homelab

This isn't strictly "homelab" related, but I'm not sure if there's a better community to post it.

I'm curious what kind of real-world speeds everyone is getting over their wireless network. I was testing tonight, and I'm getting a max of 250Mbit down/up on my laptop. I have 4 Unifi APs, each set to 802.11ac/80Mhz, and my laptop supports 2x2 MIMO. Testing on my phone (Galaxy S23) gives basically the exact same result.

The radio spectrum around me is ideal for WiFi; on 5Ghz, there is no AP in close enough range for me to detect. With an 80Mhz channel width, I can space all 4 of my APs so that there's no interference (using a non-DFS channel for testing, btw).

Am I wasting my time trying to chase higher speeds with my current setup? What kind of speeds are you getting on your WiFi network?

Got this server for free, so I talked about it on my blog !

Do you guy have any ideas on what I could run or install on this thing ? (For fun of course, nothing serious!)

I'm currently traveling for months at a time and my homelab has become unreachable to me over VPN due to a unknown complication after a power outage.

Just as a learning experience for all, my mistake was that I set-up my VPN very far down the stack - as a wg-easy app inside TrueNAS SCALE's apps ecosystem. My very important reason for doing it was that way was that wg-easy allows for setting up client devices with a QR code...

Anyway, the NAS is not booting back up nor do the TrueNAS apps. I should've set my VPN up right at the front of the network - on my MikroTik router that also supports Wireguard. The funny thing is I was so happy that my NAS has IPMI and whatnot but now I can't even access it.

For now the NAS is kept powered on from what I know, it just doesn't boot. This should help prevent bitrot until I'm back. All important files are backed up on a 3rd party service.

It's a shame my Jellyfin and Navidrome inaccessible, but I'll live.

Now I'm thinking about buying an UPS so that this doesn't happen in the future. I'd like the UPS to be fanless and rackmount, so that limits me to ~700VA territory.

Devices in my homelab pull about 65W idle and spike to say 150W when everything is booting. ISP modem, router, POE+ switch, AP, NAS. I might add another 20W due to a Lenovo M920q in the future.

I only really care about NUT and graceful shutdown instead of long runtime on battery.

I was thinking about this: https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/SMT750RMI2U/

In my country I can get it with new batteries (no front panel) and a network card for NUT for a total of 180 EUR.

Would that work? Would you be afraid of leaving an UPS (it is kinda like a bomb after all) unattended an leaving your home for 6 months at a time?

I have a host name whose dns points to my home IP. I use this for game servers for my buddies. Should I be worried about my home IP being easily accessible like this, and should I get a physical firewall appliance to protect myself?

Servers are running Windows Server 2019 and Mac OSX.

I got this AP for free, and had some fun trying to configure it, and I decided to look at the inside of this thing. It has a PowerPC processor, pretty cool!

It is a Cisco Aironet 1131AG

More pics:

It's an old AP from around 2007, I managed to get the latest firmware thanks to some guy on the Internet Archive (thank god they exists) ! ( https://archive.org/download/cIOS-firmware-images/ )

Hey folks, I have a couple things I would like some advice on. Currently for my home network setup I have my ISP’s modem/router combo set to bridge port 1, and then some google wifi and points connected to that.

My goal is to get rid of the google home wifi and if possible my ISP’s modem/router combo (I don’t really need to replace my ISP if it makes it way more complicated) with something more open and flexible.

I have a couple dell optiplex micros I can use as a pihole/dns/whatever is needed, and I was thinking of picking up a couple of these for my WAP’s and then running the omada docker container to control them.

Would this be enough or would I also need something like openwrt running on another machine as well? If that’s the case I could also pick up this and install it into one of my dell machines so I can run some kind of router software.

TLDR- what would you buy in my situation given you only want to spend about $500 cad max on all the hardware to setup a network in your home lab?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16636012

Me again, back with another probably dumb question, but you beautiful bastards have been so helpful so far, I can't stay away!

I got 10x 10TB SAS drives from FB market place. They look like they're in good shape and the guy says he pulled them from the live server of a family member who passed. HGST. most/all are 2018.

I brought them home and tried to mount them one-by-one in an xpenology VM to smart test them (easiest place I had set up for SMART tests).

But most of my troubleshooting has just involved looking at the HBA menus in BIOS and seeing if the drives even show up. Currently only 1 seems to reliably.

and I got a weird mix of drive showing up fine, but others not showing up at all. I also got a couple drives that passed a SMART test, then when I pulled them and tried to remount them later, they don't even show up?

I tried using molex to SATA power adapters to rule out 3.3v, didn't help.

I don't think it's formatting because some of them mounted at least once and they all came from the same server.

I tried putting the HBA in another PCIe slot, plan to try the third slot tonight.

I have this HBA, confirmed in BIOS it's in IT mode: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYZBNXBS/

(I'm having troubles finding a good manual for this board, by the way. there are flashing LEDs that may be trying to tell me something?)

and these breakout cables: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B9SBSVW/

I might try another HBA, rule out bad board. I plan to try the third PCIe slot tonight, try to rule that out...

What else?

They could be just bad drives, but the seller seemed genuine and they look like they're in good shape. He even pinged me after the sale to see how they worked out for me.. doesn't seem like a scammer.

Also, a couple questions: 1) these should be hot-swappable, right? and 2) what would happen if this PCIe x8 card is in a PICE x4 slot?

Thanks again. You guys have been great! :)

Hello homelabbers,

Recently I came into possession of an old Desktop PC. Its configuration is,

• Pentium D 820, 2.8 GHz dual Pentium 4 core processor, supports 64 bit.
• 512 DDR 333 memory
• 90GB HDD
• no graphics card
• 3 PCI and 1 AGP slot

I was planning to put a ethernet card and use it as a router. It was to theown as garbage. Is what I am planning feasible or a good idea. Or it would be better as trash.

I’m a new homelabber, recently bought a SilverStone RM41H08 4U Chassis

My rack is wall mounted and this server is heavy AF to get into place when I need to adjust something.

All the reviews for the branded sliding rails that “work” aka rarely, are terrible.

I’m interested in any ideas people have for maybe DIYing a sliding rail set, or like a better universal rack? Literally anything please hahaha.

I’d even try cabinet rails or something if there’s a good resource on DIYing.

Thanks!

Links for reference: https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-Rackmount-Hot-Swappable-RM41-H08-x/dp/B0922FZQFW

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09B1KZMPN

https://www.amazon.com/ECHOGEAR-15U-Open-Frame-Rack/dp/B07YYJMCNV

Hi, so I have a very individual homelab. It's a collection of stuff accumulated over nearly 30 years of doing weird stuff.

For the past 9 years it's been running as a bunch of lxc containers (privileged because unprivileged did not exist, back then) but several of those containers are p2v conversions of physical hosts dating back to debian woody and earlier. They're all upgraded to at least buster, most are bookworm. Stuff like asterisk, email, home assistant, nextcloud, matrix synapse run there these days.

The server is a 15 year old HP gen6 thing, and is getting quite long in the tooth. There's also a dedicated cheapy microserver with an i4 running opnsense on bare metal as a firewall.

Trying to run stuff like local voice stuff for home assistant is showing the HP's age quite badly. Also, our area is getting fibre, and the opnsense box is maxed out at gigabit. More speed would be nice.

So, I'm in two minds. The homelab has been a lot of fun over the years, but I'm over 50 now, I want lower maintenance. This latest wave of upgrades is making me rethink the next 20 years of homelab. I don't want to leave something stupidly "only me" if I were to die tomorrow (diabetes is a fickle bastard). My wife might want to try and carry on this thing - it runs some useful stuff around the house (but it should be noted that nothing in this house requires a server or cloud) - and that's not going to happen with the current solution.

I think I might have a path, using proxmox, from where I am now, to something that can be deployed on e.g. a bunch of ms01 class devices. I'm thinking to convert the existing HP server to proxmox, to allow me to redeploy all my existing lxc containers into the proxmox world. As I acquire hardware over the next year, I can look at a k8s migration of the services onto a small, MUCH lower power cluster. One of the keys is that I don't want to have big outages of services for days or weeks while I migrate everything so it's gotta be a rolling upgrade as it were.

I'm here soliciting feedback. Has anyone ever migrated from a deeply legacy homebrew homelab into something like this? Does it reduce the workload long term? What's the practicality of this for someone rather less tech savvy?

Thanks!

I've noticed recently that my network speed isn't what I would expect from a 10Gb network. For reference, I have a Proxmox server and a TrueNAS server, both connected to my primary switch with DAC. I've tested the speed by transferring files from the NAS with SMB and by using OpenSpeedTest running on a VM in Proxmox.

So far, this is what my testing has shown:

• Using a Windows PC connected directly to my primary switch with CAT6: OpenSpeedTest shows around 2.5-3Gb to Proxmox, which is much slower than I'd expect. Transferring a file from my NAS hits a max of around 700-800MB (bytes, not bits), which is about what I'd expect given hard drive speed and overhead.
• Using a Windows VM on Proxmox: OpenSpeedTest shows around 1.5-2Gb, which is much slower than I would expect. I'm using VirtIO network drivers, so I should realistically only be limited by CPU; it's all running internally in Proxmox. Transferring a file from my NAS hits a max of around 200-300MB, which is still unacceptably slow, even given the HDD bottleneck and SMB overhead.

The summary I get from this is:

• The slowest transfer rate is between two VMs on my Proxmox server. This should be the fastest transfer rate.
• Transferring from a VM to a bare-metal PC is significantly slower than expected, but better than between VMs.
• Transferring from my NAS to a VM is faster than between two VMs, but still slower than it should be.
• Transferring from my NAS to a bare-metal PC gives me the speeds I would expect.

Ultimately, this shows that the bottleneck is Proxmox. The more VMs involved in the transfer, the slower it gets. I'm not really sure where to look next, though. Is there a setting in Proxmox I should be looking at? My server is old (two Xeon 2650v2); is it just too slow to pass the data across the Linux network bridge at an acceptable rate? CPU usage on the VMs themselves doesn't get past 60% or so, but maybe Proxmox itself is CPU-bound?

The bulk of my network traffic is coming in-and-out of the VMs on Proxmox, so it's important that I figure this out. Any suggestions for testing or for a fix are very much appreciated.

I would like to create a VLAN that can access the internet but cannot access the rest of my network, with one exception. It should still be able to connect to my HomeAssistant server which isn't on the VLAN.

I have never set up a VLAN before so I am a bit lost. Does anybody have any good guides on how to set up something like this on a GL.iNet router? I am able to access the OpenWRT settings including interfaces, devices, etc. from LuCI.

For those of you who know of PiAlert or similar projects/forks like NetAlertX, do you know of any that can run without WAN access?

I just got PiAlert running the other day and noticed that it does not update correctly unless it has access to WAN which seems odd, since it's basically just running arp commands within internal IP ranges over specified interfaces.

Edit: Looks like I was just able to modify one function to return a hardcoded value to resolve the need to connect to WAN

My Internet provider just installed a 2,5/1Gbps Internet connection and I've asked the guys to run a couple of their fiber to connect my router (HP Prodesk with OPNsense) to my server. I didn't know that the fiber is single mode and all the SFP+ sold used now seems to be all for multi mode fiber (www.bargainhardware.co.ukfor example). The cable is about 30m, can I use a 810nm SFP+ or is it definitely better to use a 1310nm?

So, I finally got this project (PiAlert) working how I'd like.

It basically uses arp to keep track of devices on your network, and let you know when new ones join. It gives some basic stats like uptime, etc and you can configure a few different notification options to be alerted when a rogue device connects.

Anyways, to get this work on my network involved setting up several network interfaces, as I have quite a few VLANs I'd like to keep an eye on. While everything seems to be working, I feel like I may have created an asymmetric-routing situation, as now when I SSH to the VM hosting this, it will freeze up after a few seconds.

My interfaces look like such. The problem is that I am accessing this VM (hosted on 192.168.1.0/24) from my personal network (192.168.6.0/24). My personal network has access to 192.168.1.0/24 and obviously to it's own subnet, so I think packets are getting confused, as there are multiple routes they can take to this VM.

I believe this is confirmed, because if I disable the entry for 192.168.6.0/24 in my /etc/network/interfaces file, the problem goes away.

How should I handle this? I've tried some simple UFW rules to try to force things to only use the 192.168.1.0/24 interface, but to no avail.

Edit: Sorry for the weird markdown, not sure why it's highlighting keywords

Hi everyone :)

It's time to switch and give my home network a proper minimal hardware upgrade. Right now everything is managed by my ISP's AIO firewall/router combo. Which works okayish, but I'm already doing some firewall/dns/VPN stuff on my minimal spare laptop server to bypass most of my ISP's restrictions. So it's time to get a little bit "crazy" !

While I do have some "power user" knowledge regarding Linux/server/selfhosted services/networking, I'm a bit clueless hardware wise, specially regarding my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port.

I do have a 5giga connection from my Internet provider (Obtic fiber) which is divided into 4 ethernet ports (Eth1 2.5G, Eth2 1G, Eth3 1G, Eth4 0,500G or something in that range). And right now the Eth1 port is connected through an old 1G switch.

1. To take full advantage of my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port do I need a router AND a switch capable of 2.5G througput ? Or only the router and the switch is going to divid it accordingly between all connected devices on a 1G switch?

I'm also looking for some recommendation/personal experience for a router and a switch with a budget of 250e.

First I was interested into a BananaPI as a router, to tinker a bit, but it seems a bit of a hassle to flash it with OpenWRT, then I found an interesting post on Lemmy talking about the Intel N100 Celeron N5105, which looks like more what I'm looking for but I'm not sure ?

2. I have no idea what's the best bet, a SBC (bananapi mini, orange pi, raspberry pi...) a fully fleged router (like TP-Link AX1800 and flash it with opensense/openwrt) or an Intel N100 Celeron N5105 Soft Router ?

The capabilities I'm looking for:

• VLAN capable
• AP VLAN capabable to segment wifi
• Taking advantage of my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port
• Firewall customization capabilities

I have an eye on a managed switch I found on amazon (SODOLA 6 Port 2.5G Web Managed) but I have no idea how reliable they are, I have never heard of SODOLA.

3. Any good recommendation I should look at for a managed switch that would work great with the same capabilities above?

4. Probably last question, is regarding wifi APs. Is it possible to make an access point from my router even tough it hasn't atennas? If I connect an access point directly to my router, will it be capable of giving away wifi connection?

Thanks for reading though, I'm a bit unsure how I should spend my money to have a minimal but reliable/capable homelab setup. Every advice is welcome. But keep in mind, I want to keep it minimal, a good enough routing capbability with intermediate firewall customisation. I'm already hosting a few containers with a spare laptop and the traffic isn't going to be to crazy.

I recently installed an instance of TPot Honeypot, and it looks and feels pretty fantastic.

I haven't opened it up to the whole world, because my goal here was to just have the same ports I expose for my personal projects (game server, matrix chat, wireguard, etc) be exposed to it.

I know this project is a bit overkill for this use case, since it comes with a ton of honeypots that I'm not using, and that I'm essentially trying to make a fancy IDS, however I have a couple questions.

1. Is it possible to add custom ports for honeypots that aren't included in the project? For example, if I have a game running on port 4567 and there is no honeypot for that, I won't see any activity.

2. Is there another (perhaps lighter) Honeypot that you guys would recommend?

Edit: I guess disregard. I realize now that I can't have honeypots running on the same ports as the services in which I'm wanting to monitor. Port forwarding from WAN to multiple devices using the same port won't work

From open bench table : https://openbenchtable.com/

To just sitting on top of a anti static mat...

There are options for how to manage a test computer.

Do you have a preferred case that is portable, stackable, and still easy to work on?

I've thought about Fractal cases but they are on the bulky side of things. I've thought about a 4U case Silverstone rm44, but then the components are hard to access.. and noise goes up

Hi everybody! For my OPNsense router (on a VM on Proxmox) I need a 2,5Gbe card (to connect to the ONT of my provider); I only have 2 PCIe 3.0 x1 or 1 x4 because the only x16 is for a dual SFP+ fiber card.

Can you suggest me a NIC (I'd prefer to buy used)? Is it better to go with a 2,5 or 10Gbe? The cooler (temperature!) the better. I just need 1 port, if there are 2 it would be better, but the most important thing is the low operating temperature.

Thanks!

A slightly less technical post - these are some things I've learned from having a HomeLab for over a decade.

I have installed Debian with software RAID1 (and installed Proxmox on it) on 2 256GB SSD and I now want to move to 2 500GB SSD, how do I proceed?

Edit: the RAID is of the OS disks.

Hi all, I have a Proxmox server hidden away where it annoys nobody, and a small PC I'm the TV cabinet that I need to turn On/OFF every time I use it and when a movie needs to be transcoded, the fan spins like crazy.

Have anybody tried to use a Windows VM and share the desktop with NDI? In this way I just need an NDI decoder behind the TV and all the job will be done by the server.

Any thoughts about this?

Edit: NDI: Network Device Interface: basically it's an audio/video (and intercom) transmission over IP with low latency. The sender could be an hardware encoder or a software.

I recently discovered Pi Alert (and the various forks of it) and it seems like something that might be useful on my homelab.

I've decided to use this version, and have tried the others as well, but I can't seem to get it to discover things outside of the VLAN that it is installed on.

It is running on a Proxmox VM using a trunk'd interface that has several VLANs available to it. If I SSH into the VM hosting Pi Alert, I am able to ping the devices on the other VLANs without issues, so I know ICMP detection should be working.

Here is the config section. I am using SCAN_SUBNETS = [ '192.168.1.0/24 --interface=ens18', '192.168.2.0/24 --interface=ens18' ] To test 2 of my VLANs, and as mentioned, they are on the same interface, however this does not seem to be working.

Anyone have any suggestions?