I want to learn and would appreciate some help.

[Currently Studying]

I am very new to networking, but I am having a lot of fun since I replaced my Spectrum router with a Asus RT-86U Pro. I have tried both Merlin and stock firmware out. I've learned PfSense, Skynet and Diversion through the router and had a great time. Now I have the desire to make a Home Lab of my own.

I have an old gaming pc that runs well. Its got a 3700x, 2070 Super, 16GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD and has Windows 11 Pro installed. From what I understand, this isn't the right device to achieve my goals. Its going to use way more power than specialized devices. But, if I install a dual 2.5Gbit NIC and run everything through VM's it could function as a learning platform?

My ultimate goal is to learn. Very close to that, I'd like to have a hardware firewall, the ability to block ads and have DNS over TLS enabled before it hits the Spectrum Modem - all network wide. If it helps, I have a Spectrum 1Gbit plan and it seems overprovisioned to 1.25Gbps once I plugged it into the router's 2.5G WAN port.

TLR Probably a common question "I've got a decent gaming PC but I want to do more Home Lab Stuff".

Any guidance is appreciated and thanks for reading what is probably a common question to those who get the itch.

 

[RMerlin]

TLR Probably a common question "I've got a decent gaming PC but I want to do more Home Lab Stuff".

I've been revamping my homelab these past few months myself, spent a lot of work this past week on the multimedia/docker side of things.

You could start experimenting with the hardware that you currently have, but if you want a long term solution, I would indeed recommend getting something less power hungry. For reference, here is my own setup.

Hardware:
I bought an Intel NUC 11 on Amazon a few months ago. A few great things about it:

1) Since it's an older model, it's easy to find at a very affordable price. An Intel 11th gen is still more than enough for most homelab setups. Pop an NVME SSD in it and 32 GB of RAM. No need to spend twice as much for a 13th or 14th gen one, you will most likely NOT need that kind of CPU power
2) Even when under load it's still very quiet (I have the Intel i5 model). Very surprising in fact, compared to the Asus Mini PC it replaced that would get insanely loud whenever CPU load started to rise. I suspect Asus skimped on the thermal interface in it, like they too often do with their products...
3) 2.5 Gbps NIC - that's not granted these days, but it should be on any such setup.
4) If you really need to add more storage to it, it offers Thunderbold
5) It's really small, and takes no space

Now, since it only has one NIC, it might not be suitable to run a router. But for anything else, it's a great option, I really love it. Also you cannot easily RAID disks with it (tho I considered going with a dual TB enclosure for a while), so having backups of it is important. Reinstalling + restoring backups with Proxmox VE is fairly trivial overal.


Software:
I installed Proxmox VE on it (I was previously a long-time Xen/XCP-NG user with my past systems). It's fairly easy to work with even if you are a beginner at virtualization. My own setup is:

- One Win11 VM (for my remote employee)
- One Linux VM (for my docker containers, largely the usual *arr stack to manage my TV shows)
- A Pihole LXC container (I use it to block ads/malware on my mobile devices)
- A changedetection.io LXC container, which monitors various websites and notifies me over email when, for example, a new BIOS is released for my motherboard, or an updated firmware is available for my Yamaha AV receiver
- A Homepage container, which generates a "dashboard" for all my dockers/vms/container, largely used as a bookmark page for all their web interfaces


A few nice things with virtualization/containers:

- You can easily backup the VM/container to a NAS, and experiment as much as you want with it. If you truly break something, just restore the backup.
- Experimenting with software available as a docker container is very easy - you spend little time on the installation part, and can jump straight into the configuration/experimentation part. Software update is just one or two steps (depending on whether you always pull the latest image, or you manually select the image version to pull).


Beside that, I also do have a NAS, which contains all my files, backups for my machines as well as my NUC VMs, and a Plex Media Server to stream to my TV. I finally finished ripping all my DVDs last week, took me years to finally find the will to finish it. Whether to go with a complete solution from QNAP or going down the DIY route is up to you. Personally I went for a QNAP, since my data is too precious for me to start tinkering with whatever platform I'd use to host/manage it.

My next project will probably be to have a look at Home Automation. Even tho I don't have any need for the automation part itself, would be nice to have a central location to manage my Govee smart light, my two smart powerbars and my smart air purifier within a centralized application.

 

[tgl]

Just a minor comment --- I have two Intel NUC mini-PC boxes of different generations. I do like them, but unlike @RMerlin 's experience, I find that both of them spin up their fans to annoying levels whenever I put more than trivial CPU load on them. So don't assume that that entire product line is quiet. Mine are a BOXNUC8i7BEK1 w/ i7-8559U CPU (2019) and a RNUC13ANHi70000 w/ i7-1360P (2024). Perhaps i7-series vs i5-series CPU is the critical difference, I dunno.

 

[Currently Studying]

Thank you guys for the quick responses!

I looked at the NUC models and they do seem interesting. I think I really do want a 2 or 4 port solution, though.

I was casually browsing Reddit and here, and found the V1410 – 4 Port Intel N5105 4-Port with 8GB RAM, 32GB MMC and a 500GB NVMe SSD for $294 on their website. My concern is the 4x I226-V 2.5G NICs which seem like they aren't compatible or play well all the time. Maybe I remember wrong and they get hot, not sure.

Assuming the NIC's are good, would this would make a good router for PfSense and PfBlockerNG -performing both Adblocking and Firewall duties network wide? If so, would it also enable me to experiment and learn more things?

...and RMerlin, thanks for the firmware. Its both amazing and impressive. It's what got me hooked on this stuff.

Edited: I should add to this, I have no knowledge on Proxmox yet, so some of the things you mentioned were above my head. Also the LXC containers.

 

[RMerlin]

Just a minor comment --- I have two Intel NUC mini-PC boxes of different generations. I do like them, but unlike @RMerlin 's experience, I find that both of them spin up their fans to annoying levels whenever I put more than trivial CPU load on them. So don't assume that that entire product line is quiet. Mine are a BOXNUC8i7BEK1 w/ i7-8559U CPU (2019) and a RNUC13ANHi70000 w/ i7-1360P (2024). Perhaps i7-series vs i5-series CPU is the critical difference, I dunno.

I remember reading a few complains about loud NUC11s with an i7, which is why I am even more surprised to see how quiet my i5 is. Maybe the i7 SKU had a much higher max TDP than the i5 out of the box? That would still take a significant TDP bump to make such a difference. I think I kept the BIOS settings largely at their default values when I set this up. Running an openssl speed test has the CPU turbo at 3.8 GHz, with temps sitting around 50-55C then. Under a high load I don't recall temps ever breaking 75C.

Asus issued a BIOS update recently, so I will have another look at the BIOS settings when I update it sometime this week.

My CPU is currently idling at 39C while the box is mostly idling right now:

root@pve1:~# sensors
...

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +39.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:        +39.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:        +38.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:        +37.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:        +33.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

...

 

[RMerlin]

I was casually browsing Reddit and here, and found the V1410 – 4 Port Intel N5105 4-Port with 8GB RAM, 32GB MMC and a 500GB NVMe SSD for $294 on their website. My concern is the 4x I226-V 2.5G NICs which seem like they aren't compatible or play well all the time. Maybe I remember wrong and they get hot, not sure.

That's a pretty weak CPU, typically used in NAS. It might be ok for routing, however if you want to have an actual homelab and run various VMs on it, you really should look at something containing at least an Intel i5, 8th gen or newer. You will also want 16 GB or 32 GB if you want to run VMs/containers.

Somehow, Intel 2.5 Gbps NICs seem to be more problematic when running Windows. For virtualized environments (like my NUC) I have had zero issues, unlike my previous desktop where it was so bad that I ended up buying a cheap Realtek NIC.

 

[RMerlin]

I should add to this, I have no knowledge on Proxmox yet, so some of the things you mentioned were above my head. Also the LXC containers.

Basically, Proxmox VE is a free bare-metal virtualization software. Think VMWare, but that runs directly on hardware rather than within a full OS like Windows.

Heree's how the web management interface looks like on my system:

pve1 is the hostname of my NUC, you have the containers and VMs that it runs listed below it.

 

[Currently Studying]

That's a pretty weak CPU, typically used in NAS. It might be ok for routing, however if you want to have an actual homelab and run various VMs on it, you really should look at something containing at least an Intel i5, 8th gen or newer. You will also want 16 GB or 32 GB if you want to run VMs/containers.

Somehow, Intel 2.5 Gbps NICs seem to be more problematic when running Windows. For virtualized environments (like my NUC) I have had zero issues, unlike my previous desktop where it was so bad that I ended up buying a cheap Realtek NIC.

Alright. Seems that model I was looking at wasn't powerful enough, I was worried that Celeron wouldn't keep up... I'll keep hunting for something with a i5 and 16Gb of ram. Maybe a used thin client would be something to explore.

I saw you mentioned Proxmox. You replied as I was talking. I understand fundamentally what this is now that you showed me a picture and explained the idea. This seems to be the next great thing to learn. Would you say its harder than Virtual Box or VMWare to learn?

 

[RMerlin]

Maybe a used thin client would be something to explore.

I know there's a compact HP PC that is often very popular for homelabs due to it being quite affordable, but I can't remember the actual model name. I don't remember if it had PCI-E slots to add a second NIC either.

I saw you mentioned Proxmox. You replied as I was talking. I understand fundamentally what this is. This seems to be the next great thing to learn. Would you say its harder than Virtual Box or VMWare to learn?

While Proxmox is more powerful than either of these, you don't have to use any of these more advanced features (like High Availability clustering or Ceph) and you can simply ignore their existence. If you stick to just running VMs (and containers) for home, and have a backup tasks saving to an SMB share on your network, then it's just as easy to learn, with tons of online resources available about it. VMs work just like they do with VirtualBox/VMWare Player.

For LXC containers, there's a popular collection of scripts that make it trivial to create and configure a container for a popular package (that's what I used for changedetection and homepage).

Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts

Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

tteck.github.io

The original author sadly passed away a few weeks ago, but he gave his blessing to the community to take over the project before that.

Docker containers are a bit more complex, I actually learned how to work with them in that recent project where I started moving a few things to docker images within my Meridia VM. I'm not an expert yet, but I already learned a lot on how to work with them, and the benefits they can bring for hosting specific applications.

Overall, this is all the kind of thing that are fun to learn through experimenting yourself in a homelab environment. Tons of online documentation, and you can progress at your own pace. The idea is to start experimenting with it yourself.

 

[Currently Studying]

I know there's a compact HP PC that is often very popular for homelabs due to it being quite affordable, but I can't remember the actual model name. I don't remember if it had PCI-E slots to add a second NIC either.


While Proxmox is more powerful than either of these, you don't have to use any of these more advanced features (like High Availability clustering or Ceph) and you can simply ignore their existence. If you stick to just running VMs (and containers) for home, and have a backup tasks saving to an SMB share on your network, then it's just as easy to learn, with tons of online resources available about it. VMs work just like they do with VirtualBox/VMWare Player.

For LXC containers, there's a popular collection of scripts that make it trivial to create and configure a container for a popular package (that's what I used for changedetection and homepage).

Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts

Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

tteck.github.io

The original author sadly passed away a few weeks ago, but he gave his blessing to the community to take over the project before that.

Docker containers are a bit more complex, I actually learned how to work with them in that recent project where I started moving a few things to docker images within my Meridia VM. I'm not an expert yet, but I already learned a lot on how to work with them, and the benefits they can bring for hosting specific applications.

Overall, this is all the kind of thing that are fun to learn through experimenting yourself in a homelab environment. Tons of online documentation, and you can progress at your own pace. The idea is to start experimenting with it yourself.

Thank you for all this helpful info and taking the time to explain things to me.

I think I need to hunt for a machine that gives me options beyond what I initially wanted. That said, I think I'm going to sell that gaming PC to fund my learning experience.

 

[Currently Studying]

Looking at these right now...

GMKTek AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 6950H Mini PC--NucBox M7 Pro 32GB plus 1TB dual 2.5Gbit Nic for $439

GMKTek AMD Ryzen 7 5825U Mini PC--NucBox M5 Plus with the same Ram/Storage/NIC for $329.

Both of these look to be better than I was expecting for the money. That's a nice sale on their website right now.

 

[RMerlin]

Looking at these right now...

GMKTek AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 6950H Mini PC--NucBox M7 Pro 32GB plus 1TB dual 2.5Gbit Nic for $439

GMKTek AMD Ryzen 7 5825U Mini PC--NucBox M5 Plus with the same Ram/Storage/NIC for $329.

Both of these look to be better than I was expecting for the money. That's a nice sale on their website right now.

I'm not familiar with any of these, so you will have to track down reviews to see how they fare in terms of temperature or noise. I suspect they will be a tad noisy unless you limit their power, as they can reach 70W - the i5 in my NUC11 for comparaison is only 25W.

 

[degrub]

I am very new to networking, but I am having a lot of fun since I replaced my Spectrum router with a Asus RT-86U Pro. I have tried both Merlin and stock firmware out. I've learned PfSense, Skynet and Diversion through the router and had a great time. Now I have the desire to make a Home Lab of my own.

I have an old gaming pc that runs well. Its got a 3700x, 2070 Super, 16GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD and has Windows 11 Pro installed. From what I understand, this isn't the right device to achieve my goals. Its going to use way more power than specialized devices. But, if I install a dual 2.5Gbit NIC and run everything through VM's it could function as a learning platform?

My ultimate goal is to learn. Very close to that, I'd like to have a hardware firewall, the ability to block ads and have DNS over TLS enabled before it hits the Spectrum Modem - all network wide. If it helps, I have a Spectrum 1Gbit plan and it seems overprovisioned to 1.25Gbps once I plugged it into the router's 2.5G WAN port.

TLR Probably a common question "I've got a decent gaming PC but I want to do more Home Lab Stuff".

Any guidance is appreciated and thanks for reading what is probably a common question to those who get the itch.

Serve-the-home.com has a fairly good collection of reviews of small systems and networking gear that may suit your purpose.

ServeTheHome Server Storage and Networking Reviews

ServeTheHome, founded in 2009, is the place to learn more about servers, storage, and networking gear

www.servethehome.com