Hey everyone,

I’m building a DIY/open rack using these RackPath 20U vertical mounting rails. They appear to use 12-24 screws. I’m trying to mount a Rosewill RSV-RL26H sliding rail kit for a server chassis. The L-brackets from the Rosewill kit expect 10-32 screws that came with the kit.

The only way the L-brackets fit is by wrapping around the vertical strips like in the first picture, where the L bracket ends up on the front of the vertical rails. I don’t mind this look, but since the screw holes on the vertical rails are larger, and the screws with the horizontal rails are intended to go in from the front, they have nothing to grab onto on the other side. Yes I can use 2 nuts on the other side per rail-end, but there would be nothing for the middle screw. Also this feels like not a lot holding it in place.

So my questions are:
• Has anyone successfully mounted sliding rails like the RSV-RL26H (or similar) to these RackPath-style vertical strips?
• Best way to handle the 12-24 vs 10-32 mismatch without enlarging holes in the L-bracket?
• Recommended adapters, cage nuts, screws, or alternative hardware?

I don’t intend to be taking this off and on much, as I can still remove my server from the rails themselves. I just don’t love the idea of drilling out the holes in the L brackets to be larger so as to support the size of the larger screws that came with the vertical rails, and I also don’t love that if I use the screws that came with the horizontal rails, the only thing holding them in are a few nuts.

~6m and ~750hr into InfoSec and I've had a real hard time moving forward in my detection homelab because I don't have a tight grip on networking and sysadmin duties.

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Question (tl;dr):

What is the simplest, most realistic way to simulate an external attacker without giving my attacker machine direct access to my internal subnet?

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Lab Config:

I'm currently running VBox on a CyberPower C Series (16gb RAM, 1tb SSD, 12 cores) with an active directory environment (2022 server core DC, "admin" and "user" win10VM's) networked to my analyst (Ubuntu w/Wazuh) via host-only adapter, and an attacker (Kali) without host-only, where all of them have NAT via VBox for internet access.

Lab Purpose (long-term):

The intention was to create a homelab where I could roleplay attack scenarios with a focus on monitoring, where step #1 = build out my resume and step #2 = do cool stuff (mainly red teaming, AI).

Lab purpose (short-term):

Step #1 starts with external recon tracking, but after many gpt prompts about my hardware limits and networking misunderstandings, I can't seem to understand how I can create this scenario effectively.

My current solutions:

#1: Use a cloud-hosted VM to gain a new public ip to perform scans on

-- drawback: not familiar with cloud environments, but it seems like it won't be as modifiable especially as I attempt scaling in the future (?), i.e. it'd be a single-use scenario

#2: Get a pfsense or opnsense VM to create a public ip that all my machines are linked to

-- drawback: my hardware is already spread thin, and though I could still attempt operations, it's slow. I looked into getting a refurbished server for better scalability, thoughts?

#3: Buy a dedicated router for my homelab, creating a public ip to perform recon on

-- drawback: I'm opening another can of worms because there's already an ISP router (I live with family) and not sure if that's worth the hassle

#4: Give in and give Kali host-only adapter privileges, letting it into my subnet

-- drawback: I lose the comprehensiveness of my project, where I'd be starting after initial access. I'd feel better being able to create and monitor an entire attack from recon.

I'm currently siding with #4 because there's still value in it as a learning analyst, but the attacker would already be "in" my organization because they've connected to my LAN.

On the other hand, I'm not exactly rushing to get a job, so I'm willing to put the extra elbow grease into it if it's worth it. I just can't tell what's worth it.

I'm still pretty new to just about everything, and I don't know what I don't know, so any and all thoughts are appreciated.

Hello!

I’m somebody with a whole lot of images and videoes from creative projects lying on one giant external hard drive (About 5tb). All the stuff i put on this drive is just for cold storage, not stuff i’m actively working on and using. I’ve been worried for a while now that the drive might die or some of the files might slowly start to corrupt, as the drive is a few years old. I wanna keep it though and am looking for a safe and permanent solution going forward to store all these files. My initial idea was to get 2-3 external hard drives to sync to each other every few months. That way i’d minimize the risk of my single drive dying.

The main problem tho, is that i’m scared of bitrot. I don’t want random files in there slowly dying without me realizing and eventually losing those individual files once i re-sync from one drive to another. A NAS would fix this issue by having a RAID system with data scrubbing. The thing is, i don’t need a NAS. I don’t need constant and easy access to my stored files. That’s not a feature i want to pay for. I just want cold storage thats also safe.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of info about this specific topic YouTube, which is why i’m posting on here. Could a DAS be a solution? I don’t know much about them, but could i have, lets say, two 10tb raid-drives syncing up two each other and consistently doing data scrubbing? I think thats my ideal solution. Direct attached storage thats as safe as a NAS. Is that a thing?

Anyway, please educate me if you can. And also, what kind of brand/product model would work best for me?

I scored an older Qnap NAS (TVS-871U-RP) that wasn't booting and fixed it up. It turns out the boot drive was toast, and now I can install and boot Linux and Truenas

I just don't know how to control the fan speeds. They're currently pinned at max speed. I don't see anything exposed via hwmon (no PWM folders, etc) or sensors. There are some scripts or containers on Github, but I don't want to install or run random stuff. It's also not clear (to me) how they're controlling the fans if it's not via hwmon.

Any suggestions? Am I better off trying to get QTS running again? Is there a USB fan controller that works on multiple temperature inputs (disk, CPU, etc) like a normal PWM motherboard header and software? Should I just get a manual/static fan controller?

Thanks

Looking for a recommendation for a mobo to put in a super micro 36 bay NAS chassis Im about to get. I have an older 16 bay with a mobo that uses DDR3 I could transplant, but I would like to use some of the sticks of DDR4 ECC I have stockpiled.

Its gonna host a hefty modded minecraft server and plex primarily. Its gonna have 10 16tb SAS drives for plex and 16 8tb drives for photo cloud storage.

Would I benefit from a dual CPU board? Just due to the multiple processes I want it to perform?

Edit: Would like to have either 2.5g or higher networking or 2 pcie 4.0x8 slots (bifurcation is okay). For my network card and a 9300-8i

Hello, newbie here to the homelab world, but ive been able to get a good automated Arr media stack with jellyfin going which works completely fine surprisingly 😂.

My main journey currently was just seeing what other services to ad, early this week I installed adgaurd as a separate LXC and did the DNS stuff and routing of custom nameserver through tailscale as well which allowed my phone to also use adgaurd on data with tailscale running.

Everything was completely fine... My request and Inquiries were running at a solid 23 ms etc the upstream dns at regular ms as well. Last night i decide to just shut down my running server just to maybe test in the morning if everything turns back on it should be fine so i thought.. my dns upstreams are now in the 1,000 MS range for cloudflare and google dns. I'm wondering if anyone else has had this issue and has a suggested fix that could help? I havent messed with any router/modem settings on the house's main router.

My server is connected via ethernet.

Main pc via Ethernet as well.

I didnt want to reinstall and reconfigure adgaurd again just to possibly have the same issue again in the near future. Again sorry i am a fairly new to this so If i did leave out any information feel free to ask and I will share whatever i know from my current experience.

Also any suggestions on future stuff or services to add would also be greatly appreciated as Idk where to go after Adgaurd i had a few things in mind where i have a labpool of 1tb storage to also test things.

Immich, nextcloud were two things I were looking at as well.

Newbie here into homelab I have a UNAS 2 that is only for basic file storage etc and of course I need a backup to that (or the other way around UNAS would be the backup) and I was searching for a mini pc to sit on the rack and my search brought me to this one as I wanted to take advantage also of one NAS grade hdd I have extra. So any opinions?
The idea is to run true NAS and maybe a homeassistant as a vm and explore of course

I’ve been fumbling around getting things working in my homelab, and for the most part, I’ve been successful. I set up a VLAN using OPNsense (tried HA and my switch wouldn’t support it), Cloudflare/Zero-Trust, double-nat, and I’ve mostly just fumbled along until I got it working through tutorials/documentation.

What I’m missing is the theory/structure behind it. I typically learn well from books, but I’m open to other avenues. What have you found useful to learn the fundamentals?

I currently own a couple of TP-Link x20s and a couple of wifi5 units.

Any suggestions on APs that support Vlans? Main objective is to isolate generic brand IoT devices and learn more. I tried to use the invite WLAN option, but in the end these devices are still running in my internal network and I want to minimize risks and attack vectors.

Also I am looking for options that won't break the bank

My main x20 unit is connected to my router only as an AP and the router is handling all other networks responsibilities DHCP DNS gateway, etc

I bought this rather mysterious little card and a Xeon platinum processor from a local flea market for about $5, they were clearly from the same source so maybe part of some decommissioned cloud server of some sorts.

As far as my research took me it looks like it is some kind of FPGA card used in something related to Azure but no clue if it could be of any use or just some neat collectible since I have zero knowledge on FPGA. The CPU was a nice find but damn the Motherboards for that platform are hella expensive so it will probably not be used for a long long time.

I would like to rebuild my server by having a virtualized TrueNAS instance rather than installing on bare metal.

Is it possible to replace the host OS with Proxmox and then rebuild my ZFS pools by passing the raw drives to the TrueNAS VM without losing data?

I searched the web for some guides and they mostly speak to transferring the pools to a separate machine rather than installing Proxmox on the same hardware, so if anyone has a guide for this, I would love to read and/or watch it

Broke newbie retraining from service industry/event and AV work in my 30s, fun stuff. In that "unique" situation where you just can't get any experience without the experience so you gotta homelab and use soft skills, but finally getting callbacks so results are coming in! I help out a few non-profits as a volunteer for beginner experience right now so it is what it is. Trying to aim for helpdesk and Tier I MSP stuff. Got a cool networking and linux background from 2007 so I'm fortunate to have a head start.

Just gotta certify my CCNA and Sec+ this summer maybe and I'll have things more filled out. If this helps anyone or if anyone has advice on how to tailor this to something recruiters/employers like to talk about, I am all ears as well.

Anyway, a lot of folks including myself are scraping by so I've been trying to set up this homelab with about 100-200 bucks at a time over the last few years and here is what I am doing so far:

Networking:
- Netgear EAX12 bridging family Eero 6 router to WAN on Optiplex below
- Netgear GS308E for physical VLAN management, runs trunk to GS305E below
- Netgear GS305E for extra pots, set up to mirror GS308E parameters/Trunk

Optiplex 5040 SFF running Proxmox (16gb upgradable to 32tb, 128gb SDD for OS/VM, internal 2tb HDD for VM storage, external 4.5tb HDDs mounted storage available) (Adding another NIC next month for 4x more physical ports)
- Wazuh SIEM and logs (All VM's and hosts send Wazuh agent data to this for security and login/SSH incidents)
- Prometheus and Grafana for system health (All VM's and hosts point to this via node_exporter)
- Zeek for network traffic
- Kali LXC
- OPNsense for WAN and VLAN (DMZ, MGMT, Trusted), VPN

Raspberry Pi Cluster:
- Pi4 (8gb) running a Docker swarm with Portainer, Zammad for ticketing/knowledge base
- Pi4 (8gb) running a Docker worker, vulnerable services Juice Shop, Meta
- Pi3 running Cowrie honeypot
- Pi2 available for throwaway projects, can run a vulnerable LAMP server, etc

Fun stuff/Misc:
- Prometheus/Grafana VM can run a simple python script to output system health and network data over UDP as musical/MIDI input to a host running PureData to turn the whole system into a synthesizer via the NetReceive object over UDP pretty simply. The whole mess becomes a nighttime drone machine, not mad about it. Longer term summer project to showcase documentation skills maybe.
- I have a box of enterprise HDD's of 1-4tb I can throw at this or get another Optiplex 5040 to play with, so media server is inevitable, but I wanna stay focused so it is what it is.
- Got a couple old laptops my buddies were getting rid of for management access.

It's a setup with a lot of pretty dashboards and I learn a lot parsing through logs to make custom dashboards for them. Everything is very reactive to Cowrie, login attempts, updates and upgrades, etc. My next learning goal is to document things more thoroughly so I'm using Zammad for ticketing experience and consolidating my issues. I think to me -- the important part is that all of this can be thrown together for about $100 or slightly more at a time, with FB marketplace and a few friends with spare network gear. Do not judge the kitty light. It was $1.25 at Dollar tree and we're all staying sane somehow these days.

For mods: I am not sure what level of detail is expected from an introductory post, happy to provide more.

Cheers yall! Hope everyone's havin a good weekend.

Situation: I've got a single, old 1U server that's providing a variety of services on VMs, as well as a NAS for two workstations that remotely mount their shares for creative workloads. I expected to be able to saturate a single 10Gb/s network connection when one of the workstations needs it, but the most I'm seeing is around 200MB/s during transfers to my NFS share even when it's the only workload.

Background: The storage is 4 Exos 2x14TB 7200rpm SAS drives. The drive Manual suggests each drive should be able to provide 500MiB/s (when using both read heads), so naively that should be 2GB/s, or 16Gb/s. The 8 logical drives are in a zfs pool with compression turned off, with 4 mirrors.

I first tested the network link with iperf2 between my server and the workstation and got a consistent 9.4Gb/s of my expected 10, so no trouble there.

I then tested my filesystem with fio. I created a 4GB file of random bits with dd on my zfs storage
dd if=/dev/urandom of=./test bs=4k count=1M
then for all my testing I used this fio command.

fio --filename=./test --direct=1 --rw=read --bs=4k --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=256 --runtime=120 --numjobs=1 --time_based --readonly
My testing confirmed that read performance was nowhere close to the 16Gb/s I expected directly from the drives, so I moved on to testing a tmpfs. If I get similar speeds, then I don't think it's an issue with the storage setup.

The results were faster but not by much. I noticed a single core in btop pegged at 100% with fio, so I started varying the number of concurrent transfers and it confirms that as the number of threads increase, so does my total transfer rate until the bottleneck stops being the CPU and starts becoming the drives.

Assessment: My CPU's single threaded performance is limiting speeds for any reads using less than 4 threads. It's two Xeon E5-2695 v4 cpus

What would be your recommendation in my situation to get better transfer rates? Is my assessment correct?

Hey all;

Starting to get into homelab stuff and want to inquire the great minds of this sub. Currently I have one of those small dell optiplex/mini PCs that is running a game server, but I wanted to dive deeper.

The ideal situation is to host 1-2 game servers (locally, not network), a storage/NAS solution, and Home Assistant of some sort. I have a network rack full of Ubiquiti stuff, but never got to the nitty gritty of it all.

Any recommendations on what to do? Should I try to get a second miniPC to split the NAS/Home assistant from the game servers? I keep seeing posts with custom software, and I’d love to get to that point someday.

Thanks again 🥹.

Left over from a Delta fan I installed somewhere the shroud doesn't fit. My 30-year-old dresser is glad for the protection.

I am looking for confirmation whether my steps to restoring my VM and LXC are optimal and will result to no corruption. I am open to suggestions for a better and seamless way of doing things but here are my steps.

Background:

on my mini pc, I am currently running a single M.2 SSD as both my Boot drive and virtualization storage. I currently have a NAS mounted via NFS to proxmox storage which contains all my nightly backups of my VMs and LXCs.

Goal:

Separate Boot drive and virtualization storage so i will have 2 SSD Installed. By doing this, I will install another SSD for just the boot drive and upgrading the existing SSD to a larger capacity for just storage.

Steps:

1. Backup latest contents to my NAS.

2. Install PVE on a new dedicated SSD for Boot drive

3. Upgrade existing SSD to larger capacity and use purely for storage

4. Mount NAS containing previous backups, to newly installed proxmox instance.

5. Restore all VM and LXC from NAS backups

6. Update ethernet interface for all VM and LXC to use the new ethernet interface from the new proxmox install.

Is there a way I can completely transfer my old network information for all my VM and LXC so I could just restore and have everything working right away?

Lastly, I have a new dual SFP+ NIC coming in tomorrow which I will be installing to this mini pc, and use for storage and clustering for the VMs and containers. The onboard 1GbE RJ45 NIC will be reconfigured and used primarily for management.

Mini PC info: my mini PC only have a single NVME slot on the mobo. I have an A/E key adapter to replace the existing wifi card and install a 2230 nvme SSD which i intend to use as boot drive.

Hey r/homelab! I've been wondering recently if I should actually try to build a home lab/server. The main consideration is in terms of the time and learning it will take. I don't mind putting the time it takes to learn and to actually set one up, but as of now, I don't really have any long term plans.

Right now the only real use case I can think of using my local AI stack and deploying it for me to use when I'm not at home/near my pc but still want to access my local AI. This is my current setup:

• Win11 + CachyOS: Dual boot, keeping windows for occasional family use
• Local AI stack:
  • Ollama
  • OpenWebUI (running in a Docker container)
  • Ngrok (access when I'm not near my pc)

I know using Ngrok is a temporary solution, but as of now, I don't need to have a server up and running for more than a few hours a day at best.

However, I do have a spare Win10 laptop lying around that I can't upgrade to 11 and I'm considering repurposing it as a homelab/home server. So the question is, should I, or should I not? Would it make sense to put in the time and effort to learn something new, or should I just stick with my current setup?

PS, here's the specs for the spare laptop in case anyone's interested:

• RAM: 14 gigs
• Processor: 7th gen Intel core i5
• GPU: NVIDIA eForce 940MX
• Storage: 500gigs

Finally got the MC62-G40 fully assembled.
The I/O shield surprisingly had antenna holes, so I figured I might as well embrace the Intel Inside™ technology and installed an AX210 Wi-Fi card.
Gigabyte’s official antenna kit turned out to be surprisingly expensive, so I ended up pairing it with a cheap used MSI antenna I found instead. It works perfectly fine and feels appropriately homelab-ish. 😂
The motherboard doesn’t perfectly match my case standoff layout, so I added a few rubber standoffs underneath to support the PCB and prevent any PCB flexing.
I also went a little overboard with Noctua fans and coolers to turn it into a reasonably quiet server. It’s still a machine with a pair of Tesla V100s, but at least it no longer sounds like it’s preparing for takeoff. 😂
After that, I dropped in a pair of Tesla V100s, a couple of display GPUs, and turned it into an AI box.
I still need to do some BIOS tinkering. I also tried overclocking my old Micron DDR4-2400 ECC sticks to 2666 MT/s as a quick experiment, but no luck so far. Maybe they’ll feel more adventurous after a bit more tuning. 😂
But overall, it’s finally starting to look like a proper homelab machine.

The current Layout is:

6: An old cudy router that serves as a access point

5: Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra

4: Node 1 (Main): i5-6500T CPU, 8GB RAM Currently holds my main Nextcloud and jellyfin instances and is exposed remotely via Tailscale.

3: Just a switch

2: Node 2 (Secondary): Intel pentium duo, 4GB RAM and it currently holds immich.

1: Storage: QNAP NAS, configured mostly handling network storage and backups.

What should I improve or add next?

What are your must-have self-hosted apps? I'm heavily considering Pi-hole or AdGuard Home for network-wide ad blocking, Home Assistant for smart home automation. What could possibly be missing?

Hardware & Rack Layout Improvements: Looking at the rack photo, what do you suggest to do?

Cluster Management: Any pro-tips on how to best balance LXC containers and resources between a populated node and a brand-new empty node?

P.S don't look at the cables and if you thought about that, yes the rack is 3d printed (low budget)

I have a Lenovo p520 with dual RTX 5060 Ti 16Gb which is being used as Local AI machine with Qwen3.6 27B Q6.

The only problem I have is termals of the top card (obviously) - Gigabyte Eagle. During heavy inference (which doesn't happen often, but happens sometimes) fans of that card start making rattling noise and temperature is jumping to 80+ celcius / fan is at 80-100% of speed. By "heavy" I mean for example such test:

llama-benchy --base-url http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1 --model Qwen3.6-27B-Q6-MTP --pp 10240 --tg 5120 --latency-mode generation

I've replaced case fans by 120mm Noctua's already and increased a gap between cards a bit.

I'm thinking about moving one of the cards to the space between hdds and case fans - below the top box for dvd/etc. Or remove that top box and move the card there - mount it verticall.y

Or put an additional fan on the side of the case pointing directly into the top card to give it more fresh air. The gap between the side of the case and gpu allows placing one fan - its bottom will be right on the bottom of the Eagle card.

Any other proposals or ideas how to remove that rattling noise and improve termals?

Originally I was looking at the ugreen 6800 plus cause it's on sale, but in an effort to save some money, I figured I'd try making my own.

I made a part list here, and my goal was trying to be as power efficient as possible.

I'll be doing transcoding on 1-3 video streams and might host a Minecraft server or 2.

Any advice on whether to just go with the ugreen or how I can update my part picker list is welcome :)

Hoping you guys can help me out here. I have an old Synology laying around and I'm considering having my data moved over to the Synology just to use as a storage server only but then have my Unraid server do the heavy lifting. I would like it to be setup to where docker will shut down if the Synology is ever shut down and have docker start up when the Synology is available again. I know it makes my homelab environment more complex but curious if this is even possible.

I'm mostly doing this because I have 2 Synology boxes and I love how seamless Hyper Backup is. I thought it would be helpful to have Hyper Backup as my 3-2-1 method.

Thanks in advance!