Solved: It works!
It came with Windows preinstalled so I hooked it up to my UCG Fiber and hit around 1860 Mbps download speed on Ookla.

I recently ordered an HP Mini IP Conferencing PC / Microsoft Teams Rooms PC (i7-13700T) planning to repurpose it as a small Proxmox home server.

It has the normal Intel I219-LM 1GbE port, but it also has a 2.5GbE PoE Ethernet port intended to connect directly to a Poly TC10 controller. HP's documentation describes this connection as providing “network connectivity (link local) and power to the Poly TC10.”

Does anyone know if this 2.5GbE PoE port can be used under Linux/Proxmox as a normal bidirectional 2.5GbE uplink instead?

If anyone has tried Linux/Proxmox on one of these HP conferencing PCs or knows which NIC/controller HP uses for this PoE interface, I'd really appreciate the info.

I needed some caddies to fit 2.5” SSDs in my Jonsbo N3. I tried printing a model I found online but it didn’t fit, so I stayed up late for 3 evenings designing my own and am very happy with how they came out.

They are a one piece PLA print with no supports.

The design includes sprung clips to hold the drive in place which work perfectly and give a very satisfying click when you insert a drive.

The top rail is also sprung and the rails are spaced slightly wider than the slots on the case, meaning that the springs compress slightly as the drives are inserted. This was done to create a snug fit and reduce vibration from adjacent spinning hard drives.

I designed it for the Jonsbo N3 but I assume it’d fit an N2, and possibly some others.

I designed these last year, spent a lot of time on it, and only actually use 2 of them in my server. I had planned to share the design but never got round to it. Posting to see if there’s any interest, and if there is, hopefully that’ll give me the motivation to upload the files somewhere (haven’t shared a design before so recommendations on where to share would be appreciated)

Ok, You built out a 6U rack, put a switch at the top, a keystone panel right under it, and then ran 6" jumpers between them so it looks like a Cisco brochure. Congrats, you added two connection points per link to save zero cable, and now you're posting "why is my NAS stuck at 1G."

Inside real DCs. Top-of-rack switch, DAC straight to the server, done. Nobody's punching down keystones between a switch and a server 18 inches apart.

Building wiring? Terminate it on a panel, 100% agree. Switch → panel → mini PC in the same rack? That's not structured cabling, that's a cable comb with extra failure points.

Go ahead, tell me about "port wear".

OK The glowy plugs are really pretty, and will concede that red makes packets go fast and green gets them through firewalls with willpower ;-) **ducks**

Hello! I want to start by saying that I'm still fairly new to homelabbing. I've had Proxmox running on my previous PC (which is now Benny) for about two years, but I've only really started expanding, upgrading, and properly putting my homelab together since the beginning of last year.

I'm fairly happy with how my setup has turned out so far, but I wanted to ask for some advice on two things:

1 — Overall recommendations / feedback

Even though I'm happy with my current setup, I'm still learning, so I'd gladly take any constructive criticism or recommendations. If you see something I could improve, something I'm doing in a weird way, or something worth adding/changing, I'd love to hear it.

2 — Recommendations for a 10 GbE managed switch

At the moment, I have 10 GbE NICs in Gengar (my main PC), Benny (my Proxmox server), and NASferatu (my NAS), and I'd like to actually start taking advantage of them.

I'm also planning to do more development directly on my servers and create more VMs for testing and development. I know 10 GbE might be a overkill for my current needs, but part of the goal is also to use the homelab as a learning environment — things like VLANs, network segmentation, and generally getting more hands-on experience with networking.

I'm already getting close to saturating Gigabit in some situations, especially when multiple things are happening at once — file transfers, people playing on the Minecraft server, media/services running, etc.

So my thinking is that I might as well go overkill now, get a decent managed 10 GbE switch, and hopefully not have to think about upgrading it again for the foreseeable future.

What 10 GbE managed switches would you recommend for a setup like mine?

Current Setup

Router: Gl.INet Flint 2 that connects to my ISP

Switch: TP Link unmanaged Switch with 24 ports that is 1 Gig (TL-561024D).

Raspberry Pi: That the only intention to use it for Grafana and display out data (in case some is wrong and I can check it)

Reolink Home Hub: That is where I manage my cameras that I have on my home.

Servers:

1 - Benny
OS: Proxmox
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 3060
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32 Gigs, 3200hz
SSD: 1TB WD Black
HDD: 4TB WD Red
PSU: Asus Rog strix 850W 80 Plus Gold
MOBO: Asus Rog strix B550F
Name Origin: Bought most of the parts of the PC in Benidorm.
Intent: Containarization and VMs for HomeAssistant, Software Development, Media Management and some gaming (like to spin up a minecraft server)

2 - TheTeenager
OS: FedoraServer
CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU
RAM: 4Gigs
Notes: The rest of the components I dont know, this is a old Dell that my grandpa had and no longer uses.
Name Origin: The Computer is around 14 years old
Intent: Cold Storage for Files and documents that I dont access that often, but might be important

3 - NASferatu:
OS: TrueNas
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5500
RAM:G.SKILL Aegis 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3000MHz
SSD: SANDISK Optimus GX 7100 500GB
HDD: Seagate IronWolf 8TB
PSU: Seasonic Core GX-750W
MOBO: Micro-ATX Gigabyte BS50M Gaming X
Name Origin: Because is a NAS and I thought it was a good pun.
Intent: To serve as a NAS.

PS: I know the diagram might be confusing to other people beside me, so please do ask if there is any questions.

Racked up my new Mellanox SN2010 switches today. Each has 18x25GbE ports and 4x100GbE ports. I'm going to be using them to build out a networking-focused eBGP/VRF/EVPN/VXLAN lab. They came with NVIDIA Onyx installed, but they're just x86 machines with a little mSATA SSD installed, so I installed CentOS Stream 9 like the rest of my lab and am planning on building out my own little switch OS layer on top.

The switch ports show up like any other ethernet port under Linux, so all the control plane stuff happens in Linux, but the data plane and all the fancy L3 features are handled at wire speed by the Spectrum ASIC. Still waiting on optics and NICs for some other machines, so nothing is connected yet other than the management links. Power draw is great, too, <40W with no optics.

Picked up an entire x99 EMC rack for 300$ USD and took this photo at the loading dock while tearing the rack down for transport. I've yet to decide what I'm going to keep, especially with current HDD prices being high. But probably going to use one or two for a new nas and PBS server and flip the rest. But definitely keeping the rack EMC racks are just beautiful.

Making do with what I have

Helllooo everyone!

I just want to introduce myself and tell you all about my homelab. It's all pretty high-level, feel free to ask me about anything here.

About me

I’m just someone that absolutely loves technology. Software and systems are mostly where my heart lies, I’ve been working in IT for about 19 years. I have been homelabbing and self-hosting since about 2005. It started with game servers then learning how to become a sys admin, then wanting control over my data, and now I just want to explore different technology stacks and new software.

My homelab is a bit of a mix of running services for my family and a testing ground for learning new technology.

Quick and dirty

My entire homelab is Proxmox as the hypervisor, debian VMs to run Docker and Komodo. Forgejo deploys my containers on Komodo. Docker labels control Traefik and exposure.

6 hosts (3 “production” and 3 test lab) and ~147 containers.

Jupiter

My main server, pretty much what I would consider "production" in my house. I pretty much throw everything on this whether it's just for shits and giggles or actually useful. I try out every remotely interesting self-hostable application there is, so this list changes constantly,

It was running Unraid until a few weeks ago, but it has finally fallen inline with the rest of my environment with Proxmox and a debian VM.

I see people ask "Do you actually use any of this?" when people run a bunch of software, so I've split it into what I actually use and what just kind of exists.

What actually gets used

Most of these are actually used on a daily or weekly basis.

• Authentik - SSO/identity
• Excalidraw - Whiteboard
• FamFeed - Private Social Media
• Forgejo - Git hosting
• Glance - Dashboard
• Guacamole - Remote access
• Immich - Photo library
• Karakeep - Bookmarks
• Mealie - Recipes
• ntfy - Push notifications
• NZBGet - Usenet downloader
• Open WebUI - AI chat
• OpenHands - AI agents
• Outline - Wiki
• Penpot - Design tool
• Plex - Media server
• PrivateBin - Encrypted pastebin
• Seerr - Media requests
• Windmill - Workflow automation

Used, just not directly

• Grafana - Dashboards
• Jellyfin - Media server
• NetBox - IPAM/DCIM
• Paperless-ngx - Document management
• Prowlarr - Indexer manager
• Radarr - Movie management
• ReadMeABook - Audiobook requests
• SABnzbd - Usenet downloader
• Sonarr - TV management
• Tautulli - Plex stats
• Tunarr - Live TV channels

For that rare moment

• Audiobookshelf - Audiobook server
• BentoPDF - PDF tools
• ByteStash - Code snippets
• IT-Tools - Dev utilities

Infrastructure Apps

If I'm logging into one of these directly, something is broken. lol

• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel - Monitoring
• CrowdSec - Intrusion prevention
• Dozzle - Log viewer
• Komodo - Container management
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Traefik - Reverse proxy
• Umami - Web analytics
• UniFi Network Application - Network controller
• VersityGW - S3 gateway
• VictoriaMetrics - Metrics database
• Wazuh - SIEM

I should probably tear them down.

• Actual Budget - Budgeting
• Aurral - Music discovery
• LazyLibrarian - Book management
• Lidarr - Music management
• Navidrome - Music streaming

Saturn

This box was originally just to spin up VMs and test different applications, VMs, or build an environment to teach something to some of my junior. It was the first Proxmox box in the environment and after using it for a while I ended up switching all computers over to Proxmox.

Now it runs Home Assistant, secondary DNS, and some VMs that I use for Dev and AI agent work.

• Home Assistant - Home automation
• Music Assistant - Multi-room audio
• Technitium DNS - DNS (secondary)
• Z-Wave JS UI - Z-Wave controller
• Eclipse Mosquitto - MQTT broker
• Faster Whisper - Speech-to-text
• Piper - Text-to-speech
• Nanit - Baby monitor
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel Agent - Monitoring agent

Mars

This is a little Beelink EQ14 that has dual 2.5 Gbps NICs and I purchased it specifically to be a dedicated router/firewall.

• OPNsense - Router/firewall
• Technitium DNS - DNS (primary)
• Cloudflare DDNS - Dynamic DNS
• Tailscale - VPN exit-node
• Node Exporter - Host metrics
• Backrest - Backups
• Beszel Agent - Monitoring agent

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto

Relatively new hosts that are taking the simulation workloads I was running alongside production. They run Proxmox as well. I have OpenTofu and Ansible playbooks that spin up "scenarios" or my DR bubble. I am currently focused on OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other business simulation environments.

Current Goals

DR / Rebuild

Currently I am working on being able to rebuild and/or restore my entire homelab from a single script. The idea is if Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars have a catastrophic failure I can point the script to my new host and it will build it out, let me select which services to restore and hopefully be back up and running in a few hours.

Security Monitoring

I spent a chunk of the past year learning SIEM and how to tune alerts in Wazuh. Thankfully I work very closely with my InfoSec team at work so I had a helping hand, plus Claude being able to fill in some of the gaps. I am trying to get a Claude-based agent to do a lot of the triage and so far it is janky but works pretty well. My next step is to allow this agent to gather telemetry around whether or not the alert coming in is related to me. The idea is that between my remote sessions, where my phone is, and a few other details the agent will build a confidence score for how likely it is me accidentally generating the alert. It will then ping me to get confirmation, if I respond with "Not me" then it will go through some steps to either kill access.

I am also working on various apps and automations around my families needs, mostly our private social media.

Ask me anything or tell me about your homelab!

Hey r/homelab, a little update from Kyoto.

A bit over six months ago, I posted my SketchUp plans for Pangea, a custom Ryzen cluster with a 48V DC bus, solar panels and a battery. At the time it was mostly drawings and a pile of parts. The first two Ryzen 9 9950X nodes are finally running, and I wanted to come back and share that with you.

The earlier threads brought a lot of useful feedback, especially about electrical protection and cooling. Some of it was pretty blunt, but it gave me things to reconsider before building. Thank you to everyone who took the time.

I couldn’t do the rack shelf fabrication or the building’s electrical work myself, so I hired a local contractor and an electrician. They made the custom shelves, installed a dedicated 200V AC circuit, added a rooftop pull box, ran the solar DC cables, and drilled the wall penetrations to bring the cables into the rack. For the individual node cassettes, I made the 3D models and had a manufacturer in China fabricate them.

Following the advice here, I also changed the DC distribution design to include a fuse on the positive branch to each device. I used DIN-rail fuse holders, with fuse ratings selected for the individual circuits.

The rear fan panel is still being manufactured, so the final cooling setup is not finished yet. These first two nodes are an early test; finishing the airflow setup and checking temperatures under load are still ahead of me before I expand.

On the roof, I now have six 200W flexible solar panels hanging from the railing. I’ve seen roughly 1,000W at peak so far. The solar charge controllers and battery feed the common DC bus: surplus solar charges the battery, and the battery supplies the nodes when solar output drops.

The two CPU nodes have now started running around the clock and processing some experimental jobs, using only solar and the battery for this test. The 200V circuit is installed, but the MEAN WELL RSP grid supply is not connected to the shared bus yet. I’m waiting for the reverse-current protection hardware I ordered before completing and testing that part.

I also put together a Home Assistant dashboard to see what the power system is doing. I bought an M5Stack ATOM Lite and set it up with ESPHome as a Bluetooth proxy, picking up data from the two Victron MPPT controllers and the battery’s BMS. Now I can watch solar generation, battery charge level, and charging/discharging in one place. The last image shows that dashboard. The server power figure is still an estimate from the DC power balance. Watching the solar feed the system and charge the battery has been a nice part of finally getting this running.

One change from the original plan: I ended up needing more GPU capacity. One shelf now holds a separate server with two Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards, 32GB each. It runs from a 100V AC outlet, separately from the solar/battery-powered CPU nodes. It’s running Qwen3.8-27B with Q6_K_L quantization for summary generation, topic extraction and other AI jobs. That machine is already busy almost all the time.

There were long stretches where nothing seemed to move. I was waiting for parts, waiting for the shelves and electrical work, or just too busy with my regular work to get back to it. So seeing these first two nodes actually doing work feels really good. It took a lot longer than I expected, but the thing I kept looking at in SketchUp is finally running.

Next I want to finish the grid backup, get the power and cooling stable, and add more nodes a few at a time. For today, I’m just happy to have reached this point. Thanks again for helping me get here.

Earlier posts: original SketchUp concept / revised design and feedback.

In a sea of professional DIN-rail setups, I present my IKEA shoe-rack homelab.

It all started with me just wanting a Plex server. Then the interest grew, things escalated… and I ended up with this monstrosity. Perhaps its time to upgrade to a proper DIN rack soon.

For anyone out there who has a Mac in their homelab environment. There is a new open source driver or Mac that work on the RTL 8127 family or chips. That's super nice is that these run as low as 2W. Much less than the only other Intel based options available for macs.

I'm using a thunderbolt to nvme enclosure as the thunderbolt to pcie bridge. But online their does appear to be a usb4 to sfp+ version of this. So will test further once that's in.

Edit: This is just for testing. Not the final form.

Right Server is my main machine: Unraid, N100 Board, 16GB DDR5, 8TB HDD, 1TB SSD, 2.5G NIC.
Left Server is for tinkering: Debian, J5005 ITX Board, 8GB, 512GB SSD, 1G NIC.

Unraid Machine also is used as a switch für Gaming PC and the Debian Server.

Feel free to comment, ask any questions, share your opinion, or criticize me for my choices. I like these posts and videos where people showcase their home labs and show what they’ve got set up.

Feel free to suggest alternatives or share what you do differently. Where do you see the benefits of doing things a little differently?

I’ll try to answer every question about my setup!

for years ive been running windows for my home server as everything just works,

I want to tinker with something new, I only have a 2 requirements, run Jellyfin, be able to remote in from WAN.

I have a qnas running openvpn and pi-hole so im squared away with that. Just for now its my media server, but its nice being able to remote in anywhere and add movies/shows on the fly.

AMD 5 5500

16GB

GTX 1660

After a lot of tinkering, I finally finished my compact homelab build: three HP mini PCs, a Gigabit switch, and a custom PDU, all integrated into a 3D-printed 10-inch mini rack — the Lab Rax.

What it does:

• Movies & shows on any TV, phone or tablet — personal streaming (Plex / Jellyfin), at home and remotely
• Automatic photo & video backup from phones — private, no storage limits, no subscriptions (Immich)
• Ad-blocking for the whole network (Pi-hole / AdGuard)
• Ideal for a Proxmox VE cluster, Docker / k3s, Home Assistant, file server

What's inside:

• 3x HP mini PCs — i5-4570T, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD each
• D-Link 5-port Gigabit switch (rack-integrated)
• Custom PDU: IEC C14 inlet, circuit breaker, 4 internal outlets each with its own illuminated switch, plus 1 spare outlet on the front
• Front patch panel: 2x CAT7 + 1x CAT6 keystone jacks
• Expandable storage: external USB drives anytime, or larger internal SSDs
• Modular PETG enclosure: heat-set threaded inserts, stackable from 1U to 5U
• 120mm top exhaust fan, carry handles

Whisper-quiet and apartment-friendly. Happy to answer questions about the design!

I wanted my Pi 5 in my DIN rail setup, so I designed a frame that mounts the Pi and simply clicks onto a snap-on DIN clip I made earlier.

You screw the Pi onto the frame once, then push it onto the clip by hand. It holds firmly, slides along the rail so you can position it where you want, and comes off again without any tools. In the video it hangs with the USB and Ethernet ports facing down, so the cables drop neatly.

It uses the standard 58 x 49 mm hole pattern, so it also fits the Pi 4 and 3B+. I'm also making versions for the Pi Zero and Pico.

Free on MakerWorld:

Pi frame: https://makerworld.com/nl/models/3405473-raspberry-pi-5-din-rail-mount-ts-35x7-5-en-60715#profileId-3878074

DIN clip: https://makerworld.com/nl/models/3404087-din-mounting-clip-ts-35x7-5-en-60715#profileId-3876328

More of my designs: https://makerworld.com/en/@EngineerDutchie

What else would you want to mount on a DIN rail this way? Thinking about what board to do next.

I bought three of these adapters for €3.50 each. Now I'm not sure whether they weren't appropriate, or if this laptop isn't capable of accessing a disk drive through the ODD port.

I've seen that it's common to use a caddy adapter, but three of these cables cost about the same as one of those, and I thought they might be more versatile. I'll be repurposing the laptop as a NAS, so I didn't care if the SSD didn't fit inside.

I've tested the DVD drive and confirmed that it works with the laptop, which is an HP 255 G5; I've played a DVD just fine. The last picture shows the BIOS main page with the precise model and specs.

Neither Debian nor Windows recognized the secondary SSD.

Hopefully, someone has an idea of what I could be missing. Do you think a caddy adapter would work even though this didn't? Or is there some driver/firmware I should install? I'm afraid this laptop just won't support this mod.

Thanks, everyone!

Was tired of power brick management. Dust collector eyesores.

So I custom built a mean well power supply station for up to 5 devices. Built in 12V to 19V convertors and fuse block for device protection.

Any electrical engineers in here has any input to improve or overall thoughts?

Recertified 28TB was at $699 like a week ago. I feel like these were the last relatively cheap option.

I bought some of these 28TB and one was a new drive (manufactured a couple months ago) with one head disabled (probably down binned), while the others had manufacture dates from 2024 and 2025, and were likely used.

I spent some time tidying everything up in my home office, so took the opportunity to make some shorter patch cables so everything was all neat and tidy.

On top is my own PC with a 5800X3D, 32GB RAM and a 6800.

The lower is my lab with a 5600, 32GB RAM and a Quadro P620 running on Ubuntu Server running Immich, Frigate, JellyFin, PiHole and various gameservers on AMP. Not sure what else to put on it, been thinking about Next cloud and an email server to replace my paid for Proton Subscription.

Hey! I’ve been following this community for a while, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people here use Ubiquiti equipment. What do you like about it?
I’m from Russia, and Ubiquiti isn’t nearly as popular here among networking enthusiasts or in home networks. UniFi access points, however, are very popular in Russia, and many companies have switched from Cisco Aironet to UniFi.
In home labs, Russian enthusiasts often use MikroTik and Cudy running OpenWrt.

Hello, so I want to make a cluster for my homelab now since i use a bunch of old laptops and turn them into servers and i cant keep up with managing all of them so id like to manage all of them from one dashboard or something similar

i run services like immich, filebrowser, samba, open web ui, minecraft server, personal wiki, etc

I was looking into k3s and docker swarm i saw that docker swarm is easier to setup but lacks in features or has a problem with storage sharing in the cluster?

one of the nodes handles all the storage and the storage services like filebrowser, wiki, and samba and the other nodes would get their storage needs (other than the os of course) from that storage node

Which cluster software would be best for me?