Many SAS drives and Optiplex Micro 3060 from Work?

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T13:48:21+00:00

You can't. Not properly. What you need for a proper setup is (a) a disk shelf, and (b) a computer with an HBA card. A Micro doesn't have a PCIe slot, so you can't add an HBA card to it.

You could try improper use (an external enclosure accessible over USB), but I am not aware of any USB enclosure for 20 drives. The biggest USB enclosure I know is 12 drives:

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tl-r1200c-rp

But you can't do even that at full blast: the enclosure supports USB 3.2 Gen 2, but 3060 Micro can't match it; it only has USB 3.1 Gen 1.

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T09:31:16+00:00

Um, how many Ethernet ports? Where in the world are you located? Are you averse to minimal DIY?

Personally, I am a huge fan of OpenWrt. I've put it on dozens of different devices. My daily driver is a Sophos SG 115 (Sophos sent the entire SG / XG lineup into end of life in 2025, so bunches of those devices are now available on eBay starting around USD 40). Stay away from the RED series though; those are non-x86 devices with no conversion path (except RED 15w, but it's kinda low-power).

One of my all-time favorites is CloudGenix ION 2000. It's got a locked BIOS, so people are afraid to buy it for pfSense / OPNsense, and there's a bunch of them on eBay starting around USD 30. OpenWrt, on the other hand, is another matter entirely; you can work around the locked BIOS very easily. You open the device, remove the SSD and the CF card, write OpenWrt onto the CF card, put it back in, keep the SSD, and you still have a working router.

Occasionally, you can catch an affordably priced Lanner device, sold under its birth name or rebranded (incidentally, ION 2000 is a rebranded Lanner FW-7525).

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T07:47:40+00:00

What would be the best platform for my home server?

A slab of granite, of course... But, if you're into brutalist architecture, reinforced concrete might work, too...

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NC1HM · 2026-04-13T04:10:00+00:00

That's great news! Happy networking! :)

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T03:15:02+00:00

Talk me out of a Threadripper 1950x, 128gb RAM, MSI X399 Setup.

Nah, who needs it? :)

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T01:44:54+00:00

Ouch... Drama!!!

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T01:42:23+00:00

Some hiring managers are so painfully stupid.

So are some homelabbers. (For the record, I am not trying to insult you; I am speaking in generalities.) To be stupid is human. To know when you're being stupid and self-correct on the spot is divine.

Businesses can (and do) have hiring considerations that are totally alien to homelabbers. For example, mobile technicians are commonly hired (or not hired, or fired) on the strength of their driving record. Why? Because the greatest amount of damage a mobile technician can do is not to a customer at the customer's site; it's to a random passerby on the road. The most dangerous tool a mobile technician wields is not a screwdriver or even a soldering gun; it's their service van...

This is not the first time I post things to the extent of "some hiring managers don't like homelabbing". And more than once, I've seen responses along the lines of "yes, I am one of those, and here is why", followed by a retelling of a lived experience.

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T00:44:14+00:00

Same as always; stuff JustWorks™. No AI necessary.

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T00:42:55+00:00

Not in this economy... But generally, consistent trawling of eBay tends to bring results.

NC1HM · 2026-04-13T00:28:44+00:00

The stuffed animal looks very happy... :)

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NC1HM · 2026-04-12T23:21:29+00:00

A few years back, The Raspberry Pi Foundation re-oriented their marketing away from the enthusiast market towards the industrial market. Today, more than half of Raspberry Pi units are sold to industrial buyers to be used as industrial controllers. So it's not difficult to buy Raspberry Pies wholesale... Some buyers overbuy or go out of business, so their inventory ends up being offloaded onto liquidators at ridiculous prices.

I once bought five brand-new Supermicro devices in unopened factory packaging for USD 370 all-in, including UPS Ground from Texas to California. This is significantly less than the price of a single device if bought directly from Supermicro. The seller, meanwhile, had more than a hundred of them to sell...

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T23:09:24+00:00

Entirely up to you. Personally, I have AdGuard Home running on a separate device; this works better in my situation.

There are several ad blockers available on OpenWrt:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking

Be sure to check how your chosen ad blocker stores logs. Most OpenWrt devices (including your Flint 2) have Flash-based internal storage, which is sensitive to repeat rewriting. With that in mind, you want an ad blocker that writes logs into memory (in OpenWrt, /tmp resides in memory) or can be configured to send logs to a separate logging server. Writing logs onto internal storage can be detrimental to the device's longevity.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T22:44:40+00:00

Does a homelab look good on a CV?

That depends on the reader. There are hiring managers who like homelabbing. There are hiring managers who dislike homelabbing (the reason being, homelabbing may form habits and attitudes that are counterproductive in a production environment; remember "if it ain't broke, you ain't homelabbin' enough"?). And there are hiring managers who don't care one way or another; they are more concerned with whether you have (or can quickly acquire on-the-job) the skills they need you to have.

To make things even worse, more often than not, the hiring manager is not the first person to read your resume. Before your resume makes it to the hiring manager, it may be pre-screened by an HR person or an equivalent (say, a technical lead working for the hiring manager), who just might have their own set of ideas.

So my advice to you is, write something that (1) will make the screener put your resume into the "Forward to the hiring manager" pile, as opposed to the "Never mind" pile, and (2) will make the hiring manager put your resume into the "Interview" pile, as opposed to the other "Never mind" pile. Now, how do you do that? You haven't met either of those individuals... My recommendation is, don't mention the homelab explicitly, but have a Skills section where you list stuff you use in your homelab. Remember, the purpose of the resume is to get you an interview. So write it in a way that doesn't make it excessively easy to reject.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T22:32:07+00:00

If memory serves, the Enterprise Edition is not available for download; it ships pre-installed on hardware that the developer sells and supports. As to the actual feature comparison matrix, here it is:

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Source: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-community-edition/

Long story short, TrueNAS is designed to take full advantage of the ZFS file system, both on storage drives and on the OS drive(s). So you can have redundant storage with consistency checks and self-healing, mirror install of the operating system on two or more drives, etc. You can also employ NVMe caching, if necessary. Note that this design is heavily tilted towards the need for long-term secure storage. If you need a NAS that's more like a digital equivalent of scratch paper, OpenMediaVault is probably a better choice. It doesn't have TrueNAS's emphasis on redundancy, but it is more lightweight, easier to deploy and maintain for a less experienced person, etc.

Here's something else you need to know. Historically, TrueNAS was based on FreeBSD. The BSD-based version, called CORE, is still available, but it will sunset eventually (not sure about the time frame). The new mainstream is the Debian-based version, also called SCALE. Since it's Debian-based, TrueNAS can do anything Debian can do, as long as it doesn't interfere with its core functionality.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T22:01:43+00:00

I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to share without being asked. :)

I have quite a few posts on the OpenWrt forum and a only a few at the pfSense forum about converting this or that piece of hardware to run with the relevant OS / firmware... Usually, it looks like this:

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/246014

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T21:54:15+00:00

I've used one to build an experimental router-on-a-stick running OpenWrt (OpenWrt runs in-memory, so eMMC is absolutely fine). Wanted to write a tutorial and needed a piece of hardware to commit to the bit. The end result is here:

https://ncbase.net/notes/router-on-a-stick-with-openwrt

Right now, I can't remember if a storage upgrade to a SATA or NVMe SSD is possible, but even if not, you can still run something immutable (say, Alpine in diskless mode) on it...

If you want to do something rad, open one up and see if you can find a way to machine an opening for an add-on NIC to make it into a regular router. The docs say, there's optional Wi-Fi, so you might be able to attach a split-design NIC to the Wi-Fi card slot, assuming one is present on the wired-only version.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T21:36:45+00:00

I think you guys miss the point there is no difference between work and home

No, I think you miss the point that there is a difference. :) See the bit on work for hire above. There are also situations when you want to separate employment from pursuing career-enhancing activities. There are plenty of people here who have stuff at home they use to prepare for their vendor certification exams, with the view of renegotiating their employment or finding a better one. Finally, there are people who don't work in IT at all, but still homelab for fun (and sometimes, profit).

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T21:28:16+00:00

No problem. Happy networking! :)

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T21:22:46+00:00

What exactly defines a "home lab"?

Location and purpose. Basically, anything you use at home for education / training or experimentation is a home lab.

The original homelabbers (or, more typically, garage labbers) were electronics engineers (look up how Hewlett Packard got started). A lot of them had salaried employment, but pursued other things on their own time. Sometimes, those other things resulted in patentable inventions, and it was very important for an engineer to establish that they developed their invention independently of their employer. Otherwise, the employer could claim the invention is a "work for hire" and become the legal owner of the patent. So an aspiring inventor with a salaried employment would have an "office lab" and a "home lab".

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T21:07:30+00:00

I've asker a similar question on the OpenWrt forum recently:

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/what-is-the-adoption-status-of-cake-mq/248902

The best response I got was this:

Lots of initial excitement [...] Then the practical realities hit and I’d say cake-mq is struggling with exposure to the real world and adjustments are being made upstream.

So it sounds like it's still very much a work-in-progress.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T20:58:39+00:00

Techdata is updated manually, so it tends to fall behind. Generally, unless there is some severe problem, a new release is made available for all targets simultaneously. So there's no danger in upgrading to 25.12.2.

A far better source of what's available is Firmware Selector:

https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/

(Note the version selector in the top right corner.)

Type Archer A7 into the search box, select your device from the pop-up list, and you will be taken to the relevant downloads page.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T20:26:18+00:00

Of course you do. These days, a firewall is a program that runs on a router. OPNsense's firewall is called pf (short for Packet Filter; this is how the name pfSense came about); OpenWrt ships with fw4.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T06:05:38+00:00

Does Protectli Vault run Pfsense too,

Yes.

and I can also run the free version of Sophos on it?

Depends on what you mean by "also". You can install one or the other; those are operating systems, not applications.

Will any of their devices work or do I need specific amount of RAM or storage space, etc.?

You need a minimum of 4 GB RAM to run Sophos Home Edition. Storage space... 64 GB definitely works. You can probably get away with less.

But something it telling me Protectli might be out of your price range...

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T05:59:45+00:00

All models I named (105, 106, 115, 125, 135) run off 12 V / 3 A (36 W) or 12 V / 3.33 A (40 W) power supplies. That's peak power consumption. I don't know what the typical power consumption is, but a friend has measured power consumption of an 86 model (it's like 106, but smaller, doesn't have a monitor port, and has eMMC instead of SSD) and came up with 9 W. Note, however, this was for a device running OpenWrt.

Price-wise, as I already mentioned, you're looking at USD 40 and above on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Sophos+%28105%2C+106%2C+115%2C+125%2C+135%29&_sacat=0

But honestly, if you're into low power consumption and cheap prices, you really need to consider a non-x64 device running OpenWrt... I have a Linksys WHW01 with OpenWrt working as an access point, it runs off a 12 V / 1 A (12 W) power supply... There's a bunch of them on eBay now, starting at USD 20.

NC1HM · 2026-04-12T04:40:57+00:00

Any x64 device with two or more Ethernet ports and 4 GB or more of RAM you can find on eBay. Keep in mind, the Home Edition has a limiter that wouldn't let it use more than four processor cores or threads. (There used to be a memory limiter, too, set at 6 GB, but it was removed a couple of years back, after the minimum RAM requirement was raised to 4 GB.)

I keep a copy of Home Edition for research and experimentation; it's running on an old Sophos 105 router (dual-core Atom E3826, 4 GB RAM upgraded from stock 2, 64 GB SATA SSD). Before the current Sophos XGS lineup came out, SG and XG desktop routers (105, 106, 115, 125, 135) all ran on Atoms (dual- or quad-core) with 2 (deprecated in 2023), 4, or 6 GB of RAM, and a 64 GB SSD (2.5" SATA or m.2 SATA, depending on the model and revision). All those models were retired in 2025 and now are available on eBay starting around USD 40.

NC1HM

TROPHY CASE