Home lab 2026 — post your rack (or cardboard box)

Finally got around to documenting my shed setup. It's a fun little project that's been cooking since spring.

The core is a Contabo NAT VPS running wireguard back to the house, but the real star is this old Dell SFF I found on marketplace for $40. Threw in a $15 Xeon E3-1230v3, 32GB DDR3 from a recycler, and a 512GB SATA SSD. Total spend under $80 and it actually works great for the stuff I actually run.

Proxmox VE 8.2
├── pihole + unbound (2 vCPU / 2GB)
├── jellyfin (4 vCPU / 8GB, iGPU passthrough)
├── home assistant (2 vCPU / 4GB)
├── nginx proxy manager (1 vCPU / 1GB)
└── dev VM for random tinkering (4 vCPU / 8GB)

The "rack" is a $5 ikea kallax shelf with a cardboard box cutout for cable management. 3D printed some feet for a 4-port switch. Idle draw is 34W, peaks around 80W when jellyfin transcodes.

Partner hates the noise but tolerates it because pihole blocks all the smart TV ads. Small victories.

Tomchan that's a solid foundation but why pay for a gui when you can self-host traefik with docker compose and get automatic letsencrypt without clicking anything

My whole stack lives on a single ryzen 5 5600g box I got from a local recycler for $90. 64GB ram, 2x4TB used enterprise drives in zfs mirror. Runs everything. Jellyfin, navidrome, immich, paperless-ngx, nextcloud, actual budget, home assistant, the works. docker compose files as far as the eye can see.

services:
  traefik:
    image: traefik:v3.1
    command:
      - "--providers.docker=true"
      - "--certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.tlschallenge=true"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
  # ... 17 more services

Reverse proxy is the backbone of modern self-hosting. Once you go labels you never go back

Back in 2009 I had a real rack

A full 42u compaq from a datacenter liquidation. Weighed 400 pounds empty. Filled the bottom with sun fire v240s I got for scrap value, ran gentoo on all of them because compiling for sparc was character building. They don't make them like that anymore.

These days I'm down to a single thinkpad t430 on a windowsill. I5-3320m, 16GB, ssd. Runs alpine linux, openrc, no docker. Just straight nginx, postgresql, a few static sites. 15 watts at the wall.

The thinkpad has a cracked hinge so it lives in a bamboo silverware organizer I got at a thrift store. Keeps it at the right angle for airflow. Back in 2009 that would have been embarrassing. Now it's cozy. The keyboard still feels perfect after 13 years.

Sometimes I boot the old v240 just to hear the fans scream. 12,000 rpm of nostalgia. Wife makes me keep it in the garage.

52 boxes but who's counting

Ok so I dont have a rack I have a closet and its bad

The network side is where it gets silly. I have 3 switches from different eras in there. A 24 port gigabit I got for $20, an 8 port 2.5gbe that was "only" $45, and some 4 port thing from a dollar store that I use for the ipmi network because segregation is free

Power draw across the whole closet is 340W. At $0.14/kWh thats $35/month just to keep my hoard warm. For that money you get a decent vps from OVHcloud (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/) but where's the fun

My "production" stuff is spread across:

• 4x raspberry pi 4 (various dns, monitoring, random)
• 2x optiplex 9020 (proxmox cluster)
• 1x dell r230 (truenas, 4x8TB shucked)
• 1x random chinese mini pc (pfsense)
• And like 7 actual vps from various places for things that need real ips

The cardboard box is under the r230 catching drips from the dehumidifier. Very professional

Pfsense has been rock solid though. 2 years uptime on that little box. The chinese no-brand hardware is suspiciously good.

Idk why I do this

Anyway I just run everything off a 2019 gaming laptop with a dead battery

Its an i7-9750h, gtx 1660 ti, 32gb ram. Screen doesnt work so its basically a very expensive brick with a power brick. Sits on a baking rack from walmart for airflow. $0 because I already owned it and broke it myself

At 3am last week I decided to see if I could run a k8s cluster entirely in lxc containers nested inside each other. It worked. It was terrible. I took a screenshot and went to sleep

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME          STATUS   ROLES           AGE
lxc-nested-1  Ready    control-plane   4h
lxc-nested-2  Ready    <none>          4h
lxc-nested-3  Ready    <none>          4h
# all on one laptop. why.

Idle draw 45W. The gpu does nothing except warm the room. I call it space heating as a service

Partner doesnt know it exists. Its behind the couch

Some of you need to learn about power efficiency

That 340W closet is burning money. A single modern ryzen 9 7950x at 65W eco mode will outperform that whole pile and sip power doing it.

I've got a 12U startech open frame in the garage. Proper 20A circuit, dedicated 30A pdu, cable management arms on everything. Picked up three dell r640s from a colo decom last year, $75 each plus shipping pallet fees. Dual xeon gold 6248r, 256GB ddr4, 8x2.5" bays.

Only running one right now. The other two are spare parts and future expansion. Idle is 89W, under full load with all 40 cores going it hits 280W. For that I get more compute than most of you are running combined.

The r640 lives on rails. Below it is a tripp-lite 1500va ups, a patch panel, and a mikrotik crs326 for 10gbe fiber to the desktop. Above it is nothing because I leave room for airflow. This is how you do it.

Partner doesn't go in the garage anyway so it's fine

For that money you get better density with used enterprise

Carl those r640s are nice but the 2.5" bay limit hurts. For bulk storage you want something with 3.5" or just go jbod.

My setup is an auction supermicro 846 chassis. 24x 3.5" bays, dual e5-2680v4, 128GB ram. Cost $220 shipped because the seller didn't know what they had. For that money you get a platform that can hold 400+TB raw.

Currently running:
- 12x 8TB sas drives (shucked from Hetzner external deals — https://www.hetzner.com/sb, €110 each)
- 2x 1TB sata ssd for zfs special vdev
- 1x 16TB parity drive for the unraid vm I keep meaning to migrate

pool: tank
state: ONLINE
config:
    raidz2-0
        sda   8TB
        sdb   8TB
        sdc   8TB
        sdd   8TB
        sde   8TB
        sdf   8TB
    raidz2-1
        sdg   8TB
        sdh   8TB
        sdi   8TB
        sdj   8TB
        sdk   8TB
        sdl   8TB
special
    mirror-2
        sdm   1TB
        sdn   1TB

Draws 180W with all drives spun up. 140W typical. The supermicro sits on a furniture dolly because this thing is 70 pounds empty. Not pretty but it moves.

Noise is 42db at 1 meter. Tolerable. Partner says it sounds like "a small airport" but its in the basement so she only hears it when doing laundry.

What hypervisor you running on that Dell? proxmox or bare metal

15 watts at the wall

It's not about the watts, it's about what the watts are doing. That T430 runs my whole web presence, my mail, a gopher server for the three people who still care. Back in 2009 I burned 2kW easy and half of it was idling.

The bamboo organizer is the real innovation though. £1.50, holds the power brick underneath, phone cable slots through the side. Better airflow than the stand Dell sold for £40.