Bit of a long story as to why I have these, but I am curious what unique or cool ideas this community has for a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Not sure what to do with them.

25x Raspberry Pi 3B+

5x Raspberry Pi 4

I have ssh access to two servers. About 10 days ago there were 19500 attempts to login to one of those two servers. How do you protect yourself? I have passwordless SSH (key auth), fail2ban, root login disabled and i changed port from 22 to some other. What more can be done?

Edit:
Okey, from comments i understand that exposing SSH is not the best solution.

So i have found an alternative, i have spare raspberry pi 5. Could i use RPI Connect as form of VPN?

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.

Hey just wanted to share my start to my homelab journey currently only running proxmox cluster on these with Jellyfin but have plans to tinker and grow this, any recommendations on a rack would be much appreciated

I'm currently building out my homelab, and one of my main goals is to establish a solid foundation that won't require constant maintenance or rebuilding down the road.

I see a lot of people spending significant amounts of time working on their homelabs, and I'm curious how much of that is because they enjoy tinkering versus actually needing to fix or maintain things.

For those who have been running a homelab for several years:

• What takes up most of your maintenance time?
• What tends to break or require the most troubleshooting?
• Are updates a common source of problems?
• What would you do differently if you were starting over?
• Have you managed to get your homelab to a point where it mostly runs itself?

I'm trying to learn from others' experiences so I can avoid unnecessary complexity and build something reliable from the beginning.

Ultimately, I'd like to spend more time using my homelab than maintaining it.

Looking at these listings and wanted to know if there's anything i should look for when on a budget? I know computer prices have been really bad so I don't wanna get something and overpay. Im also low on space to put something in(had a big optiplex before) and would be open to upgrading in the future

This is my first home server... It was a lot of work. I wanted to post this for those looking to take the plunge, but were hesitant. Here is my advice as a greenhorn after the first build.

Design for function:

I was not looking to learn Networking, so I built to what I needed now, built an architecture that is transferable, could repurpose hardware in the future (e.g. with ZimaBoard PCIe I could repurpose for an small AI assistant), and was low cost to operate.

Build Offline:

The build, the tweaking, and the documentation all take time and have their own learning curves. Do not plan to have this replace your home router on day one; it's possible, but not a realistic expectation for a beginner like myself.

Remember you are a beginner:

There are n number of devices to the power of n number of configurations, this isn't a "kit" and your build is personal. Information will be out of date, jargon will go over your head and expect to spend time translating, system specific errors will pop up that you have no clue why and what they mean... Then laugh. You are a beginner, IT is a profession for a reason; frustration is part of the process.

Documentation takes longer than the build:

I assumed that I would forget a lot of what I did or not understand parts that Gemini helped me with. I have 32 pages of documentation that takes me through the setup and why it is configured the way it is. Additionally I have documentation for restoration if anything fails.

It's worth it:

What is possible can only be comprehended by doing the build. You will regret some choices, but if you built to your function you will be happy with the actual results.

Edits: For typos and clarity

Been lurking for the better part of the last decade and finally have something that I can even call a "lab", but I've been feeling so giddy about even putting anything together that I wanted to share this post.

The setup:

• Pi 4 Model B | 4 GB RAM | 16 GB SD | Ubuntu 26.04
• WD MyBook | 4 TB

Pi is from 2021, before prices went all dicko mode and everything, and the MyBook is probably from around 10 years ago, lying around in my parents' home being unused. All the lab does right now is run dockerized Navidrome, but every time I stream a new song from it I get this little burst of satisfaction from the fact that I'm not paying Spotify anymore!

I'm sure as many people in this space did, I'm getting into self-hosting because I want to reduce how much I depend on big tech companies, regain control of my own data, and also better control where my dollars actually go in the world (because why tf is Spotify investing my subscription funds into AI drone defense companies)

So the plan is to upgrade slowly, and only as actual new use-cases arise (unless a killer deal pops up on the 3rd party market). Ideally I would like to avoid sinking my money into under-utilized hardware and I definitely want to avoid doing something stupid and losing access to files I want/need available as long as I'm alive.

Immich is probably the next thing I want to host, as all of my photographs are currently just chilling on my main PC with no remote backups. The Pi could *probably* handle running Immich and Navidrome simultaneously, but I'm pretty sure it'd put the Pi at max load. So the next piece of hardware to acquire could be a mini PC with a bit more compute/memory. The 4 TB MyBook is enough to store all of my data for the time being, and while it's not a whole RAID system, restic cloud backups give me some ease of mind in case of drive failure, so I think I can hold off on acquiring a NAS for a while--though it would be way cooler to have one.

If I do end up getting a mini PC, I might just run both Navidrome + Immich from that machine alone, and then keep the Pi for Pihole or something else. I've also read about Paperless-ngx in some threads here and it seems really useful because I've definitely had problems fishing around for years-old documents that I needed to provide for whatever reasons. Right now, everything is spread across the Documents and Downloads folders, on my phone and my PC, and some other forms are saved across like 3 random email inboxes. That said, with or without software to help me manage these documents, it still falls upon me to do the manual effort of tagging/organizing the files.

Anyways...

Even though I've barely done anything, the amount of research I've done and context that I've gained from setting this up feels really invaluable, and as someone who went to school for computer engineering I feel like this is stuff I really *should* know better anyway, so all-in-all this has been a 10/10 experience.

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

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! I recently added this server to my collection to try to consolidate my services that dont need too much speed for the stuff they are doing (Octoprint, Homeassistant, and pelican game servers that require tons of ram, aswell as Truenas and Jellyfin) The most (and kind of only) appealing part of this platform is that I could put 768 gb of ddr3 LRdimms 1.35 volt in a single system. For hosting an ark cluster this is so much more power and cost efficent than having 3 or 4 128 gb ram servers. However I noticed these dimms get HOT, and I have tried to do my best with lots of fans on the side pannel (Cooler master 932 HAF case) but theres only so much I can do with 4 optical drive bays covering the front. I was wondering if anyone knew the safe opperating temps of the dimms (I will add the exact model numbers shortly) and any good cooling tricks, I am struggling to find any decent looking aftermarket cooling solutions myself. Further the rest of the specs is a380 for jellyfin transcoding 2 e5 2670 v1s (though will be swapping for e5 2696 v2s) and I got a 10gb sfp+ card, 2 4tb hdds and 5 4tb sata ssds with anouther 3 tb worth of nvmes. I have repasted the chipset with PTM 7950 and dont know if that should be anouther area of concern, and will likely be repasting my sas and sfp+ card here in the near future.

Spec List:

24 32gb ddr3 LR Dims 1.35 volt

2 e5 2670 v1 (switching to 2 e5 2696 v2)

2 4TB HDDs (Jellyfin Libraries)

5 4TB Sata SSDs and 3tb worth of NVME

1000 watt msi AGL PSU

10gb SFP+ HPE card

LSI something sas card but I need to swap it because its currently the pcie gen 2 version

Intel a380

4 Optical drives... for liberating borrowed media

Software list:

Proxmox Hypervisor

Pelican game server vm

Truenas VM

Jellyfin VM

On the to-do list when I figure out the best method:

Octoprint

Homeassistant

Any further hardware or Software tips would be graciously appreciated 😄 .

Hey everyone, I'm building my first home server and trying to decide between TrueNAS, Unraid, and ZimaOS. OpenMediaVault is also an option I'm willing to consider, but those are my main three choices atm.

My hardware: Intel Core i5-10500 (using QuickSync), ASUS Prime B460M-A, 16 GB Non-ECC DDR4, 3x WD Red 4TB HDDs (WD40EFRX - CMR). I want to start with 1 parity/recovery disk so I get 8TB usable space and possibly add a 4th 4TB drive down the line to expand to 12TB usable.

What I plan to run: Jellyfin (max ~3 simultaneous streams for family/friends), Immich (family photo/video backup), Arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent), Nextcloud (maybe down the road).

So here's my questions:

1. Which OS would you recommend?

Which of the options would be the best fit for these workloads, particularly in terms of ease of use, reliability, and long-term maintenance? One important consideration is expandability (but probably with a same size drive). My understanding was that TrueNAS makes this difficult because of how ZFS handles RAIDZ expansion, although I've read that RAIDZ expansion has recently become possible. How practical is it now to start with three drives and add a fourth later? My second preference would be ZimaOS. Is there any disadvantage to it for my use case? Or differences in terms of how safe the data is in case of a drive failure / restoration.

1. Performance and drive longevity

Are there meaningful differences between these options in terms of read/write performance for my use case? I'm also curious about how the storage configurations compare in terms of HDD wear. For example, would a ZFS-based setup put significantly more load on the drives compared to others or is this not important for light home server workload?

Anddd while we're here, also a few unrelated questions:

1. I bought all three WD Red drives used. 2 have 10k power-on hours and 1 ~30k. Before putting them into service, what tests should I run to check their health? Just an extended SMART self-test or something else?

2. Using the server as a VPN: The server will be put in a country where I won't be living permanently. I'd like to route my internet traffic through my home server sometimes so that websites see me as browsing from that country. Can I set up a VPN server on the NAS for this? Is Tailscale the appropriate choice for this?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I've wanted for a few years by now to upgrade my homelab network to 10Gb, on a dime, so I've managed to score this "Cisco SX550X-52 52-Port 10GBase-T Stackable Managed Switch" on ebay for about $635.
All I need from it is VLAN segmentation, inter VLAN routing and maybe some ACL handling.

Is it a good buy?

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

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.

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?

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.

I have a remote site that only needs to send sensor readings and a heartbeat back to a server in my homelab. Every build thread I find solves it with a full Starlink dish running around the clock, and the power math bothers me.

A Standard dish pulls 40 to 75 W, the Mini still 25 to 40 W. That is roughly 0.6 to 1.5 kWh a day, every day. Off-grid that means a few hundred watts of extra panel, a bigger battery bank to ride through a cloudy week, and a charge controller sized for all of it. All to move a few kilobytes into my lab. It feels like buying a truck to deliver a postcard.

Duty-cycling the dish with a relay helps, but you are still waking a phased-array terminal to say "I'm alive, it's 4°C." Starlink is brilliant when you actually need bandwidth. For telemetry-class traffic it looks like the wrong tool.

So two questions for people who have done this:

1. What are you using for the "few bytes, no grid, no cell" uplink in 2026? LoRa or Meshtastic back to a gateway, a sat IoT modem, NB-IoT, something else?
2. How does it land on the lab side? MQTT broker on the rack, a small VPS relay, a LoRaWAN gateway at home, or something I'm not thinking of?

Edit:

Sorry, I should’ve mentioned the distance up front. The node’s about 30 miles out, behind a ridge with no line of sight to anything, no grid and no cell. Since it’s just a few bytes on a schedule, I’m going with a low-power satellite IoT setup rather than a 24/7 Starlink dish. Thanks all, the “what distance?” calls were fair.

Hey everyone, ill try to keep it brief:

I’m running 2 computers right now: Thinkpad 460 and a tower from 2013 (i7-4790k.) The thinkpad is my docker bot running Adguard, copyparty, MPD, etc. The tower PC I was planning to run syncthing or some NAS to offload the big files and backups off of the thinkpad. I have the laptop run 24/7 since its bios is locked down (dad’s old work laptop NOT ILLEGAL) so WoL doesn’t work and adguard for the network.

I was wondering should I run proxmox on both with the thinkpad as manager and the tower as a node with WOL? That way I can only turn on the tower when needed instead of always on.

Also, what should I run on my tower? (Its just a cpu and embedded graphics, but I have a 4gb r9 390 somewhere here and 3 tb of hdd storage)

Hello, I have 2x Micron 16GB DDR4 3200Mhz with ECC (model: 9ASF2G72AZ-3G2B1). I've tested them and work on ASRock A520M-HDV and Gigabyte B450 Aerous Elite. Work on both, but lacks the ECC support.

The problem is with an Asus Prime B550M-A Wifi II. One stick works, one doesn't, regardless if single or or dual channel or the slot.

From my researches the stick with the issue might be lower-bin silicone and Asus is more picky about ECC memory.

Any way to fix this without changing the ram or the motherboard ?

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've been looking into setting up a NAS cause I'm tired of paying these big companies just for them to sell my data later. Im looking to build a cloud storage/jellyfin or plex server.

I've looked at a couple prebuilt NAS setups but I'm not sure what would be best and how much storage I would need for what I'm trying to do.

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.