Looking for a Noob friendly source to learn about home server/homelab kind of stuff

Hardware Hub Motherboards
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I have an extra 3900x and want to get a Motherboard and build up a home server /homelab thing and start playing with this kind of stuff.

I need to figure out a Motherboard (which varies depending how I want to use it). Im looking for a beginners guide to all of this as Im mostly clueless. Im comfortable building gaming PCs but need the next level of education…

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ServeTheHome is an excellent place to start. I used their info almost exclusively in setting up my home lab.

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For a narrow view, Alex/ IronicBadger has the PMS blog, which goes through setting up a media server.
Might not be the best but is relatatively easy to look through for general terms, even if one goes another way…

https://perfectmediaserver.com/

And he is on a self hosted podcast, which I would say is more for people already running systems, but is interresting

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It’s not that different really. You may encounter some weird PCIe cards and unknown cabling, but a computer is a computer.

Homeserver usually:

  • Doesn’t need a GPU and is fine with iGPU (or better IPMI), so you got space for other PCIe hardware
  • Is fine with low-end CPUs. Servers don’t need to break latency benchmarks, cores>clock speed
  • Usually needs more RAM than the average PC because of VMs/Containers running in parallel.
  • Additional NIC, maybe higher speed for networking (10Gbit). Or just more ports to run a router VM (forbidden router).
  • HBA PCIe card to get more SATA for storage

Form factor is really up to you…and there are good home server cases from ITX to E-ATX.

Good boards are cheap, have all/most the ports/slots you need, two x8 slots instead of just 1x x16 slot can be very important, lists ECC memory support in QVL, have on-board 10Gbit NIC or even have IPMI. That’s the things I’m looking for on a Ryzen server board.
RGB, fancy paintjob and VRMs are the least important things to look for, at least from my perspective :slight_smile:

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Thank you very much for the reply! Im comfortable with the actual assembly, Its more of a Motherboard selection thing at this point. I knew ECC was a good thing but was unaware of the other things you listed. I will do some research on those things.

There is no RGB in my gaming rig, Im with you on that!

I would also like to focus on getting a better understanding of server fundamentals and nomenclature. I have many ideas for different projects that I would like to do. But ultimately I’m going to be playing around and allow my path to flow organically wherever it goes. So a solid base of knowledge on the software and networking would probably be good… I was able to set-up a shared file network using one pc basically as a NAS but it took longer than it should have…lol

Thanks Again!

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Perfect! Thank You so much! I will check it out!

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Awesome! Exactly what I’m looking for!

Thank you so much!

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I watched “Learn Linux TV” and “PowerCert Animated Videos” to get back to what I learned at school 20 years ago (15 year break from Server/UNIX stuff, went into non-IT sales direction). Even outside YT, there are a lot of good ressources on the internet and even wikipedia can give you fundamental understanding of names and concepts.

But it felt great having it running and working. And the next time, it’ll much faster. And in some months, you’ll set up VLANs and VPNs on the network for your dozens of VMs, Containers and storage and in a year asking L1T forums for help on RDMA, ZFS/LVM, VFIO or clustering :wink: Rabbithole can be very deep.

Don’t go overkill mode on the server. Have some room for expansion (spare DIMM slots, SATA ports, PCIe slot) and it can do a lot of stuff for you. The 3900x is still a power house of a home server CPU.

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I think the most important thing is deciding what exactly you want to do with your home server before you buy anything.

Some “home labs” are as simple as an OS running Plex or Jellyfin connected to a hard drive, as an example.

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Yeah, look for the specific things you want to do, instead of just general knowledge. You’ll likely pick up some general knowledge along the way.

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https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=level1+techs+home+server

this lad seems to know his apples…
so give him a look…
sure not everything will be applicable but you should be able to find something from that list that works for you…

i think they call him wendell.
he runs a forum called level1techs…

oh WAIT A MINUTE! :smiley:

but serious… wendell has done loads of home server builds and how too’s.

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Check out craft Computers on YouTube

He has a newbee friendly
How to do anything from nothing at Home Type of Style

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Lol! I really enjoy Wendell. Sometimes he loses me with the nomenclature. And I have some fundamental knowledge gaps that im hoping to fill. That way I can actually ask questions using the correct terminology so people actually know what I’m trying to ask…lol. I’m hoping to catch up and hang out here more.

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