homelab

First, thank you in advance.

I'm having trouble with exposing my server, I think what I need is a better understanding, as opposed to technical help (though that would be appreciated)

At the moment I'm using the linuxserver.io suite of applications. I've got SWAG set up with DuckDNS, and I'm trying to set up Jellyfin and other applications. (they're all in the same compose.yaml).

I can access my applications on an external network via <user>.duckdns.org:<port> and it works fine (but no https).

Within my home network I can access jellyfin.<user>.duckdns.org - the https is valid and everything is working fine.

I suspect this means my router is not set up correctly? I'm using OpenWRT. What am I doing wrong?

This is more "home networking" than "homelab," but I imagine the people here might be familiar with what in talking about.

I'm trying to understand the logic behind ISPs offering asymmetrical connections. From a usage standpoint, the vast majority of traffic goes to the end-user instead of from the end-user. From a technical standpoint, though, it seems like it would be more difficult and more expensive to offer an asymmetrical connection.

While consumers may be connected via fiber, cable, DSL, etc, I assume that the ISP has a number of fiber links to "the internet." Those links are almost surely some symmetrical standard (maybe 40 or 100Gb). So if they assume that they can support 1000 users at a certain download speed, what is the advantage of limiting the upload? If their incoming trunks can support 1000 users at 100Mb download, shouldn't it also support 1000 users at 100Mb upload since the trunks themselves are symmetrical?

Limiting the upload speed to a different rate than download seems like it would just add a layer of complexity. I don't see a financial benefit either; if their links are already saturated for download, reducing upload speed doesn't help them add additional users. Upload bandwidth doesn't magically turn into download bandwidth.

Obviously there's some reason for this, but I can't think of one.

Has anyone else been called crazy for home-labbing front facing stuff?

I've always had this mindset of asking, "What am I really getting out of this?" But when it came to the internet and what I posted, I held onto a bit of innocence. Over the past two years, though, that innocence has been chipped away, but I think I’ve managed to reclaim it.

I don’t fault for-profit companies like Reddit for monetizing content; honestly, it was my own oversight for not reading the terms of service carefully. But since then, I’ve realized just how much I’ve unknowingly contributed to other projects for free.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but does anyone else ever feel a bit... exploited?

It’s like when a recruiter asks for a .docx version of your resume instead of the .pdf I provide. Maybe it’s just to block your contact details, or maybe there’s something more dubious at play. I’ve experienced both, and each time, I’ve ended up feeling a bit... used.

Now, when a recruiter asks for a .docx , I ask them why. If it’s to hide contact details, I send an anonymized version. If they want to trim it down to two pages, I direct them to the summary section on my professional website. And if they want to add their bits to it, I guide them to my website, where they can explore my detailed posts.

For me, it’s about reclaiming control over what I’ve shared.

I was talking to someone about this recently, and they mentioned that they like to post everything on GitLab to showcase what they’ve been working on. But honestly, it’s just not the same as self-hosting your own Gitea or GitLab instance. But this guy thought I was crazy for hosting a single instance GitLab.

Okay so take X, for example. There, could have a super locked-down account like I do here, only contributing to communities when I want to by directly tagging them, but otherwise just using it as a personal journal like my Mastodon, but it’s just not the same. When X started monetizing posts, the platform's objective changed.

I don’t mind 'for-profit,' but when it’s driven by short-term gains like a monetized post, eventually all engagement is funneled towards that. It ends up feeling like you’re writing in someone else’s diary. That you tailor for engagement.

It’s also about the love of tinkering.. breaking things, fixing them, and getting everything back up to spec. It’s about embracing the original idea of the internet: a decentralized space where anyone can contribute, without your work being exploited.

It’s your own little corner where you can post whatever you want, for whomever you want. A Jellyfin server for my partner, a portfolio for the hiring manager, a GitLab for my playground. Enjoying the freedom to experiment without an ops exec pulling their hair out.

It's kinda magical.

Footnote: This is my first post to this community, if this post isn't a good fit, please let me know and I'll gladly adjust or remove it.

Tags for Federation: @homelab

#homelab #macroblog

I've been using PFSense for years, and it's been pretty great, but I also have some friends who are homelabbers that like their Unifi setups.

What do you guys prefer, and why?

I was gifted a new Raspberry Pi. I already have a previous pihole setup and now looking for other ideas to run on my network.

I was considering a network monitoring tool. Any other suggestions?

Is it possible to have about 4 PoE cameras attached to a PoE switch in a network closet which will be trunked to a L3 switch where the NVR will be also attached too?

Or would it be better practice to home the NVR in the network closet to supply the power natively.

A few months ago, I upgraded all my network switches. I have a 16-port SFP+ switch and a 1GB switch (LAGG to the SPF+ with two DACs). These work perfectly, and I'm really happy with the setup so far.

My main switch ties into a remote switch in another building over a 10Gb fiber line, and this switch ties into another switch of the same model (on a different floor) over a Cat6e cable. These switches are absolute garbage: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084MH9P8Q

I should have known better than to buy a cheap off-brand switch, but I had hoped that Zyxel was a decent enough brand that I'd be okay. Well, you get what you pay for, and that's $360 down the toilett. I constantly have dropped connections, generally resulting in any attached devices completely losing network connectivity, or if I'm lucky, dropping down to dial-up speeds (I'm not exaggerating). The only way to fix it is to pull the power cable to the switch. Even under virtually no load, the switch gets so hot that it's painful to touch. Judging from the fact that my connection is far more stable when the switch is sitting directly in front of an air conditioner, that tells me just about all I need to know.

I'm trying to find a pair of replacement switches, but I'm really striking out. I have two ancient Dell PowerConnect switches that are rock solid, but they're massive, they sound like jet engines, and they use a huge amount of power. Since these are remote from my homelab and live in occupied areas, they just won't work. All I need is a switch that has:

• At least 2 SFP+ ports (or 1 SFP+ port for fiber and a 10Gb copper port)
• At least 4 1Gb ports (or SFP ports; I have a pile of old 1GB SFP adapters)
• Management/VLAN capability Everything I find online is either Chinese white-label junk or is much larger than what I need. A 16-port SFP+ switch would work, but I'd never use most of the ports, and I'd be wasting a lot of money on overkill hardware. As an example, one of these switches is in my home office; it exists solely so I have a connection between my server rack, two PCs, and a single WAP. I am never going to need another LAN connection in my home office; any hardware is going to go in the server rack, but I do need 10GB connectivity on at least one of those PCs.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a small reliable switch that has a few SFP+ ports, is made by a reputable brand, and isn't a fire hazard?

In the past, I've used nessus for vulnerability scanning my lab, but as my service count has grown, the 16 IP limit is becoming a little unwieldy.

Is anyone able to recommend an alternative that fits at least most of the requirements I have?

• Free (preferably in both senses of the word)

• Doesn't use Docker, even if containerized, I'd prefer to avoid having my scanner share a host with another service... and I'm not incredibly well versed with Docker

• Scans multiple systems (I tried Trivy, but as far as I can tell it only scans the system you install it on)

• Has a webui for management of scans

Alternatively, if anyone is willing to lend some advice for the configuration of Wazuh... I deployed the service months ago with the expectation that it could be used for vulnerability scanning (the Dev was in a few reddit threads suggesting that it had the capability), but i haven't been able to configure it properly.

I appreciate any advice people are willing to offer!

Edit: fixed formatting

Is there a way to easily create Gotify notifications from critical system errors (journalctl -p 3)? I recently had a bunch of out-of-memory errors and it would've been great to be notified about them. There must be a pre-build solution for this, right? Ideally also dockerized. Thanks in advance!

I've got a homelab running a number of services in Docker. Everything works beautifully internally, but access from outside the network is very slow. I'm using nginx proxy manager and cloudflare ddns for the external access. It's not a speed issue. I'm on fiber with a very solid upload.

Jellyfin and Overseerr are the main services that I'm having trouble with. Oddly, once you manage to get a video going in Jellyfin, it works fine.

I could use some guidance in what to look for, what tools I can use, or any other advice on how to track down the issue. Thanks!

I am hosting a couple of services (Matrix chat server and a game server). I know NAT's job is to translate external requests into internal addresses, so that the traffic can hit the WAN and ultimately make it to the internal service which is expected to handle the traffic, however I'm wondering if my setup is correct.

Everything is working as expected, but I'm just wondering how the traffic knows which service to go to. If an outside requests comes in, is it just the destination port that is used to route to the correct internal IP? Do I need to do something else here for best practices?

Lesson learnt: don't ever buy an used server from Quanta

Also, isn't Epyc have an efuse that will pair it with the mobo?

I've recently picked up an Intel P4000 and I'm purchasing some parts to set it up. Since it's an older platform, I get that there are some limitations on what I can use, so I'm worried about buying things that aren't compatible.

I'm interested in installing a Dell Boss N1 Monolithic to run Proxmox in RAID1, but have some concerns:

• Will it even work with my system board? Maybe my search skills suck, but I can't glean from the Internet how tightly controlled Server hardware ecosystems are. Would my mb even recognize a component like this, or the drives installed on it?

• What drives work with it? According to the user manual, there are only three supported drives, and they have to be 480gb or 960gb in size. Had anyone tested using different NVMe M.2 drives?

Help I now have several lans

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