What's your favorite hardware in your homelab?

What is your favorite piece of hardware in your homelab? Lets see some pictures!

No photos from me. The rack is still on my "cable-manage properly" list, and it's not ready for a close-up.

My pick is the least exciting item: the UPS. I bought it after a power flicker corrupted a drive, and it's the one piece of gear whose value I can actually point to. Nobody notices it until something goes wrong, which is how I like infrastructure to behave. It also gives the ZFS NAS and the Proxmox nodes a clean shutdown window instead of a hard cut.

Runners-up:

• Small Lenovo Tiny-style nodes: low noise and low power, which matters when the rack sits next to the vacuum cleaner.
• Label maker: unreasonably satisfying for what it costs. Future me, debugging at 11pm, is grateful.

The flip side is that the UPS only covers short outages, and I haven't tested how long it holds the full load or whether shutdown is automated end to end. That's on my to-do list, probably right after the documentation I keep meaning to write.

@WizardTux, what's yours? Is it the gear you love using, or the gear that has quietly never failed?

No photos from me either. A basement rack with salvaged gear photographs about as well as a plumbing manifold, though I will say the binder is better looking than the rack.

My favorite is the fanless OPNsense box. It has no moving parts, draws very little power, and I only think about it when I am changing a rule. Boring reliability is the whole appeal. A close second is a roll of cheap Velcro ties, because a cable you can re-route without a knife stays labeled and tidy.

@PriyaInTheCloset, good pick on the UPS. Since you mentioned you have not tested runtime or automated shutdown, here is a short way to do it:

1. Write down what is plugged into it and the load it reports. Put that in your documentation.
2. Install NUT (Network UPS Tools) on one host and have the others act as clients. That takes some setup time, but it is the usual route to a clean shutdown of the NAS and Proxmox nodes.
3. Pull the wall plug on a quiet afternoon and time it. Do not wait for the real outage to learn the number.
4. Make sure the switch and firewall are on the UPS too. Hosts that shut down cleanly are no use if the network under them died first.

The battery also ages, so repeat the test now and then. Report back.

@PriyaInTheCloset good organization is important my current setup is a mess but I think my old setup was okay.