this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
191 points (98.0% liked)
homelab
8412 readers
18 users here now
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I just finished converting my old gaming PC, dude, I can't afford to set new goals like this
sighs
Fine....
Very nice. I love the mini-rack format.
"For now"
Relatable
Did you print the parts yourself or you got them from somewhere else? I want to go 10'' but it seems a little bit hard to find the parts I have in mind here in Canada
Got them printed by a friend except for the white blinds and the cable brush.
Thank you for the reply! Do you mind sharing where you got the files from?
They're all from printables, e.g. https://www.printables.com/model/1040412-lenovo-thinkcentre-tiny-m720qm715qm920q-10-rack-mo
Cute. I love it!
Very nice. Details on the the mini PC & jbod? I'm curious what your read/write speeds are like and what (if any) compromises you had to make vs a "normal" 2u/tower setup.
It's this MB/CPU: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J5005-ITX/index.asp#Specification
The JBOD has SATA connectors for each SSD, it's 3 1,8TB SSDs in ZFS mirror. I tested write speed but since it's all Gbit LAN that's the bottleneck for r/w and I didn't bother any further with theoretical r/w. Currently there's not much writing except for daily backup tasks from the Proxmox Nodes.
I've already had the JBOD and was basically just looking for something small and low power to run it. I'm not sure what the "normal" tower setup would be, I didn't find too much for 10" racks. It currently being a mini PC with the case being half open and not properly fixed in the rack is certainly not ideal, I found some Mini ITX rackmount STLs, but the power supply needs some extra space etc.
I also have an APU. What model do you have and what is your maximum routing speed?
It's the 2C4. I'm not using it for actual routing but for subnetting and firewall basically and I get a little over 500 Mbit/s through it.
Okay. Thank you!
500Mbit/s with firewall rules is decent!
I only know of "routing" at layer 3 (even between just two networks) and "switching" at layer 2. What workload is subnetting?
Stats, costs, specs?
Is this the homelab version of A/S/L? 😂
Looking for something specific? Lenovos have 4C/8T, 32GB RAM and an extra SSD for the virtual drives. The whole thing is idling just below 50W.
Each box was around 100-150€ plus some drives, 3D material/energy was 15€ and my friend's bar tab, rails/screws/blinds were around 40€ in total. Bought everything second hand with low price and power consumption in mind.
How much storage do you have? Are you using raid?
The Lenovo boxes have single 480GB disks (probably the thing I need to upgrade somewhat soon). Backups go to the NAS which has a 3 x 1,8 TB ZFS mirror (RAID 1 basically) in the JBOD.
Hm so this isn't a media server? 480 wouldn't seem like enough?
How much work was the software side to get this up and running? Are there libraries to make it easy or did you have to configure everything yourself?
No, not a media server. But it could be with the NAS and just mount a big NAS dataset into one of the servers.
I spent a lot of time automating the setup of the Proxmox nodes with an Ansible role. It install packages, sets up exporters for monitoring, makes some Proxmox tweaks and, most important, creates the file system structures for replication and high availability. The NAS runs TrueNAS which is mostly in the default configuration, similar for the OPNsense firewall.
That's the operating system site of things. The VMs with the Docker services (Nextcloud, Bookstack, Calibre Web Automated, Authentik, Prometheus Stack with Grafana, this Lemmy instance, Gitea and some more) have just been transfered from the old server.