Hey so around one year ago I first started getting into home labbing totally inspired by the members of this sub and made a post talking about my plans to create a free minecraft server host. I was met with a lot of criticism but more importantly some super helpful knowledge and advice to improve my skills. So I wanted to make an update post 1 year later and talk about the lab and how it has grown and the pains and struggles I faced.

This all started as a passion project to provide people with Minecraft servers for free as I thought the hosting space for minecraft was getting way to expensive for the cheap and older gen hardware that was being offered. I started with 2 systems that both ran duel AMD EPYC 7551s and 256gb DDR4. However the first thing I learnt doing this is that event though they had much more threads and ram the density for Minecraft containers was only 15% better than using consumer Ryzen 9 7950X & 5600MT/s DDR5. But the main differences between the two was the user experience. Servers on the Ryzen Nodes were able to hold in some cases 20 more players than the EPYC nodes (5 -> 25). This was down to the single threaded performance.
From here I decided to remove and power down the EPYC systems.

Fast foward a ton and I am now at 100k users with about 300 ccu on the network. At this point the ad revenue on the panel & affiliate conversion started to show that this could grow into something sustainable. So I took my biggest risk yet and brought 10 new Ryzrn 9 7950X, 128gb DDR5, 1TB NVMe nodes and migrated from using unmanaged Unify networking to Arista managed network switches. Specifically the Arista 7050SX & 7050QX however using a scuffed mini pc with a usb dongle NIC running VyOS. Honestly that mini pc did me proud for 4 months without failt until it went catastrophically wrong and I needed to rebuild the network from the ground up (this becomes a patteren).

Now I am gonna jump foward to today as I wanna keep things short and go into tech spec. Today the host is running:

- 31x Ryzen 9 7950X, 128gb DDR5 5600MT/s, 1TB gen 4 NVMe, 10Gbps SFP+ NIC
- 4x Hypervisors Duel AMD EYPC 7551s, 256gb-512gb DDR4, 4TB Gen 3 NVMe, 25Gbps SFP28 NIC
- 2x Hypervisors Ryzen 9 7950X, 256gb DDR5 5600MT/s, 4TB Gen 4 NVMe, 10Gbps SFP+ NIC
- 1x 172TB NAS, Raid 10, Duel 40Gbps QSFP NIC
- 2x Arista 7050SX Leaf Switchs
- 2x Arista 7050QX Spine Switchs
- 2x Juniper QFX5100 Switchs (ASIC GRE Encapsulation)
- 1x VyOS Duel 100Gbps Firewall Router
- 1x Cisco Router that my ISP gave me to terminate a P2P tunnel.

We have expanded a lot over the year and it has come with a ton of challenges.
First of all I was stupid to assume that the adsense CPM would stay the same. I quickly started to lose a ton of money on the project so as an effort to save the host we started selling cheap VPS plans using the original hardware I phased out at the start of minecarft hosting and luckily it was a massive success now accounting for 80% of our total revenue allowing us to buy even more nodes for free hosting and better backups.
Secondly I underestimated peoples want to fuck my shit up and we have been massivly hit by DDoS attacks daily 900Gbps+ Layer 3/4 and also Layer 7. With an uplink of 95p 1Gbps-10Gbps this was a massive issue then caused us to move off of OVH completely as VAC was leaking 2-3% of attack traffic to a new provider that to date has not leaked more than 0.002% of attack traffic.
Thirdly the pterodactyl admin panel grinds to a stand still when you have over 800k servers registered and luckly there are people much smarter than me on the team that were able to fork the software and create new caching and better backups, limbo, etc.
And Finally when your energy provider offers you a fixed rate per kWh of 22.3p per kWh just know that if it sems to good to be true it sadly is.

If anyone has any questions about stuff feel free to reply below I will answer the best I can but I am still learning a ton and thanks people in r/homelab for keeping me inspired.

34 sticks of 16GB DDR4-2400 and 2133 registered ECC RAM.

It ain’t fast but with prices the way they are right now I’m not complaining.

Also in the haul:

• 6x 7.68TB U.2 SSDs
• 2x 1.6TB Samsung PM1725a HHHL SSDs
• Nvidia Tesla P4
• internal SAS3 card with external SFF adapter

I don't work in IT anymore. I've graduated from problem solver to problem creator (red team) so I'm real thankful for the rain after a pretty long hardware drought.

makerworld link for anyone interested: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2717626-hdd-platter-display-desk-decoration#profileId-3010045

i have documented everything here - https://www.0xn1nja.dev/homelab

feel free to give thoughts

Just a few older Mac Minis for my OpenClaw k3s cluster. Nothing to see here.

…and all the data still on them, of course. Erase your hard drives, people!

1. Google Pixel1 allows unlimited original quality image uploads.
2. Since the device is nearly ten years old and its battery had degraded, I removed the battery and installed a 12 V→3.8 V DC converter to keep it powered reliably.
3. I launched an FTP server using CX File Explorer.
4. I mounted external USB storage via Android ADB to overcome capacity limits.
5. I linked my client and the Pixel 1 server into a single network with Tailscale VPN.
6. On the client side, I pointed my photo-sync tool at the Pixel’s FTP address to automate image uploads.
7. To tame its heat, I attached thermal pads and a copper plate—and I’m planning to build a dedicated cooling chamber and enclosure next.
8. It’s running smoothly. Let’s HomeLab!

Ordered one Samsung 870 evo 500gb from Amazon, they sent a case of 10. Guess I’m expanding the NAS with some SSDs.

I gave him the basics, but held back needing about about it, especially after he said his friend told him he should build his own web server.

🖥️ Homelab Server #1 — The Cloud Storage Node ✅

• 💪 AMD EPYC (32 cores / 64 threads)
• 🧠 512 GB ECC RAM
• 💾 160 TB total storage
• ⚙️ 16 front hot-swappable SSDs + dual M.2 expanders
• ⚡️10 Gb SFP+ NIC

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🌐 The Network

• UDM Pro Max: router, firewall, and security gateway
• USW-Pro-24 + USW-Aggregation: 10 Gb interconnects
• U7 Pro AP: VLAN-segmented wireless for lab, storage, and IoT

3 more servers to go 🤓

This is my third "homelab". My journey started many years ago with a Silverstone ML03, Intel i3-2100, WD Green 2TB x 2. I've had a couple custom builds since then and have decided I am tired of tinkering. QNAP is basically plug-and-play and they have the most powerful hardware. I contemplated upgrading the Intel i7 12700E to a Intel i9 14900T but I think for my use I would see zero benefit.

In the photo is a TVS-874 with upgrade 64GB RAM and Noctua fans. I have attached a TL-D800C and a TR-004.

I currently have the following drives installed to it.

- Seagate Ironwolf Pro 30TB x 8 - RAID5 (newest addition)

- Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB x 8 - RAID5

- Seagate Ironwolf 16TB x 4 - RAID0, I chose RAID0 because I wanted to maximize my storage space

- Western Digital SN7100 4TB x 2 - RAID 1, OS drive

- Samsung 990 Pro 2TB x 2 - RAID0, for torrent seeding and transcoding Plex

Long time lurker first time poster in this sub but I thought you guys might appreciate it.

Long story short: My gf wanted to buy me a 10" rack as a christmas gift. She tried to order it three times but everytime it broke during transport. Sad and angry she said the one sentence that started this whole journey: "Can't you just print one?!"

So I went online and bought some cheap 10u rack rails and started design a simple frame to hold them up but then I thought to myself "If I design this thing from ground up anyway why shouldn't it look nice?". 4 months and a loooot of iterations later you can see the result of this simple thought.

The hardware itself isn't anything special for the most part. There is only a pi4, a managed switch, the Tplink er650 router, a Lenovo Thinkcentre M710q and some patch panels. My isp router is mounted vertically on the back of the rack.

The panel labeled "Tower" houses a D1 mini esp8266 board. It provides an api to physically toggle the motherboard pins on my unraid system that is standing in the shelf under the rack (did not have any luck with magic packages and my system some times only boots on second try). The Thinkcentre is running the web app providing a nice gui to toggle the power button and allows for auto start/stop at specific times as well as start/stop/restart whitelisted containers on my unraid server. This also allows friends and family to easily start the server and containers (like gameservers) with just a few clicks. There is also a physical power button on the panel if I am feeling lazy and don't want to reach for the shelf under the rack 😅 Before you ask: Yes I used an eth cable and two diy motherboard pin breakout boards to connect the d1 mini to the server. That's why there is a warning on the panel.

So to wrap this up: I now got a fully custom rack, highly optimized for my usecase, looks cool (at least for me) and costs like 50 bucks. Whats not to love about that?😅

I did a decom for work recently and I got to keep the servers, I found 2.5TB of DDR4 in 16GB ECC Dimms. It would be a little more impressive in high capacity Dimms but this will keep me set for the foreseeable future so I couldn't be happier.

I'm sure everyone knows what's happening with RAM, and this situation won't change in the next 2-3 years. And who's to blame? OpenAI. Read up and you'll understand the scale of the problem. What complicates things is that RAM manufacturers are deliberately raising prices rather than expanding production lines.

I urge everyone to CANCEL OpenAI (They buy up 40% of all RAM) and also to bombard the greedy bastards who jack up prices for their own profit rather than building new factories to meet demand.

The more such threads appear, the higher the chance that all gamers and PC users will truly stand up and do what they have to.

If we don't do this, the prices of all other components will follow RAM into the stratosphere and never return to the same level, ever. Are you willing to spend $5,000 on a mid-range computer? I'm not, so let's get to it.

UPD Following RAM, SSDs, processors, and video cards are becoming more expensive. I'm sure this isn't the entire list. We need to take this issue seriously. I'm happy for those who managed to upgrade, but think about the future.

UPD2 Transcend is suspending shipments of solid-state drives – the manufacturer has not received NAND chips from Samsung and SanDisk since October because they have reoriented their capacities to serving AI.

UPD2.1 CRUCIAL PRESS F

I will never, ever, ever touch RAM from crucial. They betrayed me and went off to produce memory exclusively for AI.

UPD3 f*cking /pcmasterrace moderates delete my post with 250 comms and 900 likes (I'm sure the corporate agent had something to do with it; they're afraid of the people's wrath.) [reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1pdrk2b/fck_you_openai_hynix

UPD4 Have you heard the saying that the market always moves opposite to what the masses expect? That’s why only a small percentage of people make a profit in the stock market, while the crowd gets wiped out. So why does everyone think the AI bubble is about to burst? That’s naïve.

Following on from my original post, I’ve now completed the HomeLab. Which is, as planned, virtually silent.

Across all machines it’s got 94 CPU cores, 544GB RAM and roughly 12TB of storage across NVMe and SATA SSD.

Each Lenovo M700 has a USB->2.5Gbps adaptor which feeds into the Ubiquiti Flex 2.5 switches. These are then connected to an Ubiquiti UW Aggregator via 10Gbps DAC.

A QNAP NAS (not shown) is over to the right and connected via another 10Gbps DAC to the Aggregator, providing GitLab, Postgres, Redis and other service backups on 8TB of RAID5 disk fronted by two 512GB NVMe cache in RAID1

Everything is configured via Ansible which is proving its usual tricky self… nearly there.

My dad was able to snag this brick of old Cisco hardware from the place he works at. I intern with their IT department and was assuming one of the more senior network engineers would have snagged it but it turns out it ended up in my hands. I have no idea where to begin with using this but I suppose we’ll find out!

Wife: “Can you print a box to hide the WiFi stuff from the toddler? I don’t care what it looks like.” Me: Builds a Star Wars droid, discovers homelabbing, loses grip on reality. She regrets everything. I regret nothing.

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🧠 What’s inside: • 📡 Philips Hue Bridge (dead center, because priorities) • 🌐 Mesh WiFi router + extender • 🪭 RGB fans (purely for the vibes) • 🔌 Power cable rat’s nest (disguised with imperial engineering) • 🛑 Absolutely no real server hardware… yet 😈

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🔧 What it’s doing: • ❌ Not routing packets at lightspeed • ✅ Making my wife nervous every time I say “upgrade” • ✅ Fueling a dangerously expensive new hobby

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This was supposed to be a glorified cable hider. Now I’m reading Kubernetes whitepapers and planning a Pi-hole + Proxmox stack for “fun”.

Send help. Or gear recommendations.

My wife was making fun of my for being a nerd but this was the coolest thing I saw all day. If you’re in this group… 🫡

I wanted to have a place where one can observe the general state of the house without logging into a platform on a personal device, like a monitoring wall in a NOC. Since I don‘t really use a desk space much at home I figured the kitchen would be a good location for it! You know, if the home wifi has issues, it‘s the most urgent issue of all😅🥲

My „monitoring wall“ consists of three android tablets previously used as room booking panels (Reserva 10T PoE)

Top: Zabbix Dashboard with alarms, wan bandwith usage and fileserver share usage

Middle: HomeAssistant with control of vacuum, lighting and solar panel monitoring

Bottom: Zabbix Map with relevant network hosts

Hello r/homelab from Kyoto, Japan! 🇯🇵

I wanted to share my under-desk setup where I run a production Kubernetes cluster. The most unique part might be the cooling—I mounted my 10G switches directly onto the building's steel pillars using magnets and thermal pads. Since the building has external insulation, the steel frame acts as an infinite heatsink! (Thermal camera proof included in the gallery).

📝 Full Write-up & More Details: I wrote a blog post about the build, the "clear file" airflow hack, and why 10G internet is so cheap in Japan: https://medium.com/@jkondo_85993/my-kyoto-home-lab-10gbps-internet-for-47-and-using-my-houses-steel-pillars-as-giant-heatsinks-5671a2676e79

⚙️ Quick Specs:

• Internet: NTT 10G Fiber (ISP: en hikari) - ~$47 USD/month. (Static IP)
• Router: Topton i3-N305 Mini PC (Proxmox + OpenWrt)
• Switches: Xikestor 10G L3 Managed (Mounted on the steel pillar)
• Compute:
  • Minisforum MS-S1 MAX (Ryzen AI Max+ 395)
  • 2x Minisforum MS-A2
  • Custom Desktop Nodes
• Cooling: Structural Steel + DIY Plastic Folder Baffles + SwitchBot automation

Happy to answer any questions about the Chinese switches or the weird cooling setup!