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Maathuran's Blog
Home Lab Setup

Home Lab Setup

/ 3 min read

lenovo, network, ethernet, rj45

Introduction

With how expensive cloud infrastructure and maintenance costs are getting. I wanted to reduce my reliance on multiple vendors and focus on having just a handful, with most of my infra hosted locally.

What it needed to have

  • Cheap
  • Somewhat upgradable
  • Still in support

Lenovo

After countless Google references, I discovered the Tiny Mini Micro Project1. This was precisely what I needed: A guide to small mini pcs from multiple vendors. I chose Lenovo as I was familiar with their components and the upgradability path.

M720q

The M720q is now a relatively cheap and low-cost mini PC as many businesses and companies choose Lenovos M lineup to deploy to end users. This benefits us, as when they upgrade, the used market is flooded with cheap (but still powerful) computers. I went to eBay to pick up some of them and settled with 4x M720q with the i5 configurations. Linked below is a search query for Canadian eBay2.

Upgradability

Looking at the Lenovo PSREF3 for the M720q, it can be upgraded up to a Core i9-9900T, but that is overkill. I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB4 to give the host more breathing room.

Another thing that the M720q has is a mini PCI 16x slot (but only 8 of the lanes are electrically connected); this offers a wide array of other components that can be added to this mini PC to enhance usability. Some examples are 4x Network cards, 1g or 2.5g, NVME expansion slots, and Mini GPUs.

Network

My current home is not fortunate to have Bell’s (FTTH); however, it does have Rogers DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM, which is somewhat usable. The only downside is the low upload speed, which still is serviceable for everything except live media streaming (Plex/Jellyfin/Emby)

Creating RJ45 Cables

The way that I’m currently running the nodes requires short patch cables. Instead of bulk buying them off Amazon, I made some as I still have a box of 500ft RJ45.

Two formats for wiring the pinouts on the RJ455 connectors are T568A and T568B. For this project, I went with the B standard.

                    ┌─White/Green
                    ├─Green
                    ├─White/Orange
                    ├─Blue
          ┌─T568A───┼─White/Blue
          │         ├─Orange
          │         ├─White/Brown
          │         └─Brown
          │
───RJ45───┤
          │
          │         ┌─White/Orange
          │         ├─Orange
          │         ├─White/Green
          │         ├─Blue
          └─T568B───┼─White/Blue
                    ├─Green
                    ├─White/Brown
                    └─Brown

Wiring layout

This is how my primary network is set up, isolated to the M720 nodes.

                                      ┌─M720 Node1
                                      ├─M720 Node2
───Internet───Rogers Modem─┬─TL-SG108─┼─M720 Node3
                           │          └─M720 Node4
                           │          
                           │          
                           └─Rest of the Home Network ...

Footnotes

  1. Tiny Mini Micro Project by Serve the Home ↩

  2. Ebay Search for M720q ↩

  3. Lenovo’s M720q PSREF, which shows factory confirations that it shipped as ↩

  4. M720’s Hardware Maintenance Manual on how to take apart and uprade the PC ↩

  5. RJ45 Pinout ↩