Oh and my home office set up uses Tiny in One monitors so I configured these by plugging them into my monitor which was sick.

I’m a huge fan of this all in one idea that is upgradable.

These are M715q Thinkcentres with a Ryzen Pro 5 2400GE

Not really a lot of thought went into rack choice. I wanted something smaller and more powerful than my several optiplexs I had.

I also decided I didn’t want storage to happen here anymore because I am stupid and only knew how to pass through disks for Truenas. So I had 4 truenas servers on my network and I hated it.

This was just what I wanted at a price I was good with at Like $120. There’s a 3D printable version but I wasn’t interested in that. I do want to 3D print racks and I want to make my own custom ones for the Pis to save space.

But this set up is way cheaper if you have a printer and some patience.

Not much. As much as I like LLMs, I don’t trust them for more than rubber duck duty.

Eventually I want to have a Copilot at Home set up where I can feed a notes database and whatever manuals and books I’ve read so it can draw from that when I ask it questions.

The problem is my best GPU is my gaming GPU a 5060ti and its in a Bazzite gaming PC so its hard to get the AI out of it because of Bazzite’s “No I won’t let you break your computer” philosophy, which is why I did it. And my second best GPU is a 3060 12GB which is really good, but if I made a dedicated AI server, I’d want it to be better than my current server.

I just built a mini rack with 3 Thinkcentre tiny PCs I bought for $175 (USD) on eBay. All work great.

That’s what I was thinking too. Ijust feel better having another layer between the open web an my server

True but I’m wanting to run VMs for specific tasks as well (mostly game servers) and I like to virtualize Linux distros I wanna play with as well as keep a running windows VM for the off chance I need windows ever.

Apartment is too small and my partner is too noise sensitive to get away with a rack. So my localLLM and Jellyfin encoder plus my NAS exists like this this summer. Temps have been very good once the panels came off.

Ansible is next on my list of things to learn.

I don’t think I’ll need to dedicate all of my compute space to K8s probably just half for now.

The rats nest is behind it

I need to re do some of the wiring.

I have all 4 power cables braided and zip tied together with the single data cable so its nice to pull out and put back into the entertainment center.

Only problem is I only had four 1 foot Ethernet cables and three 7 foot cables. So I used the 1 footers for the Pis and the 7 footers are bundled up as best I could and neatly hidden.

I’m waiting on some color coordinated .5 foot cables from Cables and Kits and I will swap the switch and patch panel. I want the Pis to have that one cable and that’s it, but I also want all the patch panel ports to work.

Rack shown

This is a 52pi 10 inch rack 8U

I have 4 raspberry Pi4’s 4gb running with POE

Some TP-link gigabit switch with 4/poe ports

3 Thinkcentre Tiny with a ryzen 5 2400GE 32 gigs ddr4 RAM, 512 Sabrent PCIE Gem 4 NVME boot/VM drive, 512 PNY Sata SSDs for databases

I have a bigger server for AI stuff and storage. This is just Tue “production” server for my websites and Git repos

I stole the set up idea from my man Jan Wildeboer

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/05/Cute-Homelab/

Done. Check parent comment!

Yeah!

So i am running these three computers in a set up that let’s me manage virtual machines on them from a website with Proxmox.

I want to play with a tool that let’s me run Docker Containers. Containers being a way to host services like websites and web apps without having to make a Virtual machine for each app.

This has a lot of advantages but I’m trying to use the High Availability feature when you run these on a cluster of computers.

My problem is that I know I can use the Built In container software in the already clustered Proxmox computers called LXC Linux Containers. However, I want to use a container software called Kubernetes but I would have to build Virtual machines on my servers and then cluster those virtual machines.

Its a little confusing because I have three physical computers clustered together and I’m trying to then build three virtual computers on them and cluster those. Its an odd thing to do and that’s the problem.

Quality answer. Glad my hunch was backed up by your experience. That’s very appreciated.

I hadn’t tried anything with Cloudflared and Kubernetes yet so it would be sick to see it just work.

Yes! They sell a NVME hat that I assume is for the Pi5 (these are 4’s I had laying around). It also moves the HDMI and USBC to the front.

Its the RS-P11 Expansion board. I can only find it bundled with the normal rack mount kit. I got mine off newegg from a reseller I guess so no expansion boards.

https://52pi.com/products/rs01-1u-rack-mount-for-raspberry-pi5-4b-with-four-rs-p11-expansion-board-for-rs-p22-raspberry-pi5?_pos=1&_sid=69a185129&_ss=r

Fair point. I was also thinking it would be fun to use CoreOS so I can get one step closer to ArchBTW

I have been putting off scheduling my next therapy appointment.

Ya wanna host it on my forgejo instance?

I’m about to move it to a kubenetes cluster once my parts come in.

got.ihatecode.com

Its such a good game.