Hey Brandon... been watching your channel off and on for a while. Love the content and your explanations.
Here is my current homelab - this looks huge, but most of this is home networking. We live in Northern Mi on 20 acres with several metal outbuildings. I have ethernet run to all buildings so there can be access points and security cameras. This past summer i trenched 500 ft out to a secluded back field where i hunt. I ran 2 lines of cat 6 with POE extenders and have an AP and a security camera back there. I now have wifi while hunting (we have no cell coverage)
So like i said most of that rack is home networking. I am running an Omada system with ER707-M2 Router, TL SG2428 main switch, OC200 controller, SD105G-M2 2.5g switch for my computer, my primary NAS and my secondary NAS. Also on the TP link system i have SG2008P poe switches in the strategic places around the property with AP's and camera's. I currently have 8 AP's running - 2 in the house, 2 in the buildings, and 4 outside
For my homelab, it started 2 years ago really small. I won a Pi5 4GB at the 2024 CES. Had no idea what to do with it, found Novaspirit Tech's channel, and it all went down hill ($$) from there.. lol.
My primary focus for my homelab all along is to give me something to stretch my mind with during the long cold winters, and provide some cool services for my gamer family
Homelab:
- Raspberry Pi5 4GB (POE HAT + NVME Boot): Home Assistant
- Raspberry Pi3 B+ (POE HAT + SSD BOOT): nothing currently, but plan to go through the Pi Hosted series again this winter
- Beelink SER5 Pro (Ryzen 7 5800H) 64GB: I am running Proxmox with some core services (NGINX, Cloudflare Tunnel/DDNS, Kuma, Heimdall), but mainly this is the Minecraft Server. Running Pterodactyl. My family and their friends from around the globe play minecraft together
- Beelink SER5 (Ryzen5 5560U) 64GB: This is my play ground. I have an ARR stack running through an Openwrt router container and PIA. I also am running nextcloud, startos (for emby project that i am struggling with), and various pi-hole containers for different vlans on my network
- Beelink N12 (N100) 16GB: It runs our plex server... that's it
- Reolink 36CH NVR -- we had the 16, but when we got to 10 cameras, it couldn't support, so upgraded to the 36CH version
- NAS1 (Primary): 8bay self made NAS. Jonsbo N3 case, Topton N150 6sata motherboard. Currently has a 13TB array and a couple of cache pools. No real services running on it other than rclone and tailscale. This is where we have several shares for our plex server, photos, documents, etc. Running Unraid
- NAS2 (Backup): Rackchoice 2u chassis with identical Topton N150 motherboard as above. Currently has 10TB array - 2 6TB (1 parity) and several 2.5 hdd/sdd i shucked from old laptops we had. I got a icydock 5 bay adapter that houses 4 2.5" drives and a dvd drive. This is also running unraid
-OFFSITE BACKUP: I have an AOOSTAR R1 2bay nas at the inlaws on my tailscale network as a 3rd backup. It is currently down waiting on response from Aoostar. One of the sata controllers stopped working.
My biggest goal is to not break the bank with electricity. The total outfit you see here including homelab, monitor, networking equipment, reolink, etc typically idles (nothing is every 100% idle) around 220 watts.
My plan for 2026 is to button up all the documentation especially for the networking so my family has a clue what to do. And I want to figure out how to create a website for us. Maybe self host, maybe using a hosting site. Found a couple of docker containers from this video that i might pursue for the documentation.
Forgot to put in 2025 changes
1) went from a 27U roll around rack i had purchased on auction for 75 to this Sysracks 18u wall mount
2) built 2 home made NAS the Jonsbo N3 /Topton 8 Bay, and the rackchoice 2u Topton. Actually the rackchoice was originally in a Jonsbo V12 wood grain case, but took up too much room on floor
3) add Beelink N12 for Plex (bought used on ebay lol)
4) added Beelink SER5 (bought used on ebay)
5) started using Nextcloud
6) changed NVR from Reolink 16CH to 36CH
7) swapped main switch from TP LInk SG2218MP + 5 port POE to SG2428MP. May switch back - fan noise is LOUD
2026 Changes?
1) may take the Jonsbo N3 and put it in another rackchoice 2u chassis
2) rack mount ups? Give hte floor mount to my wife for her office
3) $$$$$ but MAYBE change the main switch to TP LINK 2.5GB switch? seems excessive. My driver pc is connect to the 2 NAS through the 2.5 GB switch and 2.5GB port on the router - and my 3 beelink's only have 1gb network... so probably not
4) As i mention in the original post - website building. i know overall what i want it to look like, just getting there and learing how to create. and then where to host it? we plan on having pictures/videos of 2 fifth wheels we plan to airbnb with links to airbnb. So self hosting is risky without proper protections
@markdickey this is an awesome setup and I really enjoyed reading through everything you’ve built. The mix of home networking and homelab gear across multiple buildings is seriously impressive. Not many people can say they trenched 500 feet to get WiFi at a hunting spot! That’s commitment. And honestly, that project alone would make half the folks here jealous, including myself.
I really like the Omada layout looks really well thought out. Eight APs spread across the property with PoE everywhere I can imagine was no small job, especially when you’re dealing with outbuildings and long runs. It’s always cool to see someone take the “whole property” approach instead of just wiring up the house.
I like how you are using your Beelink boxes that are perfect for the kind of workloads you’re running, and it’s great to see how you split things out. The SER5 Pro running Pterodactyl for Minecraft is a great use case. The ARR stack, Nextcloud, and the VLAN-specific Pi-holes...very nice.
Also loved reading about your NAS builds. I have always wanted to do one of the Jonsbo N3 builds myself, and paired with the Topton board. This is a good combo. The offsite AOOSTAR is an awesome touch as well, hopefully you can get the SATA issue sorted too.
Also, those power numbers staying around 220 for everything you have is actually really really good.
Really like your 2026 plans too!, including plans on documentation! Really enjoyed the update. It’s cool seeing how the setup has evolved each year. Keep us posted on how things turn out on the various projects!
I have a 3800X, an engineering sample 11700H on a mATX, my desktop 5950X, a couple fanless mini PCs one terminal server (6x rs232) and a firewall router, and an old laptop 7700hq. All systems run Linux. The 11700 rhel8 as a hypervisor, 3800X rhel9 hypervisor, 7700 rhel10 hypervisor. Firewall rhel9. My desktop and personal laptop are Fedora 43. Storage is just a pair of 6TB spindles on my desktop shared by NFS. There is 10G SFP+ link between the desktop chassis and then the old laptop is on another port off the firewall to practice higher demand routing requirements. There is also an old Cisco access point for learning the Cisco cli
The Rack and my office have gone though many evolutions. Started out with a bunch of Cisco "Linksys" switches. I think i had 2 of those.
Ended up getting a 4 post that i could get in my basement from work, and put all my NAS's and servers in one rack, then i decided to move them to two separate racks 1 IDF and then in the other corner i setup the 4 post.
Also ended up getting some eBay Ubiquity gear, including a Ag Switch that i acquired somehow at work, so moved up to a 10Gig backbone between the 2 Ubiquity 48 ports switches (1 PoE for the IP Camera VLan) Almost everything that can run 10Gig goes though the Ag switch.
Started messing with some Dell and HP servers, but then I realized, that the coolness factor was not worth the noise and the power these suckers ate up. So I just moved to a few 7 and 10th gen Intel PC's, set up Proxmox to run a Plex server , a dozen containers and other media stuff, and the other one would run my NVR, some more containers on another Proxmox server, including some GPU passthroughs, transcoding and AI.
Currently also running Hubitat for all my home automation, but i do have some stuff running on Home assistant in a container. I will admit I wanted to move all my home automation to HA, but realized its nice having a non-virtualized system running the house,so when the servers are down, my smart home still works with no issues.
I still have my Plex running on Windows, including some of my media management programs, my big plan is to get them off Windows and into either LXC's or Docker containers.
I would like to get some better more rack friendly PC's up in the rack too, perhaps some older 10-12th gen in a rack enclosure to keep power consumption down.
Lastly I would like to move one of the NAS's to my social club or my parents house and have offsite replication.
I also have a few 2 QNAP Nas's, a old Drobo that keeps kicking, and Netgear NAS. (the Netgear and the Drobo are the backup repo for the QNAP's)
I have a single 10gig fiber running to my office, 1 laptop and one miniPC that runs the TV, also the cats usually harass me, so I built that shelf to get them out of my way. Works GREAT!
I spent a fair bit of time cleaning the rack and wiring managing the hell out of it. I have a Trunk that runs all the wires from the basement servers to the cameras thought a closet in the middle of the house and into the attic including the fiber in my office.
A LOT of eBay and old Gen 7Pc's
The Old setup when everything on in one rack and I had a small Xenon Datto that I converted to VMware. (never again)
All new thanks to Black Friday deals.
10inch 3d printed rack
MS-A1 rocking a 7950x 96gb of ram, running proxmox and part of my ARR stack.
UGREEN dxp4800+ with 4x10tb drives in raid 5, 2x 2tb nvme for apps and 64gb ram, running the rest of my ARR stack in docker and gluetun.
New to homelabbing so there will be a lot of changes and additions in 2026. Not ram though, lol got mine before the price hikes.
Just got into the hobby this year and bought an cheap old gaming PC off Facebook marketplace (I'll post the specs from the listing below).
Since buying it I added a power supply and an SSD that I had laying around and I bought and installed two 12TB HDDs plus 32gb more RAM. And my latest addition was a gtx 1080 that I had in my closet from a previous PC build that I upgraded. I plan to use one card for cloud gaming and another for local AI!
In 2026 or beyond: I plan on adding NVMe m.2 SSDs since I have two unused slots and I should really utilize them, plus upgrading the CPU may eventually have to happen since I will need more cores.
I was sick of streaming services getting worse and worse for more money so that eventually pushed me to attempt my own home media server and it then turned into a huge rabbit hole of possibilities that I'm still expanding on. I currently run proxmox with many containers and VMs running things like nextcloud, immich, Arr stack, home assistant OS, a NAS, kestra automation, and multiple VMs for testing different OS's.
My next step is setting up local AI but I also want to try cloud gaming and emulation, running my own game servers like Minecraft, set up my own local voice assistants that would integrate with my local AI and home assistant, and I still need to do some basics like proxmox backup server and Grafana or uptimekuma for monitoring.
I'd love to get this mini PC to add a new node to my proxmox network so I can have some more compute options and maybe help offload some things from my already limited setup.
