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Cake day: Jun 12, 2023

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Reliability of connection to the drives, especially during unscheduled power cycles. USB is known for random drops, or not picking the drive up before all your other services have started, and can cause the need for extra troubleshooting. Can run fine… or it could not. This is in reference to storage drives, not OS drives.


Trunas with Tailscale/headscale/NetBird as far as software and security. As far as hardware, you want storage that is not attached via usb. Either an off the shelf nas solution or a diy nas would work. There are a few YouTubers that touched on this, hardware haven and raidowl I think.


The newer Omada routers are pretty good, and their software is getting better. Personally I use Opnsense on a Chinese fanless router from eBay. Paid for an n100, got an i3-1113 with dual channel memory does everything I need no issue, and it has helped me learn ALOT. However if I had the $200 just laying around today, I would stick with Omada just for simplicity.


Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.


Proxmox is based on kvm/qemu, and is very resource conservative. There is virtually no impact on performance due to the hypervisor, even on older processors. Scheduling on the cpu and hypervisor makes running multiple VMs at the same time trivial as well. RAM and I/O bandwidth are the two things that can affect performance. Running out of RAM due to too many VMs will grind you to a halt, but so would running too many applications or containers on bare metal. Running everything off of one spinning sata disk will make it impossible, but again, same downfall on bare metal.

Those minimal impacts to performance are a minor nuisance compared to the ability to run experiments and learn on sandboxed VMs. Now that TrueNAS has better virtualization support, it has caught my eye as a better homelab solution, but I will always have a proxmox server running somewhere in my stack just due to the versatility it gives me.


Just my opinions here:

  • I have essential services running on a separate computer, 8gb pi4 right now. Stuff like NetBoot.xyz, homepage, etc, lightweight and resource low but need to be always up. That way if your main server needs to go down, you still have those services running.

  • I have bought second hand enterprise equipment for most of the hardware I have. Basically anything with ddr4 and pcie 3 or above will crush most things you would like to do. Grabbing an intel with quick sync will help with Jellyfin, but you can add a graphics card for transcoding if you want, a quadro p2000 or higher will be fine. Building is a viable option as well, but you may spend more for less powerful but more efficient hardware.

  • software is probably the most controversial. I went with proxmox on my main server, giving me the ability to run whatever I want whenever I want. It’s not perfect, but gets the job done and has helped me learn A LOT. But flip a coin or roll a dice on what software to run as a newbie, it will all be a learning curve, and everyone will tell you why what they use is superior.

Whatever you do, you’re not wrong. Run things that tickle your fancy and move at your pace. You’ll mess up, step back and punt a lot. Remember to backup essential data before you wipe. Have fun, and good luck on your travels.



It has been. I started in this because I liked picking up kick ass enterprise hardware really cheap and playing around with what it can do. Used enterprise hardware is so damn expensive now, it’s cheaper and easier to do everything with consumer products and use the rx6700 in my gaming rig. Just don’t want that running llms and always on.


Picked up an AMD instinct mi25 to try and do just that. Can get easy-diffusion working after some cussing and voodoo. Cannot get rocm to do ANY llm of any kind, feels like a waste of video ram

Also have a tesla p4 that runs most text-to-image models rather well, but have been unsuccessful at any llm either, even oobabooga can’t seem to run on it.

Have given up because the software stack keeps advancing and leaving my hardware behind. I don’t have $3000 for an a100 or $1300 for an mi100 sooo… until the models can run on older/less powerful hardware, I’m probably sitting out of this game. Even though I’d love to be elbow deep in this one.


Any old Dell desktop/workstation/server should reach those specs. Poweredge rX30 and up, precision XX20/30 and up or optiplex (don’t know or understand that product line). Most of them are being rescued from the landfill. Might have to spend a crap ton over your budget, like 5-10x over, but you will get those specs.

Look at an r430 barebones, no cpu/ram and build from there using spec sheets from Dell on what it takes. I was able to get one for $400 3 years back, even came with 16gb of ram and a single 10 core Xeon e5-v3.

Also, what are you doing that need these kinds of specs? Running more than 10 VMs at once? Cloud gaming? Form follows function.



Only downside is Reolink encodes in hvec. Frigate handles it fine, but be aware that viewing may be an issue. I’d still buy more Reolink cameras though.


Already have a 3-2-1 backup of the config folders and compose files, and I have backups of the VM if anything goes south. Making sure my logic train was on the right path.


Proper procedure for migrating servarr services from JABOD to zfs
Setting up my server as a newbie some years ago, I did not have the ability to purchase more then one 8TB hard drive. Outgrew that rather quick and now I have two additional 16TB drives, in a Just A Bunch Of Disk configuration, mounted to different /mnt mount points. I know this is not ideal, but lacking the ability to expand further or buy new drives for a new zfs pool and transfer, I don't have much of a choice but to wipe the drives, set up a zfs raid and re-download everything. I have everything set up in docker-compose files, so I'm pretty sure I just need to keep those and the folders where the configs are, modify the compose files with the new file structure and... I am unsure where to go from here. Will everything start being grabbed as soon as my dockers spin up? Is there an additional procedure I need to do to make sure I don't wipe my existing config files with blank empty ones? Is there an easier way of doing this?
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Webpage loads are slow, especially images, netboot is a bit slow. I’m sure it’s i/o bottleneck and that everything is running in docker containers. I could probably optimize things a bit better, I just don’t have that kind of time for these projects, and getting an old dell micro would be faster than what I have. but they don’t run on PoE+ that I know of.


I have a cluster of four running all off a single switch, incredibly convenient.


I have three Raspberry Pi 4 4gb and 1 Pi 4 8gb at my disposal, and I still have moments where the thing I need to do will hiccup, or be slower than usual. The Pi 5 has been said to be two times as fast, which is plenty for me. just with the price all in of over $100, curious if anyone else has a better option/opinion


Power over Ethernet. Sorry, read it over three time for spelling, didn’t catch that I never gave the acronym meaning.


PoE Single Board/Micro/Mini Computer/Server
I have an 8gb Raspberry Pi 4 that has been a workhorse for years. I keep it for my not intense but essential networking purposes, NetBoot.xyz, Homepage, etc., because I can run it over PoE (edit: Power over Ethernet), so it is always on as long as my network is up. It is growing long in the tooth, and I find myself wanting to replace it with something a bit more capable. Looking at the 8gb Pi 5 at $80 plus another $30 for a PoE hat, I wonder if there is something out there that would be a better value for running PoE? Can you convert a micro pc over to PoE? Does anyone have any recommendations for computers that run off PoE or can be converted to PoE?
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Tabby and xpipe is what I moved to after I was locked out of my Termius account. Tabby is what I use mostly now, there is a server you can run that lets you sync your profiles.


Tabby has a server that lets you synch your profiles.


Create the folder you want them in. Add that root folder to Radarr. Batch edit the root folder of all movies to the new folder. Click on move the files for me. Sit back for a few hours while it does the rest. When the process is done, then you come back and click that x.

It’s one of many ways to do this.


Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.


I use a handbrake container and a watch folder. Just move what you want converted to the watch folder and handbrake does the rest.


Just buy used and modify yourself with the tech you want. Send a message that this shit is unacceptable and we are willing to live in a less technologically enhanced world if it means no subscriptions. We keep buying it, they will continue to think this is how you “extract profit” from consumers.


Recently went through this. Needed a quick and dirty knowledge repository for work. Ended up running bookstack, wiki.js and dokuwik in docker containers, building the same wiki in each and then messed around with it. Landed on bookstack and wiki.js, bookstack because I liked the end user UI and wiki.js because of the backend. I think most my co-workers use the bookstack one.


Electronics are black magic as far as I’m concerned, I just like slapping them together and trying to make them play nice.


Don’t know man. I have a 10gb nic that makes different noises depending on if it’s passed through to opnsense or Debian.



Second for Netdata for the temps and load info, portainer for docker monitoring. Netdata gives you more real time info than even glances. Portainer is an easy way to look at logs and such, I don’t use it to manage, prefer command line for that. Netdata we’ll give you some docker info, but not logs.


The room you run it in WILL get hot, make sure it’s adequately ventilated.


I don’t know that it would be worth the power usage. If it’s all you got, then it’s overkill in my opinion, but should work fine. If you are buying, x30 poweredges are getting cheaper, their precision towers in that gen and above would work, and would be more powerful using less power. E5-v4 processors are also getting cheaper, which you can throw into most of the x30 poweredges. And they run ddr4 ram.

But if the 710 is what you got, then it should accomplish what you are looking at doing just fine in my opinion.


I notice in yours you dropped the - APP_URL=https://bookstack.example.com that linuxserver and solidnerd have in their compose files. I will comment that out and see if that helps my issues. would redirect to a 404 page every time.


Tried bookstack first, but setting it up with docker was giving me issues and didn’t want to try bare metal/VM yet. It’s on my list to fiddle with though, thank you.


This was the first one I set up. I enjoy it, but I need to see if someone who only knows how to use gmail can operate it.


I will spin one of those up. Thank you for the suggestion.


Saw everything on awesome-selfhosted, just wasn’t sure which out of the plethora of options out there was the easiest for the end user.


Simplest For End User Wiki/Knowlege Repo for the end user
I am trying to set up a repository of knowledge for my job. Was thinking a wiki, but I need something that I can make as simple as possible for the end user, as some of them are not familiar with markdown or html. Is there a self hosted option that is dumb easy simple to navigate and edit for the end user?
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Have never been able to get into playlists. I don’t have time to sit down and scroll through my thousands of movies to pick individual ones out for a certain mood. I did that with music back in the 00s, but I had a considerably larger amount of free time on my hands back then. Should probably look into them a bit more.


It’s missing from many players. Infuse is missing it too, which I have to use because Plex on tvOS is TERRIBLE. How does everyone look at movies then? Scroll through them alphabetically? I miss the play random button too, they took that away a year or two ago.


Wish there was a Jellyfin client that had a sort by random on tvOS, literally the only reason I use the Plex app.


Until I created a servarr stack, finding what I needed on Usenet never happened. Using Radarr with prowlarr and sabnzbd, now my missing files are down to maybe a dozen.


Usenet. Found so many things that I couldn’t find on public trackers once I got down the concept and was able to set up an arr server with sabnzbd. It does cost some money, but I feel it’s negligible for what you get.


Be a VPS for other people?
I have friends and relatives that would like to do some memory and compute intensive tasks, but lack the hardware locally. I have loads of ram doing nothing and a little compute to spare. Is there a way for me to set up some service accessible to them that would allow them to spin up VMs, similar to Linode or DigitalOcean? I know letting outside access to a proxmox server would be disastrous. I guess I could setup a VPN server into a virtualized proxmox server? Would rather find a way to point them to a url with a username and password and have them able to use my server as their vps like AWS or Linode.
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Network Topology Diagram/Map Tools?
I am trying to finally get my homelab organized, and I need assistance visualizing my network. I am just wondering if there are tools out there that assist with this. I have tried the paint and gimp routes, and I find myself spending more time trying to make it look good and organized rather than actually mapping my network. Is there any utility out there that is purpose build just for visualizing network topology? Or am I better off with just graph paper, pencil and a straight edge?
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APC server rack with threaded holes instead of cage nuts
Just picked up an APC 48u server rack. There were no pictures of it in the post and I did not notice until I got it home and set up, that the rack rails have threaded holes instead of square cage nut holes. I can’t seem to determine the thread size and pitch, and have a thread gauge coming. Until then, does anyone know anything about this? The people I grabbed it from had used self tapping machine screws and drove them in with an impact wrench. Is this what APC had intended, or is there some $300 proprietary screw I have to buy from them? ![](https://i.imgur.com/uf6TDlE.jpg) ![](https://i.imgur.com/3WFoRQH.jpg)
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Proxmox host network speeds are terrible, VMs are fine
Running proxmox 8.0.3, spinning up new VM, noticed my netboot was SSLLOOWW. ran speedtest-cli in the host shell, was getting 4Mbits/s, ran on a VM on that same system, was getting 500-600 Mbits/s. I have NO clue what to make of this. Is this a bridge issue in proxmox? I don't think it's a DNS issue, everything else is working, business as usual, even still serving plex and arr on the same system. Any ideas to get me running in the right direction? Edit: It's DNS. It's always DNS. Disabled AdGuard Home and magically speeds on the host were back. Confused, but have a direction at least.
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