homelab

Hi everyone, I'm looking to see if I could get some suggestions or recommendations on an upgrade path for my NAS in my current home environment. I'm also unsure if this is the best place to ask, so please let me know if this question doesn't fit in here.

My setup isn't too sophisticated at the moment. I had purchased a QNAP TS-453A back in February of 2017 and have it loaded with four WD Red 8TB (WD80EFZX-68UW8N0) configured in RAID 5. It is solely dedicated to storage and nothing else; with the bulk of it used for media archive. It has proved a shockingly reliable little device. I have a headless Intel NUC6i7KYK that is dedicated to running a majority of the self hosted services I use.

In the next year I'd like to expand my network storage and initially I had planned on simply purchasing replacement Exos X18's and go through the drive swap process but upon further thought, I figured I'd like to purchase an additional NAS and use my current one as a backup solution. I'm not particularly locked in to staying with QNAP and so any recommendations would be welcome. Admittedly, I have been looking at the TS-932PX-4G as I'm interested in adding in SSD caching to the array.

At any rate, thanks for any help or suggestions you may be able to provide! Or, if you can point me to a more appropriate place for this sort of question, I would also greatly appreciate it.

As I'm in the beginning steps of sorting out my homelab, I'm starting to ask questions I haven't asked before and come across conundrums I hadn't considered previously. One of which is how to sort out pi-hole given that my ISP has locked down the router tighter than a tight thing.

As I had been reading about and watching YouTube videos, I had stumbled across Tailscale and the idea of VLANs is a nice one. That coupled with wanting to block ads and a new router seemed to the optimal choice.

Another thing is that I eventually want to get a Reolink POE video doorbell and Reolink E1 outdoor camera for my garden and so I'm trying to think somewhat ahead as the last thing I want is a server rack in my house. Aesthetically speaking.

So I stumbled across all the recommendations for Mikrotik and they're really reasonably priced, especially compared to the Netgear Nighthawk thing I was looking at for ten times the price.

The Mikrotik HAP AX Lite is reasonably priced, does all the cool new stuff, let's me set up virtual local area networks, has room for growth and has PoE capabilities. It seems to be the perfect choice. But is it? Because it seems almost too good to be true.

Dear homelabbers,

I was reflecting on all of these nice wirings referred to as cableporn you know when all cables have the perfect length, angle and are at the perfect spot in the rack.

Considering my rack the cables have neither the perfect length nor angle nor spot. How do professionals get these results? Do they own all necessary lengths or is it common to crimp them ?

Thanks!

I have a small client on the side that I am looking to get more durable off-site backups done. I personally use restic and resticprofile in my homelab without issue. The issue is that I would like to give them some kind of GUI and from what I see, none of the restic ones will do it.

Kopia appears to be roughly the same kind of design so I'm wondering about the KopiaUI. I would be running the backups themselves off the file server itself but would like a GUI to be available via either a desktop OR at least exposed on a port on the file server to hit via a web browser.

Would running KopiaUI in 'server mode' be what I'm looking for? It seems to be but I would like to confirm before researching it any further. Backups would simply be going to backblaze.

I have a P400 in my storage server which currently also runs some media containers like Plex, sonarr-sma, radarr-sma, Jellyfin, exploring Immich, etc. I have the GPU surfaced via docker and added it to each of the containers that needed access to the GPU for hardware acceleration needs. Is it possible to be able to leverage the Nvidia gpu container remotely (over the lan) without having the containers access it (pseudo) directly? I want to move the media handling containers to a Turing Pi 2 and keep just the GPU access on the storage server.

Two friends and I would like to build a PC as a server in my house. The idea would be to have a headless server with 3 VMs. I was wondering what would be the best thing to do so that everyone could have their own private space, while optimizing disk space as much as possible (1TB M.2 SSD + 8TB HDD via RAID1). Each of us could play with Docker to have services on top. What software would you use to set up VMs and manage disks, and what advice would you give us in general?

The other option would be to go cloud, with Hertnez + Mega (autoscaling).

I've heard that WDS is the standard for creating a wireless bridge, but I have since read on a number of forum posts that WDS shouldn't be used anymore. This idea of it being deprecated seems to make sense, as it appears that it is not supported by another newer router that I have (tp-link Archer AX73). How should I go about this?

Update (2024-01-14)

I have since found this guide which seemed to work well. I'm not sure if it's the best way, but it does at least work.

Looking at the amount of PoE splitters and how much people hate having too many power bricks, I was wondering of anybody is doing something unconventional with PoE at their homelab?

If you look at the PoE table at Wikipedia, you'll see that apart from the common 802.3af (~13W), 802.3at (25.50W), there is the beefier 802.3bt with 51W and 71.3W depending on the type. I was wondering if anybody has stories of playing with the higher power types?

The list of bookmarks

• PoE nuc https://www.gorite.com/poe-power-over-ethernet-lid-for-intel-nuc-gr-lid-poe
• All-in-one PoE computers
• 1U PoE server

... but given how many splitters there are:

• PoE to USB-C (data+power) - guess it'd be cool for a dumb Home Assistant tablet - everything connected with 1 cable, but it's easier to just use regular USB-C and WiFi :P Could be also used for a wifi-less weird phone server. Can also just charge your phone

• PoE to Eth+12V - limitless possibilities. There's a guy on reddit that connected a PoE to Eth+12V splitter to power his ISP modem. The PicoPSU also takes a 12V DC plug, so you can go PoE -> PoE to 12V+Eth splitter ->PicoPsu -> some low power computer -> burn down your house

• Did some electrical engineer finally make a PoE solution for having so many power bricks when somebody has a SFF/TinyMiniMicro cluster? Those things are big.

Workaround

I'm not sure what was going wrong with what I was doing initially, but, thanks to @tapdattl@lemmy.world, as suggested, I disabled the tftp server system service, and, instead, started it with the following command:

sudo in.tftpd -L /srv/tftp --verbose --permissive -s

and it then flashed successfully.

Original Post

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11735447

I'm trying to flash firmware to a router (Archer C7) using TFTP, but, when the router makes the request for the firmware file over TFTP, the TFTP server responds with the following error

Error code: Access violation (2)
Error message: Only absolute filenames allowed

This is the config for tftpd in /etc/conf.d/tftpd:

TFTP_OPTIONS="-s"
TFTP_DIRECTORY="/srv/tftp"
TFTP_USERNAME="tftp"
TFTP_ADDRESS="192.168.0.66:69"

I have the firmware file in /srv/tftp, and both the firmware file, and /srv/tftp have chmod 777 permissions.

The TFTP server is running on Archlinux, and is installed as tftp-hpa from the arch repos.

If I test as a client, I can get it to download if I specify the full (absolute) path to the file /srv/tftp/filename, so it seems that the config isn't pointing the server to /srv/tftp as the relative path... How would I go about fixing that?

Without SSL on the LAN side of a reverse proxy, I presume that all traffic between the server and the reverse proxy is unencrypted and, thus, accessible to any device on the LAN.

Which specific scenarios result in this being a concern? The primary concern that I can come up with is if you know that there are untrustworthy entities connected to the LAN (untrustworthy devices, or perhaps malicious individuals).

I used to use an old Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 router for the purpose of testing homelab setups, but I have recently found that, as of 2022, it is unsupported by OpenWRT. So, I am now looking for a router to replace my old one. I don't need anything fancy -- I just need a router with WiFi connectivity (2.4GHz is fine, but 5GHz is, of course, appreciated, if possible), and a few LAN ports (gigabit would be nice, but it is not a necessity). By no means does it have to be a new model of router. So long as it supports a current version of OpenWRT, and satisfies my hardware requirements, it will be an acceptable recommendation

Hello, wonderful people!

I am trying to set up two domains: a.domain.com and b.domain.com. The reason for having two domains is that one is for Active Directory, and the other is for the Linux domain using RHEL IDM.

The Windows server serves as the DHCP server, with the domain controllers' IP as the first DNS and the IDM controllers' IP as the second DNS. Both domains have a forward zone set up to point to the other domain, and this configuration seems to be working nicely so far.

Now, the issue: Let's say I have clients client.b.domain.com and client2.b.domain.com. They have successfully joined the IDM domain, but neither can ping each other's hostname nor perform an nslookup on it.

I also notice in the Windows DHCP server that the clients' FQDN is client.a.domain.com and client2.a.domain.com, even though I have set them to b.domain on the clients themselves.

Any ideas on how or what I need to change to get local hostnames working in this scenario?

Hi,

I need help with my first homelab hardware. Maybe you experts can help me with that. I looked at this tutorial about building your own Openshift one node cluster using an Intel NUC, though I’m unsure, if I really should buy one of these.

I have set a budget of 1000€ (I’m located in germany). The tutorial suggests the Intel NUC10i7FNK, which I can get for 450€ new here (would buy 64GB RAM and a 2TB M.2 SSD for that). And I would follow the tutorial in getting a dedicated router for my lab environment.

Can I get more for my money (also in terms of upgradability) with some other product? Or should I just get that suggested NUC? I don’t need it to be that small (can be a tower), but I don’t want real server hardware, since the lab will run in my home office.

Thanks in advance for your help. My brain hurts from comparing products, searching for their availability, etc.

EDIT:

I've now decided to buy the NUC10i7FNK. It seems to be a sensible choice and the tutorial says, that it has enough beef for my first goal of building my own Openshift cluster for experimenting.

Thanks to all of you! You helped me to get to a good decision in this wide field of home lab equipment.

I recently stated out loud that my homelab was stable, and now my UPS is posting less than 30 minutes of estimated normal load. What's everyone using as a UPS?

I've been rocking the aptly-named CyberPower OR1500LCDRT2U for the past few years. Should I just replace the cells or upgrade the whole unit?

I'm curious how much people are interested in using this? I see posts are fewer, especially if compared to reddit.

Maybe it doesn't help that there isn't one production mobile app, but a few personal/opensource ones out there?

Everyone here still over in r/homelab a lot?

Pretty solid machine, better than new generation of HP server in terms of build quality! Also a old 2950 switch behind!

I had been having issues with my udm pro running hot and frequently overheating and powering off. It is out of warranty now and I wouldn't give ubiquity another dime but want to avoid replacing my network stack for as long as possible.

I was consistently running around 58-59c which I thought was hot but most things I read said it was fine. The problem was at increasingly more frequent intervals my network would go down and I would go to the data closet and would see "Ready to Power Off". Inspecting the logs after a reboot showed spikes to 102 before a shutdown was triggered. Most infuriating was that it wouldn't shut down but sit at the "Ready to Power Off" with fans at 100% and still hot.

I finally decided to replace the pads like I had read about other users doing. Upon inspection the existing pads seemed fine with one exception...

THERE WAS NO THERMAL PAD ON THE CPU!

Somehow they had put one on the 4 memory chips below the CPU, and one on top of the aluminum heatsink to presumably use the case as a thermal mass, but had somehow totally missed the damn processor! I have pics but they wouldn't upload. That means there was about a 2mm complete air gap between the heatsink and processor because I had to use a 3mm pad. I really don't know how it worked at all for the last few years.

Well gee, my temps are now in the mid 40s and it hasn't powered itself off since.

If anyone has an out of warranty UDM Pro that is running hot, you might want to open it up and check the pads. You will need 3mm for the processor and 4 mm for the chips and top of heatsink.

Just over a year ago I bought a 5950x on sale and with the help of some spare parts, and some great second hand deals I put together a Proxmox machine and began self hosting some services. 1 year later I have 4 Proxmox nodes; a 5900x system in the Rosewill rackmount case and 2 Beelink mini pc's.

I recently bought the Startech rack from a small business that no longer needed it. It came with 3 shelves, 2 APC rack-mount UPS's, one of which had brand new batteries, an HP Proliant DL6360 Gen 8 (not pictured, haven't made use of it) and a QNAP rack-mount something or other with 5 x 2TB drives in it. All for less than the price of the rack brand new.

Throw in a couple raspberry pi's, one that's running PiKVM hooked up to a 4 input HDMI switch, and one I use as my bastion host / jumpbox, and you got yourself a homelab!

I love my homelab

I have ZBOX MI571 with an i7-6700T and 16GB (SODIMM) RAM laying unused. And I want to make a personal backup/archive server, for which I think TrueNas will work best.

The box has more than enough computational power for running TrueNas. But as far as I could find it has only one SATA and one M.2 SATA port, so not enough to have a boot-pool and a redundant storage-pool. And it doesn't have any spare PCIe ports.

So I'm wondering what's my best option here? Can the drives be somehow reliability attached through USB for example? Or will it be best to buy a used mobo and ram and replant the CPU? Or should I just sell the whole thing and build a server from scratch?

It seems good based on the price of just the CPU. If it's good, what kind of server case would it need?

Hello! I am doing some if-I-die planning, and I want to create a machine that is separate from my current homelab that can a) host paperless-ngx and b) be used with keyboard/mouse/monitor if needed. I want it to replace my current paperless-ngx instance that's hosted in my lab.

Ideally, I'd want two SSDs in RAID 1, possibly with a third drive for the OS? I'll be backing up to my NAS and from there to the cloud, but I want to separate this machine from the rest of my infrastructure and still be able to have reliable access to the documents on it.

In theory, I could just sync the files to a USB drive and tell her to grab it if anything should happen to me, but finding the right files while stressed without the metadata stored in paperless wouldn't be the nicest thing to make her do.

tl;dr: What should I buy to build a homelab-in-a-box that can be attached to my homelab normally but also function separately as a PC.

I'm trying to free up my Pi 3b which is overkill for a PiHole with Unbound DNS and am looking to try something other than a pi zero. What are your recommendations! A few brands that come to mind are LibreComputer, NanoPi, BananaPi, and OrangePi. Bonus points if it's possible to set up with POE!

The nanopi R2S looks like a decent option however is uses a broadcom chip. Could that be problematic? https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=282&sort=p.price&order=ASC

Hey everyone,

I wanted to poll the community and pick up tips on DIY cable labeling and management.

At work, we label both ends of Ethernet cabels using a Brady Label maker. They are awesome but run about $200 USD.

I don't need such an expensive device to create (one-time) 40ish labels.

I was hoping for DIY suggestions that balances durability and ease of installation. Was thinking tape, sharpies, or even thick zip ties etc. Some forums even suggested bread ties (but I'm concerned they will fall off in hard to reach places). And sharpies are great but can wear on some materials (like those plastic sticky tabs for books and notes)

What are some pros and cons of approaches you guys have tried?

EDIT:

I was pointed to this video which suggests you:

1. Grid up a piece of paper so each rectangle's height is the size of a circumference of a cable. It will later be wrapped around the cable.
2. Then hand write the labels.
3. Cut out each label/rectangle.
4. Then use clear masking tape slightly larger than the label to secure it to the cable by wrapping it around the circumference of the cable.

The finished product looks like those shrinking labels where the label is flush against the cable and text is behind a clear film and can't be smudged.

For those that suggested borrow the label maker from work or print them at work: that has occured to every one of our engineers on staff and now our printers are locked away and are signed out bc we would always find them either low on ink/toner or more frequently out of lable paper. Yes, ordering those supplies is negligibly cheap for a budget at work but the issue lied in whenever you picked up the label maker at work, you immediately had to either change the roll or ink. sigh this is why we can't have nice things :)

The BOINC Census is back for another year! 🎉 If you use BOINC, we want to hear your thoughts!

BOINC is an open source tool and protocol for volunteer computing which enables people to volunteer their computational power to scientific research like cancer research and mapping the galaxy. I know a lot of homelab users use it.

Take the survey with the link below 👇

Should only take 5 min and your response could help shape the future of the community 😁

https://forms.fillout.com/t/n33grsgkeRus

The BOINC Census is a project of the Science Commons Initiative, a 501(c)(3) non-profit rebuilding the bridge of trust and participation between the public and science.

Happy crunching! 🚀