Rebuilding My Homelab From Scratch

For the tinkerers, have a test server.

To me, it seems like a 10Gbp switch is overkill considering that the mechanical drives can only go up to 600Mbp/s unless you got some NVME caching.

I started out with Raspberries I had lying around. Now, I'm acquiring these cool Lenovo M715q, I think. With the Ryzen 5. Two of three are existing. Slowly being upgraded. An old Mobo+CPU combo with 64 GB RAM is hosting my NAS with TrueNAS, here I plan to upgrade my networking (specifically to my PC).

Currently, I'm hosting a couple of game servers for me and my friends and I'm hosting – of course – Home Assistant, Jellyfin, immich, paperless… You name it. 😀
Ubiquiti Equipment with their self hosted controller.

Next step overall will be a router build. I'm still deciding on what type of router I would want to have since I'm interested in tinkering but I also just have 1 gig… Not like it needs that much power overall. If my main gaming Mobo + CPU are replaced, I will definitely repurpose them, too 😀

(As you can already read: I'm really on the tinkering side with Homelabs… :D)

I got 4 Lenovo M710Q's 32gb of ram running Proxmox with a few VM's (ubuntu severs and Linux versions, portainer…etc) and a supermicro mini server Xeon X3270 running IPfire for the firewall. TP-Link SDN setup with a few switches/Acess points throughout and their vpn router. Mounted in a 22u rack pulled out of the dump…Reused and renewed….

I will be starting my home lab soon.

Only thing I'm changing is that I'm adding a TP-Link ER605 so that I can use multiple upstream ISPs, so I can easily fallback to T-Mobile 5G Home when my normal ISP has an outage, which seems to happen briefly on pretty much a daily basis. I have both modems near my router, and I've been moving the WAN cable on my router to the different modems as needed, but it's tedious and I have no way to check to see if the higher-speed ISP is back up before throwing the cable. Since I work from home, a solid Internet connection is probably the most important part of my system, so that's where I'm concentrating my efforts.

For your hypothetical “starting over scenario”, didn’t you leave out your home surveillance camera setup?

Beware that the CyberPower UPS mentioned in this video has simulated sine wave output on battery. I bought a similar model and had to return it as my home server shut down the moment I tested the battery. I upgraded to a true sine wave UPS with otherwise near-identical specs and everything was fine, so I'd always advise paying the extra for this upgrade.

Is that CyberPower UPS compatible with Unraid? I have my homelab on an old Optiplex with Unraid and was looking for a compatible UPS which Unraid could integrate with and start the shutdown procedure in case of power outage.

Oh man! Looking forward to seeing your soho router "jailbreak"!

You are scratching an itch I've had for thay for a while now.

ay if you don't need one of those prodesks swing em my way lmao

It starts with a old or free computer… You start to justify why you need to spend hundreds…thousands of dollars upgrading your server… It NEVER ends. But it is fun 🙂

Great video! Thanks for sharing your though process. I'm actually in the process of renewing most of my homelab. Most of my stuff is currently quite noisy, big and powerhungry. And not that fast. So yeah: I'm gonna renew quite some stuff.

Note on UPS', it differs widly how 'necesarry' it is across the world. In the past 20 years or so we only had 2 outages. Yes TWO. For a home server it's simply a total waste of money, unless you're doing really specific stuff

That is a bit of a mix, not something I would do (or have).
Something's make sense, but some things are out of order.

The first step is the upgrade path, now and some time in the future. Then some form of redundancy both in backups and power.
The 1ltr pc is good for small and low power, but you are limited. The old desktop may work but also has some limits stopping that upgrade path.

Let's say a dell desktop and a jbod and 10bge. You may have a GPU for transcoding, so it then needs 3 express slots. Does the dell off this? But you may want more features and need more ports.
And so on.
While big discs sound fun a single failure is more a problem, so redundancy is important, and off system storage is important if you don't want to be spending hours or days transferring files.

I've a all in one built into a node 802, it's got a sas card and 10 gbe as well as ten drives. I can run VM's but the power consumption is a bit high and the compute low.

This doesn't get used, but my 1ltr Lenovo does most work in the day to day, but I have a hp micro server that is my nas and back up so this can also run a range of services, but doesn't have as much compute as the node 802.
Behind all this is a few rack servers and jbods with a lot of compute, not something you would like to run due to the power consumption, but I generally use it for the other system back ups and tinkering.
I have a high speed 10gbe fibre network though managed switches, because they are cheap and easy to do.
I think the back bone of any network has to be the data transmission and connectivity, as you can always add to that. What you add is up to you, but for home lab, and home services being two different things.😮
As long as you have always available in mind you have a great foundation.

But what if the tornado was starting a home lab?

The homelab space is an ever moving goal post. The only real hope you can have is that once its set up, you can manage it all with relative ease. I ended up moving a bunch of services to many machines because an unreliable single service would often require rebooting the host and thus taking them all down. I un-consolidated for the reliability. I can say dont make my mistakes with some relative confidence.

for me, time to start with homelab was when I had multiple computers/laptops with multiple various systems I needed centralized storage, that time it was a LAN-only setup (terribly slow internet), so I started with a 4-bay Synology NAS (918+), it's a flawless device+DSM basically "set and forget",
then since new ISP provided about 100x faster internet (seriously), I slowly started looking at better routers (to serve more devices), got WiFi 6 ASUS router (AX86S), set up own VPN too, it's a "set and forget" too,
then I realized a potential of proper Proxmox rig for VMs/Docker would be better done separate and found some old SFF PC (4th gen i7, 32GB ram) to use, mainly testing Windows updates and examining OpnSense networking,
now I'm experimenting with AI stuff, deciding between used Apple Silicon rig or used nVidia RTX rig, and also whether to use Docker or not – but that would be all just for tinkering…

i kinda watch you like from the start this yt acc or another but it some how this video feel like nostalgic

My homelab is a custom built PC in a new old stock case from 2005 or so. Erying Polestar G613 board with an engineering sample i9 on it, 64GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, 10gig ASUS NIC, and 4x4TB drives in RAIDZ1. Not ideal drive config but it works.

Runs Proxmox and does everything I need it to and more. I would love to experiment with GPU passthrough and stuff with it but I’m using the x16 slot for the network card.

Haven’t really found a need to expand it more than that so far!

I've been running a Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF for more than a year now and it's been perfect. Self hosting a couple websites, home assistant, blue iris, radio streaming server, SMB share for file share across the home network, batocera for some retro gaming, amongst some other VMs running docker for testing and tinkering. Cost me less than £100 to get started (second hand from eBay) and it's perfectly upgradable as you mentioned. It's crazy to think that this machine was at some point 'limited' by only running windows when it's now running all sorts of things and it has plenty of resources left.

The title is really misleading and confusing.

You need to try MikroTik products 🙂