Hello everyone, the time has finally come: my new home lab is set up!

In picture two, you can see my previous lab, which served me well for about a year (picture 2)! Now I decided it was time for a major upgrade. So, after a long shopping session, the packages (picture 3) arrived at my home within three days.

The rack is a 20U Vevor open frame rack, which cost me just €100.

At the top is the access point (Unifi U6+) that connects all the devices in my flat to the Wi-Fi.

Below that is my ISP’s router, which is connected to my Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra via LAN. I currently still have the problem of double NAT, but at the end of this month I will receive a new router from my ISP that can be switched to bridge mode. Apart from that, the double NAT is hardly noticeable.

One level deeper is my absolute favourite piece of equipment: the Unifi 24-port switch (no PoE). I decided against the PoE version because of the price and because I only have one device – the access point – that would have made use of it anyway. But it wasn’t a big deal because I just connected a PoE injector.

My patch panel is located under the switch. It consists of LAN-to-LAN keystones. And yes, it was only during construction that I noticed that the patch cables are much too short and are therefore not arranged chronologically in the patch panel. But I will probably correct that soon*.*

Underneath is a 19“ Raspberry PI mount. It cost me €50 here in Germany, but I don’t regret a single cent. With the large screws, you can easily remove one of the slots, attach the Raspberry Pi with four screws, and you’re done. Plus, the cable feed-through looks really clean! The Raspberry PI 3B+ on the left is currently my DNS server (pihole) and also allows me to use internal domains instead of annoying IP:port addresses. The Raspberry PI 4 2GB RAM on the right runs the Reverse Proxy Caddy, which centrally assigns a domain to all IPs and ports. It works extremely quickly and reliably.

A third Raspberry PI 3B+ will be added in the course of the month to serve as a second DNS server.

The penultimate level currently houses my two Proxmox cluster servers. The one on the left is a refurbished HP thin client t630 upgraded to 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM, and the one on the right is an Intel N150, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM mini PC from China.

The mini PC takes care of all the important things where failures are unwelcome: HomeAssistant, Password Manager, Tailscale VPN, Baikal Calendar, etc.

The thin client, however, takes care of all other “not-so-important” tasks: dashboard, monitoring, Portainer with all possible Docker containers, etc.

For my smart home, I rely on Zigbee, which is why I have a Zigbee stick on my cabinet with a USB extension cable.

My cable chaos is currently located on the bottom shelf. It includes a 10-port power strip and an Aqara Zigbee Smart Plug. This allows me to measure power consumption via Homeassistant (last picture).

The remaining free space will also be filled at the end of the month. I will then order a NAS or build one myself (not sure yet), which will then be responsible for all storage-heavy tasks (Opencloud, Jellyfin, Arr, Immich, etc.).

I will write a second post in a month’s time, once my NAS is fully set up. Around the same time, there will also be another post on selfhosted Reddit showing everything I’m running on it!

Feel free to write your opinions and suggestions in the comments!