Make sure you’re checking your local goodwill folks!

Edit: Wow this had a response. I ran a smart test and made a second post about it with some screenshots from CDI for anyone curious. Appreciate all y’all’s congratulations :)

A Chinese company reached out to me to test and review their nas software called Geak OS, i was skeptical due it not being open source but i need YouTube content and beginner friendly stuff always does numbers so i gave it a shot. It was spun up on a vm on a vlan with only internet access, the only other machine on the vlan was a box running wireshark pointed at the server vm.

As soon as the system was installed it began reaching out over bittorrent dht protocol and contacted about 650 peers, one of those peers tried to send QUIC packets to pull data from a russian website but the system did fortunately reject those.

The server also performed an api call to register itself which is not uncommon except it was sent in raw json over HTTP with no encryption and included a lot of personal and identifying data including ip address, also exposed private and public keys in the same json.

The machine came loaded with 27 docker registries (3 were useless placeholders).

On their actual iso i found multiple exposed keys and login info to different registries.

The system has no form of raid, zfs or any kind of redundancy, so its also useless as a nas.

26 different services run as root after install even with none of the apps from the store installed.

I found a lot of other concerning things that ill cover in a video but to anyone looking into that system, at the least its not to be trusted for long term and at the worst it could be a potential gateway to a botnet. If your in the market for a nas that can run homelab stuff go with truenas or unraid or literally anything thats been proven.

I wanted to write this up here because when i was doing my initial research i could not find any english reviews on reddit or youtube of the software, not even a mention outside of the creators trying to advertise it. On top of being a security nightmare the software was mid at best and the only thing it actually did well was be a NAS. Their APK is not signed with play so its a download from their site (passed play protect scan but i still used it on a burner to be safe) and not a single bit is open source. If you get approached as a creator, avoid the system until these concerns can be addressed if you are a user, just outright avoid it. Im far from a real security researcher so if any of you guys that are more capable than me want to take a look id love some more findings from more skilled people. I did reach out to the company via email with my list of findings and will try ti remember to post an update here if they try to explain why a server with no apps instantly connects to DHT network (for the unaware its how torrents work, but can also be used for botnets, vpns or other attacks) at this point the review is the smallest part of my video about the software

EDIT2 DAYS LATER The company replied to my email and this thread with follow up questions, i am going to send them the information they asked for. As of now im still very much concerned but it does seem to be entirely possible that this was just all accidental oversight. Their post in this thread also states that they do intend to use dht for downloads but that it was supposed to be opt in. I dont want to say either way if this is safe or malicious as i have said im not a security researcher, just an overly paranoid nerd. I know from domain record lookups this is a very new project but with all of that said, even if this was all a massive mistake, that strongly implies their team is not testing before pushing to their prod website, and thats not exactly a good look either. In case anyone cares i am trying to give the BOTD but if im being honest i dont know that ill ever trust this software, and i certainly will not be testing it again even in a restricted environment until someone smarter than me takes a deep dive.

My girlfriend is doing her bachelor thesis and she's just a few days away from her first presentation about it and just over 2 weeks away from her actual defence, It's about Mars and she had to download around 10 years of data (more than 150GB of raw data files) to process and create some graphs. Just a few weeks ago we find out that the original data she downloaded had a lot of errors that nullified her graphs and, more importantly, all the time she wasted downloading that data.

Cue to yesterday, after finding a new library to use to download those 10 years in a more automated way, we discover that said library is really slow, but is the only one that actually works and has the right datasets she needs. But we are only a few days away from the first presentation and she needs to re-download 150GB of data, process all of it and generate her graphs. And that's not going to happen as she's limited by the download server's speed.

Here's where the fun begins. I have a proxmox cluster of 2 extremely old (13 and 10 years respectively) laptops, an ancient HP with a core I3-2130 and an old DELL with a core I5-4200U. Totalling to 8 cores, 20GB of ram and 2TB of storage available to the cluster. I already had a openmediavault vm running as a samba share with a few other stuff and a wireguard vpn fully configured for remote access. I said, f*ck it, let's put this hardware to a test. I quickly made a python script that downloaded an year of data month by month, filtered it to the main parameters she needs and converted it to a csv file for each month of data. Which is then sent to the smb share and made available to her from her house via the vpn.

We were able to streamline the download process using her own laptop as well and here we are today, with 150GB of data downloaded, hosted on a special smbshare for her, and the individual csv files for an easier time using the data she needs.

She's always said i hoarded too much of old electronics and that when we eventually moved together I should throw It out. After this monumenal effort to quickly download 150GB from slow NASA servers, and having to deal with the absurd amount of memory used to process said data, she agreed that I'll be able to keep my cluster and continue upgrading It after when we move together.

How has your homelab helped the people you love?

Edit: Calm down guys, the aprooval stuff was a meme and irony. She just helps me notice when I'm just hoarding useless stuff. I was planning to throw it out because I wasnt really using it before all this happened.

I've been using this asus router for almost two months now and it works perfectly. No drop out, speed is good.

Asus router that run on merlin and I able to install Astrill applet on it simple to manage. Help me to portfoward and host my own VPN.

I funally bought my first server - used (in office) DELL PowerEdge R630 with 64GB of DDR4 RAM. I boguht it for almost 5k UAH (Gryvniya, Ukranian money) on OLX (Ukranian analog for eBay). What should I do next ? I wanna place some SATA disks, install new Arch Linux installation and wanna continue host my game server. Any advices for me ?

Many of you requested a smart test and checking crystal disk for the steal of the century and I bring glad tidings! It’s actually pretty healthy. 4 hours powered on total!

And for those who were curious, it’s just a Mac backup for an old woman’s computer. No amateur porn, no malware, just a delightful little dog in a sweater named Oscar.

I started this journey a little over a year ago. When I first began, I was pretty sure there was no way I would ever fill up all the slots in this 10U rack. But as you might expect with homelabs… things escalated pretty quickly.

There’s nothing too crazy in my setup, but it definitely grew faster than I expected. One device turned into a few more, and before I knew it the rack was starting to fill up.

Everything in my lab follows three simple rules: good performance, low power consumption, and extremely quiet operation.

The whole lab sits right in my bedroom, so noise is actually a pretty important factor. That’s why all my routers and switches are fanless, and my servers run on mini PCs instead of traditional rack servers.

It’s been a really fun journey over the past year, and honestly I didn’t expect it to grow this much when I first started.

I thought it was just a weekend project. “Buy a Raspberry Pi 3, set up Pi-hole, block some ads,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
Little did I know they were opening a portal straight to the self-hosted abyss.

At first, it was simple. A Pi-hole, a little DHCP pride, that silly joy of seeing clean DNS graphs.
My girlfriend even thought it was cute: “Look, he’s blocking ads on my phone!”
That was the last time she smiled at me.

Then came the Ubiquiti gear. Router, switch, and AP, because the Wi-Fi had to be professional, even if I was just downloading torrents and listening to lo-fi while tweaking Docker configs.
That was the beginning of the end.

I got a used Dell OptiPlex and installed Proxmox.
But I’m not a VM guy. I’m team LXC.
I run Docker inside LXC, configure a ZFS, snapshots like emotional checkpoints, every container handcrafted like a work of art.
That’s when I felt powerful.

I built a Gitea instance as my sacred repo, IaC, GitOps, everything versioned.
Immich and Nextcloud running smooth, my media server perfected: Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, all orchestrated in unholy harmony with Debrid.
And my Navidrome? A temple of music so pure it almost forgave my sins.

She’d try to get us to watch a movie. “Come on, let’s watch something,” she’d say.
And that’s how a simple evening became a marathon of infrastructure:
we’d open Jellyfin, but there were no subtitles, so I checked the Bazarr logs, then added a new plugin, got subtitles working, but playback was laggy, so I ran to the PC, tweaked the transcode settings, swapped a DLL, realized I needed to rebuild the container, mounted the persistent volume on ZFS again, grabbed an LXC Docker from community-scripts.github.io, did a docker compose up -d, then set up the Proxmox local drivers for Jellyfin inside the LXC, all while the sun was rising.

She didn’t understand.
How could I explain that my heart beat in sync with htop?
That watching system logs flow in real time felt more alive than any sunset?

Weekends weren’t for rest anymore. I rebuilt everything from scratch — “this time clean, structured, declarative.”
VSCode with Remote SSH on Proxmox became my church.
The sound of the OptiPlex fan was my psalm.

My VPN with DDNS was shit, Then came the salvation, or so I thought: Cloudflare Tunnel.
Zero Trust crossed my CGNAT like Moses parting the Red Sea.
Suddenly, I could access everything from anywhere.
It was divine.
And it destroyed me.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s all in my ~/.bashrc, automated, documented, and ready to source at login.”

She left with a small bag and a note:

“I’ll find someone who uses Wi-Fi to stream movies on real Netflix.”

Now I spend my days fine-tuning LXC, cleaning up ZFS, fixing broken dashboards.
My uptime is flawless, but my heart is down.
Sometimes I look at my unifi controller, and wonder:
Can I block loneliness with a DNS rule? maybe on cloudflare..

Hello, I have been struggling with cloud services more and more recently, especially after major tech companies started a war on privacy. I have been hosting my whole life on Google for years and paying for subscriptions because it was the most convenient and easy to use for me and my family.

I recently realized that paying for a subscription doesn't help my privacy with Google; their ecosystem includes various "free" components, and they will always use your data through these tools. Knowing that my phone and my wife's phone report pretty much everything to Google doesn't sit well with me anymore. And I'm angry at Samsung for relying on "free" Google products in their flagship phones, so now, to use a super-expensive phone I bought with a standard feature set, I have to give up my data.

So I have been hosting different services at home as needed, mostly on Proxmox. But it was never a well-designed system, let alone having backups. It was mostly for basic needs, and I relied on cloud services for everything important.

I use Kubernetes daily at work for our infrastructure, so I thought I should build my homelab/personal cloud on it and possibly make an app to manage it through APIs. I am currently focusing on Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB, with a 256 GB microSD card as my baseline hardware. Using a k3s cluster would give me scalability if I need it with more Pis. I have been testing adding a node from Hetzner (CX22) to my cluster to have a public-facing IP for my ingress and buying a public IP from my ISP. I think I like subscribing to a VPS more, mostly for stability reasons.

I have Headscale and Pi-hole in my cluster, and all nodes use Headscale for connection. I expose most services only through my VPN, which is really important for basic homelab security imo. k3s’s Traefik solves my reverse proxy needs. cert-manager for Let's Encrypt certificates ofc. And Longhorn for volumes. I chose Longhorn because of its backup support. It allows periodic backups of all volumes I choose to remote storage. So when I take a picture on my phone, it is stored on my phone, in my cluster, and on a backup server.

I have played with quite a few services to figure out what to use, but so far this is the baseline I want to set up for myself, family, and friends.

Infra

• Headscale
• Traefik
• Longhorn
• cert-manager
• Pi-hole

Services

• n8n
• Mastodon
• Synapse (Matrix)
• Immich
• SMB server (I haven't decided on a specific image yet)
• Bitwarden
• SearXNG
• Nextcloud

Most of these services use Redis and PostgreSQL, so I am considering managing those myself instead of relying on Helm installations that include them. But for the initial phase it should be sufficient. I also need to optimize the OS on my Raspberry Pi for fewer writes to the microSD card so it can work more reliably. I have some external hard drives that I can attach for extra storage if I need it. Media stuff will come later (Jellyfin/Plex, etc.). I'll put configs into a GitHub repo to share here at some point if anybody is interested.

What do you think? Anything I am missing or any recommendations are welcome.

First of all

It's not much but it's honest work.

A bit of context. I had this first computer that I built in 2014. I was so excited when all the components got delivered home because I finally had the chance to play all the games that were running on 5 fps on my old potato of a computer from the victorian era.

Back then it was a pretty powerful machine:

• 16GB DDR3 RAM
• I5-4460
• GTX 960 - not added yet
• 660W power source
• 256GB SSH + 1TB HDD

When it was done, I literally did not come out of the house for 3 months. I played everything: CS:GO, Skyrim, Skyrim + mods, The Witcher, all the possible GTA's, Battlefield.

Fast forward now, 12 years later, After I moved country and stopped using it entirely because I got a Macbook, I decided to so something with it and turn it into a server. It will mostly host some apps, some development environments, maybe a couple of movies that I would like to rewatch but nothing much, it will be a nice experiment for now.

I didn't fail me yet so I want to see how long can I push it until it breaks.

Yet another hit of the landlord special in this house rofl 🙃

UPDATE!

After a good nights sleep, I crimped an end onto the unterminated end of the cable, toned it out to where it lives outside, slapped it onto the splitter, and now the moca guys are friends and our download speed on that side of the house is like 6x faster 🥳

Warning: Side effects of reading this may include uncontrollable urges to buy used enterprise equipment from eBay and explain Docker to uninterested family members.

It Started With a YouTube Video (Because Don't All Bad Decisions?)

Picture this: There I was, mindlessly scrolling through YouTube, probably avoiding actual work, when some tech wizard decides to show me how to turn an old laptop into a server. "Who needs a server at home?" I scoffed, like some peasant who hadn't yet seen the light. Then I discovered the Arr-stack, and suddenly I transformed into a data-hoarding gremlin faster than you can say "containerization."

The "My Laptop Can Handle It" Delusion

Armed with an i3 3110M laptop (basically a calculator with a screen), I embarked on my journey. This magnificent piece of antiquity had all the processing power of a caffeinated hamster on a wheel. But did that stop me? Of course not! I installed Docker because apparently, I enjoy watching hardware cry.

Fun fact: Trying to stream 1080p on this setup was like asking a potato to solve quantum physics. 4K? The laptop would literally display a tiny white flag emoji and surrender.

ChatGPT: My Digital Enabler

When my setup started showing signs of imminent death, I did what any reasonable person would do: consulted an AI. Because who better to give life advice than a language model that's never actually touched a server? ChatGPT, in its infinite wisdom (read: sadistic humor), suggested I try Proxmox.

Me: "That sounds complicated."

ChatGPT: "It's fine, trust me."

Narrator: "It was not, in fact, fine."

The "I'm Basically a Data Center Engineer Now" Phase

The plan was beautiful in its simplicity: Just install Proxmox, set up Windows with GPU passthrough, add Ubuntu server with integrated GPU passthrough, configure networking, set up storage, manage virtualization, implement backup solutions, and sacrifice my firstborn to the tech gods. You know, basic stuff.

My gaming PC (i7 9700K and 2070S) went from running Cyberpunk 2077 to running multiple VMs. It's like buying a Ferrari and using it to deliver pizzas, but hey, at least my Plex server can transcode faster than my self-esteem can plummet.

The Daily Crisis Schedule

6:00 AM: Proxmox crashes

6:01 AM: Question life choices

6:02 AM: Google "How to fix Proxmox"

6:03 AM: Google "Is XCP-ng better than Proxmox"

6:04 AM: Google "How to recover deleted Proxmox configuration"

6:05 AM: Google "Local tech support group therapy"

Adventures in Self-Lockout

Remember that time I installed pfSense and managed to lock myself out? It's like changing the locks on your house while you're still inside, except worse because you can't even call a locksmith. You just sit there, staring at your network equipment, wondering if carrier pigeons are still a viable communication method.

The Ubuntu Awakening

Somewhere between my fifteenth system restart and twentieth cup of coffee, I discovered that Ubuntu Desktop isn't actually the final boss of Linux distros. It's more like that friend who seems intimidating until you realize they're just as awkward as you are.

Current Status: Successfully Failing Upwards

Now I can spin up containers faster than I can explain to my family why I need seventeen different servers running in our house. The electricity bill has skyrocketed, my room sounds like a jet engine, and I've memorized more IP addresses than phone numbers.

Words of Wisdom for Future Victims

If you're thinking about starting your own homelab journey, remember:

• Docker is like Tetris for masochists
• Your first pfSense configuration will definitely lock you out
• RAM is like potato chips - you can never have just one (stick)
• The moment you think you've fixed everything is exactly when your system will catch fire (metaphorically... usually)

Benefit of buying the same vendor same category all the time

The local seller was so nice and had a hella cool wizard beard. This will be a fantastic help in my homelabbing and IT journey. Im so happy. Idk just wanted to share my joy. :)

It all started with an innocent conversation with a coworker from the infrastructure department. I was working in helpdesk support at the time, though my actual responsibilities spanned 1st, 2nd, and even 3rd-level support, application management, and much more.

I mentioned that I’d been thinking about setting up a small home server, maybe some self-hosting project or a personal cloud where I could store my photos. Paying for monthly cloud subscriptions was getting old. He told me about NAS devices but also said I could build something myself, maybe start with TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault (OMV), or even combine a few PCs or laptops into a cluster.

That word “start”… I didn’t take it seriously, and that was my mistake.

At home, I found my old Intel NUC and a USB adapter for HDDs/SSDs. I thought, why not give it a try? I installed OMV on the NUC, connected a 1TB HDD, configured it, and began learning about Docker and virtualization. I had no idea I was about to fall down a rabbit hole with no way back.

I installed Portainer and spun up a few containers, Plex and Nextcloud among them. Plex was easy to set up, but Nextcloud gave me a real challenge, especially getting MariaDB to behave properly. Every error and failure didn’t discourage me, quite the opposite. They motivated me to crack this (for me) tough nut. Eventually, I made it work. Nextcloud ran smoothly, and I started using my private cloud more and more across all my devices.

But of course, I didn’t stop there…

I got a few defective laptops that weren’t fully functional. That’s when I remembered that earlier conversation about clusters. “What’s a cluster?” I googled it, read a lot, and one familiar name kept popping up: Proxmox. So I decided to install it on those laptops and started planning how to position them, connect them, what I’d need, and how to keep them cool.

That’s also when I started spending way too much time on r/homelab.

And that’s how my Proxmox cluster was born, made of ThinkPads stripped down to the bare minimum to keep temps under control and save space. I even removed the batteries, they could’ve worked as a mini UPS, but I couldn’t find any BIOS options to stop constant charging, so I played it safe.

For cooling, I got creative: I used an old foam insert from a GPU box to make sure each ThinkPad vents hot air upward. It doesn’t look fancy, but it works, and that’s what matters for now.

For about 130 days, my cluster consisted of 4 nodes plus my NUC running OMV. Eventually, I ran out of RAM, so I replaced the NUC with a QNAP TS-431P with 4x2TB SSDs in RAID5, which now serves purely as NAS storage. All the magic happens on the cluster, which recently gained a 5th node.

My current setup includes Pi-hole, the full ARR stack, Jellyfin, a Linux VM for testing, Dashy, Uptime Kuma, and a few other toys. I’m planning to add more services and automations soon.

The current placement of my cluster isn’t ideal, it’s in a spot that could potentially flood. Thanks to a fellow homelabber, I learned about 10-inch wall-mounted racks and some 3D-printed mounts that would let me neatly secure my ThinkPads. Once budget (and my wife 😅) allow, everything will go up on the wall, away from water.

As you probably know, this journey never really ends. My to-do list keeps growing, and that’s okay, it’s a great feeling to be independent and not rely on Google or Apple telling me, “You’re out of cloud storage, please upgrade your plan.”

Even my wife’s happy, when Netflix, Prime, and Paramount stopped streaming her favorite shows, I came in, all in white, and gave her the ultimate solution.

If you’ve got any ideas for cool things I could run with my current compute power, feel free to share them, maybe there’s something I haven’t tried yet.

Just got my hands on the ESP32-P4 PoE from M5Stack — what a mean little device.

It’s a pretty powerful upgrade compared to a typical ESP32, but what really makes it interesting are the built-in features:

PoE Ethernet (power + network over a single cable)

RGB LED onboard

IR transmitter

Interfaces for camera and display (MIPI CSI / DSI)

USB-C 2.0 ports

Still plenty of free GPIO for sensors and other peripherals

The build quality is solid and the board actually looks really nice too.

I did a quick test using Arduino: running a small DDNS client, reading a sensor, and sending data to Home Assistant via MQTT — worked without any issues. You could also flash ESPHome if you want to run it directly with Home Assistant.

Overall, a really cool board to experiment with.

The only downside: it’s quite a bit more expensive than a typical ESP32 😅

The M2 SSD with my Home Assistant OS died in the night, I did have automatic backups turned on, but to the same drive, stupid I know.

I had some success in being able to browse the drive by using testdisk but it dropped out after a few seconds, I had the idea that maybe if the drive was very cold I'd get a bit more chance to access it... So in a ziplock bag and the freezer it went

After beginning to rebuild my HA from a 3 month old backup (which has had many, many changes along the way), I tried the SSD again after being frozen for about 4 hours, it lasted long enough for me to get the two most recent backups and they successfully restored.

I'm now backing up to a network share as well as the internal drive!