LINUX Unplugged - 646: The Great Holiday Homelab Special 🎄

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

The Great Holiday Homelab Special! Where our community brought their absolute best, from budget busters to beautiful disasters. Plus, a boosties celebration! Grab an eggnog and join us as we attempt to choose this year's winners.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM

This is the Great Holiday Home Lab special Linux Unplug, episode 646. Welcome into Linux Unplug'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 homelab, 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 built, 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. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello to all of you.

Hello up there in the quiet listening. Of course, everybody listening on the live stream, too. Appreciate you, join 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 to find networking, manage it for you. Optimize 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.

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Go to define.net slash unplug and define and redefine your VPN experience. That is defined. dot net slash unplug to redefine your VPN experience. Okay, so before we start, guys, I don't want to get too like 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 bar and burner budgets, you know. I mean, you know, stuff with all kinds of like multistate 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 a smile. We were messing each other back and forward. 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, 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 mean, I've got a few things over the years, but nothing like this. No, very, very scrappy.

It was very surprising to see the trend that many people who got free stuff is just from their employer. So, 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 certainly something. So we have lots of categories that we do want to cover. I mentioned some of them at the beginning of the show. 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 set up, the mostest, right? And so that's where we'll start our holiday home lab special. It's beginning to look a lot like home labs everywhere you go. Racks in every room, blinking lights and blooms, and the uptime starts to glow. But the prettiest side to see is the holly that will be on. All right, Wes Payne, let's start with Dark Owl, who just has a massive self-hosted set-ups. So we put this in the most-est self-hosted category.

And you pulled ahead Dark Ow. Yeah, okay, so start off here, take a look at the pictures. We've got just a nice little rack setup, nothing obsessive. seen or crazy but it's clean and tidy clean and tidy it 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 be worse than that so I can't critique and we've got plenty of B-Links going on we got a B-Link SCR 5 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-Ling link with 32 gigs of RAM set up as like a micro PC. We've got a prod portainer setup. We've got two orange pi 03s for pie hole. I assume that's redundant pie holes. So you've got to have that. You got a redundant pie hole.

There's also a six bay NAS mini ITX going on with two 4 terabyte hard drives, two terabyte hard drives, and a one terabyte SSD in 32 gigs of RAM and a sonology that's aging off. Which makes sense. You've got to do transition, right? But what stood out to me here is the clever part. part. I do like the mission, which is simple, to the point. Hosts video, stores paperwork, and allows me to play. Isn't that, I mean, isn't that when we come down to it often? Sometimes it's, you know, real work. Sometimes 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 CA. 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 Owls 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 H.A. proxy and add an entry on my dashy dashboard, which sounds pretty nice. So he technically has two NASAs, two orange pies run in redundant pie hole. And one of his NASS is massive. I mean, that's a big, just in size. That's a big unit. And it's run an open media vault. Huh. You know, I wonder how he likes that B-Link SRE 5 Max.

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 portainer server, 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. and get, and the files backing the Docker containers were on my file server. Well, that's not so bad. Woo, I bet the heart rate was going, though. No kidding.

And it's a backup test, I guess. Oh, wow. We're very well done. All right, while we're looking at the self-hosted setups with the MOSTIS, Captain Reginal 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 ubiquity edge router stuff. And this came up a couple of times, actually. splits inbound traffic from his modem. He routes it to his parents' home router, and he forwards all the ports to a hardware

Sonic Wall firewall. Oh, fun. So Ubiquity Edge Router X, then to a Sonic Wall firewall. I haven't looked at a Sonic Wall 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.

Then he's got a true NAS with an AMD phenom in it. We're going to see plenty of true nass today. That was interesting to say. 28 gigs in that free nass. And he's got 3,500 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, I'd 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 nanoconfigs 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 nanoconfigure 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 d ddns updator for dynamic dns next cloud mealy audiobook show

shelf jellyfin pinch flat me tube firefly three sink thing dozel t sd proxy for tail scale container integration and he's also running pie hole with a backup tailnet subrouter on there and then he has on a one b 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 truness scale 3-gen Intel I-7 So that's an older box It was running image

And server backup But the SATA controller 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 sync thing Uptime Kuma Again TSD proxy And Mili Where he also has a Raspberry Pi 3B

Running on there Yeah come on Brad And then he's got a kitty of projects, 20 terabytes of loose hard drives and SSDs he wants to work on in numerous windows and macOS and old laptops. I know that one. Big on the meshnet with tail scale for everything. He says, my homelab provides benefits including off-site 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 lovers. I loved 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 of hardware that you got for free. That's what stood out also here. It's just, it's a very impressive array of services being offered and what seems like a nice setup. Yeah. From a diverse array of stuff. And Brent, is this a great example of, again, the ingenuity of getting

second-day in 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 break 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.

Wow, that's impressive. It's like a firmware break. The Windows command line's powerful. That's what the lesson is like. And 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. No, 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 JOOP's isn't like a fixed thing, right? That's, it's more like a mobile thing. It's a little sketchy on its own. Yeah, the studio is kind of like a support base in a way, right? So it's not really a fair off-site. Let me have a sketch at the studio. Let's be honest with ourselves. Hey, think 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 is 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. Right? I love that. Or a temporary web server.

He also uses one of them just as a USB power source for a meshtastic 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, but... 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. But not so honorable. No, those are just the big... There's plenty of honor involved. Yeah, those are just some of the ones we want to pull forward. But now we're going to get into the categories.

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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 DFS support went in there so you get Grandpa's photos off here, hold hard drive. But I think, you know, I mean, also the response of UI. I mean, there's so many things I could talk about. But what just keeps blowing me away is the way.

the community's building around this new open source on rate API it just unlocked so much custom new dashboards new ways of automation i really it's scripting home assistant automation 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 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 have 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 unrayed.net slash unplugged. See why everybody's loving it and support the show. That's unrayed.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 so I'd nominate for this category distro stew.

Distro stew's setup seems pretty great. One of the photos, though, my goodness, it looks, I mean, I've done slightly better than this. I did not expect this. Me either, actually. I did not expect you thrown distro stew under them. Well, I did note the note from distro, Stu, 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? 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? Okay. 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, you know, 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,

ah, 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 plug them all together. And somehow that's running part of a home lab.

So I really loved that. All right, you're making a good case for distrust you 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. Let's say, a little quick blurb here.

Chaotic, FreeBSD, NixOS hybrid from recycled school hardware. 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. Network sweatsh from an old shipping container ISP set up. Yes.

The mission even is self-descriptive, which I love. It's not really a home lab. Okay. So much as it is a cry for help. Well, that tells you. There's personal trackers. There's Lou Blogger. There's pinch flat.

Three instances, no less. Podcash. Love it. Image. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. three instances of pitch flat 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 uh that's a good contender

so we got distro stew and you're putting mayhem under the bus this one's the school the school bus yeah yeah mayhem was listening live this next one's tricky too because is 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 their 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 actually think it's, I mean, my, boy, I have to hear in your guys. 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 strew over mayhem just real quick? Just like a, anything, because, I mean, that cry for help from mayhams. That's a bad homework. 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 daisy-chained set of power strips, and he says, an honest spaghetti cable management style. Yeah. So there's, you know, at least some. Can I, Lobby?

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 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 districts do if that's true

goes to plan a nix again or scale Don't know. Which one do you think we could make a bigger impact if we had a little chat? Well, distro stew says I'm working on switching things to next. So there's, you know, potential there to help with indoctrination. Right, we said don't say that on the show. Oh, sorry. Damn it.

All right. I could give it to distro stew. Do you want to give it to distro stew? Let's give it to stew. All right, Distro, Stu, 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 Distro Stu. All right, so the disaster goes to Distro Stu.

Congratulations. I think it's Disaster, Stu. Thank you for being willing to submit your Home Lab and to throw yourself under the box. That's very true. We had fun. All right, so that moves us now on to something a little more positive, the setup with the most potential, the one to watch that could get somewhere. Brentley, 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 Truness-C-E machine. That's a community edition featuring Jellyfin, the R-stack, tail-scale, handbrake, sync thing, Calibre, and more.

The machine is now 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. Yeah, this is Pixie, P-I-X-E. You are winning me over with the media stuff, okay? Mm-hmm. The aim is to expand these services when new three time, or three new 20-terabyte refurbished Iron Wolf drives arrive soon to add paperless N-G image and more, or basically whatever you guys keep recommending on the show. This is 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 pies that run a home assistant, and up said there. And the network runs off a stock ISP router and a little net gear. And he says here, I have dreams of bigger and shinier machines. Read Unify. The extra 4 terabyte hard drives will get moved to become the in-house backups for docs images. and I really would like recommendations for privacy-conscious VPS, VPSs for those backups. I would do. 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 them. Why would you nominate Abe for most potential? Yeah, well, just to start, you got to check out this sweet 3D-printed Labracks 10U unit going on here. 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-meet project, inspired by the Bobaverse. The rest of the servers are just servers providing services to friends and family, but that's books, movies and shows, password managers, O-I-D-C, IRC, Bats, A-G-A, C-2M-H-A, 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 got to watch that. Wow. Abe. The A-Biverse. 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 I'm going to have to give it to Mega. 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 cis admin 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 they're doing. So I feel like that's worth watching. Okay. So do you want to get on board with mega? Are you switching to team mega? I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to switch. Sorry, Pixie, love you, but I think I'm going to switch to a mega vote. Wes, do you want to try to make a fighting response for Abe? Well, you just, I mean, we're in the area of AI. And when you have AI bots that are going to improve your home lab,

like the potential is seemingly endless. Okay, it's a good argument. That's a good argument. Hmm. I think these two should get together into a collaboration. That way, you know, we have the best. Can we do a dual winner, a tie between Abe and mega? This is the first year, so we're set in precedent.

I feel like we should because the Bobaverse 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. 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. I do it.

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 Dare's 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 Hen Bagel here has a Lenovo Think Center M720S. Sound familiar, Chris? Yeah. It's got 64 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes, SSD for storage, running ProxMox, a mix of LXCs. debion VMs. There's a media server also, Raspberry Pi 5.

Nice. It's got one of those MVME hats. So it's running Raspberryin. There's also a bunch of dark composed 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 D.WRT. 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 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 a general infrastructure running things such as pie holes and that server, reverse proxy for the Home Lab. Additionally, the Pi-5 runs services like paperless, Philip Warden, Loublogger, Fresh RSS, Mealy, and data is backed up to BlackBless. The Lenovo Towers, my media server, running jellyfin, and a pile of ours. 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 answer. and other infrastructure as code tools, potentially using self-hosted for Joe, and switching maybe to Podman as well. So the clever part?

Clever part here. My pile of interconnected shell scripts that stop all my containers, individually backup all of their data using Restick, 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. Yep. 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. 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.

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. Kane CTL, all right. Yeah, okay, so we got some gear here in Intel Pentium Silverboard and 6,05 with six add-a-ports.

Oh, what? Really? Yeah, 32 gigs of rain. 1 terabyte SSD for the main storage, 4 terabyte NVME for fast storage, 2x C-Gate Ironwaller 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 need it. 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 pick this one. Learning to love system D and NixOS. The 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. It's Idle. Also, there's some B-Cash-F-S involved here. Yep, Idle is 21-W.

Come on. V-Cash-F-S, 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 NASS. And when I got my first disposable income,

I looked for an interesting NAS fitting Linux distributions. I read about Nix OS a few years ago, looked for a podcast covering the topic and learned about Linux unplugged. Now it's a NASJ jellyfin server home assistant running B-Cash-FS and uses a custom. Oh, God. 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, pie, Wi-Fi, everything. He says, I don't sacrifice any utility, and he gets it for 34 watts. But the problem is is hand bagels 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 my dream route. Everything is directly DC power.

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

is 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, sorry, I wrote it down on Kepler. 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. There is a tricky overlap between some of those. There is some overlap there. But I think that could be argument for winning this particular second. 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 a 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 in loft. I currently live in with some motorcycles, a Honda CB 550 cafe racer, and a car, a Toyota Land Cruiser, H.J.60, and a Fiat Panda Panda. 141A 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 setup and I definitely, for their home library and definitely saw that as like 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, Westpane, 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.

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 Dairs 19, who I, you know, 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 pies in this home lab. I love that. There are many pies in this home lab.

There are six raspberry pies, and they all are doing. something a little different. So here we go. One of them is called the laundro pie. It's in the laundry room. It's a Raspberry Pi 4. It's got an MVME on it as well. There's another Raspberry Pi here. It's basically a compute module 4. The other pie. Number three 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 the second to last pie 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 EngineX proxy linked, doing a bunch of fancy network stuff that I don't really good. The second Pi is only running Pi hole for DNS and points to the internal domains to Pi number one. Pye number three is the homelab workhorse that runs 20 containers, such as Mealy, audiobook shelf, music assistant, Jelly Finn, and some others.

Another pie here is 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 Zigby MQTT, and a little MQTT on there. Okay. There's another pie here in their parents' house, in another country running tailscale as an exit node and the last pie currently at their sister's house

and will also be a tail scale 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 Zigby controller is down and home assistant is down and Wi-Fi is down. This is because the Zigby bindings from switches to lights and because I flash some shelley's 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 Zigby, ZWaves, 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. 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 pie. 400 with a 2 terabyte USB SSD.

But the mission, the mission is broad. Cody Media Center with additional services running in Docker. We got the OS is Libre Alec. We have things like Samba, Pihull, 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 a pie hole 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 free tube 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 pie and a couple of PS2 controllers, plug-in, play so like depending on what they want to do he's swapping 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 two uh yeah two a couple different SD card OS is that's brilliant swap wow that's tough so you know if you're thinking doing the most with the least mm-hmm that's a strong contender

that's a strong damn way it's well done all right well my tiny Titan I do have See, I have Ders 19 as my runner up. So I'll give a plus one to Dair's 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 N-100s, and he's done 3D-printed enclosures for them. You know, it's small, it's modern.

We aren't giving hardware awards, but the N-100 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 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 lease there. Brannley, 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 pie 400? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's impressive. What would you do with another pie?

That was a question I would want to afford. Yeah. I almost want to send them one just to find out. Yeah, we have to do some pie redistribution here. There's just something's not right. Congratulations to Tom. You are our tiny titan. All right.

So now is 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, a 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 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 that's got to 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 surf rock contention for something else, not this one. Really? But Surf Rock definitely stood out.

You know, what I liked about Surf Rock setup, what spoke to me deeply and personally is that they have a custom open L-Dap 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 L-Dap 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 R740 XDs. Those are, yeah. Yeah, I guess it makes sense to go through. 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 Power Edge are 740 XDs. So those are two U servers. They both run ProxMox and they're

be wasted from work. Lucky, lucky duck. A super micro for U36 Bay TruNs, got 44 terabytes of spinning, 7 terabytes of SSDs, basically for VMs and such. There are two desktop class PCs running as public Minecraft servers, two APC UPSs and extended run cabinets. Those are also e-wasted from work. There's a brocade ICX-6610 L3 switch. It has 10 gig fiber. There's an Aruba 2930F48 port switch that's also e-wasted from work. I see a theme here.

So here's the mission hidden in a closet behind. a custom bookshelf with its own external AC, so a dedicated server air conditioning, which is very fancy. Three dedicated power circuits, 30 plus VMs, and two Minecraft servers that they essentially have 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, Next Cloud, audiobook shelf, two piles with different upstreams for adults and kids, a certificate authority, asterix, PBX for an HTML5, a SIP client. Yeah, I love it. Vaultwarden, FreshArcest, pinned flat to keep the kids off real YouTube, Shinobi NVR, Apache Guacamole for Remote Access, OpenLDAF with a custom schema they built, plus Simple Sammel PHP to service OIDC and Sammel.

Wow, okay. Zabix 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. Okay. Sir Mysterion. I love the name.

Yeah. Okay, so we have an Intel Nuck running, he's got 16 gigs of RAM running proxmox. We have a desktop horizon, 64 gigs of RAM, ProxMox gaming pass-through. We have a Super Micro C-S. This is Super Micro 1. 2XE5s, Zions, I assume, in there, 192 gigs of RAM. I guess that's offline, has some offline disks and stuff, J-Bod. Then second Super Micro, 2XE5, 2690, V-4s.

Okay. Another 192 gigs of RAM. This is for ProxMox. Oh. And then Super Micro 3, that's 8XE5-2630 V3s, that's got 256 gigs of RAM. That's HCI, hyperconverged proxmox, plus DRDB. A lot of proxmox. 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, NextCloud Home Assistant for the family. cited network ad blocking, clusters, hyper-converged proxmocks, 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 Beartube and Mastodon. That's great. Some Kubernetes, added some Olamma and cheap Tesla P4. Oh. Oh, clever parts got also got a NixOS daily driver laptop. with full description. Nice. I think this helps.

So I didn't submit it for the sipper because the Home Lab Idol 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 Lama 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. 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-quarter eye-perf tests required. Don't have the disbandwidth 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, a very nice, a little rack set up, and it looks nice. That's pretty good.

Sir Mysterion. Just a slight point to add to my submission. Uh-huh. EIDL is 1500 once. Sur frog. Wow. All right.

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 Tigers 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 A6,000 GPU and 100 terabytes of Enterprise SSD storage. What? He's essentially built himself a Tier 3 data center disguised as a home server. I mean, this thing is high end.

So I didn't know, 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 if, uh... 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 beat it? Going once? Anybody, you want to make a case? Otherwise, I think it could be a contender here. I think it could be a winner. 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 as it takes a lot of time. Oh, my God. Design dedication, and 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. That's so true. I think we go by the budget. West Payne, you got any arguments?

I think I have to give it. All right. I think I'm in. Opti Tiger, I think we give it to you for that $120,000 custom epic server with an A6,000 GPU and 100 terabytes of enterprise SSD storage, housed in a homelab disguised as a tier three data center. You, sir, are our most overkill budget blowout for the holiday home lab special. Now we get to our final category, gentlemen, and that is the best overall home lab. Now, this was so...

It's 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. And then like then when I whittled it down 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. No, but like emotionally, because I feel like everybody has a different purpose for the 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 saying you got a sweet rig there. And that's a, that's the best overall home lab I saw. I like that. Kepler's a good contender. That's a good one. Okay, West 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 got a patch panel, custom rack mount from things in rack, P-O-E switch, Netgate, 1100 router with P-F cents on there, Raspberry Pi-4,

some extra stuff for 2U power draws, 2X Dell Y's thin clients and 3D printed rack mount, Intel J 5, 5,0005 with 4 gigs of RAM, 512, gig, SATA M2, 4U server on Rails, Pi KVM inside the case. There's just so much going on here. There's another AzRoc going on in here, but check out the mission, various self-hosted apps, including Image, NextCloud, Paperless, Piehole, Audio Bookshelf, Jellyfin, Bitcoin Note, the R-Suite, monitoring, Grafana, Prometheus, scrutiny, Ghostfolio, which is investment tracking. Wow.

Grist in Node Red, Linkward and Miniflux Tandor, Sterling PDF, Beaver Habits, Gittia, duplicate, arrestex server, Kubernetes, ZFS with mirrors used for everything. There's a fast pool and a slow pool. Jesus. Sanoid making hourly snapshots of most volumes. Shared Postgres between all services to make good backups easier. There's also, of course, so one of the wisest is doing Home Assistant,

running H-AOS. Another one is off, but. It might be the Bitcoin node. The Raspberry Pi was doing Zigby to MQTT. Okay. There's also, in 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, Noster Relay, Mumble, backups with Autorestic to the home server, all managed with Terraform. Okay. So there's a 3D printed rack mounts for non-rack mountable gear is a really nice little touch.

idle for all this is like 100 watts which is you're that's you know pretty pretty conservative i think the entire rack yeah yeah uh 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're 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 homelab. 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 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 page. 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 open BSD 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 gave him a total 54 out of 60. So firefighting dad, I just was really impressed because it nailed that sweet spot, but also, you know, 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.

So do we... Hit me in the fields. These are all so good. They were. They were all so good. But we can only give it to one this year. I think I mean I like

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 it was impact overall

because it's not just for himself the family 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 think 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 combined with the notes and the Easter eggs in there, or just reading everybody's set up and being so freaking impressed with what you do with what you've got. It was really great for us. So just again, for me and all the boys, thank you, thank you very much. And 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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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'd 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. 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. 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, Home Lab 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 resource light, tiny 10-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 CepFS-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 hammer 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. 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 loved 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. Yeah. Also, he just had this great story where he was talking about trying to 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, f, 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 telehealth.

telegram message to the wife. They say, I pretend like it's patched Tuesday at Amazon with a big notice, expected downtime imminent, prepare snacks, alert to 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 the single dollar on the set of it. Amazing. Wes Payneau, do you have an honorable mention? I do. Let's go with the do to buy. Oh, very good. Oh.

Yeah, I like the dude to buy it's because there's just a sweet rack, a huge array of apps, lightning nodes in there. We can kind of get into some of the details. There's, let's see, it's a 15-U Star Trek rack cabinet, enclosed and locked. A nice UPS, HPGENI-Microserver with some zions, 16 gigs of ECC. a 4 by 16 terabyte ZFS mirror 2 and a half gig

Nick jet KVM involved There's also a Lenovo M720Q Ooh that's got a 10 gig SFP Plus A whole bunch of nice looking Unified gear Nice A home assistant blue

With the Zigby antenna There's some cameras Oh yeah did he include a picture Yes 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 That was really cute Like that. Also, ISP modem, but I guess there's some double-knat issues because he's getting 8 gigs symmetric from his ISP. Oh, my goodness. But with the double-knat, it's kind of in the 4-gig symmetric range. 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-on, zero-tier, influx, Grafana, Samba, Code Server, Next Cloud. a backup tail scale, ESB homes in there, Mosquito, music assistant, uptime Kuma. Oh, good. There's a Trunaz involved on that microserver for daily photo backup to backblaze. Of course, Proxmox is going on that Lenovo box,

a bunch of LXs on top of that, including a backup server. And there's like the R stack there, plus a Bitcoin node with Umbrol is going on. Nice. Yeah, I just thought kind of the whole thing looked like a classic HomeLab Plus. You'll like the clever part. The latest thing I'm proud of is the addition. of some Zygby relays to the radiators we have around the house so that I can control them via home assistant.

We don't have central heating and be able to do this was really cool. And all of that had an idol 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 also.

runs image and NextCloud, 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 and this one is something that's pretty fantastic. Friends, it's time for the boosties. Four score and seven boosts ago. 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 I have the way this works, you've probably already heard him do it before. Yeah, it'll be... Will it be the same?

We don't know, but... And so the folks that supported the show with the most sets for 2025, DeVitor comes in at an even 600,000 sets. 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 cents.

Thank you very much. Now, I know a lot of that. I think I recall a lot of that came in during our Texas road trip. Yes, definitely. A huge shout out to adversaries for having me there, too. That's another V for V. Sure. That is some serious about you.

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 into 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 Black Host 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, Black Host. And our number one booster for 2025 is at 1,066,632 sats, the dude abides. Oh, wow. Yes, thank you very much. We have an extra match 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 2020,

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 dude abides. 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. That is. Congrats.

That's amazing. That is community to community gifts. And hybrid, thank you for doing that. Yes, plus one to that. Thank you. Yeah, we did not prompt that. Aiberge is fucked up. All right.

Let's give thanks to the folks who sent us the most boost 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 boost. Tomato tomato.

Not surprisingly, the Duda Bides comes in next on the list at 20 boosts. Number three is none other than Turd Ferguson. Turd Ferguson. With a handsome 23 boosts. Thank you, Turd. Appreciate that. Number two, we've got adversaries 17. Oh, back again. 25 total boosts.

Very nicely done. And our number one sender for the most booths, 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.

Really impressive. And it's great. And when you see his boost come in, you're always like, oh, good. the gene boom, 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, Brantley? 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. It is 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 streams. Thank you, Gene. Well, I'll be dipped. 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 streams. Sats.

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 blues from Biggles, but out there streaming. That's great. That's a great observation list. Thank you, Biggles. And our number one most stream Sats listener goes to squared triangle, 276,500 Sats. That's, that's, thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.

If you have a membership at Linuxunplug.com slash membership or the Jupiter Party or you streamer, 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? So we have the stream sets and then we have the most streams. That's a different category. Yeah, I don't know if it's super meaningful. We can give it a quick mention. Yeah, definitely. People out there who are doing a lot of streaming, including forward humor number five, 2.5K streams.

Very nice. Moonenite, also 2.5K streams. Hey, Moona Night. Odyssey Westra at 2.6K. There he is again. Undead Fable, 2.9K. Good to see you again. And Dano Seltie at 3,120 streams.

Thank you, Dan, appreciate you very much. Yeah, let's see. Our total number of boosters with something like 2. 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.

That's 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. 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, 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. 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. the last week into the show. Thank you very much, and we'll see you next week. of year. Home lab, home lab, homelip for the holidays. Speeds are humming bits

becoming a festive digital haze. Dashboards glow bright. Uptime is tight in a winter wonderland of life. Master reboot, your hand don't you be so bold jammed a USB where the display

port was cold now it's gloves on whispering sweet nothing's to the rack send a telegram alerts so the whole fam's got his back expected downtime imminent echoes down the hall neat land on the wash are sitting high above it all Johnny's brewing holiday cheer in a smart tank pot till he tripped the kitchen breaker now the house is not so hot

source four's got a little cloud glowing neon blue till a four-year-old pulled the cords and the network set a do Simon's got a 3D rack printed clean and neat Fault overloads record needle

keeps the rhythm sweet and bagels gears on wheels to dodge the shedding hair The dude abides put his kid in the rack Just don't ask if that's fair From candy wrapped closets To super microbeasts We're hosting all the services From west unto the east

So check your logs and check them twice Make sure your ZFS is nice Happy homeland To all