I'm going to paint my office in the next couple of weeks, which'll mean
taking down my homelab and recabling everything. I'm lookng forward to
it. The walls are sort of a pale blue, and I have to correct for a blue
cast when I'm on video.

I have an old Asian armoire that serves as my server cabinet - it's got
16 apothecary drawers full of cables, drives, old phones, earbuds and
assorted crap. Inside are a color inkjet printer, color laser and one
Proxmox node running in a desktop PC.

On top is the mess - https://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab.jpg

A Synology NAS, 8 port gig switch, thinkpad running Proxmox and an
OpenWRT router. The cables are a complete mess, as is power. I have a
UPS on the floor with a couple of power strips fed from it inside the
armoire.

I'm going to shore up the legs of the armoire, it's already holding way
more than it should. Once it's pulled away from the wall, it's time to
manage cables. It'll be nice to get everything labeled, documented and
cables dressed before putting it back up against the wall.

That reminds me, I should place an order with Monoprice for a couple of different sizes of cables. I think I have 6 foot cables where a 1 foot
cable would do.

I've seen some interesting deals on rough-condition newer thinkpads,
would like to find one with more than the 4 cores, 4 threads I'm
currently running. NVMe would be nice, too.



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On 30 Aug 2025, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

I'm going to paint my office in the next couple of weeks, which'll mean taking down my homelab and recabling everything. I'm lookng forward to
it. The walls are sort of a pale blue, and I have to correct for a blue cast when I'm on video.

Sounds like a fun project, how long do you anticipate this will take?

I have an old Asian armoire that serves as my server cabinet - it's got
16 apothecary drawers full of cables, drives, old phones, earbuds and assorted crap. Inside are a color inkjet printer, color laser and one Proxmox node running in a desktop PC.

Oh nice touch, that's a unique homelab setup!

On top is the mess - https://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab.jpg

Ooh that looks tidy!

A Synology NAS, 8 port gig switch, thinkpad running Proxmox and an
OpenWRT router. The cables are a complete mess, as is power. I have a
UPS on the floor with a couple of power strips fed from it inside the armoire.

Ah that's a cute setup for sure.

I'm going to shore up the legs of the armoire, it's already holding way more than it should. Once it's pulled away from the wall, it's time to manage cables. It'll be nice to get everything labeled, documented and cables dressed before putting it back up against the wall.

Perhaps a mini rack is required? You can pick up 6-8U racks pretty cheap, some with doors too.

That reminds me, I should place an order with Monoprice for a couple of different sizes of cables. I think I have 6 foot cables where a 1 foot cable would do.

Have you considered buying a reel of it and making your own? Then you can get just the right length for each cable for extra cable pr0n =)

I've seen some interesting deals on rough-condition newer thinkpads,
would like to find one with more than the 4 cores, 4 threads I'm
currently running. NVMe would be nice, too.

Perhaps if you're ready to advance to the next level, a cheap used rack mount server could be a thing? I use Dell PowerEdge servers for my homelab, the R620 is nice, dual xeon cpu, mine has 32 threads total. I also have an R810 in the data centre, that is something I may consider bringing home at some point lol... but that's way OP... 64 threads, 428GB ram =) vroooom!

It gets addictive, I will say - I have moved on from a laptop with proxmox and a few LXC containers =)

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... A social life? Where can I download that!?

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