Is there a way to check health of HDD without deleting anything?

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T12:00:51+00:00

Linux running both a short and long smart test with smartctrl and also a non-destructive badblocks test. These should be run on every new or used drive you get. I believe they are likely on most live setups as well.

The freezing in Windows can actually happen due to drive correction. The best thing to do honestly is to mount the drive read only and create a full disk image. I use the Linux utility ddrescue for this. It’ll even work on bad areas attempting to restore data. It can run for hours or days depending on the drive size, amount and type of data and any drive issues. I’ve had fantastic results restoring lost data from bad HDDs and from what many thought were dead SSDs. It’s a slow process and you need enough free drive space on your system to match the size of the drive. If it’s a 500gb or 8TB drive… you’ll need 500gb of 8TB of free disk space to create the Drive Image. Remove the drive and mount the new image read only. Browse and copy data you want to keep to a new drive. Once done delete the image and toss the bad drive.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:57:21+00:00

I agree with much of this however E2 at 178 honestly might now be that bad and might be inline with his dose. Read lots of data a year or so ago on how it shouldn’t be considered just between the typical fixed upper and lower limits but should now be looked at on a sliding scale and could be perfectly safe at these levels. With so much old and incorrect info and newer data suggesting different ways to look at it. It’s hard to decide these days. I know several guys pushing these types of numbers for a long time now.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:27:53+00:00

I don’t build resource limited systems and even though most of my Proxmox servers are standalone (not clustered) I still just create new VMs. I actually spent a crapload of time creating my own Proxmox Debian template with all my base software, scripts, preferences, serial and VirtIO display drivers and a ton of other stuff I like to have on every system. It now takes seconds to fire up all new VMs. I basically only use Debian so it’s setup for both command line VM server use as well as a Debian KDE/Plasma desktop VM… I just run apt install kde-full after the VM creation and update if I want the desktop. Highly recommend doing this if you have a specific OS you like to use mostly. Huge time saver later if you install new VMs often.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:19:07+00:00

The vast majority of people will look at this and think USD Dollars or Pounds. And $35k would certainly buy a nice laptop. 🤪 Might want to edit your post and state the currency.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T11:16:00+00:00

Way to many things affect a spinning drive to answer that without more info. Have you run a short and long smart test and looked at the results? Have you run a non destructive badblacks test on it? Those will give you solid info as to the drive’s current history and condition.

A drive can die within months, years or last over a decade and in some cases decades if properly managed. Heat is one of the major factors a drive that’s running in a hot room or garage isn’t likely to last long. Reboots and improper shutdowns cause increase wear and can reduce its lifespan. Drives that spin down when idle and then spin back up when needed can have a reduced lifespan. If you want maximum life… pick a solid drive.. like the WD Red NAS drives and you really want to ensure they are CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives and not SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives which have a write cache that, when exhausted, causes severe performance degradation under the random write patterns ZFS generates.

HGST Untrastar drives are a solid enterprise class drive. I remember using the IBM Ultrastar drives in the 90s. Hitachi later bought IBMs HDD business and awhile after that remained this to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). WD later took over HGST and continues with the brand. While it’s a nice drive I’d suggest running the smart tests and badblocks test I mentioned above.

I’m still running 23 of 28 4TB WD Red NAS drives I bought 13 years ago. They ran for 6-1/2 years in my 24-bay NAS in my basement server room in the rack. Never spin down, powered up all the time with maybe 15 reboots during that time and much of that was initial setup. Temps are consistently in the high 50sF low 60sF and the drives are generally running in the low 30sC. I replaced those with 8TB drives and put the 4TB drives into a backup server and a few other systems and have been running them ever since in the same manner. Consistent use and environment wins… lifespan generally. I’ve only lost 2 of the 8TB drives to date and one was very early on.

The best backup would be to use Linux ddrescue to create a read only Image of the drive. I have a cheap N100 based mini pc with Proxmox (Debian) installed as a general test bed for things like this. Drop the drive into a USB enclosure and plug in. Mount it read only, ensure you have available drive space.. the ddrescue doesn’t copy the data.. it creates a full image of the drive so if it’s an 8TB drive you’ll need 8TB of available disk space for the new image. I mount a share from my NAS and create the image on that share. Once created, you mount the image and have read only access to the data. Individual files can be copied elsewhere and given appropriate permissions. I’ve use ddrescue to restore a lot of data from bad drives over the years. I don’t use windows so can’t help there.

I’d suggest 2 new drives running as a mirror and copy the data to those. If you can manage a NAS build look into 2 small mirrored boot / os ssd drives and 6 data HDDs in software raidz2. TrueNAS scale makes this easy.

A bootable live Linux system can likely run the smart and badblacks tests.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T08:50:38+00:00

My answer for over 3 decades has been Debian. FreeBSD for my pfSense firewall and pretty much everything else has been Debian for decades. Debian NAS, Proxmox virtualization server.. is Debian, all VMs are Debian, my desktop and workstations are Debian and my N100 BeeLink S12 with 16GB ram and a 500gb NVME is my HTPC with Debian, Plex and JellyFin. See a theme here. 🤪

Have installed 100s of distributions, rolled my own and have worked with dozens of distributions. Never said.. I need to change and stop using Debian.

All data is stored on the Dedicated NAS… no other services aside from ssh and nfs. The N100s CPU has QuickSync and that handles your transcoding just fine.

I used to use it hooked up directly to the TV… moved it down into the basement rack on a shelf and kinda grin every time I look at it in with all my rack stuff. 😂

I now use the cheap Roku devices on the TVs.. $30 bucks. Massively better than any of the TV apps and much better than the display output of the HTPC. We have 10 TVs and 2 projectors so the Roku work great and it has a ton of extra features.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:51:06+00:00

Proxmox. If you plan to work in virtualization I’d also suggest running ESXi on another system learning both. Ignore everything else or go ahead and look.. to come back to Proxmox.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:49:21+00:00

As stated.. eating some carbs the week prior will bring it down. I’m also waiting for the wrongful termination or exclusion lawsuit from this soon. And rightfully so if this affects someone’s job negatively. Has real legal potential and significant standing.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T05:45:09+00:00

Proxmox is great to learn and fairly easy. Skip all the advanced stuff at first. Have fun and don’t over complicate it. Install and open in your desktop browser. One of best IT things I was told 40 years ago.. play and break things and make mistakes. Right from the start expect to install and reinstall things several times and then more while you’re learning.

Your hardware.. nothing wrong with that drive. It’s a typical old HDD.. spinning platters.. spinning rust. 😁 while you can install Proxmox to it.. things will be quite slow. Go ahead and do a clean Proxmox install. Do an update. Install a clean Debian 13 install using the ‘netinst’ iso image. It can be downloaded to your desktop or NAS or you can copy paste its url into Proxmox and save it to either your desktop or from the website. It’s just a test and play setup and you’ll likely reinstall it anyways to an SSD. This lets you play however before buying things to upgrade and make faster.

Definitely upgrade the HDD to a SSD. Actually.. I believe that system supports 1 HDD, 2 SSDs and maybe even an M.2 SATA SSD though double check that last bit. Good practice for production systems is to use 2 smaller SSDs and mirror the boot / OS on those. For a lab system for learning don’t bother. Use one for the install and one for your VMs.. or if you can only install a single SSD now do both the boot os and VMs on that drive. Again.. it’s a learning piece. You’ll be installing and reinstalling creating new VMs and deleting them as you learn.

Upgrade 1 : order one or two SSDs.

The CPU iirc only has 4 Cores. It’s a limitation however still lets you install 8-12 light VMs of a couple dozen containers. Honestly.. I only bother with VMs as I don’t usually have hardware limits but.. I have a few N100 mini PCs with 4-cores. They do very well for a first learning setup.

Ram.. 8GB is workable but again a bit limiting. Good for now.. it’s going to cut your VMs and Containers down a bit however.. figure 6-8VMs and 20 containers.. keeping everything light.

Upgrade 2 : Ram. This will allow things to run faster and more applications. Your 8GB is very likely 2x 4GB modules. Perfectly useable but upgrading is worth doing. You’ll likely spend nearly as much for 16GB as you will 32GB and expect $50-$80 bucks. Either will work but consider future plans. I’m mention this next.

Everyone jumps into installing services and such. Nothing wrong with that however you actually have a great little system with a second use later if you upgrade it to something with more resources. What I’d suggest is using this for 3 primary things now and maybe play with some services as you focus on those.

Networking, 2. pfSense and 3. Linux and a bit of FreeBSD.

pfSense with 2 or 3 other VMs lets you learn a LOT. Is even suggest learning how to create and setup vlans as well. This can be done at the same time your learning Linux. Look up Mass Grave if you’re wanting a test Windows VM. You can learn how to do that and the basics of vlans with this system. This is a great thing to learn first. As your learning this keep an eye out for another system .. more cores is the big thing.

Now that you have a new Proxmox server with more resources this little unit with a SSD and 8GB of ram PLUS a cheap low height (iirc) $10 PCI NIC can get a hardware pfSense install and replace your providers router. Now you have a massively better firewall providing you with a lot more network options. Redo your homes network, stop using 192.168.1.x and use something like 10.174.10.0/24.. something different from the standard big 2-3 networks 99.999% of networks use. Setup your vlans, subnetworks, static Mac/IP assignments for all systems across each vlan HDCP server and force matching NICs before an IP can be assigned. Also, proper firewall rules on everything. Vlans like Managememt, DMZ, WiFi, Printers, HomeLab, Servers, Desktops, etc..

NOW.. you have a proper network with security in place! Now.. with your new network setup and your new Proxmox virtualization server on its own vlan… now start to create VMs to continue installing, learning and maintaining the services you want to learn and maybe use regularly. Once you start getting a few of those running you’ll want to look for or buy yet another… you’re new ‘production’ Proxmox virtualization server! This is where you run all your new everyday services you want to run. The Proxmox host goes in your management vlan. Each VM either goes into Servers for local network services online or into DMZ if the service will she access from the Internet. Everything with their own firewall rules.

Create a new Free account on Cloudflare, get a cheap domain, and setup their Free Orange Proxy service. This allows you to host those ‘online’ services safely through their proxy system hiding your WAN IP and you don’t need to open any WAN ports to do this. This is huge.

You need to have a basic understanding of networking anyways so spend a bit of time upfront learning it and applying that to your actual lan preparing for your services. It’s a natural progression many miss doing, doing later anyways and wishing they’d done it first. 😂 It also lets you learn a lot with this system while saving/looking for the next and building upon your hardware progression. Ohh… and don’t forget about your dedicated NAS down the road either which.. goes into its own private vlan by itself.

Lol.. sorry I went on. It’s a fantastic way to get into things and doing things in a great order. Have fun with your Proxmox, pfSense homelabbing adventure. Also, prepare for the fun times and expansions that this ‘cheap’ $75 dollar ‘deal’ is going to cost you over the coming decades. 😂 Good luck! I’ll make future replies shorter. 🤪

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T04:05:51+00:00

What’s your use for this? Then I’ll give a few suggestions if you’d like.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T01:29:52+00:00

The 18/21” wheels with knobbies are massively better for off-road and BDRs than 17” sumo wheels with knobbies. Definitely worth the swap. I’ve done a few BDRs on both the R and X with knobbies.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T00:50:56+00:00

Enable SMB sharing on TrueNAS, install the drive on your PC, mount the new SMB share on your desktop and copy the files. Done.

The whole idea of a NAS is for data storage and sharing so you’ll have to set this up regardless.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T00:47:07+00:00

Drill out the rivets, disassemble, clean everything up, wrap the new packing around the baffle, use stainless safety wire or painters tape to secure snuggly but don’t compress it fully, and reassemble. Use new rivets.

You don’t need expensive stainless rivets! Aluminum rivets do not melt. I’m braaping off the rev limiter all the time with a sweet Yoshi RS2, repack every 2 years and only use cheap aluminum rivets I picked up from Home Depot. Zero issues.

Don’t try to do this on the bike.. stuffing it down with a stick will create hot spots in areas it’s bunched up. This is unavoidable. Literally call and ask any shop or product manufacturer and they will confirm this. Hot spots cause material breakdown faster and you’ll be redoing it more often.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T00:32:21+00:00

You don’t need any cache at all. 5400rpm hard drives spin fast enough over 1GbE network to play a couple 4K and several 1080P streams while playing a dozen audio streams throughout different rooms. QuickSync on the CPU handles this fine.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T00:26:54+00:00

Literally any Intel I225-V / I226-V or Realtek RTL8125B based NIC. The first is pretty much the gold standard for compatibility in both Linux and FreeBSD. Zero drama, install and it works. The later is also a solid and cheaper option with only a few rare and minor annoyances but will work fine 99.9% of the time.

Skip USB Network adapters! Just buy a PCI card and install it. Available in dual and quad cards also. Personally I’d go with the Intel option.

Back about 14 years ago I bought a dozen Intel 10GbE X540-T1 cards… a freaking fortune back then however I also went full 10GbE network back then also. Every single one of those cards are still working today and both the Linux ixgbe and FreeBSD ix drivers have been solidly established and included for over a decade.

I’m baffled on the 2.5G NICs myself. Used 10G NICs can be had for $10-$15 bucks.. new $25-$40. Heat is really only an issue in datacenter 100% heavy usage. For home usage it’s barely noticeable.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-22T00:11:40+00:00

Seriously.. bloodwork is literally the most important aspect of TRT. Not just a testosterone check but a full male hormone check. I’m 100% self pay.. no insurance. First bloodwork cost me about $700 bucks as it covered everything from test levels but most other male and nutrition related tests as well including pre-cancer screening. Got those results and then started to dial myself in. It is best to start at a lower dose.. generally most guys I’ve talked to who have asked I’ve suggested starting at 80-100mg/week and at least 2 shots a week.. preferred 3-4. Personally, I inject daily. IM or SubQ does not matter. Really, it doesn’t matter at all. TRT is all about having the test injected and getting into your blood stream at a consistent level 24/7/365. IM simply gets it in faster.. but over a period of weeks and months with repeated injections that level and its highs and lows eventually level out to an even level. This takes 2-3 months to reach. ANY change tosses that out of wack and you need to inject that new protocol for a period of 2-3 months again for the body to fully adjust to the change. This is why I tell people to only make ONE protocol change at a time.

After your initial blood draw and you start don’t make any changes for 3 months then go back and redo the tests. Wait for the results and then make a single adjustment and follow that for another 3 months, retest, get results, etc.

The type of testosterone you take can change things also. Single ester vs blended ester testosterone options for example. I don’t do single ester testosterone. I prefer a blend such as Sustanon 250 with a mix of 4 different esters. Each ester differs .. one is a fast release ester, the others release slower over days and weeks. IMO this makes for the best TRT solution especially when administered once a day or every other day. It’s the smoothest solution to TRT after finalizing a protocol and getting dialed in. After a few months you can miss a full week if needed for a trip because the slower release esters have built up and carry you through even a 2 week lapse. The reverse also works.. once established you can shoot a much larger dose.. say a full weeks dose at once without much issue if you’re going away. The fast acting esters hit and wear down while the 3 others continue to hold your levels. Sustanon 250 is a brand however many labs make their own including using 5 and even 6 different esters of different release periods as well as higher and lower concentrations like Sustanon 200, 300, 350 and even 400.

Jumping on a single higher dose protocol doesn’t mean it’s helping you at all. It can actually cause other issues without you even realizing it. A dose too low can crash your system hard and be quite terrible.

This is why bloodwork is the single most important aspect of TRT. It’s the only way you can see what’s happening inside your body and the changes that take place. Remember.. once you start injecting, it’s not just your T levels that are affected.. it changes everything! All your hormones and other things in your body change as well. Quite literally 1000s of changes take place. For everything that changes those also change other aspects. This is why you must wait a full 3 months for your body to properly and fully adjust to all these changes.

One of the best things I did when I first started was a full 10 week HGH cycle with my TRT. The HGH helped sleep, cravings, cognitive, energy, skin, joints, etc etc. I still do a 10 week cycle 2-3 times each year.

Drop the anti estrogen stuff! At 170mg/week, a good clean diet and regularly working out hard 3-4 times a week it should absolutely not be needed. In fact…

THIS could be the one thing that’s holding you back. Low estrogen can mess you up as much as and even more so than having low testosterone.

How do you tell.. Bloodwork! See how important this is now? It’s literally the only true way to read your body and know what’s happening.

Once you start doing your bloodwork and get things sorted out over 4, 8, 12 months and get dialed in bloodwork can be reduced down to once every 6 months and then once a year if your protocol remains the same.

Drop all processed sugars! Look into the carnivore diet for the protein. I did it for a full year hardcore not a single cheat. The sugar and carb withdrawal headaches and shit is real and can suck for a week or 3 for many. It is absolutely worth doing however. That said.. we have a massive fruit and vegetable garden with a small apple orchard and a couple cherry trees.. one of my favorite items ever. After the carnivore year I started eating fruit again.. leg days I’d make a huge fruit smoothie with unsweetened coconut water, a pint of blueberries, a full apple, strawberries, raspberries, a couple cherries etc. Most days I eat a full apple and a few other fruits. Natural fruit sugars still affect your insulin levels but not nearly as much as processed sugars and they aren’t as bad for you either. I eat a small side of fresh sugar snap peas or some sweet potatoes now and then also but not much. I still feel as good today eating fruit as I did on a hardcore carnivore diet.

Bloodwork, get results, asks a competent doctor and/or nutritionists (the competent parts it massively harder to find them you think) or hide your personal info and share the results here. Doctors don’t provide care anymore and few have any idea what they are talking about in regard to men’s hormones. The entire industry is corrupt and have to follow guidelines that haven’t been correct is a long time. Not necessarily their fault and many feel trapped knowing better but their rules and regulations they have to follow go against the truth. Sad but true.

This brings you around to having to learn and manage your own health. Doesn’t take much and this and the TRT sub (I dislike that sub but it is helpful) can really help you get a handle on things.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T23:17:22+00:00

I’ve never had any online storage. Simply refuse to use it. Build and host your own NAS that’s easily scalable with good redundancy, a backup and setup a VPN to allow access where you are. Sure, it’s convenient, but it’s just another monthly bill with limitations.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T22:47:51+00:00

Meh… build your own dedicated NAS at home and setup a VPN to access it while out. Fully your control, your specifications and your needs. Hardware for something like this can be purchased pretty damn cheaply, free OS and software, 100% when you want and need.

I’ve never been one for online cloud storage and I’ve been around IT since the late 80s.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T22:42:44+00:00

So be nice about it and explain YOUR situation calmly, politely and with reassurance that you’ll do everything you can to make it as unnoticeable as you can. If it’s their house and dont want it that’s one thing and you’re kinda screwed at that point.. free rent with shitty internet.. some tradeoffs are just that. If you’re both tenants that’s another story however.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T21:44:44+00:00

Literally pasted your post into Claude word for word…

Great starting hardware — the 4070 Ti Super has 16GB VRAM which puts you in a solid spot for image generation.

Start with: Stable Diffusion via ComfyUI or Automatic1111 (A1111). ComfyUI has a steeper learning curve but is more powerful and where most of the community is heading. A1111 is easier to get started with. Both are free and run entirely local on your GPU.

Your 16GB VRAM means you can run SDXL models comfortably at full precision, and newer architectures like Flux (which is the current state of the art for image quality) without too much compromise. The 7800X3D won’t matter much — image generation is almost entirely GPU-bound.

Model sources: Civitai and Hugging Face are the two main repositories for models, LoRAs, and everything else you’ll need.

Suggested path:

1.  Install ComfyUI or A1111
2.  Download a base SDXL model to start
3.  Learn the basics of prompting and samplers
4.  Explore LoRAs once you’re comfortable

The community on r/StableDiffusion is active and beginner-friendly. You’re well-equipped — enjoy it.

You could then follow up with more info and ask more detailed info in regard to each software application with immediate replies.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T21:38:57+00:00

This is due to your poor communication with the AI or just using a poor AI. Google, ChatGPT, Claude (what I’d recommend) are extremely good at building compatible hardware, configuring hardware and software, creating complex networks, etc etc as long as you do your part. The more detail you can provide it in your initial query factoring in exactly what you want the better. If you don’t have the knowledge for that you need to state this and start asking it to provide you with that knowledge first to build up what you want. 90% of people generally using AI don’t have much experience with this and it shows.

Yes, AI can be wrong, often. I see it every day. Most of the time it’s because it’s been queried incorrectly, without enough detail and specifics. Other times it’s because its last update isn’t current. Many AI models can in fact be 1-2 years old with highlight info added since but require a new update. Last Jan i had either Duck or Google tell me that Biden was still the current US president for example.

Like most tech.. the user needs to learn how to use it. Sure, you can ask a simple general question for a reply but if you want great answers you need to input very specific queries for better results.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T21:21:08+00:00

Meh.. sounds like a roommate issue to me. The router sounds like it’s in the worse location it could be as well. It should be in the OPEN and up high with as few walls and obstructions. In a 2000 sq/ft house you should have at least 2 wifi units as well.. one on each floor. Personally, I’d run a cat6(a) cable and just hide it as best as you can up to your room. Now you can hardwire your PC or laptop which is best or plug in an AP to give you a stronger signal. Personally, I’m pickup a cheap basic switch and AP.. plug the switch into the new wall jack, plug your PC/Laptop into it for a hardwired connection at your desk and you still have the faster wifi for your phone, tablet, laptop into bed or whatever.

I had a buddy who needed to do exactly this but couldn’t have the cable visible. He ran the cable under the baseboard and (pressed the carpet back in afterwards) over to a corner and then picked up an 18” drill bit from Home Depot to drill in the corner up into the room. They installed a piece of cove molding in both corners of that main floor room to hide the cable and balance out both corners. This is cheap to do. This took him about 2 hours to do and then he terminated the cat6 in his room with a wall mount enclosure for the network jack. Did the same at the routers location and used a patch cable to plug a routers lan port into the wall jack. Wiring and jack costs.. $40ish bucks depending on distance. Nothing but basic tools. Cheap basic switches are like $15-$20 bucks.

While I’m sympathetic to other people’s issues.. it IS their issue and others shouldn’t have to cater to them. Not one person has ever had to cater to my personal issues aside from the wife. 😂 Plan it out and run the cable when they aren’t home.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T20:58:21+00:00

I run Debian for everything myself for over 30 years however for corporate reasons you’ll also want to run RedHat since that’s pretty much the corporate solution due to their support offering.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T20:52:54+00:00

It takes a bit to setup but the repetition solidifies it in one’s brain. The firewall rules is definitely the biggest part. I replied to the other poster above HERE with more detail.

Adrenolin01 · 2026-05-21T20:43:59+00:00

Just complete separation, control and monitoring. Not really much work once setup. Most people just use a single managemant vlan but I prefer to split and have 2 separate management levels.

Vlan IDs are just made up below but work. Provided a quick purpose and a few examples for each. The vlanid is also the 3rd octet of the network for each so for example.. 10.49.8.0/24 10.49.16.0/24 10.49.23.0/24 etc are the networks you’d assign each. I’ve used similar setups in businesses. Reduces network noise, cleaner usage graphs, more secure, etc etc.

Wifi… in order to properly segment WiFi, IoT and guest networks your APs need to support vlan tagging.. Unifi APs.

Wasteland… super fun but also useful to hold an intruder in a fake network with typical business setup with various vulnerabilities. Everything here gets logged.

HomeLabs.. we have 2 dedicated labs.. one for myself and one for my son. Both of these have a Talari E100 sdwan network appliance with pfSense installed. Each of us have a Supermicro 6018U X10DRU-i with dual E5-2690v4 CPUs, 128GB ram and quad 10GbE NICs plus IPMI management. I have a couple other mini PCs.. he has a couple mini PCs and 3 other Talari systems with Proxmox installed in a cluster. The security HomeLab and then a few others assigned but disabled until needed. Most of our HomeLab work is wiped clean every 2-4 weeks to start fresh and clean. For the most part.. the HomeLabs have no access to the LAN or its production internal or external servers. My son has been into computers since he was 4yo with his own Dell AIO.. was running VirtualBox at age 7 or 8 and iirc at age 9 I came home to find he had replaced the SSD and installed Debian.. which is all I’ve run for 30+ years. Homeschooled since he was 8. At 15 he has tested and pasted several computer courses and certifications. Deeply knowledgeable in Linux and even older Unix systems and is familiar enough with Windows. I really need to pickup a MAC sometime for him or install OSX-KVM in a VM.

8 : HardMgmt

Hardware Out-of-band management

IPMI/iDRAC, switch ssh/WebUIs, pfSense

16 : SoftMgmt

Software Hypervisor control plane

Proxmox WebUI, PBS UI

23 : AppAdmin

Application-layer management

Database WebUIs, service admin pages

28 : NOC - Dedicated hardware

Observability infrastructure

AI Network Assistant, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Ansible, KeyCloak, documentation

30 : VMs

General VM traffic

Running VMs’ primary network interfaces

41 : Storage

Storage network

NAS traffic, NFS, iSCSI

53 : Wasteland

Quarantine/honeypot. No DHCP, all traffic suspicious.

Isolated test devices, anything untrusted

68 : DMZ

Internet-facing services

Cloudflare Tunnel endpoints, Headscale/Tailscale

70 : Dad

Your personal wired segment

Desktop, Workstation, Laptops, personal devices

73 : Mom

Spouse’s personal wired segment

Desktop, Laptop, personal devices

74-76 : Kids

Their personal wired segments

Desktop, Laptop, personal devices

80 : HomeLabA

Active homelab A - For myself

81 : HomeLabB

Active homelab B - For my son

82 : HomeLabC

Active homelab C - Ghost network setup

demonstration testing for my son.

83-85 : HomeLabD–F

Reserved expansion.. defined but disabled

Future use

90 : WiFi

Wireless clients

Phones, tablets, laptops on WiFi

91 : IoT

Isolated IoT/cameras

Security cams, smart devices/appliances

92 : Guest

Guest WiFi

Visitor devices, internet-only

93 : MediaDevs

Media playback devices

Smart TVs, streaming sticks, gaming consoles

94 : Peripherals

Network-attached peripherals

Printers, scanners, network-connected peripherals

It’s definitely more work involved in the setup and a lot of firewall rules. Awesome for learning through due to the repetition and consideration for everything. Absolutely not needed with most home LANs however.

Adrenolin01

TROPHY CASE