I absolutely love this community, and honestly sad that I’m just finding how awesome it is in the last few days! ~2ish years ago I watched JDM’s tabletop build of the GA-7TESM, and really found it helpful. I already had a couple x5680’s and a bunch of ram from a HP Z800 I recycled from work, but wanted more drives than it could support, which lead me on my google search to find his vid and also how to flash IT mode onto the SAS controller. The one gripe I always had about the board was that I’d get the dreaded “BMC SEL area full” message when I’d reboot, and then have to drag out a monitor and keyboard to get it to boot (since I couldn’t get the KVM redirection to work due to the button being greyed out). Low and behold, I come here and there’s this awesome article on how to keep the event log from getting greyed out, AND in the discord @rosegold came up with a sweet tampermonkey script to avoid having to manually edit the page HTML to get the KVM to work. This community is a dream for people like me who like to tinker and build systems
Merry Christmas everyone!
I have to go with the remote gaming guide. Even though my initial attempts at a remote gaming build were not successful (couldn’t get GPU passthrough working) this is a concept that I’ve been a fan of since before joining this community. I will be making another attempt in 2021 with some different hardware. Looking forward to another year hanging with you guys!
This is the post that started it all for me. When I came across this post and the discord, I had no idea how much my life would change. I was working at the time in a NOC doing NOC stuff and not really progressing. I imagined saving up to get a server and start learning more than what I knew already about Linux and hosting services. I just couldn’t pull the trigger and my own ignorance kept me desiring homelabs like you see in r/homelab.
With this article, I took the plunge on the Ideapad to setup my Plex. That made a world of difference and as the cliche goes, it was the gateway drug to learning more. Since then I bought 4 HP290’s that I set up as independent servers, then got into docker, then podman, then learned how to SysAdmin the correct way. Which now has changed my career for the better. Since this started I have become a SysAdmin at my job. Experimenting with containers has opened the door to training with the cloud infrastructure team. In 6 months, and a ton of hard work, I am sure I will get a position in that team and continue to reach my goal to be a Cloud Architect.
With all this said, just want to thank the community here that helped me in my journey and showed that expensive gear is not necessary to learn. A homelab of cobbled together of laptops/hp290s can and is more than enough to hone your skills.
The Intel QuickSync guide has been my go-to post on this forum. I could have referenced the whole topic but this particular section describing the ins and outs of QuickSync was extremely well put together. I have read this particular section of the guide at least 25 times and reference it constantly as I’m trying to put together a cheap but fully-functionally Plex transcode QS box. I appreciate the work of all in this community to openly share information for all to learn. Happy 2021 All!
This post was my entry into the serverbuilds world because I was trying to figure out how to improve my data storage/Plex setup.
Now because of the 4.1 and 4.0 guides, the drive shucking thread and the Quicksync guide - I’ve got a ridiculous server in a Rosewill L4500 an HP 290 driving everything and 24TB full… so back on to the shuck-watch I go…
On top of that the help getting it all going at the start was phenomenal and the guides straightforward enough that I’m at 214+ days of uptime (next shut down will be the next drive upgrade…)
This is a recent one (and technically one I haven’t quite started yet), but I’ve read through it multiple times and am really excited to get started. The biggest reason for me is that it is partially a gift build - this is going to go in my parent’s home for their personal use, and perhaps also as a remote backup endpoint for myself and my sister.
While not my first time cobbling together hardware for my homelab, the Anniversary 1.0 gave me an easy to follow guide that got everything up and running with very little hunting. The 2.0 guide is even more focused and gives a ton of options to get everything you would need in a home server. I’ll often refer back to this thread, to see what I may want to swap out in the future.
Hope this isn’t a boring link, but I’m going to use the original nk 4.0 thread, because that’s what originally got me to find this awesome site.
I’ve said this before, but I think that the diversity that’s found on this forum is it’s strong point. I’m hanging out in the discord, soaking up knowledge, learning from everyone from networking pros who don’t know the first thing about hardware, to linux gurus, to people like me who have a very basic working knowledge of linux but no mastery, people who are hardware pros but novices at software.
I’m hugely appreciative of this community and all the help everyone has given me.
Once I learned about the power of Quicksync I have come back to this post time and time again. Any time a friend asks about building a Plex box I send them to that post before doing anything else. Thank you so much for this reference!
I feel a little guilty submitting the post from the landing page but it is just such an incredibly well-written, fool-proof guide. I would especially highlight the pre-built subsection for anyone still uncertain about their first build. If you follow the links for ebay listings you can find a killer deal, and it really helps lower the bar of entry. Fair warning though, once you’re in there’s no going back!
The NAS Killer 4.0 Post was how I found out about the ServerBuilds community. This post is very detailed and after reading it I decided to go with the prebuilt option of a Dell Poweredge T110 ii for my NAS to get the most bang for my buck. I found one on ebay with the SAS card for $72 which was a steal. I bought 4 8TB HGST drives for $90 each on ebay that were recommended, these ones: HUH728080AL5205, for plenty of room to grow. I followed the guide to flash the SAS card that came with my prebuilt server to IT mode as well. I never would have figured out how to get a prebuilt server and turn it into a killer NAS at a fraction of the price of a synology or qnap. Just want to say a big thank you to @JDM_WAAAT for this guide.
It’s great to see people overcoming challenges of home nas/server solutions. I would never even think of cooling issues but then again I’m looking for a low power (meaning low heat) server solution.
I’d be fine having a miniatx in my living room for now. But as it grows I’ll need to do more research.
One guide I found helpful was something small, but still taught me a lot. It was the heatsink information guide and explanation of different types of M.2 connectors. I ended up buying one of the heatsinks from the guide and have been happy with it! But of course now I want to buy another NVME drive for my server, and I’m gonna have to get another one, same color to coordinate of course…or I could wait for the next 14TB Easystore sale…these are hard decisions!
This is the thread that got me looking at moving my plex server off of my main desktop. I’ve only been looking around here this past week, but it looks like I still have so much to learn that I never even thought of.
This was my first small project once I got Unraid up and stable that wasn’t just a simple click and confirm configuration. It was the gateway to other items like cloud backups for config. Details and support on the questions I had were great.
After discussing the pihole build I was considering and the cost for the hardware to make it happen, a few other users suggested skipping all of that and investing in a pfsense build. For that reason, my preference is package #1.
Thanks for a great SB year in 2020. Looking forward to 2021 projects.
I heard about serverbuilds.net on the self-hosted podcast awhile back but dismissed it as something that would be too advanced and too expensive for me (never built any sort of machine before). Came across another reference and decided to check it out. The price, information, and community support around the hp290 has been a real eye-opener! Thank you for everything you do and the community you have created!
