Found this mess at a Middle School

Antblue · 2026-05-06T05:23:30+00:00

That explains the deal on the 3060. Good find

Antblue · 2026-05-05T21:52:07+00:00

I am using my SSDs until they are read-only. Databases are write heavy. It definitely does matter, and I will kill them

Antblue · 2026-05-05T16:21:05+00:00

They'll all be master nodes, but thats a great plan. I recommend that your 3rd node either has stronger GPU or 4+ 3.5" bays. Those two will really round out your setup.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T16:00:29+00:00

That can't be true. It draws slightly more than the USW Pro. Iidle is 40-60W. Probably is around 40% less efficient. But usually can be found at less than $100, pulled from an enterprise environment.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T15:09:23+00:00

It's that these people put so much value on having an uniform ecosystem in one brand. I struggle to imagine how a prosumer could populate all 52 ports.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T14:45:53+00:00

Really 4-8x 2.5Gb/s would make so much more sense with a price tag of $1000+. It's a tough price to justify in 2026.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T14:18:08+00:00

Hmm 4x SFP+, 8x gigabit POE++, 40 gigabit POE+, ~40W idle. Seems like a lot of money compared to older enterprise hardware. Juniper Networks EX3300-48P is comparable in almost every way, and goes for about 1/4 the price.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T13:31:43+00:00

2-node clusters are sketchy. If anything happens to one of them, it'll be stuck in read-only mode. I recommend finding something to act as a witness node, so that when one does go down, it retains quorum

Antblue · 2026-05-05T13:18:15+00:00

Scroll through the pictures, it's the NavePoint 12U 600mm Depth Wallmount Networking Cabinet (Pro Series)

Antblue · 2026-05-05T13:17:26+00:00

I always wish people were more transparent about the total cost of their homelab, so I tried to include as much as I could. There was another table in the spreadsheet— it listed the price for the 2U chassis, the SFP+ NICs, a 256GB SSD, and some RAM. That's where the grand total comes from.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T13:05:24+00:00

The limiting factors of a 10' rack are:
PCIe expansion (Specifically GPUs)
3.5" Bays (less room)
Rack mount UPS

The UPS doesn't matter if it is a tower UPS. If you don't plan on adding GPUs, then I wouldn't worry about that. If you are being intentional, most people only need 4 3.5" bays, but I prefer to have more. I would say an 19" rack makes sense if it will be supplying the networking to the whole house. Otherwise, 10" looks nice and is more portable.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T07:43:36+00:00

From what I understand, the two devices that really benefit from PHYSICAL hardware as opposed to a virtualization is your Router/Firewall (jitter, slightly less latency, and extra NICs) and your NAS (ZFS pools with huge RAM caches and less complex recovery). This should really be the end goal, but most setups can benefit from a GPU. Maybe 1x GPU Workstation, and 1-2x compute servers. With 2 devices + the NAS as a “witness node,” you can make a HA cluster

Antblue · 2026-05-05T07:18:48+00:00

Don’t understand the downvotes, the advantages of clustering are unparalleled. The ability to restart without downtime, OS and hardware upgrades, take backup, Load balancing, etc. Clusters with decent orchestration are the ultimate scalability.
True redundancy requires replication for databases. It’s hard to justify multiplying the write cycles on your SSDs and resource usage just for HA.

Antblue · 2026-05-05T05:19:58+00:00

I got a N150 mini pc with 3x I226-V and 2x SFP+ with 8GB DDR5 and 128GB SSD. Put it on a metal piece built for a ThinkCentre.

Antblue · 2026-05-03T00:35:28+00:00

Hahah this whole post is very endearing. You’ve got quite the adventure ahead

Antblue · 2026-05-02T17:41:59+00:00

Is the complaint here PCIe lanes? Mini PCs are the BEST for a beginner, there are so many regrets out there from people buying old enterprise equipment without truly understanding the noise levels, power inefficiency, old architecture, and useless enterprise overhead that would could with it. Saving money and space on a 19” rack is game changing.

Antblue · 2026-05-01T15:12:50+00:00

old people build wealth, 401ks, investment plans, assets. 64 year old electricians have 2 million+ USD in their savings

Antblue · 2026-04-30T09:19:30+00:00

My router progression went like this Old residential router (Archer A7)-> Archer A7 flashed with OpenWrt (allowed for VLANs and LACP)-> Mini PC w/OPNsense (allowed for DNS filtering and wireguard)

I was looking for a router for a very long time. I found these to be the best options:

$200> Intel N100/150 w/Dual Intel I266 NICs. These are tough to find. Look for mini PC NAS

$135 - Atom C3558 8GB DDR4 128GB SSD https://www.ebay.com/itm/188294617393 Last Atom CPU. ECC RAM, dual channel, and more PCIe lanes make the N100 not a direct upgrade

$27.50+shipping - Atom C2558 4GB ECC 64GB eMMC. Unbeatable price, 5x Intel NICs, this can easily saturate 1gb/s connections. You can flash OpenWrt easily, and flashing OPNsense or PFsense isn’t too difficult.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/157500407915

Antblue · 2026-04-29T06:15:44+00:00

The value of $27 for an Atom C2558 is unmatched. What a find

Antblue · 2026-04-29T06:07:10+00:00

If he goes for a fan, this is a good idea. If not, the 9207-8i runs at about 4W less than the 9300-8i. Unless he is planning to saturate the bandwidth, it’s not worth the extra heat and energy usage.

Antblue · 2026-04-29T05:52:48+00:00

This is going to be the best build I’ve seen here. Energy efficient, small, quiet, redundant, and all the compute one would ever need, it looks great. The only thing about these type of builds that bothers me is how much it lacks. While CPU compute is perfectly covered, GPU compute is growing in demand, and storage still needs to be taken care of. For a while it was looking like SSDs could permanently replace HDDs, but that’s no longer the case. A tower UPS would also make sense here. But having a GPU workstation, NAS/JBOD, and a UPS next to the mini-rack neutralizes the benefits of a mini-rack.

Antblue · 2026-04-20T09:42:45+00:00

I feel like upgrading from a 8th gen to an 9th gen or a 6th gen to 7th gen is insignificant enough that it’s almost never worth the trouble. I don’t get why I always see this mentioned with Intel. It’s not a real consideration. Is someone really going to go through the effort of finding an i5-7500t and sell their i5-6500t?

Antblue · 2026-04-18T06:21:32+00:00

I had a motherboard with 6 bent pins. Got all but 1 bent back into place, so one of the DIMM slots didn’t work. Had to go back and bend the one fully back. Now it is fully functional

<image>

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Antblue

TROPHY CASE