I Turned My Homelab Into A Profitable Business + Small ¡clusterf*ck! Update!

Hey all!

I have been extremely lucky in life lately to be able to make my love for computers into a full time business run directly out of my home/homelab. My current product is what I call the M910Q+, a completely refurbished, BIOS/UEFI updated, dual nic (1G on mainboard, 2.5G expansion) Lenovo M910Q with all new case badges and new samsung NVME storage. I try to avoid repainting when I can, so the paint has minor scratches usually. In a really bad case i'll strip/tape/paint, but that sucks so I try to avoid it when I can. It also helps cut down on refurbishment cost for a more economically friendly product. I prefer wired networking, so WiFi is sacrificed for the dual nic capability. It also makes the units more useful for a router/firewall situation (OpenWrt etc.) For a CPU, they have used but fully tested Kaby Lake i5-7600Ts installed with the aluminum block cooling and fan. I also build some with Kaby i7-7700Ts and the copper heatsink and fan. For memory, its dual channel, 2400 MHz (highest supported) and 8GB minimum. I sell them either with no OS and drive wiped, or with either Ubuntu (Noble Numbat) or Mint (Zara) freshly installed.

I don't want to risk breaking any rules so I won't link to my EBay store from here. I don't have any listed just now anyway, so there is nothing to see. That is always changing depending on when I finish a build, unless I'm doing a private sale job. Hopefully in the future I'll scale up and be able to provide deployable "fleets" of M910Q+s to enterprise situations. That is the ultimate dream.

Included in this post are a few pictures I took on a recent rebuild. In the background of one photo is my proxmox cluster, which I have posted about before. It’s built from the unusable motherboards leftover from the M910Q refurbishments. For those of you were interested in an update, there she is all lit up :) Please excuse my unmade bed. I do my accounting and minor repair work in my bedroom sometimes, just because I can.

Turning homelabbing into a full time job has been a gamechanger for me. I don't always have the greatest mental health (yay anxiety!) but being able to control when and how I work, and to do it from home, and to even have it be fun... goddamn. Life is really starting to look better for me. I wanted to share this little part of my journey with you guys to hopefully inspire someone else to do the work they love and to do it for themselves and on their own damn terms.

Peace!