¶ Intro
This is the Great Holiday Home Lab special, Linux Unplugged, episode 646. Welcome in to Linux Unplugged's Great Holiday Home Lab. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, we've gone through hundreds of submissions, spent hours making our list and checking them twice. And this week, we're going to give you the winners for the best overall home lab, the most overkill budget blowout, the tiny Titan that does the most with the least. And of course, the sipping sage, the most energy efficient build, a bunch of other categories. And we will get some final winners. We were blown away by the results.
I mean, really, they were incredible. But before we get into all of that, we got to say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello to all of you. Hello up there in the quiet listening. Of course, everybody listening on the live stream, too. Appreciate you joining us on a special holiday episode. And a big happy holidays to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Manage Nebula from Defined Networking, a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform, which means you always have full control at your fingertips, or you can let Defined Networking manage it for you.
optimized for speed simplicity and what that really boils down to is when you're using it on your phone you're using it on your laptop you're not burning cpu cycles and you're not wasting network packets that don't need to be wasted the architecture of nebula is chef's kiss they had to build it robust and secure from the beginning when they got started in 2017 to secure the slack global empire of all of the
¶ Holiday Homelabs
major s&p 500 corporations private data so it had to be good Right. It's a complete platform. You can completely control yourself or you can use it for free through defined networking for 100 hosts. When you go to define.net slash unplugged, this is the VPN infrastructure you want to build on top of. Start the new year right with a good network infrastructure. Go to define.net slash unplugged and define and redefine your VPN experience.
That is defined.net slash unplugged to redefine your VPN experience. Okay, so before we start, guys, I don't want to get too cheesy or anything like this, but I did not expect this to be a bit of a holiday treat for us.
No, me either.
I was surprised. I mean, it was a task, but it was also really, really humbling, awesome, impressive, all of the above to see everybody's various home labs. I mean, you had just absolute scrappy budget builds to total barn burner budgets, you know.
I mean, you know, stuff with all kinds of, like, multi-state replication and, I mean, every scale of setup. And it was, you know, kind of, you got a little view and window into all of these different setups. And it's almost like, you know, we finally get to see a bit of their side. We're always showing all of our stuff off. It's great.
That's true. Yeah.
I really appreciated a lot of the energy that went into these submissions. Like some people wrote some like really interesting observations as to why they're even self-hosting, what their mission is, a ton of like photos. We even received some videos, tours of home labs. Like it was super impressive. So thanks to everyone for taking that time. I just had a lot of fun. It's better than TV.
That's for sure. And some of them included some very kind notes that I shared with the wife or Easter eggs in the pictures, which made us smile. We were messing each other back and forth. Did you see this? Did you catch that? Some of you clearly have budgets, and some of you have been able to get by with just an unbelievable setup. I mean, I'm talking, you know, multi-GPU, tens and tens of terabytes to machine
rescued from the dumpster, and that's the home lab. I mean, it really, and everything in between. It was awesome. Some of you are very, very clever out there at sourcing discounted or free slash used gear. I was very impressed.
I've got a few things over the years, but nothing like this.
No, very, very scrappy.
It was, it was very surprising to see the trend that, um, many people who got free stuff is just from their employer. So it's like, oh yeah, you know, every year we throw out a bunch of stuff and yet it doesn't get thrown out. It just goes until their employees own labs.
Oh yeah. Or a lot of people are good at sourcing companies that are getting rid of gear. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's certainly something. Uh, so we have lots of categories that we do want to cover.
¶ The Mostest
I mentioned some of them at the beginning of the show. Uh, but we're going to start with a category that doesn't necessarily have an award, but we still think is very impressive. And that's going to be the most self-hosted setup, the mostest, right? And so that's where we'll start our holiday home lab special. All right, Wes Payne, let's start with Dark Owl, who just has a massive self-hosted setup. So we put this in the most self-hosted category. And you pulled ahead Dark Owl.
Yeah, okay, so start off here, take a look at the pictures. We've got just a nice little rack setup, nothing obscene or crazy, but...
It's clean and tidy, I like that.
Clean and tidy.
Looks like a master power switch down there at the bottom. and telco gear and he's got a nice switch there and some clean patches just the right cable lengths you know i mean could be slightly tidier but honestly my mess would would be worse than that so i can't critique.
And we've got plenty of b-links going on we got a b-link ser5 for a dev portainer setup so we've got dev and prod going on here we'll hear more about that in a sec another b-link with 32 gigs of ram uh set up as like a micro pc um we've got a prod portainer setup we've got two orange pi zero threes for pihole i assume that's redundant pihole so you gotta have that you.
Gotta ever done a pihole.
There's also a six bay nas mini itx going on with um two four terabyte hard drives to two terabyte hard drives and a one terabyte ssd and 32 gigs of ram and a synology that's aging off which makes sense you got to do transition right but what stood out to me here is the clever part i do like the mission which is simple to the point host videos stores paperwork and allows me to play which isn't that i mean isn't that when we come down to it often that's sometimes
it's like you know real work sometimes it's it's a mix a.
Little bit of both yeah.
Okay so the clever part of darko set up i have my own certificate authority my entire network runs off of the domain home.darkowl.org which i do not buy certificates for and does not exist outside my home lab using step c a, And I thought if you're going to be an off-grid operator, having your own certificate authorities, you don't have to bother with trusting anybody else out there. It's got to get you in the contention.
I like that he was too afraid to tell us how much power it. He didn't want to check.
No.
He didn't want to check.
Dark Owl is also doing some custom stuff, which I like to see. A custom node app that will stitch together Docker configuration files. So, for example, when Dark Owl adds a paperless NGX container, it'll add the port forwarding to HA proxy and add an entry on my Dashie dashboard, board which sounds pretty nice.
So he technically has two nazes two orange pies running redundant pie hole and one of his nazes is massive i mean that's a big just in size that's a big unit and it's running open media vault uh huh you know i wonder how he likes that b-link sre 5 max that's, that's a nice unit i bet he likes that a lot.
I can see it in your eyes.
Yeah yeah and.
Then we did get a fun little oops moment.
Yeah tell us about that.
When i decided to add a new production port which we just talked about. I copied my original production server configuration so everything looked the same. I was then planning on deleting the configurations and starting production from scratch, then switch over when everything was up and running. However, I messed up the URL and I ended up deleting all the containers off my only Portainer server and had to start from scratch.
Thankfully, all my configurations were in Git and the files back in the Docker containers were on my file server.
Well done. Well, that's not so bad. I bet the heart rate was going, though.
No kidding. And it's a backup test, I guess.
Oh, wow. Well, very well done. All right. While we're looking at the self-hosted setups with the Mostis, Captain Reginald also came up. He's got a Colorado lab, easy for me to say, a Colorado lab that's remote, and he's all in on the Ubiquiti Edge router stuff. And this came up a couple of times, actually. But he splits inbound traffic from his modem, he routes it to his parents' home router, and he forwards all the ports to a hardware SonicWall firewall.
Oh, fun.
So Ubiquiti Edge Router X, then to a SonicWall firewall. I haven't looked at a SonicWall in about 200 years.
And then we've also got an old Dell 24-port gigabit switch in the mix.
I love those old dell 24 if it's the one i'm thinking of from the era i'm thinking of they were sleepers they were really good um then of course he's got a true nas with an amd phenom in it.
We're gonna see a plenty of true nas today that was interesting to see.
28 gigs in that free nas and he's got three 500 gigabyte hard drives he says they're cheap to replace it's sort of motherboard limited though and a gtx 560 in that thing i wonder if that's useful for anything Yeah.
Be curious.
Ubuntu server running a VM for Nextcloud. He's got some other things in there, like Music Sync and Password. He's got another Ubuntu VM for tinkering and dev work. Got to have all his nano configs in one spot.
I find it interesting to see kind of how people break out. Like, do you segment? What do you segment?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, interesting. Like, to have like a central nano config and project files VM that is sort of like a state, right?
It's just ready to go. You kind of pop in and start working.
I don't think I ever would have thought of using a VM for that, but I kind of like it. All right, let me run through some of the services he's self-hosting, because this is one of the things that pushed it over on my list here. Minecraft server, no IP DNS updater for dynamic DNS, Nextcloud, Melee, Audiobookshelf, Jellyfin, Pinchflat, MeTube, Firefly 3, SyncThing, Dozel, TSD proxy for tail scale container integration. And he's also running PyHole with a backup Tailnet subrouter on there.
And then he has... yeah.
On a 1b i didn't think those were still useful that's impressive that is impressive.
That puts in a low power category for that one but it also looks like and we all know how this goes i've got one of these he's got a broken server sitting around i like that he included this it was a true nes scale third gen intel i7 so it's an older box, It was running image and server backup, but the SATA controller failed.
That's rough. Those sound like important roles. Dang.
So we're not done yet because he's got a lab in New Mexico on 5G where he's got a local laptop running as a server over there running several Docker services like Lublogger, SyncThing, Uptime Kuma, again, TSD Proxy, and Melee, where he also has a Raspberry Pi 3B running on there.
Yeah. Come on, Brett.
And then he's got a kitty of projects, 20 terabytes of loose hard drives and SSDs he wants to work on and numerous Windows and Mac OS and old laptops. I know that one. Big on the mesh net with tail scale for everything. He says, my home lab provides benefits including offsite backups in a different state, saving money by not paying for commercial services, staying private by keeping my data local, and being a great educational tool for learning Linux.
Ain't that the truth.
Mm-hmm. It's great having two lab locations. I love that. He says, my best trick is to fix computers for your friends and family. And then when they upgrade down the road, they sometimes give you their old gear so you can basically run an entire home lab and have backup PCs if one goes down off of hardware that you got for free.
That's what stood out also here. It's a very impressive array of services being offered in what seems like a nice setup from a diverse array of stuff.
And Brent, isn't this a great example of, again, the ingenuity of getting second-hand hardware that's still perfectly usable?
I have 100% done this. It works very well. And most people have old hardware that is completely up to this task, just not for their everyday use, right? So why not?
He did have an oops moment he shared with us. He says, several years ago, I was tinkering around trying to figure out how to fully reformat drives in the command line on Windows, and I managed to completely brick at least one of them. I was also trying to get an ancient NAS from 10 plus years ago to accept some very large drives. And while in the deep of the CLI, I managed to also completely brick that. So it wouldn't even turn on anymore. That's impressive.
It's like a firmware brick.
Well, the Windows command line is powerful. That's what the lesson is.
Luckily, no data was compromised. Okay.
Yeah. Wow. How about that? He says he found the show through self-hosted. Sad, it's gone, but loves it when we do the Home Lab content.
Well, thank you for helping.
Well, there you go. I think, you know, that is an example of a setup that we went through that I kind of envy in the sense that he has the two locations. I have the studio and I have Joops, but Joops isn't like a fixed thing, right? It's more like a mobile thing.
It's a little sketchy on its own.
Yeah, the studio is kind of like it's support base in a way, right? So it's not really a fair offsite.
There's plenty of sketch at the studio. Let's be honest with ourselves.
It's fake as we'll hear you.
Yeah, dude. Jeez, getting by. But then the other thing that I really liked about Captain Reginald's setup here, as you notice this, Brent, is he's got some old pies. He's got a 1B in production still and a PI 3B still getting used and being used for useful stuff like a simple tail scale exit node. That makes a lot of sense. I love that. Or a temporary web server. He also uses one of them just as a USB power source for a Mesh-tastic node.
It's just great use of old hardware, which will be relevant, I think, in the predictions episode. I'm not giving it away.
You've been doing your homework.
I've started a little bit.
I hate that.
You boys better get ready because I'm going to.
When you can't sleep, you start dreaming of predictions.
I'm going to try to bring the predictions game this year. All right. So those were just some of the kind of honorable, not so honorable mentions. We also have an honorable mentions category, so don't call it that. The not so honorable. No, those are just the big.
There's plenty of honor involved.
Yeah. Those are just some of the ones we wanted to pull forward. But now we're going to get into the categories. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware. Check out Unraid. They really go from strength to strength. And when I was going through our home lab holiday submissions, so many awesome setups using Unraid. And it just makes sense. You hear us talk about a cool project here on the show.
You can get right to it with Unraid because they have just such an impressive catalog of apps that have been submitted by their community. And really, those are getting better, too, with Unraid's new official API. That was part of the new 7.20 release that came out just a little bit ago. Some ZFS work went in there and TFS support went in there. So you can get grandpa's photos off your old hard drive.
But I think, you know, I mean, also the responsive UI. I mean, there's so many things I could talk about, but what just keeps blowing me away is the way the community is building around this new open source Unraid API.
¶ The Glorious Disaster
It just unlocks so much custom new dashboards, new ways of automation. I really it's scripting home assistant. I mean, I'm just like, oh, wow. It's like one. I mean, I know it wasn't a little thing. Right. But that one thing just unlocked a whole world. It's so, so great what's going on over there. Really just giving you more power, more flexibility. You can start with what you have in the closet right now, and it will grow with you if you want to go just even further and further.
And with expanded ZFS support, you can migrate from some of your older systems. Like if you had like an Ubuntu system running ZFS, and you want to move it over to a proper Unraid setup, well, they make that really simple now. It's so great. If you're a home lab enthusiast or if you're just getting started, maybe you're a small business that needs some infrastructure for your team. Unraid 7.2 gives you the tools to build and scale the way you want.
There's already well over 25,000 people, that's the last time I checked, that are using Unraid 7.2. It's just been a banger release. So go download a free 30-day trial at unraid.net slash unplugged, see why everybody's loving it, and support the show. That's unraid.net slash unplugged. Okay, here's where things get a little tough. This is the showdown where we have to advocate for category winners. We have picked our contenders who we think deserve winners to different categories.
And Brent, you are going to kick us off with your pitch for who should win the Glorious Disaster Award.
I am this one i particularly felt very you know when you go through one of these and then you get an instant strong pang feeling where you're like wow this fits that category yeah well that fit for me when i saw the last photo in their submission and uh so i'd nominate for this category distro stew uh distro stews setup seems pretty great one of the photos though my goodness it looks, i mean i've i've done slightly better than this and that's not saying much expect this, actually i.
Did not expect you throwing distro stew under.
The bus well i did i did.
Note the note from distro stew about the fan uh-huh that stood out to me maybe i should have picked up on the signal yeah.
Okay what was the note about the fan do you have it there.
Yeah the clever part see that hanging fan on the top uh i put it there a while back to cool my overheating 24 port data center switch that switch is long gone but i kept the fan around who knows what would happen if i remove it.
And like, to be fair, it's like he has a mini rack with some devices in it and that all looks good. And the cables and stuff look fairly organized. The angling fan got me to kind of think, oh, what's going on here? There's some ingenuity here, at least. Then reading that note and knowing it's doing exactly nothing just got me to think, this is so perfect. But I got to tell you, that last photo of just like, if I had to describe it, it's basically looks like a pile of half taken apart computers.
Many of them seem like their innards have just been sort of taken out of their respective computers. And yet there are like LEDs on of each of these pieces and they're plugged into cables. So they must be doing something right. And it's, I think, also just the perspective of the photo just makes it look like someone threw a bunch of computers into a pile and then plugged them all together, and somehow that's running part of Homelab. So I really love that.
All right, you're making a good case for Distress 2 to be the Glorious Disaster. Wes, do you have a pick for a Glorious Disaster?
I do, I do. I would like to nominate the one, the only Magnolia Mayhem.
uh-oh okay um let's say let's a little quick blurb here chaotic free bsd nix os hybrid from recycled school hardware uh no backup services run honest and alive that was my short description that i wrote down but mayhem himself just says almost all recycled parts a bsd machine came from a school recycling pile for 20 dollars network sweats from an old shipping container isp setup yes, the mission even is self-descriptive which I love it's not really a home lab so much as it is a cry for help.
Well, that tells you.
There's personal trackers. There's LubeLogger. There's Pinchflat. Three instances, no less. PodCash, love it. Image.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Three instances of Pinchflat?
I mean, that's what Mayhem says.
That's a bit of a disaster. Boy, you're making a good case, too. I mean, especially because he says it's a cry for help.
That's a category opt-in if I've ever heard one.
All right. Well, that's a good contender. So we got distro stew and you're putting mayhem under the bus. This one's the school bus.
Yeah.
Yeah. Mayhem was listening live. This next one's tricky, too, because Haleas is also listening live. I have to put Haleas up as a contender for the glorious disaster just because they have a completely deserted rack with what is classically a to do pile of drives on the table, like an NVR located somewhere like in the roof.
it's kind of wild it's kind of chaotic and I also I identify with it you know what I mean like identify with it so I had to kind of put Halea up there, I mean the cry for help is a good one Brent I think I actually think it's I mean my boy after hearing your guys I think this.
Is why it was hard.
I think it comes down for glorious disaster contenders between distro stew and mayhem Brent do you want to make a case for distro stew over mayhem just real quick just like a anything because i mean that cry for help from me, that's a bad home like.
Distro stew also has a 10 gig switch that is not in use yet he just says.
It's quite loud and.
It's just sitting there.
Oh he has a powered on uh-huh.
He's also got a a daisy chained uh set of power strips and he says an honest spaghetti cable management style.
Yeah so So there's.
You know, at least some might.
Yeah, you can respond.
Okay, here's Mayhem's oops moment. Collected several one terabyte drives in a Z2 raid. Bad things happened. Tried to re-silver, which killed the spare. No backups. Inadvertently deleted nearly my entire laptop. so does that get some sympathy.
Maybe yeah yeah i feel like we could do the most probably for mayhem over a call but i'm not sure right what do you think that's kind of my because whoever wins the glorious disaster award and.
Maybe we'll get to see distros too if.
That's true goes.
To planet nix again or scale don't know.
Which one do you think we could make a bigger impact if we.
So there's you know potential there to help with uh indoctrination.
Right we said don't.
Say that on the show.
I'm sorry damn it all right i i could i could give it to distro stew you want to give it to distro let's give it to stew all right distro stew you congratulations are our winner of the glorious disaster, We will have to get in touch and schedule a call, perhaps maybe next 28th on the Sunday. We'll just do it in the pre-show and do a little consulting with DistroStu. All right. So the disaster goes to DistroStu. Congratulations.
I think it's disaster, Stu.
Thank you for being willing to submit your home lab and to throw yourself under the bus.
That's very true. We had fun. All right. So that moves us now on to something a little more positive.
¶ The Most Potential
The setup with the most potential. The one to watch that could get somewhere. Brantley, do you have a contender for the category with the most potential?
I do. I have one contender for this category.
Okay.
This is Pixie. So I chose Pixie's submission here because I felt like they were in transition. So from one style of HomeLab to another. And so he basically says here, let me give you the mission. HomeLab contains one TrueNess CE machine. That's a community edition featuring Jellyfin, the R, Stack, Tailscale, Handbrake, SyncThing, Calibre, and more. The machine is now a production media server for friends. The majority of the content is ripped DVDs and Blu-rays that are owned.
Jellyfin now replaces all the streaming services that we used to use. That's the collective of friends.
Okay, give me their name again.
This is Pixie, P-I-X-I-E.
You are winning me over with the media stuff, okay?
Mm-hmm. The aim is to expand these services when three new 20-terabyte refurbished Iron Wolf drives arrive soon to add paperless, NG image, and more, or basically whatever you guys keep recommending on the show. It says the hardware may look extreme, but it's my old gaming PC replaced by the Steam Deck. So basically, they don't need that gaming PC anymore. They got a Steam Deck.
That's great.
Got a couple of Raspberry Pis that run a home assistant. Enough said there. And the network runs off a stock ISP router and a little Netgear. And he says here, I have dreams of bigger and shinier machines, read Unify. The extra four terabyte higher drives will get moved to become the in-house backups for docs, images. And I really would like recommendations for privacy conscious VPSs for those backups.
I would too. All right. Pixie, that's a strong contender. Wes, do you have a contender for the most potential?
Yes, I do. I would like to nominate Abe.
Oh, yes. I remember Abe's, all right, give it to me. Why would you nominate Abe for most potential?
Yeah, well, just to start, you got to check out this sweet 3D printed LabRax 10U unit going on here because it's just beautiful.
Abe.
But then also, okay, so part of, here's the mission statement. Part of my home lab is an actual lab where I'm running my mini-me project, inspired by the Bobiverse. The rest of it are just servers providing services to friends and family, but that's books, movies, and shows, password managers, OIDC, IRCBots, AGAs, C2M, HA, backups, etc.
I just got to book two of the Bobverse.
So then maybe you get what's going on here. Because, inspired by that, the project aims to create persistent, autonomous AI agents called ABES that manage and optimize a home lab environment.
So
Shouldn't you be watching that we gotta watch that.
Wow hey the ab-verse yeah so.
Yeah there you go.
That's strong that's strong thankfully i'm very confident in mine mine is very strong too i do have a couple of contenders in this one but uh i'm gonna have to give it to mega i want to i want to submit mega to the most potential here mega is 16 years old they're building custom python downloaders and running home assistant in proxmox they've built the entire thing on rescued machines and they are quickly learning sysadmin skills and providing home hosting
to various members and i think when you talk about potential here and one to watch, mega at 16 years old it's really incredible i mean that's really something so i don't know how we make a choice here we have pixie abe and mega i've.
Basically been trying to do this for 16 years i've gotten nowhere close to what what they're doing so i feel like that's worth watching.
Okay so do you you want to get on board with mega are you switching i'm gonna i'm.
Gonna yeah i'm gonna switch sorry pixie love you but uh i think i'm gonna switch to a mega vote.
West do you want to try to make a fighting response for Abe?
Well, you just, I mean, we're in the era of AI, and when you have AI bots that are going to improve your home lab, the potential is seemingly endless.
Okay, it's a good argument. That's a good argument.
I think these two should get together and do a collaboration. That way, we have the best.
Can we do a dual winner? A tie between Abe and Mega?
This is the first year, so we're setting precedent.
I feel like we should because the Babaverse appeal is so strong and I am so impressed with what Mega has gotten done.
Yes, definitely.
All right. I think we're going to call it. It's a strong double win for the most potential. It goes to Abe and Mega. Congratulations. You've really built something pretty special.
¶ The Sipping Sage
All right. So now we get to a category that I find personally very interesting.
Maybe that's why it's in here.
Yeah.
Who made these categories?
There's a couple of those.
The Sip and Sage.
I don't remember getting a review document.
So this is the labs with the best energy efficiency. And this is always really interesting because it's fun to figure out how people do this. And, Brentley, I'd like to start with you. So who do you have for your contender or contenders for best energy efficient sipping sage home lab?
I have two contenders here. I'm curious if any of ours overlap. So I chose Hen Bagel and also Dares 19. Do either of you have either of those?
No, I do not.
Okay. Well, I chose these because they, well, were clearly sippers, but they're both a little bit different. So Henbagel here has a Lenovo ThinkCenter M720S. Sound familiar, Chris?
Yeah.
It's got 64 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes, SSD for storage, running Proxmox, a mix of LXCs, Debian VMs. There's a media server also, Raspberry Pi 5.
Nice.
It's got one of those MVME hats, so it's running Raspbian. There's also a bunch of Docker Compose stacks in there. There's another Raspberry Pi 3B. It's basically e-waste from work, which is a theme we've seen a lot in here. It's currently running Fedora IoT for learning and experimentation. There's a free router from Facebook Marketplace running extremely old version of DWRT. I've never done that before. It's basically pulling triple duty as a router, an access point, and a switch.
As you do when you're doing energy efficiency.
There's a mobile home internet gateway in the lab. Yay, triple net. And basically backups from a UPS device. Pro 1500, and there's also a gaming PC in there, which is not part of the sipping part, but he gives some stats on there. It says, basically, my Pi 5 is for general infrastructure, running things such as Pi Holes, NetServer, ReverseProxy for the home lab. Additionally, the Pi 5 runs services like Paperless, Vault Warden, LubeLogger, FreshRSS, Melee, and data is backed up to BlackBlaze.
The Lenovo Tower is my media server, running Jellyfin and a pile of R's. I also use it to test distributions and other software stacks and VMs. I value simplicity and documentation. Short-term goals are drastically increasing my usage of Ansible and other infrastructure as code tools, potentially using a self-hosted Forgeo and switching maybe to Podman as well. So the clever part here, my pile of interconnected shell scripts that stop all.
My containers, individually back up all of their data using Restic and start all the containers again. Each container has its own script detailing which directories it will back up and if or how to get the data out of it. So basically, there's a restore script for every single service. And they're tested.
I like that. This is the energy efficient category. Give me the name again just so I can make sure I have it.
This is Hen Bagel.
Oh, yeah.
H-E-N.
Hen Bagel is going to be featured in our outro song.
Okay. You ready for the number that actually matters?
Yeah, I am.
Here's the idle use. Yep. 32 watts.
That is pretty great.
That does not include the gaming PC. Okay. They had a little note here. My home lab is on wheels, so I can clean the cat hair out from behind it.
I love that. That was like, that made me laugh.
There have been numerous cat-inflicted service outages.
All right, Hen Bagel. That's pretty great. 32 watts is pretty competitive. Wes Payne, do you have a contender for the sipping sage?
Yeah, let's go with the cane CTL, cane control.
Cane CTL, all right.
Yeah, okay, so we got some gear here, an Intel Pentium silver board N6005 with six SATA ports.
Ooh, what? Really?
Yeah, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte SSD for the main storage, four terabyte NVMe for fast storage, 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 18 terabytes for Blu-ray rips. Nice. Jellyfin videos, music, and stuff like that's on the fast storage, which is great.
Yep.
And it's a backup target. I avoid spinning up hard drives as much as possible to minimize power usage.
Oh, okay. Right there. That's, When I see a couple of these people are doing dynamic things to spin things up only when they're needed. Yeah, that's commitment. That's sipping.
Okay, the mission, started as a learning platform, still is, three years ago with the main focus to learn more about NixOS, self-hosting, and system administration.
I see why you picked this one.
Learning to love System D and NixOS. This server now runs my smart home, media server, Jellyfin and Navidrome, backup services, document management, and many more.
Do we have a wattage? Do we have a bottom line number there? I know sometimes people included that. That's a pretty impressive setup.
Yes. I think we've got about 21 watts idle. Also, there's some BcacheFS involved here. Yep, idle is 21 watts.
Come on. BcacheFS too? All right, Kane.
I think this is a made-up home lab just to hit all our boxes.
Yeah, here we go. Extra notes. I always wanted to have my own NAS, and when I got my first disposable income, I looked for an interesting NAS-fitting Linux distributions. I read about NixOS a few years ago, looked for a podcast covering the topic, and learned about Linux Unplugged. Now it's a NAS Jellyfin server home assistant running BcacheFS and uses a custom kernel.
Oh, God.
Chris, did you submit this one?
I know, that's right. It's speaking to my heart. And I got to play rough because I was going to submit DMK USA or Dan because he's got a great setup, an entire stack, switches included, Pi, Wi-Fi, everything. He says, I don't sacrifice any utility, and he gets it for 34 watts. But the problem is, is Hen Bagel's coming in at 32 watts, and Kane's coming in at 21 watts, so I need to be competitive here. So I'm going to go with my most competitive pick, and that is Kepler. Kepler has gone crazy.
My dream route. Everything is directly DC powered. There's no AC to DC conversion happening in Kepler setup. And they have designed the ultimate off-road expedition truck. Every single watt has been scrutinized as you have to do. Get this. 15.8 watts at idle.
Come on.
That's even when, actually, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 15.8 watts idle for a full media server. He's very, very, he went through the details. And I have to say, Kepler has, he has designed this entire home lab from a watts first principle. And he manages a 15.8. I can't even imagine. Mine right now has got to be closer to 70. I mean, it's really gotten out of control. And to get the full stack that he's achieved for 15.8 watts, I wouldn't have thought possible.
So I'm putting Kepler down as my contender for the sipping sage. Does anybody want to argue 15.8 watts?
I would like to add to this submission, if you'll allow me to.
Yeah, yeah, please.
I had Kepler as my choice, top choice for the Tiny Titan as well.
It's a tricky overlap between some of those. There is some overlap there. But I think that could be argument for winning this particular segment.
I think that, yes, I'm going to also suggest that. I will also say Kepler had the photograph of their home lab that made me the most jealous of any of the home lab photographs. mostly because the background is a bunch of like really super sweet car projects that are in the loft that they're in they.
Have this really cool looking pc that's like an open case design.
That one right yeah.
That was very cool.
Basically he says the background shows my workshop and loft i currently live in with some motorcycles a honda cb 550 cafe racer and a car a toyota land cruiser hj 60 and a fiat panda 141 a as projects what a setup, I admit I got entranced by the background and forgot to look at the home lab. And then I was like, wait, why am I here? I loved Kepler's setup for their home lighting and definitely saw that as the potential for what my own home lab could be in the future.
So I'm going to give a strong vote to Kepler for this one.
So you're getting on board with the Chris train. I like that. I mean, 15.
Yep.
Wes Payne, can you argue with 15.8 watts even? Can you even attempt to argue that?
Well, see, I do want to, but then I have one that I want to use for Tiny Titan, so...
You're going to give it to Kepler?
Yes.
Congratulations, Kepler. You are our sipping sage.
¶ The Tiny Titan
All right, now let's get to that Tiny Titan category. We need to just knock this out right now. The idea of this category is they do the most with the least hardware. Brent, do you have a contender for our Tiny Titan?
I am going to nominate Dares19, who I thought I was as a sipping sage, but really they're using twice as much as calories. But what stood out here for me was that this is a pies only setup. There are only Pis in this home lab.
I love that.
There are many Pis in this home lab. There are six Raspberry Pis, and they all are doing something a little different. So here we go. One of them is called the Londro Pie. It's in the laundry room. It's a Raspberry Pi 4. It's got an NVMe on it as well. There's another Raspberry Pi here. It's basically a compute module 4. The other Pi, number 3, is a Pi 5 with 8 gigs of RAM and NVMe also on there.
number i don't know what is this for i ran out is a raspberry pi 4 with one of those poe hats on it nice and uh the second to last pi here is another pi 4 4 gig and the last one is another pi 4 4 gig so here's the mission all pies run one or two docker compose files the home lab is centered around home assistant which lives on pi number one along with an nginx proxy linked doing a bunch of fancy network stuff that i don't really get
the second pi is only running pi hole for dns and points to the internal domains to pi number one pi number three is the home lab work that runs 20 containers such as mealy audiobook shelf music assistant jelly fin and some others.
Another pi here is uh basically not in the laundry room which i think is where their main home lab is but is in a central position in the house running zig b mqtt and a little mqtt on there okay there's another pie here in his in their parents house in another country running tail scale as an exit node and the last pie currently at their sister's house and will also be a tail exit node.
Wow.
A nice little tail scale setup too.
That's a strong setup. That's a really strong contender for the Tiny Titan.
There's some extra highlights here that you'll appreciate, Chris, if you'll allow me to just give a little bit more. Not necessarily part of the pies, but all of my lights and light switches are smart. However, they still work in case the Zigbee controller is down and home assistant is down and Wi-Fi is down. This is because the Zigbee bindings from switches to lights and because I flashed some Shelleys with ESP Home.
So the home approval factor is through the roof, except during their biggest oops.
That is something we should talk more about is Zigbee, Z-Wave, and a couple others. They do offer the ability to essentially create control groups. I'm probably getting this wrong, but control groups where the logic actually happens on the devices themselves. And so you don't need a controller operational. That is an extremely, extremely strong contender, I think, for the Tiny Titan. And Wes Payne, you have yourself quite the task.
I do. I do. But I think our dear Brentley may have misread the brief because it's actually trying to do the most with the least. So I would like to submit Tom Chuggler the gear. A lonely Raspberry Pi 400 with a 2 terabyte USB SSD. But the mission, the mission is broad. Cody Media Center with additional services running in Docker. Like we got the OS is LibreElec.
We have things like Samba, PyHole, Transmission, you know, for downloading those Linux distributions and Shinobi home security monitoring.
Ah, that's great.
Also using GPIO and some Python to add IR remote control. Now you've also got to factor in here. I know my idle power. It's three watts.
Shut up.
Three watts.
Tom, how is that?
And then extra notes. Docker is amazing. At various times, our media center has had a web-based game emulator, Minecraft server, and much more. The main thing, though, is Piehole keeping the internet clean for the kid. Cody doesn't do YouTube that well, so we do have a separate Raspberry Pi OS SD card with FreeTube on it for that.
But he's not doing a different machine. He's just swapping. Same thing.
And the media center is also a retro game emulator, SD card with retro Pi, and a couple of PS2 controllers, plug-in, and play.
So, like, depending on what they want to do, you swap in SD cards?
Yeah.
Huh. So is that two systems total that I counted there?
No, it's just the one. It's a single Raspberry Pi 400.
Oh.
But it's just multi-purpose.
Yeah, a couple different SD card OSes.
That's brilliant.
Swap it. Wow. That's tough.
So, you know, if you're thinking doing the most with the least, I think it's a strong contender.
That's a strong... Damn, Wes. Well done. All right. Well, my Tiny Titan, I do have, see, I have DARS-19 as my runner-up, so I'll give a plus one to DARS-19. I will just also mention that I thought the Tiny Titan maybe should go to Simon. Simon has a itsy-bitsy rack stack of N100s, and he's done 3D printed enclosures for them.
Ooh.
You know, we aren't giving- It's small.
It's modern.
We aren't giving hardware awards, but the N100 might have earned itself on with just the submissions that we got.
For real I just thought it was dense powerful and modular but I'm having a hard time my only thing is I think I think I want to throw behind oh boy I'm having a, I think I'm going to throw behind Tom. I thought I was going to do DIRS 19, but if you go by the spirit of the category, Tom is doing the most with the least there. Brantley, how do you feel about that? Could you give it to Tom in the spirit of?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Getting the mileage out of that Pi 400? Yeah.
Yes.
That's impressive.
What would you do with another Pi? That was a question I would want to forward.
Yeah. I almost want to send him one just to find out.
Yeah, we'd like to do some Pi redistribution here. There's just something's not right.
Congratulations, Tom. You are our tiny Titan.
¶ The Blowout Build
All right, so now it's a pretty fun category. It's the most overkill budget blowout build. I mean, you know, people, they have hobbies. They spend a lot of money on those hobbies. Sometimes home labbing is one of them. And, Brentley, who is your contender for the most overkill budget?
There were some super impressive builds with some equally jealous making photos accompanying those builds throughout. I didn't think a home lab could be so large, but I do have someone who stood out for me. Surf Rock 66 stood out for me. They built a custom bookshelf that basically hides the entire home lab.
And if you know how to open the bookshelf, then the bookshelf opens and you gain access to the entire home lab, which also has built in cooling, has exterior access so you can get to it from like outside the building as well. And like, there's a heck of a lot of stuff behind that bookshelf. And they even submitted a, like a video walkthrough of the entire build and what's going to happen in the future to make it even more impressive.
This was just blew me away. This submission. So I, that's gotta be my choice. Surf rock. You blew me away.
Well, I'll go ahead and reveal right now. Surf rock was my runner up.
I also had SurfRock in contention for something else, not this one.
Really?
But SurfRock definitely stood out.
You know, what I liked about SurfRock setup, what spoke to me deeply and personally, is that they have a custom open LDAP schema just to manage central authentication across everything, like their Wi-Fi and everything. And that speaks to me because if I had all the energy in the world and time, there'd be a lot of things I'd do before I get to setting up a central open LDAP server.
but it would be one of the things i would get to and i dream about it so i also i had surf rock 66 as my runner-up for the most overkill budget and i also i do love those uh r740xd's those are uh yeah that's.
Yeah it doesn't i guess it makes sense to go through the hardware in this.
Particular category i think it does yeah yeah okay.
So here's the list of the gear that was at least included in the submission. Three PowerEdge R740XDs. So those are two U servers. They both run Proxmox and they're wasted from work. Lucky duck. A Supermicro 4U 36 Bay TrueNAS got 44 terabytes of spinning, seven terabytes of SSDs, basically for VMs and such.
there are two desktop class pcs running as public minecraft servers two apc ups's and extended run cabinets those are also e-wasted from work uh there's a brocade icx 6610 l3 switch, has 10 gig fiber there's an aruba 2930f 48 port switch that's also e-wasted from work i see a theme here uh so here's the mission hidden in a closet behind a custom bookshelf with its own external ac so a dedicated server uh air conditioning which is very fancy three dedicated power circuits uh 30 plus
vms and two minecraft servers that they essentially have uh the internet on land so they can operate fully offline with those minecraft servers some services jellyfin Home Assistant, some internal DHCP and file servers.
QWix, which is with Wikipedia and the Khan Academy, so they can use those being personally indexed, Nextcloud, Audiobookshelf, two piles with different upstreams for adults and kids, a certificate authority, asterisk PBX for an HTML5 SIP client they developed, Vault Warden Fresh RSS, Pinchflat to keep the kids off real YouTube, Shinobi nvr apache guacamole for remote access open ldap with a custom schema they built plus simple saml php to service oidc and saml wow okay zabbix for
monitoring those minecraft servers with mumble integration and a bunch of small web apps they've developed or deployed.
I feel like Sir Frog should come run our infrastructure Wow okay Wes Can you Try to beat that?
I have a contender Sir Mysterion I.
Love the name.
Yeah okay so we have An Intel NUC running It's got 16 gigs of RAM running Proxmox We have a desktop Ryzen 64 gigs of RAM Proxmox gaming pass through We have a Super Micro CS This is Super Micro 1, 2X E5s, Xeons I assume in there, 192 gigs of RAM, I guess that's offline has some offline discs and stuff, JBOD and second Supermicro 2X E5 2690 V4s another 192 gigs of RAM this is for Proxbox and then Supermicro 3 that's 8X E5 2630 V3s,
that's got 256 gigs of RAM that's hci hyperconverged proxmox uh plus drdb a.
Lot of proxmox.
Uh we've got 10 terabytes of ssd storage usable and 38 terabytes of hard drive storage usable the mission everything and anything sandbox for work sometimes advanced networking ipv6 only when i can jellyfin image next cloud home assistant for the family cited network ad blocking clusters hyperconverged proxmox advanced routing BGP and OSPF starting to look into EVPN and VXLAN IAC deployed VMs in NixOS config minimal windows
unless I have to test something built my own 3D printer for anything else I need printed also host some services for a friend such as BeerTube and Mastodon that's great some Kubernetes added some Olama and cheap Tesla P4 oh, clever parts got also got a NixOS daily driver laptop with full description nice um, I think this helps. So I didn't submit it for the sipper because the HomeLab idle is 980 watts.
That's a baller budget just on the power right there. That's the sip? That's just the sip?
Oh, man.
Oh, wow. So when it's cranking like on an old llama job or something, it's higher than that. Okay.
The oops moment. I added enough servers that the breaker kept tripping.
I bet.
Had to upgrade to 20 amp circuit.
My man. All right.
And the extra notes. Do you know how hard it is to saturate a 40 gig network card? Well, I don't know either. Something about multi-core iPerf tests required. Don't have the disk bandwidth to make use of it either.
Yeah, isn't that tricky?
So, there you go.
Okay. All right.
And it's a very, if you look at the picture, it's a very nice little rack set up, and it looks nice.
Pretty good. Serer Mysterion is pretty good.
Just a slight point to add to my submission. Surf Rock's idle is 1,500 watts.
Surf Rock. Wow. All right.
Yeah.
That's pretty good. I mean, it's cute that you guys are measuring by power, but this was supposed to be the budget blowout. So my contender is Optic Tiger. And the reason why is we have a dollar figure on just one of the rigs in Optic Tiger's setup. It's not $3,000. It's not a $6,000 server. It is not an $8,000 server. It is not a $12,000 server. No, is it a $14,000 or $15,000 server?
No, it's not even an $18,000 server. It is a $20,000 custom Epic server with an A6000 GPU and 100 terabytes of enterprise SSD storage.
What?
He's essentially built himself a tier three data center disguised as a home server. I mean, this thing is high end. That's incredible. So, now I don't know what his power run rate is, but I know that his entry rate for that server is 20 grand plus all the networking equipment, the rack, all of it. So, it's a tough call because these are all really good. These are all very good.
I think you would call that a budget blowout. Yeah.
I feel like with this with the dollar amount on there kind of gives it, I mean, one box is 20 grand.
Right? What are they doing with it?
Well probably high performance thought simulating.
What else do you do.
So okay anybody I mean can you beat that can you beat 20 grand can you be it, going once anybody you want to make a case otherwise I think it could be a contender here it's.
Very strong I mean custom it just I mean it didn't specifically say monetary budget so I'm going to say building a custom bookshelf with your woodworking skills is it takes a lot of time.
Oh my god you know design dedication.
And and uh therefore you know it's an impressive set of.
Multi-skills to pull it off but all these home labs are a large time investment, so true i think we can go by the budget i tried west pain you got any arguments i.
Think i have to give it.
All right i.
Think i'm in i can't.
Tiger i think we give it to you for that one $20,000 custom Epic server with an A6000 GPU and 100 terabytes of enterprise SSD storage housed in a home lab disguised as a tier three data center. You, sir, are our most overkill budget blowout for the holiday home lab special.
¶ Best in Show
Now we get to our final category, gentlemen, and that is the best overall home lab. Now, this was so...
Basically impossible to choose.
Right? It was impossible. This was so impossible that we realized next year what we would like to do if we do this again is do community ranking for some of these. Because it was... There are so many good submissions. There are so many. And it took us all hours to go through them. Like then when I whittled it down to my, to my top list, that was still 30 ish picks that I then had to whittle it down from even further.
Absolutely amazing. The submissions we got from all different ends of the spectrum, but we do have to pick one overall winner. And so Brent, do you have the best overall home lab contender?
I found this the most difficult thing to choose.
Well, yeah. Yeah.
No, but like emotionally, because I feel like everybody has a different purpose for their home lab. And like, who am I to say what the best one is? Because I don't know what I'm doing. So I am going to go with the one I fell in love with. So I'm going to say Kepler, your little tiny machine that was a 15 watt sipper and did a ton of stuff and you're moving it into your off-road expedition truck with your sweet loft project, you know, car projects that won me over.
I'm, uh, I'm saying you got a sweet rig there and that's a, that's, that's the best home overall home lab I saw.
I like that. Kepler is a good contender. That's a good one. Okay, Wes Payne.
I would like to submit Dan from Down Under.
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Yeah. A sweet rack on wheels. I just, I love it. It came in handy for Dan, which we'll talk about.
And then just a nice little from the top, we've got a patch panel, custom rack mount from Things in Rack, POE switch, netgate 1100 router with PFSense on there, Raspberry Pi 4, some extra stuff for 2U power draws, 2x dell wise thin clients and 3d printed rack mount intel j 5005 with 4 gigs of ram 512 gig sata m2 for you server on rails pi kvm inside the case uh there's just so much going on here uh there's another azrok going on in here but check out the mission various self-hosted
apps including image nextcloud paperless piehole audio bookshelf jellyfin bitcoin node the r suite monitoring grafana prometheus scrutiny ghost folio which is investment tracking wow grist and node red link warden miniflux tandoor sterling pdf beaver habits getia duplicati rustic server kubernetes zfs with mirrors used for everything there's a fast pool and a slow pool sanoid making hourly snapshots of most volumes shared postgres between all services to make good backups easier uh there's
also of course um so one of the wisest is doing home assistant running haos another one is off but It might be the Bitcoin node. The Raspberry Pi was doing Zigbee to MQTT.
Okay.
There's also, and this is stuff we do, there's a Linode VPS named Outpost, which I think is a classy name. Synapse Matrix server with a WhatsApp and Signal Bridge. Traffic and Tailscale used to provide access to some of the stuff. Uptime Kuma, Rally, Nostra Relay, Mumble. Backups with Autorestick to the home server. All managed with Terraform.
Okay.
So there's a 3D printed rack mounts for non-rack mountable gear. It's a really nice little touch. idle for all this is like 100 watts, which is, That's, you know, being pretty conservative, I think.
The entire rack?
Yeah.
Extra notes. We just moved apartments, and the rack and server were carefully transported the day before the move by me to keep it safe. It was the first piece of furniture in the new apartment. We were on the fifth floor without an elevator, so carrying it was tough. The new apartment is just one floor up, so much more manageable.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. That's a good one. The name again, that was Dan from?
Down Under.
Down from Down Under. You also were my runner-up for the best home lab. Dan from Down Under was my runner-up. So I will say that. I agree. I will plus one everything you said. I'm going to give a pitch for Firefighting Dad. Firefighting Dad, I think, nails the gold standard for a beautiful home lab. Because it's not overdone on the hardware. It's about a clearly defined mission. And he's really striving for digital sovereignty for his entire family.
and providing a service to the community and one of the things he's done that's really cool is he has an open bsd system where he auto has he has scripts that auto provision different resources for friends and family so he can just hit a button and then provision them what he needs when.
I saw that it's so cool it was all five fire diet was my runner-up.
Really yeah we were thinking.
We're on the same well done gents.
I decided also to apply the scoring system and we didn't do this a lot but, If you total it up, if you go by our scoring system, he got a 54 out of 60. He scored a 10 on functionality because he solves routing, storage, automation, and education to friends, family, like literally his community. Great design, clean, SFF cluster, well organized.
He's got Tasmoda he's using, really nice. But also the ingenuity around his OpenBSD auto provisioning scripts to set up friends and family access to his stuff. He's got quite a bit of stuff he's providing for multiple different sets of people. and he's doing it all at 450 watts. Yes, that's high, but he's doing a massive amount of work at 450 watts. And he also gives special attention to documentation, very clear explanation of why and how for his end users.
And then he really focused on digital sovereignty and teaching those lessons to his kids in a way that's really classy and it's not overbearing. And so I gave him a 10 on that too. So it gave him a total 54 out of 60. So firefighting dad, I just was really impressed because it nailed that sweet spot, but also it was making an improvement on the people around his lives. So that's a great one.
Firefighting Dad also has a little note here. Every Christmas, I make a donation to the open source software that I used for the entire year. That list gets longer every year, but that's one way I try to pay it forward.
That's pretty freaking great. Right?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah. Hit me in the feels.
These are all so good.
They were. They were all so good, but we can only give it to one this year. I think it's Dan from Down Under and Firefighting Dad. Those are our two top right there, if we give it to both. But I think I kind of want to give the edge to Firefighting Dad just because of his impact overall. Because it's not just for himself, the family, but his community too.
Yeah, that's noble. I respect that.
Right? How do you feel about that, Brantley?
I said, let's do it.
Oh, wow. I can't believe we got to consensus. I thought we'd be fighting on this forever. So there you go. Firefighting Dad, you are the Great Holiday Home Lab, best overall home lab. Congratulations.
but really sincerely thank you everyone who took the time to whoa that's way too much in the studio way too much we cannot have whoa thank you everybody who took the time to fill out the survey and you know really that's your time is your most precious asset and we really do appreciate you actually getting involved with all these crazy shenanigans it was a real holiday treat for us and um combined with the notes and
the easter eggs in there or just reading everybody's setup and being so freaking impressed with what you do with what you've got it was really great for us so just again for for me and all the boys thank you thank you very much and uh we have ways to make this even better potentially next year if we do this again that hasn't necessarily been decided but we'd love to hear your feedback on that segment and ways you would make it even better We'd take that feedback too. Boost that right in.
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¶ Honorable Mentions
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Now, one thing that became very clear to us as we were going through these together is that we made some categories and there were many home labs that did not fit at all into any of these categories. So we decided to pull a few of these out as honorable mentions, but they're mostly just home labs that blew us away for reasons we couldn't predict. And I have a list. Wes, you have a list. And Chris, you have a list, too. I feel like we probably have some that overlap.
Maybe.
I know I've got a couple that are just like blew me away.
All right, start us off with one.
This was a very impressive setup by Barry KK7JXG.
Oh, Barry was a runner-up I had earlier, so I'm very glad we're featuring Barry.
And Barry blew me away. They basically said, I got a home lab, everybody's going to have a home lab, but I'm going to show you my ham cluster. Oh, right. And this was impressive to me for so many reasons. One was that it's being used for a competition that's coming up, basically a ham competition, and they go into details about that, which I'll read in a sec. But also they did some like really nice electronics work to have the entire
tiny ham rack be powered by only one power supply. And it was splitting the power to a bunch of different things. Well, basically a bunch of different little one-liter PCs that are doing all this work. This thing blew me away. So ham cluster, yes, we don't have a category for that, but it was very impressive.
I guess we might need one.
Here's the mission. I mean, Homelab is a bit meh, so I thought I'd submit this. Basically, they're Ham Radio Club's field network consisting of a three-node Proxmox cluster, which will be deployed semi-off-grid in the field. Its core purpose is to host a virtual desktop infrastructure for contact logging. Logging is the process of recording details of a ham radio contact. So call signs, time, frequency, and signal report.
This January is Winterfield Day, which is one of the largest ham radio field events of the year. And my club will have a multi-operator station, which will be supported by this field network. Since our logging software is Windows only, I'm using Apache Guacamole to provide browser-based cross-platform access to each of the dedicated ResourceLite Tiny10-based VMs.
Last year's guys groaned when I told them they needed a Windows laptop, so I thought they'd get a kick out of logging on with their iPads this year. For data protection, the logging databases reside on a CephFS-backed Samba share. This setup isolates database transactions from the Wi-Fi network. So if radio interference occurs, which is possible around a lot of high-powered ham radios, it might temporarily disrupt an RDP session, but it won't corrupt
the centralized database. At least, that's the plan.
That is so great. I love that. That's great. Very well done. Great suggestion, Brentley. All right. Do you want to hear my honorable mention? I loved Master Reboot because, and I quote, I didn't spend a single dollar on my setup, he writes. I worked at two companies with three-year hardware refresh cycles, and when it was time to recycle the equipment, I first picked up everything coming out of rotation. He says, my home lab, though, is a space heater. It runs at 352 watts idle.
But about six months ago, he swapped video cards. I don't think he loves it. But I just, I love the story he gave us about trying to set things up. Wasn't the best situation. Kind of dark. He had to forcefully plug in a port. And he was kind of given a shove. He's like, why isn't this going in right? And turns out he was trying to stick a USB stick into a display port and wrecked his display port.
And did stick it in that point.
Yeah, he got it. also he just had this great story uh where he was talking about trying to uh flash a hard drive and i think i can find it here he says it's so good i tried to flash a usb stick and i put it in my fedora machine and it said nope not our problem so finally i grabbed my macbook in desperation i found the usb creator tool for mac i hit one button and bam it worked i swear that Mac looked at me and said, amateurs.
He says, but what would have taken me one hour ended up taking seven hours. That's not tech support. That's a hostage situation. He says, before I touch anything, too, I send out a telegram message to the wife. They say, I pretend like it's Patch Tuesday at Amazon with a big notice. Expected downtime imminent. Prepare snacks, alert the teenagers, we may lose Wi-Fi for up to 15 minutes. Godspeed.
That's the message he sends out to the wife via telegram. He included a couple of diagrams that he created with draw.io, too.
They were nice.
Yeah. So I had to give the honorable mention to Master Reboot. Love that story. And not spending a single dollar on the setup.
Amazing.
Wes Pano, do you have an honorable mention?
I do. Let's go with the dude abides.
Oh, very good.
Ooh.
Yeah. I like the dude abides because there's just a suite rack, a huge array of apps, lightning nodes in there we can kind of get into some of the details there's uh let's see it's a 15 new star tech rack cabinet enclosed and locked a nice ups hp gen 8 micro server with some xeons 16 gigs of ecc 4 by 16 terabyte zfs mirror two and a half gig neck jet kvm involved there's also lenovo m720q oh that's got a 10 gig sfp plus a whole bunch of nice looking
unify gear nice a home assistant blue with a zigbee antenna there's some cameras oh.
Yeah did he include a picture.
Uh yes yeah i saw a gallery actually yep.
I saw that.
With an adorable photo of his daughter hanging out next to the wreck.
Yeah i saw that too that did speak to me.
Uh-huh yeah i was really like that also isp modem but i guess there's some double nat issues because he's getting eight gigs symmetric from his isp.
Oh, my goodness.
But with the double NAT, it's kind of in the four gigs.
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, really limping along.
That's probably fixable, though. You know, maybe not totally solvable, but probably pretty solvable.
The Home Assistant sounds like it's up your alley. 159 devices, 12 add-ons, zero-tier influx, Grafana, Samba, code server, NextCloud backup, Tailscale, ESP Homes in there, Mosquito, Music Assistant, Uptime Kuma.
Oh, good.
There's a TrueNAS involved on that microserver for daily photo backup to Backblaze. Of course, Proxmox is going on that Lenovo box. A bunch of LXCs on top of that, including a backup server. And there's like the R stack there, plus a Bitcoin node with Umbral is going on.
Nice.
Yeah, I just thought kind of the whole thing looked like a classic Homelab Plus.
Well done, dude.
You'll like the clever part. The latest thing I'm proud of is the addition of some Zigbee relays to the radiators we have around the house so that I can control them via Home Assistant. it. We don't have central heating and being able to do this was really cool. And all of that at an idle of 183 watts.
Oh, not bad.
Not too bad.
I want to give just a quick shout out to PJ. Producer Jeff sent in his setup and we've seen this setup and it's impressive. And I bet a lot of you out there do this is he has a home theater PC NAS custom desktop hooked up to his TV that It also runs image and next cloud. So it's his media center box. And also it does a lot of his hosting there. It's pretty great.
So there's so many good submissions that what we're going to do is some of them that didn't make it into today's show, just because we're already running long is we'll probably read some of them in a future bootleg feed too, because there's too many not to get into, but we have one more treat for everybody.
¶ Boosties
And this one is something that's pretty fantastic friends. It's time for the boosties. And this is just a moment where we can just acknowledge and thank people who have supported the show directly with a boost throughout the individual productions. And, of course, we have to first start by thanking everybody who's a member. That is our ongoing support, and we really appreciate that. This is to acknowledge those who also contribute above and beyond each individual production.
And, as always, I'll butcher some of these pronunciations.
Please do.
But because of how the way this works, you've probably already heard him do it before.
It'll be...
Will it be the same? We don't know, but...
Yeah. And so the folks that supported the show with the most sats for 2025, Devator comes in at an even 600,000 sats.
So neat.
I wonder if they... Did they plan that? That's so perfect.
That would be impressive.
Adversary 17, not surprised at all to see them on the list. They come in with 622,839 stats. Thank you very much. Now, I know, you know, I know a lot of that. I think I recall a lot of that came in during our Texas road trip.
Yes, definitely.
Well, huge shout out to adversaries for having me there, too. That's another V4V. It's not counted in these stats, but it sure is memorable. So thank you for having me.
Yeah. Weren't you supposed to boost in, Brandon? Sort of part of that?
Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot.
Well, coming in at number three, we have our buddy, Our Podcast, Always Generous, with 902,345 sats.
Fantastic. Thank you, Our Podcast.
Second from the top here, we've got Blackhost, 957,624 Satoshis.
Whoa.
Just under a million. That's wild.
Heavy lift. And that is something that goes back to the entire community, right? It's really, thank you so much, Blackhost. And our number one booster for 2025 is at 1,066,632 sats, the dude abides.
Wow.
Yes, thank you very much. We have an extra batch of fireworks just for you, the dude. We really do appreciate that. That is a significant contribution to this show's run in 2025. These are some of the folks, along with our members, that made 2025 possible and the reason why we had an episode every single week for you. Thank you very much.
We have also a special little gift for the DudaBides. Hybrid Sarcasm, if you remember from last year, suggested that the one who won the Boosties would get a free Jupiter Broadcasting Party membership, either to use for yourself or to give away maybe to another community member or someone you know who would love the show. That is so great.
Congrats.
That's amazing. That is community to community gifts. And, Hybrid, thank you for doing that.
Yes, plus one to that. Thank you, Hybrid.
Yeah, we did not prompt that. Hybrid just stepped up.
All right. Let's give thanks to the folks who sent us the most boosts in total. Are you ready for this category, gentlemen?
Yeah, coming up, number five is Tomato with 19 boosts.
All right. Thank you, Tomato, 19 boosts. Tomato, tomato. Not surprisingly, the DudaBides comes in next on the list at 20 boosts.
Number three is none other than turd ferguson with a handsome 23 boost thank.
You turd appreciate that.
Number two we've got adversaries 17.
25 total.
Boosts very nicely done, And our number one sender for the most boosts, ladies and gentlemen, goes to the one, the only, Gene Bean. With 54 boosts.
Wow.
Do you notice how that's more than twice as much as the number two person?
You know what? I love the engagement. I love it. Thank you, Gene Bean.
Gene keeps in touch, and it's great.
And when you see his boost come in, you're always like, oh, good, it's a Gene boost, right?
I always see his smiling face whenever we get that pew from Gene.
I agree. I agree. All right. Our next category is those of you who set those sats on streaming, and you just send the sats as you listen, minute by minute. And we really do appreciate that. Brentley, will you kick off the number one, or it's not number one, but the first entry. Number five. I guess it'd be the number five entry, yes. Will you kick off number five, Brentley?
The number five most stream sats to the network came from undead fable with 90 460 sats streamed in total all right.
Thank you, Undead. Thank you very much. Our good buddy, Odyssey Wester, has been around for a long time. He sent in, just via streaming while he listened to the show, supporting minute by minute, 93,817 sats.
Nice. Impressive.
Thank you, Odyssey. Appreciate that.
And, well, you already know that Gene Bean boosts a lot, but it turns out Gene Bean streams a lot in at number three with 116,934 stream sats.
Thank you, Gene.
That's on top of the boosts.
Yes, that's on top of the boost, Gene. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
We've got our number two here, Biggles. Biggles is number two with 120,950 stream sets.
Very, very impressive.
And this is kind of why I like just taking a peek in here sometimes, because, you know, we don't see necessarily a lot of boosts from Biggles, but.
Yeah.
Out there streaming. That's great.
That's a great observation, Wes. Thank you, Biggles. And our number one most stream sats listener goes to Squared Triangle, 276,500 sats. That's the, that's, thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. If you have a membership at linuxunplugged.com slash membership or the Jupyter Party, or you stream or send those sats, thank you for making 2025 possible. We really appreciate you. Honestly, I wasn't ever sure if it happened. We were sure.
In 2024 at this time, we're like, will we make it? Will we make it? And the audience made sure we made it. Thank you, everyone out there. Is there any other categories that we need? Because I see, so we have the stream sats and then we have the most streams. That's a different category.
Yeah, I don't know if it's super meaningful.
Well, we can give it a quick mention.
Yeah, definitely. Just people out there who are doing a lot of streaming, including Forward Humor, number five, 2.5K streams.
Very nice.
Moon and Night, also 2.5K streams.
Hey, Moon and Night.
Odyssey Westra, 2.6K.
There he is again.
Undead Fable, 2.9K.
Good to see you again.
And Dano Selti at 3,120 streams.
Thank you, Dano. Appreciate you very much.
Yeah, let's see. Our total number of boosters was something like 238.
Individuals?
Yeah. Total number of boosts was 746.
Wow.
We had a total number of streamers was 189 and we had 50K streams.
Thank you, everyone.
Unbelievable.
Thank you for, you know, every time we go through this, it really feels like we are proving out a model here where a niche that couldn't have been successful in magazine and in other mediums because what we talk about and the demographic that we appeal to, who prefers free stuff in a lot of cases, It's like we're making it actually possible where some of our greatest community resources for media, like the Linux magazines, weren't able to make a long run of it. I mean, we're doing it.
We're proving it right here. And so much gratitude goes to our members and everybody who supports us with the boost. Thank you. Thank you very much. And a round of applause also to anybody who's contributed to the show in the community, who has told the show to something like a friend because word of mouth is the number one way to spread a podcast or spent a little time with your time, talent or treasure, any of those. Thank you so much for making 2025 possible. We will have one more episode.
¶ Outro
One more episode. We will be back after the holidays on December 28th, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, for our predictions.
Uh-oh.
You know what also that means?
Review.
Yeah.
So we have some homework to do.
We do. You can join us December 28th.
Boost in those predictions, too, please.
Get your predictions in. You still have time. And we'll be reviewing the boost that you sent in the last week into the show. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next week.