A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Here's my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)
Hey it's more than good enough to run all this Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Still busy building it. Have a few more parts to print, like the back trim and plug holder, and I need to remove the protective plastic from the aluminum sheets.
sexy π
Love it, i'll probably end up doing something like that with a few HP elitedesk.
Behold the Splendor!
I used to have a random server box. This past year my hobby has been CAD work and 3D printing to turn a bunch of mini PCs into a fully remote controlled cluster, complete with a DIY IPMI KVM and custom built outlets that are controllable for power cycling (hard wired, not radio smart outlets). It's all self-contained with a single plug to the UPS.
I plan on releasing all my models/etc as I usually do on my site when everything is finished.
I will say, I don't miss the dusty box π
Edit: And yes, I color coded cables from each system. Β―\(γ)/Β―
Love this thread, here's my contribution
Just a pi4B and some external drives for Linux ISOs
edit : they resting on a piece of foam to reduce vibrations
Bonus pic of the zigbee dongle for Home Assistant
You may get better signal by not folding the antenna.
this is the way :)
I bought a 16U rack this year to organize stuff a bit. Zigbee dongle is still installed exactly like this. I'm not convinced there's a better solution.
Honestly, I doubt there is. Youβre suspending it away from metal and wood, seems like the best solution other than replacing the antenna with something expensive and βmountingβ that separately.
β Rackmounted
β Professional
What front end are using for your apps? Looks nice.
Here my homelab.
I moved not too long ago and I am still lacking some furniture, so it's on the floor with cables lying wild. Does not look like much but it actually covers almost all my needs.
I still need a VPS because of email ports and resident ISP not being compatible...
people put too much "lab" and not enough "home" in homelab. we need more dust, more cables, more jank. love this.
Dust and jank you say? Behold, my old basement homelab when I rented just outside Boston with a very permissive landlord who agreed to let me have Comcast gig pro fiber pulled into the basement, running off an outlet I installed without asking on a free slot in our breaker box. The dust was terrible, the rack was a hodge podge, I had to put up that sign because maintenance guys kept plugging their power tools into the UPS when I wasn't around and tripping it. But Comcast fucked up the billing and the 2gig + 1gig symmetric internet is still active to this day for free, which I left behind minimally working for the next tenants after parting out the rack. The tower by the side was a friend who wanted to colocate on my fiber, and I had some fun stuff like a slide out vga console. I also pulled Ethernet into every room, most of them installed with nice wall plates all bundled down to the rack, so with a house full of gamers, you could have multiple people pulling a gig on a game download without anyone stepping on anyone else's toes.
Moving to a new house soon where it will be in a rack, but this is the current setup. Mini pc for opnsense, UPS and server. Behind that the spaghetti includes a kvm, switch and AP.
Just a smol bramble.
All is network booted from the head node. Had to mess around with iscsi mounted root because i'm running k3s, and it needs block devices.
Offsite backup with a Hetzner storage box.
a bunch of ebay specials with more ebay parts scavenged over time + some 3d printing.
The centre tower has a miniitx mb and PSU behind those panels to run the NAS, and the drive bays are in the bottom.
The right is a failover cluster that isn't finished yet.
Awesome thread !
So many cool homelabs !
Mine is a little janky with some old tech. The tower was running an old FX-8320, but the hard drive "landed" a few weeks ago.
Two rack rails bolted together with a power strip and a tray holding my server mini PC. My router is bolted on as well to act as a switch for everything while also providing Wifi to my phone and laptop
Makes mine look boring.
Yours looks power hungry thoughβ¦
I'm on a variable rate electricity tariff and I use Home Assistant and iLO to power things on and off automatically, so most of the time it pulls 30-50W. At peak it pulls north of 1.5KW but that's really rare.
Wow! How do you do that? Do you accept that something could be down sometime?
the hardrive just out in the wild, living life like it was meant to be lived.
Such professional. Much clean.
Not pictured: my raspberry running adguard. It's tucked behind a TV, because it also runs Kodi.
Also not pictured, my Sophos SG-135 rev 2 running OPNsense. It's in the box where my Starlink equipment is, on the other side of this room.
Built a year ago, didn't change anything but drives since. PCengine APU OpnSense, two Proxmox cluster hosts, one mini PC NAS with JBOD. All DIY.
Projects that im running:
Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.
Solar powered web server. Its going to be repurposed into a meshtastic node soon.
Somewhat jank setup of a heltek which is also an ebook reader. It runs a webserver to upload the book in txt format, then I can take it on the go. I still have to do some work on the text.
I hope that barracuda was shucked from a Seagate Expansion lol (that's where I got all of my barracudas).
just a HDD that was replaced by a NVMe in my desktop a while ago and I had lying around.
Kinda in a lull with homelabbing ATM, but here I've got my router in a custom 3d printed mini rack with 3d printed patch panel, and a couple of old NUCs. Only thing I really use day-to-day is a NUC connected to an amp so I can use the amp as a Spotify connect client
I was too lazy to put on clothes and go out to my shack. This picture is a bit old. It's missing a lot of mess and my PeerTube server.
It is strange seeing the physical manifestation of a web endpoint, to me, in 2026, after decades of cloudslop.
Its just a computer! on a shelf! you can go hold it!
Did some one ask for dust cos I got plenty! Also have one desktop with 30TB of memory, separate small form for HA and Pihole, networking equipment, cooling fans and a UPS all packed into one (un)tidy cupboard. The door doesn't quite close but enough to hide it from my partner!
30 TB of memory?!
Youβre a billionaire!!
Only two of the minis are in use. The other two i am just messing with different things. Still have three more not in use and unsure what I am going to do with them. Two extreme AP not being used and probably never will.
