A Home-lab, or well my attempt at one anyway. This is just a way to document my most recent PC Build and learn some hopefully pick up some new skills while I do.

So Why is it?

Suppose I should give some context for the why, about a decade ago (as of writing this anyways)I decided to build myself a small Network Attached Storage (NAS), mainly because I was interested in the idea and wanted to see what I could do with it, the NAS started out with a single 3TB drive, and a few cheap parts thrown together, over time a few additional drives got added to it.

Turns out I got alot of use out of that NAS, and this past year the 1st 3TB drive started throwing up errors, I had a think about the options I had before me (the simplest of which was to replace the drive) and came to the decision that I would build a whole new PC, from the ground up, I got alot of use from the current system (as mentioned lasted about 10 years), so why not invest abit more and build a system that could perhaps have even more functionality?

The Parts

• Intel i5-14500
• Asus W680-ACE IPMI
• Kingston 32GB DDR5 EEC Memory
• Noctua NH-D12L Black CPU cooler
• Thermal Grizzly Intel 13th & 14th Gen. CPU Contact Frame
• Seasonic Prime TX-750 750W 80 Plus Titanium PSU
• Intel 64GB M10 Optane NVME
• WD Black SN850X 1TB NVME
• 3 x 24 TB Seagate Exos HDD
• IPC 4U-4129L
• IPC 26″ Telescopic Rails
• Vevor 15U Open Frame Rack
• Slim SAS to 4x SATA Cable
• Rack Studs – Series II
• Raspberry Pi 5 8GB – Starter Kit
• Raspberry Pi 5 PoE Hat
• 2 x 80mm Noctua Fans (5v)
• 10 pin USB header to Dual USB 2.0 Female Adapter
• 1 Domain Name

I toyed with added a small reason for each choice above, but I liked how clean the list looks, so instead I’ll cover the reasoning behind some of the choices here,

For the CPU I went with the i5-14500, the i5-1×500 series seemed to be well regarded and frequently recommended from the reading up I did when trying to chose a CPU, one of the reasons I chose Intel over AMD here is the integrated graphics, I use Plex and Intels igpu/quicksync performance for transcoding makes it difficult to not go team blue here, in the case the UHD 770 should be more than enough for any transcoding I may need.

For the motherboard, I was very tempted to go down the consumer route again, in the end I decided I wanted a few extra features and settled on the Asus W680-ACE IPMI, few of the reason I chose this board – rated for 24/7 operation, Compatible with ECC Ram (my RAM choice was from the official QVL list for this motherboard)and the big one – an add in IPMI/BMC Management card, I haven’t had the system too long but I am already glad I have this handy device, allowing me to remotely communicate with the system, power on/off, run bios updates etc, I would highly recommend some form of IPMI/BMC functionality for a NAS/Homelab etc.

One potential pitfall for the future – although I hope it wont matter in the end, is the PCIE bifurcation only allows 8X_8X_4X_4X and not say 4X_4X_4X_4X- etc.

The Thermal Grizzly contact frame was picked up as I had seen issues with Intels ILM on 12th/13th/14th gen CPUs causing uneven pressure and potentially creating hotspots, I didn’t fancy putting the system together only to find out after I was unfortunate enough to have such a problem, so I picked the contact frame up at the start more as a preventative measure, the Noctua CPU cooler came in as one of the most recommended at 145mm in height – a limitation of which was put on by my choice in Case.

The case then, I was originally tempted to reuse an old ATX case I have lying about, but where’s the fun in that? Looking at potential rack mount cases and soon realized that prices for such a case can quickly start climbing, I didn’t have too many requirements here, I ignored any sort of 1u case etc as I wanted to be able to fit 120mm fans to reduce any noise from the system, that’s when I settled n a 4U size case, came across the Brand Inter-Tech that seem to offer reasonably priced rack mount cases, the one I settled on has 2 x 120mm intake fans (over the Hard drive bays) 3 x 120mm fans in the middle, 2 x 80mm exhaust fans at the back (would have liked to have had 120mm exhaust fans too it’s not the worst), the case fits full a sized ATX power supply, I picked up the specific IPC rails instead of generic rails to try and forgo any potential compatibility issues here also.

The power Supply was chosen for it’s high efficiency, I probably went over kill on the PSU wattage tbh, originally I looked into getting a PSU compatible with the IPMI/BMC card mentioned above, for use with the SMBus(PMBus/L2C) – but turns out this isn’t easily obtainable on a consumer ATX PSU, this idea got dropped and I went with the Seasonic.

The Intel optane drive was chosen for use as a boot drive, the SN850X is to be used for as an App drive (I don’t expect to use 1tb worth of Apps but with storage prices so low why not.

Vevor 15U rack was chosen primarily because it’s what comes up when looking for a cheap open frame rack, I’d seen a few posts/builds in the rack and knew it would work for my needs.

I’ll mention the 80mm Noctua fans here, while I plan to eventually swap out all the stock fans in the case (and get rid of all the molex connections while I do it), I decided that the only ones I’d initially swap out were the stock 80mm fans, they had the potential to be the noisiest, I picked them up when buying the Pi 5, but did not notice at the time they are 5v fans and not your standard 12v fans, as such they cant be connected into a normal motherboard fan header, my mistake here, as a quick fix I picked up the 10/9pin USB header to Dual USB Female adapter as the 80mm fans came with there own adapter allowing them to be powered from a USB device – got Lucky here.

I have a few omissions in my hardware that I would like to fix in the future, after-all this is just a starting point, I would like to have some form of UPS in the even of a power loss, a power strip wouldn’t go amiss either, my primary desktop has a 2.5G Ethernet port and the W680 and 2.5G ports so I’d like to add in a 2.5G managed PoE network switch, and I’m sure I could continue this list but these are the main items I’d be looking to add to my setup.

So Whats on it

That’s all well and good I hear you say, but what are you doing with all this hardware?

I think I’ll start with the Raspberry Pi 5, on this I run Pi-hole, this started out being used as just an ad-blocker but soon I started using it as my DNS resolver also, giving the devices/service in my home network their own domain name.

Also on the Pi5 I have installed nordvpns Meshnet feature, I was looking for a simple way to connect to my system outside of my network, I know it’s not the go to option, or even recommended option but it was the simplest for me to setup, I have Meshnet on the Pi5 and Meshnet on my mobile device, any time I’m away from my home network I can choose to route the traffic from my mobile through the Pi5 – which effectively connects me to my local network and allows me to access the webui of the IPMI card/Truenas etc.

Next is the primary system, which as spoiled above, runs Truenas Scale, my old NAS was running Freenas (I never did update the OS when they moved away from that branding).

So far on Truenas the only app I have installed on it is Portainer, but I have installed a few containers within it,

Teamspeak – own personal Teamspeak server to use with a few friends

Plex – for personal media use

Nginx Proxy Manager – allows me to assign domain names to the Apps running within Truenas (in combination with Pi-Hole), additionally lets me assign a secure certificate when accessing the WebUi of the apps.

So all in all not alot of Apps….yet* I have a few Apps installed that I know I will get use out of, and I am on the look out for any other interesting Apps I can try.

Which is sort of why this page exists, I was tempted to host my own website but thought better of it, but seeing as I have a domain name, I thought I may as well create a page just for the experience of it.

I bought my Domain name and transferred the nameservers over to Cloudflare – I wanted to make use of Cloudflares Proxy DNS, after that, seeing as I already had a Cloudflare account I looked into what else they offered I could make use of – I have a signd certificate on my Truenas WebUi (this was done before I set up Nginx), I used Cloudflare with Nginx to add signed certificates on my other internal services (I’m aware giving things within my local network a domain name, and signed certificates isn’t necessary, I ended up doing this more to see if I could than anything else).

After deciding not to host my own website, I looked into free options, turns out Cloudflare Pages exist, so after looking around I found a way to use Local WordPress along with Clodflare pages to create and host this page.

Other potential Cloudflare services I will look into atleast will be Zero Trust/ Cloudflare Tunnels, I’ve been quite impressed so far with the functionality in the free tier of Cloudflare

I’ll end with 2 pics of my setup, one of the mess that is the internal cabling:

And one that is the finished product: