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Mech and Elec Engi here. As long as it works and fits the design constraints, sometimes it's better to go with the fast/easy option if it means you can fit more projects into the time. (Time is ALWAYS the most important constraint in my experience.) We can all be guilty of spending 100 hours overoptimizing something. I usually don't bother to do something "the right way" unless I'm either: a. Giving it to someone else. Don't let others inherit your problems. b. Doing/Using it at least semi-frequently. c. Doing it specifically to learn how to do it right.
@@Prophes0r it was as bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment, but come on, you can't surely be defending stuffing wires up a 240V connector held on with glue as 'not gilding the lily'. Even the wall mounted contraptions cannot surely be any more efficient in time than using a suitable case. The time spent ordering such case will be recouped in spades over the time spent drilling holes in walls and applying zip ties etc. I can appreciate some may do it for an aesthetic, but they're ignoring thermal management, fire safety and RF screening. Your point a. covers why you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking a bodge is being time efficient; you are storing up problems for the future. These things have a habit of coming back to bite you!
@@shm5547 I am defending the wire bodge. It works. It doesn't use extra new materials. They took the time to think about safety, and covered the exposed wiring with insulator. They should have also covered the screw terminals. But they admit that. Cutting the end off the wire and going directly to the screw terminals would have made that wire single-use. Maybe they don't have a box full of those wires like some of us do. (My box is almost empty because I always treat them as disposable...) Wall mounting is perfectly valid. Ideal in some cases. It saves bench room. It gets rid of a blank space on the wall without having to put a decoration there. It keeps the machine WAY cleaner in a dusty environment, as long as the mount is not too close to the floor. As long as it is all properly secured with some zip-ties or whatever, it's fine. Also, who cares about holes in walls? Unless you have solid concrete walls (which I know is the norm in a FEW places), drilling/patching a hole is trivial. People spend WAY too much effort trying to avoid putting holes in their walls. You also misunderstand the [a.] point. (Or maybe what bodge means?) Let me give you some examples. If a friend needs me to fix a dining room chair, [a.] applies, I will take the time to fix it strong and make it look nice too. If I'm fixing a shop stool with a broken leg, I'll use a scrap of 2x4, glue, and some drywall screws(gasp!) It just needs to work well. I'm not going to waste my time with joinery and color-matching. If it's 6 weeks until the end of the semester, and I'm fixing a laptop, I can tell you right now that I'm going to be using tape, hot-glue, and maybe a piece of Aluminum from a soda can. I'm not going to waste time making a tool pretty. I'm not wasting time on something that will either be fixed "properly" during the break, or replaced. If I have to drill holes in 3 pieces of wood, and the thing I'm making only needs to work for a week, I'm going to eyeball it and drill the holes by hand. If it's 200 pieces of wood or if the thing I need actually needs the precision, I'm going to make a jig for it and do it right. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from knowing you did it right. I absolutely get it. I WANT to do it right. But we can't let that desire for self satisfaction get in the way of actually getting things done. Knowing when it is okay to bodge something is a valuable bit of wisdom. Sometimes "Just Make It Work" is the right goal.
@@Prophes0r insulating that screw terminal was the least of my worries, as it's inside a metal case, there's really no need. Of more concern is the fire risk due to a potentially high resistance dodgy friction-fit wire shoved up the connector and the apparent lack of an earth connection to that metal case. I don't know how you can claim to be an electrical / mechanical engineer and can't see the problem with that being a fire risk and electrical shock hazard. I'll excuse the lack of knowledge about RF / EMC, as that is a bit of a dark art and won't be covered much on elec/mech courses.
14:34 The screwdriver is there so the case and the support it's sitting on don't get too close; otherwise, if the two halves get too close together, the radioactive core underneath will go prompt critical and release fatal amounts of ionizing radiation into the desk. This guy definitely learned from the Demon Core.
@@dude2093 And the comment was a joke referencing the real Demon core, and how it was actually propped open with a screwdriver prior to one of the incidents...
13:25 Hi! Just a bit of clarification for my build: I took the C14 connector from an old PSU, so the cables were already soldered in place. I used hot glue as an insulation to make sure the cables don't touch the case. So even though it looks extremely sketchy, the glue makes it just a bit safer :)
Safety glue - great 👍 But please also protect the PSU screws - i have used 3d printed cover, else just use some more glue, better than nothing. Vita wrap and then glue, then you have costum removable cover 🤓
good job choosing PSU. But just ditch the connectors, cut off from one of power cables (you'll have plenty of them in the years coming) and connect directly. Get a half-decent crimper and proper terminals for connections, because bare strands will brake off, just a matter of time, especially while both cable and PSU are not secured to anything mechanically (- safety points as well). An the minor thing is output wires are sure thin ass for 5A, not sure how much they experience in the setup, but these kind have insulation thicker than copper. Not that janky overall, but exposed mains is indeed irresponsible.
I'm the one who submitted the "Backup Stackup" at 25:20 and I'm flattered by your reaction (and the inclusion in the thumbnail!) For anyone who's curious, the new build has only marginally better speeds due to the crappy old SMR drives 😂. I should've kept the low power draw and style points!
We can even flip this whole thing around and mount the homelab on *the opposite* of the ceiling. Maybe even invent some kind of a mounting system to stack different appliances on top of each other. We could call it a "rack" or something like that
The setup you're looking at 23:25 is just a network cabinet setup but on a wall. The stuff inside the wall is telcomm stuff, its just data and phone lines punched down onto a 110 block. None of that stuff is high voltage. Lastly, the orange plug you're looking at is an RJ-45 jack with an ethernet cable plugged in. The jack in question is a faceplate style, meaning it gets mounted into a faceplate on a wall outlet.
Yay!! Thanks for including my setup at 11:25 The power consumption there is a combined one at the circuit level including my gaming PC, networking and the servers. Its a bit on the higher side when the PC is running as the PC has a 3090 in it. Without the PC running this idles at around 150W, which is still higher than I'd like, but this is the best that I could get without changing my hardware entirely, which I assume would have more financial/environmental costs than just the energy cost this adds.
I think the aversion to using cases for home servers stems from "Well, I have all the other parts, and why spend $40-60 on a case when I can spend that same amount for a few extra TB of storage?" 🙃
I used it all throughout the years, PC cases, 19" cases, open stands, mobos laying around, sure as hell skipping 19" racks, but you name it.. And in the end I now have my water cooled desktop in an open upside down bench and my shielded rack corner is definitely moving from Fractal cases to cutom wall mounts. Those people in the video got the hunch.
Had I known earlier that you are doing a video like this I'd have sent over some pics of my Homelab for sure! Network: - TP-Link Archer C7 wireless router - runs OpenWRT - dual WAN via 1 cable modem and 1 LTE router) - TP-Link TL-SG1016D 16 Port unmanaged switch PCs/Servers: - Fujitsu Esprimo - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 - 8 GB RAM - Nvidia Tesla P4 - runs Proxmox VE - provides a Pihole, a NAS (10TB), Jellyfin, Ollama and a bunch of other services - SUN SPARC T4-1 (just to play around a bit with it ^^) - HP ProLiant DL360 G6 - 2x Intel Xeon X5550 - 48GB RAM - runs Proxmox VE - used for video transcoding - DELL PowerEdge 850 - Intel Pentium 4 HT - 8GB DDR-2 RAM - runs Ubuntu Server - currently used for backups only Misc: - 1x Monitor ASUS VA27EHE (27" 16:9) - 2x Monitor Acer V193WL (19" 16:10) - 2x USV (1 for the Fujitsu + all network gear except the cable modem, 1 for the main monitor, studio lights and the speakers - this setup can run about 90 minutes on battery) And everything except the misc stuff and the cable modem is inside my desk ^^
Tag Wolfgang, dont judge the wall mounts too hard, because sometimes the wall in the basement is the only place with cold environment. the other pictures with wall mounts in the living room maybe from white old male singles who dont care anymore about anything. i have a Streacom DA6 XL next to the TV, sometimes i prefere looking to the smooth 200rpm spinning RGB (WLED) Lian Li fans more than watching german prime time tv. Danke Ampel. :-)
The last one from "Felix" appears to have speech-to-text goofs. Here is probably what he meant to say: "They got really HOT once I put the 10 GIG cards in them".
And here I thought I was living on the edge keeping a bare Z170 miniITX board on my shelf without standoffs, enclosures, anything at all (running proxmox with pfsense and ubuntu server next to network gear), while the side plates that form a 3.5" 'bay' are held together only with the screws inside the hard drives. At least it's Christmas themed with all the color-coded UTP cables! Yellow from ONT, blue to pi-hole, red to pfsense wan, green from pfsense lan, white to router. I just hope for the sake of my ISP that they never have to troubleshoot the ONT... because giving them a rundown of my network would be like trying to explain to a five-year-old how Santa gets to all the houses in a single night. You just don’t even try, you just say 'magic.'
25:10 I'll take that advise, though in my defense, the outlet is 220V and not 120V, and nothing connected to it draws much anyway. Also, the panel behind is networking, no POE, so should be fine...
36:56 I'm guessing they meant to say "They got really hot once I put 10gig cards in them"? That would explain why they removed the top covers and let there be a bunch of space above the 10g cards.
Thanks for including my setup, 37:14 is the sketchy setup, aio is not screwed in as it doesn’t fit in the case. Didn’t want to include all my sketchy stuff, I too have a bunch of raspberry pi’s lying around without a case and cable spaghetti right behind that IKEA tv stand. New setup is a 6U case, power usage is at 200w. Also WinServer 2016 has been replaced with Windows Server 2025 Data centre edition 🤣. I agree she is “Overkill” but I really wanted that headroom to push it and for it to last a long time. ❤ Edit: Oh and have have intentions to throw my 4090 in there later down the line :D
Nice to see you here in the comment section. Your build is amazing! What do you do with all this GPU Power, because I am considering to get a beefy gpu in for training AI models and a gaming VM that I don't need a dedicated pc for this stuff anymore. But I don't know, if I can make it work in UnRaid.
@@Tri-Technology Thx. The GPUs are currently set up for transcoding in Plex and Immich, and I also want to pass them to the VMs as well (but haven't worked out the best way to vnc them after). The 1650 was originally purchased with Plex in mind, and the 2080 Super was from my old "gaming" build. And its really easy to pass GPUs in dockers and vms, but its not recommended to use VMs for gaming as anticheat is an absolute mess. I also wanted to do some similar stuff with the Ollama docker, but have had some issues setting it up (the models don't stay after i downloaded them), But i have already have ComfyUi, Kohya_ss & Fooocus setup on my current "gaming"/youtube watching build. As for the beefy GPU for "Ai" models, The 4090 cuts it like butter and with ease. (Had to re write this, idk what happened to my first try)
@@aedan_kerr I use rdp for my VMs, because it's running much better than VNC in my case. Ok that's interesting. I am not running AI models so far, but it's planned but first step in my case is get a setup running to train own AI models. But good to hear that it can work!
"...I guess I'll need a ladder for that" 🤣🤣🤣👻 I'm ded Now I want to create a home lab! Love you Wolfgang, and thanx for the reminder, "power strips exist." 🤟🏼🥴🤘🏼
From what I saw there seams to be a commnon theme of people reusing parts from their first (gaming?) PC to start their homelab. Nice to see resusing older parts 👍
I've a question for the submitter at 28:41 : Why you put the system out of the notebook enclosure? You said the hinge was broken, but you could still fix its position with an L bracket or screwing it on the wood with the case on, protecting it from dust, water and probably also cat attacks ahahahhahahha
16:23 Hey, Thanks for checking out my NAS! I guess a bit of backstory was that at that time, I was 14, my mother asked me to spice up her office pc and as a result, I got that LGA 775 board. Now I didnt know what to do with it but after some discord conversation with some friends they said I should try using it for a NAS or something like that. I was like okay sure. Since I wasnt fully commited at first, I figured okay then ill just get the ikea pegboard, thinking if it doesnt work out I can just make it as a display piece. The other reason was that I didnt know where else to put a mid sized case in my room, while the ikea pegboard is relatively slim that I can just strap to the drawer. Also as a bonus, the pegboard was wayy cheaper than any new case or at least cleaner than any used one AHAHAH. Those fans were just random fans I had laying around, and to be fair they work, drives never touch low 40s with them Anyways thank you for the review!
I think it's brilliant. Not everything has to be in a box. And lets be honest, most people have more wall space than floor space. I'd like to see you send Wolfgang a peg board mounted 3D printer. 🤣🤣🤣😂 Maybe?
I’m definitely curious about those Zima Blades. A recent data loss incident at work has me interested in putting together a home server to experiment with.
That one from Felix near the end should read that 'it got really HOT after he put the 10GBit NICs in it'. I think... hence the open units in the rack mount front panels
Not me imagining them cramming gift cards inside the miniPC case until the plastic cracks, and then going "ah dang it, not again. let's try the other two miniPCs"
I was so lucky on rlly good prices when I was building my aliexpress homelab... e5-2630l v4 for $14, 64gb ECC(samsung) ddr4 for $50 and mb for $30, chilling on 32w and full blast on ~84w
On the aversion to computer cases overseas it can be a nightmare to get like a nice rack mount server case. I've spent ages trying to find one that fits short depth into a network cabinet and ultimately just gave up because I couldn't find one that was a reasonable price. I was hoping for a nice short depth with removable bays but they were triple a regular case cost but full depth, or five times the cost with international shipping to try and bring one across.
I have often wondered why no one ever seems to cut wood to size. I mean the hardware store sells drawer slides, right? And Sudge64 did build the frame from wood. Still, I like the esthetic, I have much more wall space than floor space.
I wouldn't say aversion to normal cases, but you see cases cost money and homelab/servers need multiple HDD so not every case you found in the garbage can would be usuable, even on local used market (I know there are free cases from time to time but not always the case not pun intended). Fortunately, I bought a full PC and upgraded parts to become my server, so I have a pretty good case. But if I'm buying parts only and hypothetically even after month of waiting I still can't find a case for free, I'd definitely not bother putting everything in it. I've already done it with my gaming PC (just laying on my table) for over a month.
I'm looking at all these power figures and...oof. My core switch alone idles at like 60w. Add in the 4x other switches and It's like...140w. My main Proxmox/NAS used to be ~140w average but is now ~200w. Enterprise U.2 drives are surprisingly hungry. Another thing to note is how power hungry memory can be. My 8x sticks of DDR4 ECC use ~60w.
Honestly, with my cableTV modem , mikrotik router, esprimo Q956, UPS and random temporary addition of RPI or ROCK3C on the floor, i was thinking about "nailing" all of it to desk at the back of table where it would collects less dust and allow vacuum cleaning the floor without touching sensitive coax cable to the modem.
glad to see my jank at 13:58 I honestly cant remember why i needed to keep it half open maybe it was a hot day my room gets hot with all these pc's on 35'C(95°F) the once after having the desktop on and rendering it was hell it was 30'c outside. the was breifcase is my desktop and the motherboard a proxmox node for awhile i ran only 2 nodes, i dont recomend this its more headache than running 2 unclustered nodes please have 3 minimum lol oh and the cardboard on the ram was to cover the rgb this is my bedroom
@@WolfgangsChannel I did try openrgb but kept getting errors about it needing a desktop/compositor to run I'll have to look into making a service for it, thanks
7:44 Maybe so many of these setups have no case, is because there are not many cases available anymore to fit all that hardware/hdd's? Most if not all cases right now are aimed at gaming setups, where you can mount one or two hdd's at the bottom next to the power supply if you are lucky. Gone is the hdd cage at the front of the case. Basically you are very limited what you can build inside current cases.
24:21 It is not an electrical panel but LSA+ rail for some kind of data connections (voice or other low voltage). The plugs in the front are a problem indeed.
Who ARE Your viewers.?! A very creative and not-risk-averse bunch. That's for sure. I've enjoyed all of your server builds, especially the ones where every cubic centimeter is put to good use. But the look on your face as you went from strange to stranger to strangest was hilarious. NowI see my next setup has got to be wall mounted!
3:41 ... I, uh, can't imagine what you'd need that many *pci(-e) slots* for on a drive shelf. Maybe some sort of hardware acceleration shelf? GPU compute or something? (Edit: eh, apparently so... just confused why you'd go to drive bays first given what they look like)
I've got a msi b250m that i broke and repaired a bunch of bent pins a couple of years ago equipped with an i3-9100 and a 256gb nvme ssd that's just dangling there because i lost the mounting screw and other screws didn't fit in there, that's running proxmox and the entirety of my homelab
When I see all these janky homelab setups, mine suddenly isn't quite so bad. I'll have to organise it anyway. Maybe get a small shelf to put the components on.
I though my third drive held together with corks and zip ties inside a case really made to only hold 2 drives was bad. Now I feel much better about myself, not gonna lie.
my current Setup is a old nuc i got from a friend with a SATA drive for the TrueNAS OS and a NVME fanxiang 1TB drive for the mass storage. It runs Adguard Home and paperless. My dream setup currently would be a AOOSTAR GEM10 with 3x NVME slots...one smaller SSD for the OS and two for redundant mass storage. It would be much more powerful than the current NUC so i could potentially run also more Docker apps like Nextcloud or something. Very small and nice setup i would think. (no need of that upgrade currently unfortunately...)
@WolfgangsChannel yeah it would Just be a so cool and tiny but still powerful setup... I rather invest in speedier and reliable nvme drives nowadays. Especially because I don't need a huge amount of storage space The nuc currently resides in top of the Heating Tubes in the basement 😁
No need to have electric motors in there to move stuff around. Also the CPU can go faster into power saving states because it gets its stuff faster done because of the lower latency.
Hey wolfgang! I have a question... I finally got the IMB-x1231... (after mistakenly buying the IMB-1231 🤦🤦) Anyway now I realise how bloody hard it is to get 32GB sticks of UDIMMS (in SODIMM format).. Can you share where you got yours? Thank you for all the power saving content
@@WolfgangsChannel oh I see.. Thank you. That seems German only. I'll keep looking. I think I may end up getting non ECC memory that I'll swap eventually. Edit: It ships around EU but I'm in an exotic location.. GG
From screenshots it seems downloading movies and tv series and storing them. Mine runs cloudflared reverse tunnels, dynamic dns and three instances of nginx server, one of them host blog, other stat counters, third is for a small company (basically single page info), then nextcloud for backup of phone photos and sharing big files, git server and i'm using it also for python development and experiments as it's accessible from everywhere. Mine is basically a single Esprimo Q956 USFF PC with size of the modem, i5-6500T, 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD with manual backups.
31:50 It's Me! Glad to be apart of this and have my home lab shown off! I didn't include any power measurements in the email, so I'll share them here. If you count my entire rack at idle, it's around 150W. Without my pc, it's closer to 30W~40W.
You sir. This. This is exactly what I want to build. However, I've been thru 60 summers so I don't think I'll see that day. The long and short of it - Thanks you made my day.
@@WolfgangsChannel Yes that is how VMs works. My point was that this user was running 20 containers. A docker container is not bootstrapping the whole Linux kernel, instead containers reusing most of the existing kernel and avoid overhead of emulating an entire VM. An VM on the other hand will therefor have much more memory usage, since it starts the whole kernel without any way of reusing resources of the host OS.
Despite running full-blown virtualized Linux kernels, the memory consumption of 20 Linux VMs will still not be anywhere near 80 GB due to KSM and memory ballooning. Try it yourself when you have some free time
worst nas home setup i ever saw where 3,5 hdds glued to the under side of the desk reinforced with some plastic ( was from a fren on discord) ( all jbod no raid)
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As an electronic engineer, this video has confirmed my suspicions about software engineers where hardware is concerned.
we run on cat logic, if it fits it sits
Mech and Elec Engi here.
As long as it works and fits the design constraints, sometimes it's better to go with the fast/easy option if it means you can fit more projects into the time. (Time is ALWAYS the most important constraint in my experience.)
We can all be guilty of spending 100 hours overoptimizing something.
I usually don't bother to do something "the right way" unless I'm either:
a. Giving it to someone else. Don't let others inherit your problems.
b. Doing/Using it at least semi-frequently.
c. Doing it specifically to learn how to do it right.
@@Prophes0r it was as bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment, but come on, you can't surely be defending stuffing wires up a 240V connector held on with glue as 'not gilding the lily'.
Even the wall mounted contraptions cannot surely be any more efficient in time than using a suitable case. The time spent ordering such case will be recouped in spades over the time spent drilling holes in walls and applying zip ties etc. I can appreciate some may do it for an aesthetic, but they're ignoring thermal management, fire safety and RF screening.
Your point a. covers why you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking a bodge is being time efficient; you are storing up problems for the future. These things have a habit of coming back to bite you!
@@shm5547 I am defending the wire bodge. It works. It doesn't use extra new materials. They took the time to think about safety, and covered the exposed wiring with insulator.
They should have also covered the screw terminals. But they admit that.
Cutting the end off the wire and going directly to the screw terminals would have made that wire single-use. Maybe they don't have a box full of those wires like some of us do. (My box is almost empty because I always treat them as disposable...)
Wall mounting is perfectly valid. Ideal in some cases.
It saves bench room.
It gets rid of a blank space on the wall without having to put a decoration there.
It keeps the machine WAY cleaner in a dusty environment, as long as the mount is not too close to the floor.
As long as it is all properly secured with some zip-ties or whatever, it's fine.
Also, who cares about holes in walls? Unless you have solid concrete walls (which I know is the norm in a FEW places), drilling/patching a hole is trivial. People spend WAY too much effort trying to avoid putting holes in their walls.
You also misunderstand the [a.] point.
(Or maybe what bodge means?)
Let me give you some examples.
If a friend needs me to fix a dining room chair, [a.] applies, I will take the time to fix it strong and make it look nice too.
If I'm fixing a shop stool with a broken leg, I'll use a scrap of 2x4, glue, and some drywall screws(gasp!) It just needs to work well. I'm not going to waste my time with joinery and color-matching.
If it's 6 weeks until the end of the semester, and I'm fixing a laptop, I can tell you right now that I'm going to be using tape, hot-glue, and maybe a piece of Aluminum from a soda can. I'm not going to waste time making a tool pretty. I'm not wasting time on something that will either be fixed "properly" during the break, or replaced.
If I have to drill holes in 3 pieces of wood, and the thing I'm making only needs to work for a week, I'm going to eyeball it and drill the holes by hand.
If it's 200 pieces of wood or if the thing I need actually needs the precision, I'm going to make a jig for it and do it right.
There is a certain satisfaction that comes from knowing you did it right.
I absolutely get it.
I WANT to do it right.
But we can't let that desire for self satisfaction get in the way of actually getting things done.
Knowing when it is okay to bodge something is a valuable bit of wisdom.
Sometimes "Just Make It Work" is the right goal.
@@Prophes0r insulating that screw terminal was the least of my worries, as it's inside a metal case, there's really no need. Of more concern is the fire risk due to a potentially high resistance dodgy friction-fit wire shoved up the connector and the apparent lack of an earth connection to that metal case.
I don't know how you can claim to be an electrical / mechanical engineer and can't see the problem with that being a fire risk and electrical shock hazard. I'll excuse the lack of knowledge about RF / EMC, as that is a bit of a dark art and won't be covered much on elec/mech courses.
14:34 The screwdriver is there so the case and the support it's sitting on don't get too close; otherwise, if the two halves get too close together, the radioactive core underneath will go prompt critical and release fatal amounts of ionizing radiation into the desk. This guy definitely learned from the Demon Core.
It's an Ice Pick.
@@dude2093 And the comment was a joke referencing the real Demon core, and how it was actually propped open with a screwdriver prior to one of the incidents...
13:25 Hi! Just a bit of clarification for my build:
I took the C14 connector from an old PSU, so the cables were already soldered in place. I used hot glue as an insulation to make sure the cables don't touch the case. So even though it looks extremely sketchy, the glue makes it just a bit safer :)
Safety glue - great 👍
But please also protect the PSU screws - i have used 3d printed cover, else just use some more glue, better than nothing. Vita wrap and then glue, then you have costum removable cover 🤓
good job choosing PSU.
But just ditch the connectors, cut off from one of power cables (you'll have plenty of them in the years coming) and connect directly. Get a half-decent crimper and proper terminals for connections, because bare strands will brake off, just a matter of time, especially while both cable and PSU are not secured to anything mechanically (- safety points as well). An the minor thing is output wires are sure thin ass for 5A, not sure how much they experience in the setup, but these kind have insulation thicker than copper.
Not that janky overall, but exposed mains is indeed irresponsible.
Postarane na mocne 30% 😅
better never put your hand in there '-_-
I'm the one who submitted the "Backup Stackup" at 25:20 and I'm flattered by your reaction (and the inclusion in the thumbnail!) For anyone who's curious, the new build has only marginally better speeds due to the crappy old SMR drives 😂. I should've kept the low power draw and style points!
I actually love these setups, it's showcasing that all you need for a beginner homelab is a working hardware and there's nothing complicated involved.
I no longer feel bad about my own jankiness lol
*Cases exist so fans can direct air across hardware*
Wolfgang viewers: "And I took that personally"
I think they meant "10 gig cards" rather than "10 gift cards"
Thanks, that makes sense!
Also, probably “hot” instead of “got”
Ok, you may have seen wall-mounted homelabs , but hear me out...
Ceiling-mounted servers
(I unironically want to do that now)
We can even flip this whole thing around and mount the homelab on *the opposite* of the ceiling. Maybe even invent some kind of a mounting system to stack different appliances on top of each other. We could call it a "rack" or something like that
35:06 not just a fire hazard, but an explosion hazard with all that gas pipes!
The setup you're looking at 23:25 is just a network cabinet setup but on a wall. The stuff inside the wall is telcomm stuff, its just data and phone lines punched down onto a 110 block. None of that stuff is high voltage. Lastly, the orange plug you're looking at is an RJ-45 jack with an ethernet cable plugged in. The jack in question is a faceplate style, meaning it gets mounted into a faceplate on a wall outlet.
Yay!! Thanks for including my setup at 11:25
The power consumption there is a combined one at the circuit level including my gaming PC, networking and the servers. Its a bit on the higher side when the PC is running as the PC has a 3090 in it. Without the PC running this idles at around 150W, which is still higher than I'd like, but this is the best that I could get without changing my hardware entirely, which I assume would have more financial/environmental costs than just the energy cost this adds.
What are you using to create that Dashboard view?
Babe wake up Wolfgang posted
Lowest possible effort comment
@@LongerThanAverageUsernamethis
Why are people like this?
@@hyperprotagonist like what? Interacting to boost the video on the algorithm?
I think the aversion to using cases for home servers stems from "Well, I have all the other parts, and why spend $40-60 on a case when I can spend that same amount for a few extra TB of storage?" 🙃
I’m quite sure it’s exactly this
I used it all throughout the years, PC cases, 19" cases, open stands, mobos laying around, sure as hell skipping 19" racks, but you name it..
And in the end I now have my water cooled desktop in an open upside down bench and my shielded rack corner is definitely moving from Fractal cases to cutom wall mounts.
Those people in the video got the hunch.
Had I known earlier that you are doing a video like this I'd have sent over some pics of my Homelab for sure!
Network:
- TP-Link Archer C7 wireless router
- runs OpenWRT
- dual WAN via 1 cable modem and 1 LTE router)
- TP-Link TL-SG1016D 16 Port unmanaged switch
PCs/Servers:
- Fujitsu Esprimo
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
- 8 GB RAM
- Nvidia Tesla P4
- runs Proxmox VE
- provides a Pihole, a NAS (10TB), Jellyfin, Ollama and a bunch of other services
- SUN SPARC T4-1 (just to play around a bit with it ^^)
- HP ProLiant DL360 G6
- 2x Intel Xeon X5550
- 48GB RAM
- runs Proxmox VE
- used for video transcoding
- DELL PowerEdge 850
- Intel Pentium 4 HT
- 8GB DDR-2 RAM
- runs Ubuntu Server
- currently used for backups only
Misc:
- 1x Monitor ASUS VA27EHE (27" 16:9)
- 2x Monitor Acer V193WL (19" 16:10)
- 2x USV (1 for the Fujitsu + all network gear except the cable modem, 1 for the main monitor, studio lights and the speakers - this setup can run about 90 minutes on battery)
And everything except the misc stuff and the cable modem is inside my desk ^^
Tag Wolfgang, dont judge the wall mounts too hard, because sometimes the wall in the basement is the only place with cold environment. the other pictures with wall mounts in the living room maybe from white old male singles who dont care anymore about anything. i have a Streacom DA6 XL next to the TV, sometimes i prefere looking to the smooth 200rpm spinning RGB (WLED) Lian Li fans more than watching german prime time tv. Danke Ampel. :-)
The last one from "Felix" appears to have speech-to-text goofs. Here is probably what he meant to say: "They got really HOT once I put the 10 GIG cards in them".
If I could just see it all, like a homelab on the wall...
this is easily the funniest update I can recall you doing ever. 100/10, no notes.
I thought my set up was messy...please part 2-3-4...really fun to see all those weird setups.
And here I thought I was living on the edge keeping a bare Z170 miniITX board on my shelf without standoffs, enclosures, anything at all (running proxmox with pfsense and ubuntu server next to network gear), while the side plates that form a 3.5" 'bay' are held together only with the screws inside the hard drives.
At least it's Christmas themed with all the color-coded UTP cables! Yellow from ONT, blue to pi-hole, red to pfsense wan, green from pfsense lan, white to router.
I just hope for the sake of my ISP that they never have to troubleshoot the ONT... because giving them a rundown of my network would be like trying to explain to a five-year-old how Santa gets to all the houses in a single night. You just don’t even try, you just say 'magic.'
25:10 I'll take that advise, though in my defense, the outlet is 220V and not 120V, and nothing connected to it draws much anyway. Also, the panel behind is networking, no POE, so should be fine...
"some ketch and mustard cables...." got me cracking!!.
36:56 I'm guessing they meant to say "They got really hot once I put 10gig cards in them"? That would explain why they removed the top covers and let there be a bunch of space above the 10g cards.
14:11 is the best webcam I've seen in my whole life (kidding)
Thanks for including my setup, 37:14 is the sketchy setup, aio is not screwed in as it doesn’t fit in the case.
Didn’t want to include all my sketchy stuff, I too have a bunch of raspberry pi’s lying around without a case and cable spaghetti right behind that IKEA tv stand.
New setup is a 6U case, power usage is at 200w.
Also WinServer 2016 has been replaced with Windows Server 2025 Data centre edition 🤣.
I agree she is “Overkill” but I really wanted that headroom to push it and for it to last a long time. ❤
Edit: Oh and have have intentions to throw my 4090 in there later down the line :D
Nice to see you here in the comment section. Your build is amazing! What do you do with all this GPU Power, because I am considering to get a beefy gpu in for training AI models and a gaming VM that I don't need a dedicated pc for this stuff anymore. But I don't know, if I can make it work in UnRaid.
@@Tri-Technology Thx. The GPUs are currently set up for transcoding in Plex and Immich, and I also want to pass them to the VMs as well (but haven't worked out the best way to vnc them after).
The 1650 was originally purchased with Plex in mind, and the 2080 Super was from my old "gaming" build.
And its really easy to pass GPUs in dockers and vms, but its not recommended to use VMs for gaming as anticheat is an absolute mess.
I also wanted to do some similar stuff with the Ollama docker, but have had some issues setting it up (the models don't stay after i downloaded them),
But i have already have ComfyUi, Kohya_ss & Fooocus setup on my current "gaming"/youtube watching build.
As for the beefy GPU for "Ai" models, The 4090 cuts it like butter and with ease.
(Had to re write this, idk what happened to my first try)
@@aedan_kerr I use rdp for my VMs, because it's running much better than VNC in my case. Ok that's interesting. I am not running AI models so far, but it's planned but first step in my case is get a setup running to train own AI models. But good to hear that it can work!
"...I guess I'll need a ladder for that"
🤣🤣🤣👻 I'm ded
Now I want to create a home lab! Love you Wolfgang, and thanx for the reminder, "power strips exist." 🤟🏼🥴🤘🏼
From what I saw there seams to be a commnon theme of people reusing parts from their first (gaming?) PC to start their homelab. Nice to see resusing older parts 👍
I've a question for the submitter at 28:41 : Why you put the system out of the notebook enclosure? You said the hinge was broken, but you could still fix its position with an L bracket or screwing it on the wood with the case on, protecting it from dust, water and probably also cat attacks ahahahhahahha
Any chance for a future episode? I didn't know about this now I kinda want to send in my homelab for roasting.
That homemade bomb aesthetic is strong.
16:23 Hey, Thanks for checking out my NAS!
I guess a bit of backstory was that at that time, I was 14, my mother asked me to spice up her office pc and as a result, I got that LGA 775 board. Now I didnt know what to do with it but after some discord conversation with some friends they said I should try using it for a NAS or something like that. I was like okay sure. Since I wasnt fully commited at first, I figured okay then ill just get the ikea pegboard, thinking if it doesnt work out I can just make it as a display piece. The other reason was that I didnt know where else to put a mid sized case in my room, while the ikea pegboard is relatively slim that I can just strap to the drawer. Also as a bonus, the pegboard was wayy cheaper than any new case or at least cleaner than any used one AHAHAH.
Those fans were just random fans I had laying around, and to be fair they work, drives never touch low 40s with them
Anyways thank you for the review!
I think it's brilliant. Not everything has to be in a box. And lets be honest, most people have more wall space than floor space.
I'd like to see you send Wolfgang a peg board mounted 3D printer. 🤣🤣🤣😂
Maybe?
@waterandsteel4713 Ahahaha thank you!
Honestly not a bad idea... Pegboard mounted 3d printer is a sick idea.
"Erm.. IntEReStinG... bit of a fire hazard" - This whole video lol!
Having said that, looking under my own desk, I'm hardly one to throw shade!
I’m definitely curious about those Zima Blades. A recent data loss incident at work has me interested in putting together a home server to experiment with.
That one from Felix near the end should read that 'it got really HOT after he put the 10GBit NICs in it'. I think... hence the open units in the rack mount front panels
Are you a code breaker? Lol this needs to be pinned. TY
36:55 i think they meant that it got really hot when they added the 10 gigabit cards
Not me imagining them cramming gift cards inside the miniPC case until the plastic cracks, and then going "ah dang it, not again. let's try the other two miniPCs"
@@WolfgangsChannel ahahaha🤣🤣🤣🤣
"They got really got once I put 10 gift cards in them" --- I believe, 'They got really HOT once I put 10 GIG cards in them'
I was so lucky on rlly good prices when I was building my aliexpress homelab... e5-2630l v4 for $14, 64gb ECC(samsung) ddr4 for $50 and mb for $30, chilling on 32w and full blast on ~84w
On the aversion to computer cases overseas it can be a nightmare to get like a nice rack mount server case. I've spent ages trying to find one that fits short depth into a network cabinet and ultimately just gave up because I couldn't find one that was a reasonable price. I was hoping for a nice short depth with removable bays but they were triple a regular case cost but full depth, or five times the cost with international shipping to try and bring one across.
I have often wondered why no one ever seems to cut wood to size. I mean the hardware store sells drawer slides, right? And Sudge64 did build the frame from wood. Still, I like the esthetic, I have much more wall space than floor space.
I wouldn't say aversion to normal cases, but you see cases cost money and homelab/servers need multiple HDD so not every case you found in the garbage can would be usuable, even on local used market (I know there are free cases from time to time but not always the case not pun intended). Fortunately, I bought a full PC and upgraded parts to become my server, so I have a pretty good case. But if I'm buying parts only and hypothetically even after month of waiting I still can't find a case for free, I'd definitely not bother putting everything in it. I've already done it with my gaming PC (just laying on my table) for over a month.
With all these wallmounted setups, I'd love to see your version of a wall mount home lab! 😂
That setup at 23:25 was lit (like a fire hazard)
I'm looking at all these power figures and...oof.
My core switch alone idles at like 60w. Add in the 4x other switches and It's like...140w.
My main Proxmox/NAS used to be ~140w average but is now ~200w. Enterprise U.2 drives are surprisingly hungry.
Another thing to note is how power hungry memory can be. My 8x sticks of DDR4 ECC use ~60w.
I've got two 24 bay jbods with 40-something total drives... and the drives alone use ~400w, let alone the other stuff!
Honestly, with my cableTV modem , mikrotik router, esprimo Q956, UPS and random temporary addition of RPI or ROCK3C on the floor, i was thinking about "nailing" all of it to desk at the back of table where it would collects less dust and allow vacuum cleaning the floor without touching sensitive coax cable to the modem.
glad to see my jank at 13:58 I honestly cant remember why i needed to keep it half open maybe it was a hot day my room gets hot with all these pc's on 35'C(95°F) the once after having the desktop on and rendering it was hell it was 30'c outside. the was breifcase is my desktop and the motherboard a proxmox node for awhile i ran only 2 nodes, i dont recomend this its more headache than running 2 unclustered nodes please have 3 minimum lol oh and the cardboard on the ram was to cover the rgb this is my bedroom
I wondered how people deal with that rgb. My ram just has a heat spreader on the cheap (GSkill Aegis).
May I introduce you to OpenRGB?
I have a systemd service that runs automatically on system boot and sets all supported RGB peripherals to #000000
@@WolfgangsChannel I did try openrgb but kept getting errors about it needing a desktop/compositor to run I'll have to look into making a service for it, thanks
Here's the script that I'm running:
#!/bin/sh
NUM_DEVICES=/usr/bin/openrgb --noautoconnect --list-devices | grep -E '^[0-9]+: ' | wc -l)
for i in $(seq 0 $(($NUM_DEVICES - 1))); do
/usr/bin/openrgb --noautoconnect --device $i --mode static --color 000000
done
7:44 Maybe so many of these setups have no case, is because there are not many cases available anymore to fit all that hardware/hdd's? Most if not all cases right now are aimed at gaming setups, where you can mount one or two hdd's at the bottom next to the power supply if you are lucky. Gone is the hdd cage at the front of the case. Basically you are very limited what you can build inside current cases.
There are still a lot of good cases with HDD mounts - Fractal Define series comes to mind.
Other than that, what happened to the good ol' 3D printing?
backup-stackup was my favorite
These homelab stups are epic and out of this world awesome! More of these please!
24:21 It is not an electrical panel but LSA+ rail for some kind of data connections (voice or other low voltage). The plugs in the front are a problem indeed.
Cool review. Love to see what other tech fellas put together at their home.
Let's see if my drunk homelab email got read.
Great video, thanks Wolfgang.
Who ARE Your viewers.?! A very creative and not-risk-averse bunch. That's for sure. I've enjoyed all of your server builds, especially the ones where every cubic centimeter is put to good use. But the look on your face as you went from strange to stranger to strangest was hilarious. NowI see my next setup has got to be wall mounted!
Wolfgang ! I love your content ! Your videos are so instructive! 🤩 Greetings from France mate ! ❤
30:34 The light green slot is not ISA, it is AGP 🙂
I always love the vids on this channel, but this one was by far the most entertaining ;-) Please make this kind of thing a regular thing!
Thanks for the feature
Hey!!! VERY nice to see you again, Wolfgang... I missed you.
Dang, I have an entry for this! I didn't see your add, please have a part 2. I want to send mine.
I for one want to see that happen. I wish I had a server to submit.
3:41 ... I, uh, can't imagine what you'd need that many *pci(-e) slots* for on a drive shelf. Maybe some sort of hardware acceleration shelf? GPU compute or something? (Edit: eh, apparently so... just confused why you'd go to drive bays first given what they look like)
Well, i have no build to show. But i'm laughing my a*ss off at some of these janky builds. 😂😂😂 Nice series
Ketchup & Mustard cables 😂😂😂😂
I suddenly feel a LOT better about my own janky homelab setup!
I've got a msi b250m that i broke and repaired a bunch of bent pins a couple of years ago equipped with an i3-9100 and a 256gb nvme ssd that's just dangling there because i lost the mounting screw and other screws didn't fit in there, that's running proxmox and the entirety of my homelab
When I see all these janky homelab setups, mine suddenly isn't quite so bad. I'll have to organise it anyway. Maybe get a small shelf to put the components on.
i have no clue about my power consumption and am too scared (running enterprise networking and a dl380p g9 + threadripper)
i feel that this could be a monthly/bi-monthly video series
I though my third drive held together with corks and zip ties inside a case really made to only hold 2 drives was bad.
Now I feel much better about myself, not gonna lie.
In which software can I make something similar like in 12:03 ?
homepage
my current Setup is a old nuc i got from a friend with a SATA drive for the TrueNAS OS and a NVME fanxiang 1TB drive for the mass storage. It runs Adguard Home and paperless.
My dream setup currently would be a AOOSTAR GEM10 with 3x NVME slots...one smaller SSD for the OS and two for redundant mass storage. It would be much more powerful than the current NUC so i could potentially run also more Docker apps like Nextcloud or something. Very small and nice setup i would think. (no need of that upgrade currently unfortunately...)
Yep. I'd also like to upgrade my 4x2tb SATA SSD setup to 3x4tb NVMe, but I don't need more storage or speed currently...
@WolfgangsChannel yeah it would Just be a so cool and tiny but still powerful setup...
I rather invest in speedier and reliable nvme drives nowadays. Especially because I don't need a huge amount of storage space
The nuc currently resides in top of the Heating Tubes in the basement 😁
9:05 Running a HomeLab and not using SSH is crazy...
Hopefully he does these again, I'd love to send in my recycled 'beast'
Can I submit mine for a part two if you do one?
These are some of the most cheeto dusted finger having mountain dew drinking home lab setups I've ever seen 😂
in 31:20 you said SSDs will help in power consumption. Why?
No need to have electric motors in there to move stuff around. Also the CPU can go faster into power saving states because it gets its stuff faster done because of the lower latency.
Because SSDs consume less power than HDDs.
Great video, love it !
i have a singe rasberry pi 400 running nixos and a fritzbox (a student edition homelab 😂)
Come for the jank, stay for the disrespect
Hey wolfgang! I have a question... I finally got the IMB-x1231... (after mistakenly buying the IMB-1231 🤦🤦) Anyway now I realise how bloody hard it is to get 32GB sticks of UDIMMS (in SODIMM format).. Can you share where you got yours? Thank you for all the power saving content
I got mine from Jacob
@@WolfgangsChannel oh I see.. Thank you. That seems German only. I'll keep looking. I think I may end up getting non ECC memory that I'll swap eventually.
Edit: It ships around EU but I'm in an exotic location.. GG
mu question is always what do these people do with these setups?
From screenshots it seems downloading movies and tv series and storing them. Mine runs cloudflared reverse tunnels, dynamic dns and three instances of nginx server, one of them host blog, other stat counters, third is for a small company (basically single page info), then nextcloud for backup of phone photos and sharing big files, git server and i'm using it also for python development and experiments as it's accessible from everywhere. Mine is basically a single Esprimo Q956 USFF PC with size of the modem, i5-6500T, 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD with manual backups.
@@pavelperina7629 I think you mean Linux ISOs XD
16:25 The homelab equivalent of a serial killer?
Can you please show how sonarr radarr or the whole arr network works in Germany? I don’t get it to work somehow 🙃
31:50 It's Me! Glad to be apart of this and have my home lab shown off! I didn't include any power measurements in the email, so I'll share them here.
If you count my entire rack at idle, it's around 150W. Without my pc, it's closer to 30W~40W.
You sir.
This. This is exactly what I want to build. However, I've been thru 60 summers so I don't think I'll see that day.
The long and short of it - Thanks you made my day.
Nice to get your kudos haha thanks. Pretty cool video
Is it valid to post GPU mining rigs?
Kannst du eine komplette Homelab/Setup Tour machen
omg didn’t the open air wall computer case die in like 2015!
Ima go bleach my eyes now
2:30 containers indeed not VMs. If these were all VMs, you will need 80GB ram.
That's not how VMs work, at least on Proxmox with KSM and memory ballooning
@@WolfgangsChannel Yes that is how VMs works. My point was that this user was running 20 containers. A docker container is not bootstrapping the whole Linux kernel, instead containers reusing most of the existing kernel and avoid overhead of emulating an entire VM. An VM on the other hand will therefor have much more memory usage, since it starts the whole kernel without any way of reusing resources of the host OS.
Despite running full-blown virtualized Linux kernels, the memory consumption of 20 Linux VMs will still not be anywhere near 80 GB due to KSM and memory ballooning. Try it yourself when you have some free time
Those poor machine spirits...
28:43 I Don't mind the janky setup, but please clean that screen!!
Can you even read what's on it ?
why do i feel like a solid 10% of these homelabs have an i5-6500 somwehre lol
carpeted server
So, are there any Nix videos coming out in the future 😁
Saw you on a certain event 😏
This video was hilarious 😂❤
I'll better hide mine 😂
worst nas home setup i ever saw where 3,5 hdds glued to the under side of the desk reinforced with some plastic ( was from a fren on discord) ( all jbod no raid)
Oh that's def glue
9:08 thats pretty cheap. well 6 rubles a kwh isnt alot to begin with. so guess where that cheapness is coming from