Half seriously half not... Group buy? It has a lot of A100s...

I started with in-house projects: smart switches, then Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. One thing led to another—Pi-hole, a couple of servers, Immich, network monitoring—and now I’m getting into more hardware-focused projects.

Right now I have:

- A mini PC with an Intel Celeron running Home Assistant, network monitoring, Immich, etc.

- A Raspberry Pi handling smaller services like Wake-on-LAN and Node-RED.

Recently, with help from GenAI, I’ve started projects involving Raspberry Pi GPIO, ESP32s, WS2812B LED strips, microphones, and similar components.

Although I graduated in electronics over a decade ago, I haven't done anything in electronics fields after college and I don’t feel confident reviewing circuit diagrams generated by Claude. Is there a platform where I can get schematics reviewed—by human experts, automated tools, or both?

I’m mainly looking for something suitable for hobbyist-level analog/digital circuits: level shifting, powering LEDs, microphone inputs, GPIO protection, and so on.

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to solve a stubborn hardware/firmware limitation and could use some hacker advice.

• The Goal: Display a continuous (24/7) live stream from a TP-Link Tapo C545D security camera on the built-in screen of a Hiseeu NVR (Model: T8510-W6-XF, Firmware: 3.6.8.0F).
• The Problem:
  1. The Hiseeu NVR runs a locked proprietary firmware (N1 protocol) and does not have any option in the UI to manually add third-party ONVIF/RTSP streams.
  2. The HDMI port on the back of the Hiseeu is HDMI OUT only, meaning I can't feed an external video source (like a Fire TV Stick or mini-PC) into its screen.
  3. The Tapo camera works perfectly and outputs a clean RTSP stream on port 2020 (rtsp://ip:2020/stream1), which I verified can be opened via VLC/PC.

What I'm looking for: Has anyone cracked or reverse-engineered these specific Hiseeu NVRs? Is there a known way to gain root/Telnet access, inject an RTSP stream via a local proxy, or patch the firmware to unlock ONVIF support? Or is a hardware mod (LVDS-to-HDMI controller board) my only option left?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

living in the UK, I thought it was a great idea to keep my homelab in my loft. Over the past couple of years, summer has become even warmer than normal. For those who live in the UK, you know what I mean, temperatures hitting 38 Celsius, that’s 104F in the US. You can imagine how hot my loft can be. 9 months of the year temperatures are cool.

After messing around with a home server on an old Dell laptop, I got so hooked on self-hosting that I decided to buy some proper hardware.

It's a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720t with an i7-8700, 16GB RAM and a 240GB SSD, running Debian 13. The whole thing cost me around 12,000 UAH (~$285).

I'm running a bunch of Docker containers: AdGuard Home, Uptime Kuma, Vaultwarden, Linkwarden, Docmost, Ollama, and a ton of my own projects and Telegram bots.

Honestly, one of my favorite things about this hobby is being able to host pretty much whatever I want on my own hardware. I get full control over my setup, more privacy, and a place to deploy and experiment with my projects without relying on a bunch of third-party services. It's been incredibly useful for development.

I'm already thinking about expanding the setup. I'd like to add more nodes, get a UPS, and eventually build a proper rack setup.

For those of you who've been doing this for a while, what would you prioritize when expanding a homelab like mine? I'm thinking about a UPS, more storage, additional hardware, and eventually a rack. Anything you'd recommend planning ahead for before the setup grows?

I'd love to hear how your homelabs evolved over time!

Since my previous post was removed because it focused too much on the server room renovation and not the homelab stack, I'm reposting just the technical part about the lighting here.

I'm using this setup as my homelab. I have three servers running various services, including my entire AI stack, which is connected to Home Assistant to control my whole smart home, along with other services. So sure it is my homelab.

This is just the very first test setup. Now the values came in real-time and the latency is completely gone. The technology behind the lighting could actually be pretty simple. I manage the values through our monitoring system, but the whole thing can also be done using just Home Assistant and WLED.

The light waves speed are driven by my main WAN interface rx/tx and visualize the current utilization of my internet connection in real time. You could also simply fetch these values via SNMP in Home Assistant, and you're pretty much ready to go. Then you have to create a template sensor and an automation.

I'm planning to visualize other metrics as well. I have additional hosts across my lab, and I'd love to visualize things like resource usage or similar metrics.

The original post got an incredible amount of attention, and the reach of r/homelab is crazy!
I'd love to see as many people as possible recreate this idea and come up with their own cool visualizations.

Feel free to check out my other posts in for more technical details, and for the recabling and server room renovation as well! There you will find the real showcase.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/1xfddqn/renovated_our_server_room/

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1xhmg5y/realtime_bandwidth_visualization_in_our_server/

At university, I had a friend who was also into homelabbing and we met up every few months to show our newest ideas and projects. Now as I am older I really miss those days (this friend is no longer into this stuff). Is there by any chance anyone in the greater area of cologne / germany who is interested in doing this stuff or any other idea of how to find someone? I don't just want to talk with someone over the internet, I want to meet up and talk about the hobby.

Hello everyone, recently I bought a vps with 1 core and 2 Gb of ram. I have one small question, can this VPS run and normally use Remnawave panel?

Here is the url for the project(and I know that, in docs "min. requirements" 2+ cores and 2+Gb ram.

I don't have a lot of money(((

I'm based in mainland China and need a reliable setup for TikTok Live and Claude. Standard datacenter IPs—like the one on my current DMIT VPS—get flagged or blocked almost immediately.

I've tried chaining static residential proxies from providers like Proxy-Seller, but the experience has been rough. The connection drops constantly, and the IPs are clearly oversold and shared among multiple users, which triggers endless CAPTCHAs.

I had a failing DDR4 32GB stick that had a failing cluster of errors at about 11.9GB.

First I played with voltages, timings frequencies but nothing would make it pass.

So I took it out, wrapped it in two layers of tinfoil and put it in cold air fryer. I set the air fryer to 195C, 7min. The tinfoil was scrunched so there was no direct contact of ram to any air fryer surfaces.

I didnt smell anything weird, it was hot when I took it out and let it cool. The plastic on the RGB did not melt and it just looked fine.

Ayy lo and behold it passed the memtest that day AND a day later.

So I guess the oven baked trick is not a gimmick.

I want to know if it is ok/stable/makes sense if you have TrueNAS running in a Proxmox VM, and then put a NextCloud App into TrueNAS:

Proxmox -> TrueNAS VM-> NextCloud APP

Hey r/homelab,

I just stumbled across what looks like an absolute goldmine of a government data center liquidation auction in India.

Unfortunately, I found it after the auction had already closed, so I completely missed the chance to bid. 😭

It was a Regional Passport Office / Ministry of External Affairs data center liquidation, and the reserve price was surprisingly low. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for similar auctions in the future.

The interesting (and slightly crazy) part was that it was an all-or-nothing bulk lot. So you'd have to take everything — including the heavy infrastructure/scrap — rather than just picking out the servers you wanted.

Some of the hardware listed:

• 4× Lenovo ThinkSystem SR550
• 5× Dell PowerEdge R630
• 2× HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9
• 80+ IBM x-Series systems (x3650/x3550)
• FortiGate 800D & Check Point 5600 firewalls
• Hitachi G200/G400 SANs
• EMC storage arrays
• 30+ server/network racks

If I'd managed to get the lot, I'd probably have kept a couple of the R630s/SR550s for the homelab, harvested ECC RAM, caddies and SAS drives from the older IBM gear, and then tried to sell the usable equipment to local refurbishers and scrap the rest to recover some of the cost.

Since this came from a government environment, I'm guessing the storage would either have been removed or securely wiped/degaussed before the equipment was auctioned.

I've never actually bought a large decommissioned enterprise/government hardware lot, so I'm curious about the reality of doing this.

For those who have:

1. What are the biggest hidden traps with "unserviceable / as-is" data center lots?
2. How often do you run into proprietary firmware or hardware locks on things like SANs, firewalls, etc.?
3. What's your workflow for testing a large number of servers quickly?
4. At what point does the logistics of moving/storing 50+ servers become more trouble than it's worth?
5. Has anyone here actually scored a great homelab deal from a government liquidation auction?

Would love to hear some success stories (or "never again" stories 😂).

The auction is already closed, but here's the original listing for reference:

https://forwardauction.gem.gov.in/eprocure/view-auction-notice/41687/0/6AEF73365152F26C5B9AB07F715A847D75745975

File transfers and organisation is doing my head in. I’m literally transferring files in the CLI and permission issues related to the datasets I’ve created is giving me a headache.

I’ve heard proxmox numerous times but just wanted opinions on what everyone’s tried and what operating systems for their homelab storage.

Edit: this may be a question of “how do you manage your files?”

Almost entirely new to this obsession and after buying a small Corsair atx case for my first build I realized with me wanting to further upgrade and add on to my server, would it have been smarter and cheaper to buy an etsy 3d printed rack and rack mounts? Or would it be better to stick with the tower for now to get better cooling efficiency and get a server rack later down the line?

The hardware I have so far is an Asus z97 pro, intel i7 5775c, 2x8gb gigastone ram, haven’t ordered storage yet but will probably go with a 500gb-1tb sata ssd for proxmox and jellyfin and a 2tb ssd for storage

Yes I’m aware the hardware I have is grossly outdated… this is mostly an introductory; as cheap as possible, first homelab server build since I have no reason to build another pc and I’m itching to build something.

Hey r/homelab,

Repo: https://github.com/sablierapp/sablier (since October 2020)
Docs: https://sablierapp.dev

The problem

My server is a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) running 30 containers on an SSD and a 6 TB HDD. On a box this small, every service is everyone's neighbor: when Paperless runs OCR while the *arr stack is busy, Home Assistant and Pi-hole get sluggish too. Most of these services sit idle most of the day, still taking RAM, CPU and disk.

What Sablier does

It starts a container when you open it through your reverse proxy, and stops it when nobody uses it. You get a waiting page while it boots. On my Pi, Transmission, Memos, Portainer and Speedtest only run when I use them.

If stopping is too blunt, it can instead throttle an idle service's CPU, memory or disk I/O, and restore them the moment you open it.

It works with Docker, Podman, Proxmox LXC, systemd, Kubernetes and Nomad, behind Traefik, Caddy, Nginx and others.

Why not an existing tool

Nothing like it existed when I started in 2020. ContainerNursery and Lazytainer came a year later. Compared to them, Sablier plugs into your existing reverse proxy and can throttle instead of stop.

Why it's relevant here

Most of us run more services than our hardware comfortably holds. Sablier lets idle ones step aside for the ones you're using.

AI disclosure

Written by hand from 2020 to early 2026. Since May 2026, I've used AI coding agents (mostly Claude Code) for features, tests, docs and bug hunting. I design the features and review every change. About 43% of this year's commits are AI co-authored. This post was also written with Claude's help.

Recently I created my own lab with a dedicated server. All my machines are hyper v's and I run dedicated gaming servers for my group of friends on it. I separated all my devices on different Vlans so my NAS and gaming pc are on a vlan and my server is on a different vlan. I dont have a true firewall device I instead used my ASUS routers build in firewall to open a port to go to my servers hyper v address. On my hyper v I set the correct firewall rules to all traffic for the game. Due to me not having a true firewall device is the asus router sufficiently safe to protect my network. I have the latest firmware on it but I am new to this so looking for advice.

Built an enterprise-grade router gateway at home and wanted to see what you guys think.

• Topology: ISP Fiber ONT doing DMZ passthrough straight to a Qualcomm ARMv8 OpenWrt router.
• Performance: Blazing sub-2ms ping to Cloudflare (~1.90 ms), full hardware flow offloading, and zero CGNAT issues on a clean static residential IP.
• Privacy & Security: Encrypted DoH (https-dns-proxy) + AdBlock-Fast blocking ~284k ad/tracking domains network-wide.
• VPN: Self-hosted WireGuard server for remote access, plus outbound Cloudflare WARP via policy routing.

Everything runs at full line speed. How's the architecture look? What should i add any suggestions?

I got 4x64GB (each is a 2x32GB stick) DDR4 Corsair LPX Vengeance 3200 RAM. How can I use this ram for a Home Lab? I tried putting the ram into a Dell 5820 Intel 10900X system but it failed to post and now I'm hoping a cmos clear will bring the system back... Since it's not posting any more.

What I am trying to run is a proxmox server, so I can run a EVE NG lab for studying networking and want an always on lab I can go back to. In additonal, I wanted some extra capacity to run other VMs as I gain more knowledge. Is this usable ram or should I sell it for something else?

I have a ton of tech stuff I've been wanting to do:

1. I want to build an at home server, to store media (audio and photo) and I want that server to be able to share it with my android device regardless of where i am.
2. I want to get a free AI model for personal use, that I decide what it can and cannot do, no restrictions. no subscriptions
3. I want to own all of my things, instead of having games, photos, videos, music or anything else just needing a $10 subscription. I'm tired of it.

If anyone can help me on how to build a server for those needs, how to get an AI model for personal use and where it should go (Main PC, Server, get a new one). How I should get all my music onto my server to start, any help would be appreciated

Hi all.

Looking for some advice here.

I picked up about half a dozen Quadro P2200's a Quadro 5000 RTX, and a 1080p - these were pulls from working devices. All were destined for e-waste.

Part of my homelab is Plex and TDARR. I want to get some HW transcoding going, but not sure which of these fine specimens would be best for the purpose. My mind says the 5000 - but the P2200 doesn't require extra power...so less power (maybe?) Would the performance be close?

Ask questions if I am being too vague - I dont' wanna splatter this post with worthless info.

Thanks in advance!

I'm wanting to set up a centralised log, initially mostly for network device logs (eg DHCP, DNS, routers, WiFi), and have been toying with the idea of ELK.

My concerns at the moment are because I'd use it for network traffic, it'd be always on, so a cheap, low power device. Probably something dedicated. However, looking at the suggested hardware, I'm not sure if I have anything suitably powerful. But mostly what I've read so far is enterprise context, and dev/test PoC kind of setups rather than "enthusiast".

If anyone is doing this kind of thing already, what kind of hardware are you using for it? Does it work?

For example is there a difference in handover between AP, channel setup for each AP, or change settings for all AP at once?

The brand could be Unifi or Omada.