2025 Homelab Tour: Network Overhaul
Key Points
- The 2025 homelab tour highlights major upgrades since last year, including revamped WAN/LAN networking, added low‑power devices, a new NAS, and the migration of some enterprise servers to a nearby colocation facility.
- The server rack now shares its room with a second, separate lab, and the “wall of tech” continues to expand with additional hardware mounted on wheels for easy reconfiguration.
- A dual‑ONT fiber setup provides active‑backup internet connectivity, though the owner plans to drop the more expensive, slower backup line in favor of a single, higher‑performance fiber feed.
- The smart‑home infrastructure has been broadened with four Hue hubs and a generic Zigbee network, all consolidated via a dedicated switch.
- The presenter thanks Twitch, YouTube, Patreon, and Discord supporters and teases an upcoming video detailing all the services running on the homelab, urging viewers to subscribe.
Sections
- 2025 Homelab Tour & Upgrades - The creator thanks subscribers and then walks through recent WAN/LAN changes, added low‑power devices, a new NAS, co‑located servers, and the expanded server rack in a detailed homelab tour.
- Zigbee Hub & Redundant DNS Setup - The speaker outlines using a PoE Zigbee adapter integrated with Home Assistant to control 42 smart devices, while a Pi Zero runs Pi‑hole with Keepalived to load‑balance primary and secondary DNS servers for continuous network access.
- Home Lab PoE Switch Overview - The speaker details their 48‑port PoE+ 2.5 Gbps switch, its power delivery to APs, cameras, and other switches, the link aggregation to a USW Pro, and the replacement of a UDM‑SE with an Enterprise Fortress Gateway that provides dual‑WAN fiber connections.
- Home Lab Network Switch Setup - The speaker explains acquiring a network switch from a moderator, using its numerous 10‑Gb and 25‑Gb ports to connect servers and devices, and integrating a remotely controllable PDU with USB‑C power outlets in their homelab.
- UPS‑Backed Home Proxmox Cluster - The speaker details a home lab where UPS‑protected fiber ONTs, switches, cameras, and a UNVR keep networking alive during outages, while three Intel NUCs running Proxmox (with SATA OS drives, NVMe storage, and 2.5 Gbps uplinks) form a Kubernetes‑capable virtual machine cluster alongside a Storinator node.
- Home Lab Test Devices Overview - The speaker outlines their low‑power test hardware—including a Beelink EQ13, an AMD‑based MS‑A1, and a UNAS Pro—and explains how each is used for real‑world OS and performance testing within their mini‑rack setup.
- Upgrading AI Server Node - The speaker walks through pulling out the SSD cage to fit an RTX 3090 in the fourth Proxmox node, plans to reinstall the cage with printed SSD caddies, and then showcases a separate Intel Xeon‑based TrueNAS NAS with 10‑GbE links and a striped‑mirror ZFS pool.
- Planned Upgrades for Home Server - The speaker outlines current storage usage, cleanup tasks, and upcoming hardware upgrades—including new CPUs, Noctua fans, a Seasonic power supply, and potential GPU changes—to improve efficiency and quietness.
- Rack Integration and Cable Management - The speaker outlines connecting a Pi KVM switch, Philips Hue lights, Noctua fans, an Axe Effect monitoring unit, and other devices in a rack, describing current cable clutter and plans to tidy it once the HL15 and Storinator arrive.
Full Transcript
# 2025 Homelab Tour: Network Overhaul **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q) **Duration:** 00:27:09 ## Summary - The 2025 homelab tour highlights major upgrades since last year, including revamped WAN/LAN networking, added low‑power devices, a new NAS, and the migration of some enterprise servers to a nearby colocation facility. - The server rack now shares its room with a second, separate lab, and the “wall of tech” continues to expand with additional hardware mounted on wheels for easy reconfiguration. - A dual‑ONT fiber setup provides active‑backup internet connectivity, though the owner plans to drop the more expensive, slower backup line in favor of a single, higher‑performance fiber feed. - The smart‑home infrastructure has been broadened with four Hue hubs and a generic Zigbee network, all consolidated via a dedicated switch. - The presenter thanks Twitch, YouTube, Patreon, and Discord supporters and teases an upcoming video detailing all the services running on the homelab, urging viewers to subscribe. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=0s) **2025 Homelab Tour & Upgrades** - The creator thanks subscribers and then walks through recent WAN/LAN changes, added low‑power devices, a new NAS, co‑located servers, and the expanded server rack in a detailed homelab tour. - [00:03:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=210s) **Zigbee Hub & Redundant DNS Setup** - The speaker outlines using a PoE Zigbee adapter integrated with Home Assistant to control 42 smart devices, while a Pi Zero runs Pi‑hole with Keepalived to load‑balance primary and secondary DNS servers for continuous network access. - [00:06:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=401s) **Home Lab PoE Switch Overview** - The speaker details their 48‑port PoE+ 2.5 Gbps switch, its power delivery to APs, cameras, and other switches, the link aggregation to a USW Pro, and the replacement of a UDM‑SE with an Enterprise Fortress Gateway that provides dual‑WAN fiber connections. - [00:09:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=586s) **Home Lab Network Switch Setup** - The speaker explains acquiring a network switch from a moderator, using its numerous 10‑Gb and 25‑Gb ports to connect servers and devices, and integrating a remotely controllable PDU with USB‑C power outlets in their homelab. - [00:12:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=775s) **UPS‑Backed Home Proxmox Cluster** - The speaker details a home lab where UPS‑protected fiber ONTs, switches, cameras, and a UNVR keep networking alive during outages, while three Intel NUCs running Proxmox (with SATA OS drives, NVMe storage, and 2.5 Gbps uplinks) form a Kubernetes‑capable virtual machine cluster alongside a Storinator node. - [00:15:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=958s) **Home Lab Test Devices Overview** - The speaker outlines their low‑power test hardware—including a Beelink EQ13, an AMD‑based MS‑A1, and a UNAS Pro—and explains how each is used for real‑world OS and performance testing within their mini‑rack setup. - [00:19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=1145s) **Upgrading AI Server Node** - The speaker walks through pulling out the SSD cage to fit an RTX 3090 in the fourth Proxmox node, plans to reinstall the cage with printed SSD caddies, and then showcases a separate Intel Xeon‑based TrueNAS NAS with 10‑GbE links and a striped‑mirror ZFS pool. - [00:22:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=1328s) **Planned Upgrades for Home Server** - The speaker outlines current storage usage, cleanup tasks, and upcoming hardware upgrades—including new CPUs, Noctua fans, a Seasonic power supply, and potential GPU changes—to improve efficiency and quietness. - [00:25:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaVYAcOR9Q&t=1518s) **Rack Integration and Cable Management** - The speaker outlines connecting a Pi KVM switch, Philips Hue lights, Noctua fans, an Axe Effect monitoring unit, and other devices in a rack, describing current cable clutter and plans to tidy it once the HL15 and Storinator arrive. ## Full Transcript
It's that time of year again. Time for the 2025 tour of my homelab. A lot has changed since last
year and I'm excited to show you how my setup has evolved. My homelab has gone through some of the
biggest changes yet and I'm sure yours has too. This year I've made changes to both my WAN and
LAN networking, my wall of tech keeps expanding, I've moved some of my enterprise servers to a
nearby co-location, and I've added more low-power devices and another NAS. On top of that, my server
rack now shares this room with another kind of lab. Before we head down to the server room, I want
to take a second to thank you for an incredible year. None of this would be possible without your
support. So a special thank you to my subscribers on Twitch, my YouTube members, my Patreon members,
and my Discord community. You've made all of this happen. And if you haven't subscribed yet,
now's a perfect time. I've got an upcoming video detailing all of the services that will be running
on my homelab, so be sure you subscribe so you don't miss it. All right, with all of that out of the way,
let's dive into the tour and check out my homelab setup. Welcome to my server room. It's a little bit cramped
in here, but I'm super thankful that I have a dedicated space to put all of this stuff. Now, you can see
my homelab and my server rack here, but then off to the side... Oh wow, I just unplugged it.
Okay, thank goodness for UPS. Let's try that again. But you can see off to the side here, glad this is on wheels, is this other
lab we're not going to talk about today. But maybe in the future, we're going to talk about this lab
and this wall of stuff. So here's my wall of tech. It continues to grow. And maybe I'll start with the
network and how everything comes into here. So everything, network cables and even fiber, comes
into here, through here. And then they patch into different places to the house. And then they patch into
my server rack here with this umbilical cord and then down into the server rack. This year, I actually have
dual ONTs because I have dual fiber. And honestly, that's only temporary. But this is my old fiber
connection. And this ONT then connects to obviously their network. And this ONT connects to another network.
And right now they're both configured on my gateway, as you'll see in a little bit. But they're in active
and backup mode. So it will fail over. And so right now, this is my primary fiber. And then this is my
backup fiber. And so if the internet goes down here, it'll fall back to here. And if this goes down, this
one's still providing it anyways. And I'm going to discontinue this service because it's twice the price
for half the speed of this one. So it's nice to have some competition and some options here in the
neighborhood. So I've expanded in my Hue hubs, but I've also moved some of my Hue devices off to a generic
Zigbee network. But you can see here, I have four Hue hubs. And then I have a switch up here that connects to
all of these Hue hubs. Now the reason I have four Hue hubs is because I have four entertainment zones. One,
two, three, four. And these are all mapped to specific devices in my house. So that when you play music or
watch a movie, it synchronizes the lights to it. And Hue only supports one at a time. So I figured, well,
I have four entertainment zones. I may as well use four of these old hubs that I have. But it did move a lot
of these devices over to here. So I may as well talk about this really quick. So this is a PoE Zigbee adapter.
And this PoE Zigbee adapter is for all of my Zigbee devices. And I've moved all of my Zigbee devices off
a Hue for the most part and move them to over here. Now there are a few left over here, like I said, for
for movies and entertainment, but most of them are now on a generic Zigbee hub. So this controls about 42
devices. It controls switches, wall switches, water leak sensors, Hue lights indoor and outdoor. So it's
controlling a lot of things and I love it. And it's hooked up to home assistant. And this thing is
fantastic. So let's take a look down here and you can see my Pi Zero. I've had this for a long time.
This is still running Pi Hole with Keep Alive D and it's my third DNS. The way that this works is it's
running Keep Alive D, so a load balancer, and it load balances DNS 2 and 3 so that when clients make a
request, they'll get one of them. I always say DNS 2 is the primary. But if DNS 2 goes down, then DNS 3 takes
over. The reason I did that is because if my whole, you know, server rack is down, I still want to have DNS
to be able to access to the other. So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device. So I'm going to
to be able to access the other side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device.
So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the other
side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the
to the other side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device. So I'm going to be able to access the other side of the device.
So if we go up to here, this is my PI 3B I've had for a while. This is running Nut Server, so network UPS tools.
And what it's doing is connecting to three UPSs that I have and monitoring those UPSs. And then if needed, we'll shut down machines if it needs to.
Nut Server is pretty cool. Even if you don't coordinate shutdowns, it's great to see how your batteries are doing, how much time they have remaining.
And so it gives you a pretty decent UI to see all of that. And I have a video on that if you want to see it.
So coming down here, this is my HD Home Run. And this HD Home Run connects to a large antenna way up there in the attic through here, through this coax.
But inside of here are four tuners. And those four tuners can be used for Plex or even Jellyfin, but I use it for Plex.
And with these four tuners, I can watch live TV or record shows. And that's how I watch PBS to get two of my favorite shows: Nature and Nova.
But it's pretty cool to hook this up to Plex or Jellyfin and schedule your recordings and then remove or skip commercials. It's pretty great.
And I have some power strips down here and then this UPS. And so this UPS keeps everything up here powered on and it's separate from my server rack.
So coming to my server rack...
So first up is the Enterprise 48 port PoE switch. Now some people are going to say, "Hey..."
[whistles] "Here I come."
"Oh, here I come."
"Oh."
"That's not Enterprise UniFi. That's not Enterprise."
Well, the name of the switch is called the Switch Enterprise.
But anyways, it's a 48 port PoE switch and every single port on here is PoE.
And every single port supports PoE+. And every single port on here is 2.5 Gigabit. And that's why I got it.
Now it doesn't have any PoE++ ports, which sometimes comes in handy for power hungry devices or for PoE devices that support pass-through.
But I haven't run into it yet.
And this PoE switch provides power to a lot of devices in my home. So it provides power to some of the access points, to some of my cameras, and then also other switches too.
Over here you can see that it's lagged. So I have a link aggregation and these are 2.10 Gigabit.
And these are lagged all the way down here to my USW Pro switch. And this is a USW Pro aggregation switch.
And so these are lagged here all the way up to this switch.
This right here is new to my homelab. This is the Enterprise Fortress Gateway.
And this is a high powered gateway.
But this replaced my UDM-SE. And I had that UDM-SE here for a while.
But after switching over and buying this NVR, I realized that this UDM-SE wasn't doing much anymore, except for running the network application.
Because I switched Protect down to the NVR.
So since it was only doing network, I decided to take that role away from the UDM-SE and replace it with this Enterprise Fortress Gateway that I've been testing.
And the EFG supports dual WAN. So I have both of my fibers coming into here.
And this is actually the primary and this is the secondary.
And these are 2.5 Gigabit.
And then next to that, it has two 10 Gig ports, SFP Plus.
And then next to that, it has two 25 Gig ports here.
And then I have this 25 Gig uplinked all the way down here to my Switch Aggregation Pro.
Because this Switch Aggregation Pro has two 25 Gigabit ports as well.
Oh, actually it has four 25 Gigabit ports.
So that's uplinked to the Enterprise Fortress Gateway.
And I know this is way overkill for my homelab.
It can do up to 12.5 Gigabits per second routing with IDS and IPS turned on.
It can do SSL inspection.
But again, I was testing it and it's also nice because it can actually route cross VLAN
faster than my UDM-SE anyway.
So, but yeah, it supports up to 25 Gigabit internet too.
So maybe someday.
And this brush panel is mostly for looks,
but it helps me route cables pretty easily from the front to the back.
And then it keeps dust out from getting pulled in.
And I think helps with pressure too.
I might do away with this with something I have coming up soon, but we'll see.
This is my Switch Aggregation Pro or the USW Pro.
And I bought this Switch from YCHTO.
I don't know if you know YCHTO.
I think he's a moderator for Craft Computing.
But he's also in my Discord.
Just a really nice guy.
But he sold this to me and I've been using it ever since.
I needed a few more ports than the Switch Aggregation got me.
And then so this was perfect for connecting all of these 10 Gig devices.
And we already talked about these.
These are lagged.
These two 10 Gig devices are lagged up to my Enterprise Switch here.
And these other 10 Gig ports go all over the place.
Some of them are for servers in this rack.
Actually, a lot of them are for servers in this rack.
And then once we start to get into these ones
that are converted to Ethernet, those actually connect elsewhere in the house.
But you can see I have a lot of 10 Gig ports left and some 25 Gig ports too.
But not a ton of space left in my server rack.
So I don't know.
Maybe we'll have to do something about that.
Next, I have my PDU.
And this PDU supplies power to a lot of devices that are here in this Homelab rack.
The nice thing about this is that I can toggle individual devices on and off remotely
through the UniFi network application.
So that's pretty nice.
I can reset a device if I need to.
And it also has four USB-C ports right there.
And I'm powering a couple of things back there.
And that's nice to have these ports here as well in the front.
Not only to power things and toggle power on and off.
But every now and then I need to charge my phone while I'm down here.
So I plug it into there.
And then this is uplinked to my switch up here for network connectivity.
Next is my UniFi NVR.
And I bought this when it was on sale.
And I think it came with a free G4 bullet cam, which is pretty awesome.
But I wanted to pull the roll from my UDM-SE out to this device so I could have more drives.
And so I only have three drives in here right now.
And so these are three 3TB drives.
I have 10 cameras connected to it that I bought over the years.
And so with 10 cameras and three 3TB drives, I get 30 days.
So that's pretty good.
And this UPS right here is my Eaton 5P 1550 VA.
It's 1100 watts.
And this powers all of the network equipment that you see in here.
So it's battery backup for my 10 gig switch, battery backup for my Enterprise Fortress gateway
or my firewall router, and even my PoE switch.
And so if the power goes out here at home, this PoE switch will still power all of the devices
around my home.
So switches, cameras, access points, all still be powered.
And that's because of this battery backup right here.
I purposely separated networking up here to this UPS from compute, which goes down to that UPS down
there.
And I did that because I didn't want this all to have one big timer, for lack of a better term.
But I wanted to make sure that my network devices had a longer runtime than my compute down there.
So if I lose power, my networking will stay on.
And again, back here, my two ONTs for my fiber modem, they're actually on this UPS here.
So if the power goes out, I have internet, Wi-Fi, switches are powered, and then security cameras as
well.
And this UNVR is on a UPS as well.
But it's actually down on that one.
Next up is my Intel NUC cluster.
I have three of them.
These are all three 11th gen Core i7 CPUs.
They all have 64 gigs of RAM.
All three of these have a SATA SSD for their operating system.
And the operating system is Proxmox.
And all three of them have an NVMe drive.
And that NVMe drive is for virtual machines and containers.
They're all connected at 2.5 gigabit up to this switch that's up here.
And these are three of the four nodes I have in my Proxmox cluster.
And the fourth node in my Proxmox cluster is my Storinator.
And we'll talk about that here in a little bit.
But these are running lots of virtual machines.
And in those virtual machines, I'm actually running Kubernetes here at home for some services,
as well as some testing, and a lot of other virtual machines that I'll talk about here later,
especially when we go through the services tour.
And I really love these Intel NUCs.
I'd love some more.
I'd like to have a larger cluster of NUCs or even different devices.
But I love these because they're compact.
And while I love the MS01s, they're kind of hard to rack.
At least nicely.
You might be noticing that we're missing some servers here.
I had three 1U SuperMicro servers here for quite a while.
They were Intel Xeon's 14 core, 28 thread, 256 gigs of RAM.
They had 64 gigs SATA DOM for the OS, which was running Proxmox.
And then they had four 1TB SSDs in a ZFS pool, mirrored VDEVs.
And they're great servers.
But I moved them to my co-location.
And so these Intel NUCs have picked up the role of what those were doing.
And these Intel NUCs are controlling stuff here at home.
A lot of my self-hosted services at home.
A lot of my test stuff.
But my public services have now moved to my co-location.
But in my co-location, I'm also considering doing some downsizing there.
So maybe some MS01s or some more mini machines.
Who knows?
Sounds like fun.
But that's for me to figure out this year.
Then we have the Zema Cube Pro.
And I'm really just using this to test out different NAS operating systems.
Right now, it has four 8TB drives in here.
It also has two NVMe drives.
And right now, it has HexOS installed in there that I've been testing.
It's not usually on unless I'm testing one of the OSs.
So I'll shut it down here afterwards.
But it's connected at 10GB up to my Switch up there.
My Switch Aggregation Pro.
But yeah, lots of fun NAS stuff going on in here.
Both hardware and software.
But kind of my test bed.
I'm going to be testing some more like Zima OS and other NAS operating systems on here.
So it's nice to have this dedicated rather than a virtual machine.
Because then I can test real hardware and real failures.
And you know, mimic more of what goes on in people's homes or people's homelabs.
Next is this little guy, this is the Beelink EQ13
It has an N200 in here
Super low, low power
I used this in my mini rack
I used this in my mini rack
I used this in my mini rack
I used this in my mini rack
I've been using it to test all kinds of things.
Performance, testing Ubuntu, testing Windows 11.
But it's really just kind of been my test device.
That's easy to hook up and super low power and easy to wipe.
And I'm thinking about doing another mini rack build soon.
So I don't know.
Maybe he'll make a return in that rack.
But he's connected at 1 gigabit up to the 48 port PoE switch.
Next is the MS-A1.
And it has the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G, 32 gigs of RAM.
And I've been using it for performance testing.
It's running Windows now.
And it might be running Linux here soon.
But other than using it to compare performance to other machines,
it's not doing much right now.
So I'll find something for it.
But it's nice to have this small compact AMD device in my environment for testing.
And it's connected at 2.5 gigabit per second to that same switch up there.
Next is the UNAS Pro.
And I've been testing this out for a while.
So this is the UNAS Pro from Ubiquiti.
I tested it and reviewed it a little while back.
But I have four 8TB drives in here for testing.
And it's connected to my 10Gig Switch.
So it's connected here at 10Gigabit to my Switch Aggregation Pro.
So connected right up there.
Now I'm only using it for testing now.
But I'm considering using it as a backup NAS
so that I can have an additional copy of my important data from my NAS here.
So that if I need to restore stuff, I don't have to restore from the cloud.
So maybe my most critical data will be backed up here from my NAS down here.
Here's my Storinator that I've been running for a long time.
I've kind of had it torn up the last couple of videos.
I've been running for a long time.
I've been running for a long time.
I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time. I've been running for a long time.
I've been running for a long time.
I've been running for a long time.
I've been running for a long time.
256 gigs of RAM.
I should probably open this up.
As you can see, I have the tape on here because there was a gap.
You can't see the gap right now, but there is a gap due to having a video card in here.
So here it is all opened up, but it has two 256 gig enterprise drives back there, and they're mirrored
in a ZFS mirror, and that's for the operating system, and that's actually Proxmox.
So this is the fourth node in my Proxmox cluster.
As mentioned, there's the CPU, and you can see the RAM back in there.
And then it has six one terabyte SSDs.
As you can see here, they're just kind of dangling because I pulled the cage out.
Because this video card is too big to have in here and have the cage.
But I pulled the entire cage out so I could fit this RTX 3090 in here doing a little AI stuff.
If you remember the video about my all-in-one AI server, well, this is it.
And for the network, it's connected.
It's lagged two at 10 gigabit.
Again, back up to the Switch Aggregation Pro.
But yeah, right now, this is the fourth node in my Proxmox cluster,
but I'm going to be changing up quite a bit here in a little bit.
So I'm going to take this 3090 out, and I'm also going to be putting the drive cage back in
instead of letting these SSDs kind of dangle there.
And I printed out some SSD caddies for it.
So when I put that cage back in, I'll have these SSD caddies.
And lots of upgrades here in the future.
So yeah, that is my Storinator.
Next is the HL15.
Let me pull this out really quick.
And this has an Intel Xeon.
And this only has a bronze CPU.
It's pretty low power.
And it has six cores and six threads.
And it only has 128 gigabytes of RAM here.
Actually, now that I look at it, it seems like I have more.
But I'll check that later.
And it has 10, 14 terabyte drives.
And if you couldn't tell, this is my NAS running TrueNAS.
And this ZFS pool is configured with striped mirrors.
So there are five mirrors, and they're striped all the way across.
And this too is lagged.
There are two 10 gigabit connections down there.
And they all go up to my Switch Aggregation Pro.
And here I also have two 256 gig drives.
And they're in a mirror.
And that's for the OS.
And the OS, as I mentioned, is TrueNAS.
So it's running TrueNAS scale.
And then I have a total of four Intel Optane drives.
And those are the 118 gigabyte Intel Optane drives, the NVMEs.
And I have two in there.
And then two there.
One is actually connected to the board.
And then one is on this card right here.
I had a lot of weird issues with bifurcation and how many lanes I had.
So this is how I had to do it.
But not important.
What is important is that two of them are mirrored for L2 arc.
So it's an L2 arc cache.
And the other two are mirrored for a log device or slog.
And it's nice to have those mirrored just in case one dies.
I'll still be fine and up and running.
And yeah, I've thought about changing my drive layout from, you know, mirrored VDEVs to something else.
But it's been running pretty good.
I think as I fill this up, I might have a different opinion.
But so far, I'm doing pretty good.
And I think this is about 60% filled right now.
I do need to do some cleanup on some of my videos, past videos, and some of my B-roll and A-roll.
Once I do that, I should be back around 50% usage.
But I have a lot of plans for this machine.
First of all, Patrick from Serve the Home sent a few CPUs.
He had so many and just grabbed and sent an entire stack of them.
So I'll go through them and figure out which one I want in here and which one's best
and swap out this bronze CPU right here.
And then Noctua sent over a whole bunch of stuff.
And you can probably kind of see it through there.
But Noctua sent a whole bunch of fans to replace all of the fans in here, which was pretty awesome.
And I'll also be replacing the power supply with a Seasonic Prime, the TX1600.
It's a beautiful 1600-watt power supply that is Noctua branded.
And they work with Seasonic to do it.
So they asked, "Hey, do you want to replace your power supply?"
I thought, "Yeah, why not?"
So I'll be checking that out and testing it.
My goal is to run a little more efficient and run a little bit quieter too.
And this NVIDIA Quadro, this P2200 right here,
the only thing it's doing is encoding for place.
And so once I move some of my Docker workloads from here over to here,
it might be doing more and I might put a different video card in here.
We'll see.
I wonder if that 3060 I just used for my Linux build could fit in here because that would actually be perfect.
But I'm really excited for all of the upgrades I want to do with this machine.
I just need to find some time to actually do it.
And here on the bottom is my TrippLite 1500VA. It's rack-mountable, obviously.
But it supports up to 900 watts. And then behind it, I have an external battery pack.
And that's pretty awesome because it doubles the runtime that I get.
And I want to be sure that I show the power usage right now.
A lot of people ask me, "How much does it cost?" and, you know, "How long do you get on your UPS?" and
"How much are you actually using?" And as you can see here, I'm roughly 40% load.
I get about 50 minutes and it's using close to 600 watts.
Now, there are a lot of things on right now that I don't normally run. I just turn them on.
So if I power off this and this, I'm getting about 77 minutes, 33% load, and anywhere from 450 to 460 75 watts.
So in the future, I also want to be able to shut this down so that my NAS is doing a lot more compute
and storage as well because this one's always on. And then I can have this one for on-demand and testing.
Yeah, all of which I hope to do this year in 2025.
So no tour would be complete without showing you the back of the rack.
It's a little bit messy because I get a lot going on and a lot that's been changing.
But I still have my TESmart switch and this switch is connected to the Pi KVM if you could kind of see it right there.
And so that allows me to switch the Pi KVM to any of those devices or most any device that's in here.
I am having some more issues with it and I do have a new device from Pi KVM.
It's their switch and I'm going to give that a shot to see if that resolves any of it.
Then you can see I have three Philips Hue devices and these power all the lights.
So two in here and then there's one right there and this light strip is actually going to go inside the HL15.
And it's going to go in there because I don't want to install RGB fans because I'm using the Noctua ones.
And so because I'm doing that I still want lights in there.
So I'm going to connect those as well.
This is the Axe Effect from Kraft Computing.
So this is his data center monitoring thermal and probably humidity I think relative humidity soon.
But this is a monitoring solution and I have it connected and this is the beta version.
I've been running it for a long time but here it is.
And then I've done some organizing to keep all of my power over here on this side.
And I've used these metal clips to do that that screw right into your rack.
And I've done the same over here but this side is mostly network.
And so this is all network cables that go down here.
And then in here it is kind of a mess.
I mean it looks I guess worse than it really is because there is a rhyme and reason to it.
But yeah it looks kind of messy.
So I'll tidy all of this up in a little bit as soon as I get the HL15 and the Storinator
and these two devices upgraded and swapped out.
I hope you enjoyed the tour.
Let me know what you're going to change in your homelab in the comments.
And be sure you're subscribed to see which services are running on all of this hardware.
Thanks again for a great year.
I'm Tim.
Thanks for watching.