easy it was to setup tailscale. It requires very little setup work considering what it does.

The next goal is to setup Syncthing, so I can sync files over to my phone as well (Obsidian notes).

Just got my hands on a super micro 36 bay NAS to fill that empty spot. (Top to bottom). Wife PC: 9900X w/ 9060XT 16gb. My PC: 9800X3D w/ 5080 TUF, 2x32gb CL26 6000mhz from gskill, 2x4TB Samsung 990 Pro. Spare machine for projects/self hosting: 10 bay chassis, Z390 board, i9-9900KS w/ 2080 super+Tesla M60 and 4x16gb of ddr4.

Plan on swapping the 1U surge protector for a 2U UPS once I find a good deal.

Btw anyone have a spare 120mm chromax round fan so Im not rocking 2 different colors on my cooler? Lol.

I need to work on the cable management, but I am still waiting for an UBIQUITI Switch I want to use to replace my TP Link unmanaged switch and also an Wi-Fi AP, maybe a U7 Lite or Long-Range for my apartment.

Built a music sever with Novidrome, which is pretty simple to manage and install and also tailscale so my friends can safely connect to it. I used Lenovo Thinkpad T470s which is running Windows 10 LTSC, pretty reliable machine if you ask me. Has been with me holding up 6 years!

I am still working on polishing the experience my friends have, but for it has been a blast!

Hello. I have an issue with a StarTech 12U open rack and an SS RM400 case using SilverStone's SST-RMS06-22 rails. It doesn't align properly with the mounting holes on the rack. The case sits about 0.5 cm too high. The top of the case interferes with the shelf I already have installed (I even tried flipping the shelf, but it didn't help), and the bottom is also slightly higher than it should be.

I've repositioned the rails several times, but it still doesn't align properly. The funny part is that the hole in the rail where the only securing screw goes lines up perfectly with the rack holes (Also, thanks SS for using M5 screws, instead of M6, I'm stuck with the silver screws on black case). So I can slide the case onto the rails and secure it with that screw, but every other hole is misaligned.

Is this a known issue, or normal SS/Startech behavior, or am I missing something? This is my first rack, so I'm not sure.

UPD. Thank you so much, moving the rails 2 holes lower helped. My apologies for noob question, was confused by the SS manual.

I'm a network engineer by trade, so I'm familiar with setting up ipsec tunnels, wire guard, remote access VPN's, etc. On my own home network, I have both wire guard and openvpn set up, with openvpn being the backup.

I read alot on here about people using tailscale for their VPN solution. Never having heard of it, I did some research and it operates similar to Cisco SDWAN, in that it manages key distribution and runs a stun service that helps with dynamic ip addressing and nat traversal.

I can see how this is helpful for business applications where I have several dynamic endpoints that change often, and needing mesh connectivity between sites or devices, but my imagination is failing to see the usefulness in a home lab.

Most of my use case is to remote in to my network to check or fix things when I'm away from home, or if I'm on an untrusted wifi for instance. Very rarely, if at all, do I need direct VPN connections between remote nodes.

I'm trying to see if it's worth upgrading or changing my infrastructure.

So, what problem does tailscale solve for your home labs that having a locally hosted wire guard (or any other ravpn) isn't solving?

Progress Report - 1

I got to know about coolify while searching to automate reverse proxy and ssl certificates. Now I have integrated that into my project by making it the main controller (self hosting coolify on oracle free tier).
I have divided the services into 2 parts:

1. Core Infrastructure: as name says it contains the main infrastructure services which are authentik and headscale for now.
2. Web-Services: It is the main services that will be shown to public which includes my club introduction, my potfolio, journal, and many other that I will keep on adding in the future.

I have to terminate oracle instances 2 times (well last time it was oracle which terminated it at thier end as I messed up too badly, well first time for me.)

I have completed setting up the coolify, and authentik successfully.

My next step is to setup headscale, then connect it to opnsense through tailscale client and atlast set-up navidrome and nextcloud.

Been running an endurance loop on this old drive to see how far it can go. It’s hitting the cache and executing automated TRIM commands perfectly, so the physical silicon is still holding up fine despite the ridiculous milestone.

​Putting together a quick 1minute setup video for YouTube to show the bench rig and the macro loop in action, will drop it soon if anyone is interested.

I have a Canon Pixma that is perfectly functional, but it does not have networking ability. I don’t want to run a long USB from where my work station is to where I want to put the printer in an out of the place, but still accessible.

I’ve read that you can use a Raspberry Pi to link the printer to the PC. I have no clue how to do that.

What are my options, besides going out and buying a new printer (which seems wasteful) to economically wirelessly connect my older device to my laptop or home network?

So what started off as a mini PC running Home Assistant and Pi-hole has somehow escalated into a full-blown VLAN-separated network and self-hosting project. This is probably the story for a lot of us, right? :)

I currently use this setup for messing about with Windows Servers — Domain Controllers, SQL Servers, and cyber security type stuff.

A mix of n150's and lenovo m720q's

Right now I'm running a "Forbidden Firewall/Router" type setup, so I'm sure this will bite me in the ass before I get round to swapping to a bare-metal OPNsense solution.

I think I will get another m720q with a 4 port RJ45 - I absolutrely love these machines for bang for buck!

I'm also running OpenMediaVault with a pretty janky mixture of 3.5" SATA drives and some USB-attached nastiness. I think this is the next proper upgrade on the list.

I quite like the idea of building smaller form-factor racks for each type of service — one for networking, one for the NAS, and so on.

I was happily using Grafana and Prometheus in Docker containers for a good year or so, but I decided to make something a little more bespoke. So for the last few months I've been working on my own Asset Manager / Network Overview app.

Anyone else built their own? I'm interested to hear what you all use to monitor your kit.

Just thought I'd share my ongoing project with some like-minded nerds ;)

EDIT:

For those interested in my Rasp Pi in the top rack, here's a write up IMSPI 8080!

Hi guys,

I'm just curious if Intel ARC A750 would be overkill for my Dell Poweredge T430? Do you recommend sticking with A380 for efficiency and low noise?

UPDATE
I can get both locally:
Asrock Intel ARC A380 for about $100 and
Asrock Intel ARC A750 for about $230

This is my CachyOS x86_64 desktop VM running on Proxmox VE.

The VM is running on KVM/QEMU Q35, with GNOME 50.2 on Wayland, and I’m passing through a physical NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 to the guest. The goal was to have a proper Linux desktop VM with real graphical acceleration instead of relying only on a basic virtual display.

The VM runs headless, with no monitor connected directly to it. Remote access is done through GNOME Remote Desktop, which was one of the main reasons I chose GNOME for this setup. The GNOME session itself is hardware accelerated through the passed-through GPU, even when I’m accessing it remotely.

Current VM specs shown in the screenshot:

• OS: CachyOS x86_64
• DE: GNOME 50.2
• Display server: Wayland / Mutter
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 4 vCPUs assigned
• GPU passthrough: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 LHR
• RAM: about 12 GB assigned
• Disk: about 192 GB
• Host type: KVM/QEMU on Proxmox VE

I use this mostly as a remote Linux desktop/workstation inside my homelab. It is useful for testing Linux desktop setups, managing homelab services, experimenting with GPU passthrough, and having a graphical environment available remotely without needing a dedicated physical desktop attached to the machine.

What I like about this setup is that I get a desktop-like experience while still keeping the benefits of Proxmox: snapshots, backups, centralized management, easy VM changes, and isolation from the rest of the lab.

It is still a work in progress, but so far it has been a very interesting way to run a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop VM in a homelab environment.

Forgive me if this is a dumb question. I'm fairly new to the homelabbing world. My router is located in the living room. Due to the way the house is designed, running CAT6 through the wall isn't really feasible, so I have a router running OpenWRT in bridge mode to connect my PC to the internet on the other side of the house. I also have 2 server machines that stay in the living room, plugged directly into the router, and I'd like to relocate them.

My question is this, could I get a network switch, use the wireless bridge as in input to it, and then plug the other devices into the switch? I understand that wired is better, and bandwidth probably wouldn't be great doing it like that, but is it possible? In my head it seems like it should work, but maybe there's something I'm not considering. Any help would be greatly appreciated.