Homelab & Selfhosting Thread - One Day it will be a Home Datacenter, you just gotta believe!

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Is it worth the Power Bill?

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Unicorn Fairie said:
How do I make my server not hurt my ears? I am very sensitive to noise :-(
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Generally either pick components that are quieter and a noise suppressing case, or relocate the server to a closet or something that keeps you from hearing it
 
Unicorn Fairie said:
How do I make my server not hurt my ears? I am very sensitive to noise :-(
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I just use consumer grad components. You can get cases and rails off of NewEgg/eBay/whatever that fit standard ATX stuff.

Switches are expensive so you might get one used that's really loud. Fret not. Open up the switch (be careful, there is mains voltage in there if it's plugged in) and see if you can replace the fans with Noctuas. You will likely have to de-pin the existing connectors (get a little pick tool) as the wires are usually in a different order. I've done that on several pieces of enterprise equipment and gotten a lot of it really quite. If the equipment has a fan alarm, you can stop the fan with a finger and make sure the alarm still triggers. Even with expensive Noctuas, it will still likely be cheaper than trying to buy the same equipment new.

Keep your rack in a dedicated lab room with a door you can close.

If you want a lot of powerful nodes in a small amount of space, get a NUC rack mount bracket. Depending on the size of NUCs, you can fit up to 12 of the Intel/Asus units in a 3U. I have several of these with 10G over Thunderbolt used for Proxmox. They're not cheap, but if you want small quiet powerhouses to continually do your scraping or number crunching, they work pretty well:


(they've got an eBay store too; how I found them originally).

At some point I hope to build or buy a shed and run power/fiber to it. That way I can also use regular enterprise rack equipment and not give a shit about the noise.
 
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Slav Power said:
What if I want to move this array to another machine? Do I just replug the drives to another machine that supports ZFS, set them up as a ZFS array and the software just magically knows this is a ZFS array of this type, this size with this arrangement?
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Yea, I've also been forced to use this before and it was fairly easy. I have to look up the right commands every time something like this happens but its like a couple commands to recover an array and put it right back into use. Its more work to set it up the first time.

In theory since ZFS is fault tolerant (personally i use it in zfs2 mode which is two drives deep before data loss) you could take any viable combo of the drives and recover them into an array and then add in replacement drives and regrow it back to normal. (it works in 'degraded' mode but the performance is horrendous)
 
I'm just using mergerfs. I'll problably continue to use it until the first time a drive fails on me and I couldn't replace it in time.
 
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Betonhaus said:
I'm just using mergerfs. I'll problably continue to use it until the first time a drive fails on me and I couldn't replace it in time.
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I think mergerfs is great. If you use HDDs it's impossible to not get your data off on time. It is highly unlikely the drive will just fail.

Monitor them with scrutiny and you'll have enough time to take a shower, drink your morning coffee, maybe even go on vacation for a month before you risk actually losing data. These fuckers are resilient. I have a 2TB disk from TEN YEARS ago without issues. Granted, I'm not using it to store important data out of an abundance of caution, but I have not lost anything from it.

For RAID or other filesystems that require lots of extra space it's such a higher cost in energy & disk purchases that it doesn't really make sense to me unless you have Linus levels of disposable income, and even then it's probably a bit of a waste. Do you really need high availability in your home for your Plex server? If you're worried about data loss just backup. I'd recommend Duplicati with an ftp backup location
 
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I came into possession of a bunch of thinkcentre m715q tiny's for a bargain price at auction (about £25 each). One has gone to the wife, to replace the ancient zotac she was using as a writing computer. I'm thinking I could re-purpose that as some sort of shonky NAS. I think the other three are going to become an expanded cluster alongside the not-a-NUC. Just got to finish some renovations first. Wife requirement.
 
teriyakiburns said:
I came into possession of a bunch of thinkcentre m715q tiny's for a bargain price at auction (about £25 each). One has gone to the wife, to replace the ancient zotac she was using as a writing computer. I'm thinking I could re-purpose that as some sort of shonky NAS. I think the other three are going to become an expanded cluster alongside the not-a-NUC. Just got to finish some renovations first. Wife requirement.
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I followed this guide for a similar PC and made a Proxmox server out of it which is pretty neat given you can find lightly damaged ones all over the place.
 
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This thread is baller as fuck

Two questions:

- what’s the consensus on QNAP NAS enclosures? Should I immediately nuke mine or what

- what’s the best open source llm available? I’ve done a bunch of reading and it seems like deepseek v3 might be it, I want to play with an llm like that or maybe Claude 3.5? I can acquire the hardware but I’m not sure which is the best all around model
 
The I Scream Man said:
- what’s the best open source llm available? I’ve done a bunch of reading and it seems like deepseek v3 might be it, I want to play with an llm like that or maybe Claude 3.5? I can acquire the hardware but I’m not sure which is the best all around model
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Deepseek-R1 just came out that supposedly is on par with claude3.5 and gpt-o1. I've played around with it a bit and it's fairly good, can't really speak to comparisons against other stuff.

Meta is apparently freaking out about it (taking that with a grain of salt). But this was posted to Blind:
1737922357024.webp


I've been using this one, it's about 8gb.

if you use ollama you can run it like
Code: 
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-GGUF:Q8_0

But fact of the matter is you'll probably want to try several different ones and play around with it. You will probably find certain ones do better at different tasks.
 
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Working on a relatively simple all-in-one guide for homelabbing phone-posters.
Effectively how to:
Set up Opnsense on a shitbox
Set up Proxmox on another shitbox
Set up Pi-hole
Wireguard from your phone to a VPN server vendor
Wireguard from your phone to your home Opnsense box
Wireguard outbound network traffic from your Opnsense box to a VPN server vendor
Route traffic from the inbound tunnel to the outbound tunnel.

"why not just phone-post from a normal VPN server like everyone else?"
Because this is the homelabbing thread and I want to encourage a setup for people to enjoy their homelab services from their phone while browsing the site safely!

Is there anything people have encountered setting this up that I may not account for in my own guide? personal hardship? quirks?
 
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I’m looking to host a git-based software forge on my Proxmox cluster. Right now I’m looking at Gitlab and the Gitea fork Forgejo. I have experience with Gitlab, but I’m hesitant to host it myself since I’ve read it’s a resource hog. Does anyone know how forgejo’s cicd stacks up against gitlab?
 
Dr Bathroom said:
I’m looking to host a git-based software forge on my Proxmox cluster. Right now I’m looking at Gitlab and the Gitea fork Forgejo. I have experience with Gitlab, but I’m hesitant to host it myself since I’ve read it’s a resource hog. Does anyone know how forgejo’s cicd stacks up against gitlab?
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I have a proxmox cluster, but I haven't tried hosting any of those. Right now I'm still using Gitlab.com. For CI/CD, I did move off of Gitlab into a locally hosted instance of Laminar which has jobs kicked off by webhook. I'm not sure if I'll get around to moving to my own forge, but if I do, I want to try out Radicle to see if it's any good.
 
HootersMcBoobies said:
I have a proxmox cluster, but I haven't tried hosting any of those. Right now I'm still using Gitlab.com. For CI/CD, I did move off of Gitlab into a locally hosted instance of Laminar which has jobs kicked off by webhook. I'm not sure if I'll get around to moving to my own forge, but if I do, I want to try out Radicle to see if it's any good.
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I’ll have to check those out sometime. I ended up going with Forgejo since there was a Proxmox helper script available. Since it’s an LXC, I can quickly spin up the Postgres db in the same container.
 
Dr Bathroom said:
I’m looking to host a git-based software forge on my Proxmox cluster. Right now I’m looking at Gitlab and the Gitea fork Forgejo. I have experience with Gitlab, but I’m hesitant to host it myself since I’ve read it’s a resource hog. Does anyone know how forgejo’s cicd stacks up against gitlab?
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I have used gitlab in a work setting; it is indeed a resource hog.

Right now I host a couple forgejo instances. There is integrated CI/CD in forgejo but it is beta quality at best. What most people (including forgejo devs) do is set up woodpecker CI (forked from drone after they went closed source). It is about as straightforward as setting up forgejo, and the official docs for both will get you going in an afternoon if you're decently comfortable with your system, as a bonus you can point woodpecker at other places including your public/private github and not just what you're hosting yourself. Protip: don't use the local backend for the runner, but install the docker engine on the host running woodpecker-agent and configure accordingly.

I have a magical kubernetes setup for one instance that uses the cluster to run the pods that run the pipelines but I wouldn't recommend if you're not looking to get into bullshit cloud architecture cluster nonsense.
 
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