homelab

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

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?