Howdy!
I’ve been sucked into the rabbit hole of home-labs, self-hosting, and generally getting off of Big Tech servers. And then it hit me: I’m in a forum with a bunch of cool people who may have more experience than just searching blog posts and dreaming about a caster-mounted 20u rack.
So please, throw your knowledge at me! Or share your own thoughts with me! Do you have your own home-lab? Do you host your own services? What do you wish you did differently, or what would you not change for the world? Or, regardless of your own personal home-lab status, what are some cool projects you’ve seen recently?
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Currently I have a VPS (Virtual Private Server)(1c1t, 1GB) for a VPN and a small Nextcloud host, that one exists because having my own VPN to the Netherlands is the most responsible (and honestly, relatively cheap) solution. With Nextcloud being there so I have an emergency back-up of important files and documents (which are all password protected .zip files to be sure)
My Macbook (2017 i5 2c4t, 8GB) is currently running Jellyfin, of course it’s for totally legally acquired series, films, music and anime being streamed inside the home. For the music specifically it’s because all local music libraries for Linux are hot-garbage, and Feishin is fucking great.
Once my roomie empties the old laptop (hopefully soon, that’s been a long wait.) I’ll install ProxMox on it, so I can at least move the Jellyfin server over to that and add an AdGuard server to it as well, perhaps other things in the future as well.
Before then I had my old N56VZ laptop (2012 i7 4c8t, 16GB) repurposed to function as NAS, VPN, AdGuard server and torrent machine. I’m not sure if I have the screenshots left of it, but I managed multiple terabyte worth of uploading actual Linux distro’s .iso files.
I had a short stint where I repurposed an old router with some intel Atom and 4GB of memory to run as a server, this ran practically the same as the N56VZ.
The VPS before, the N56 and the router all ran/run base Debian.
Before that I had a full blown desktop tower (2012 i5 4c4t, 16GB) with 3x2TB HDDs in RAID-5, and 2x500GB in RAID-1. This originally started out running Ubuntu server because I had little experience and this sounded like it made sense and was easily approachable. At a certain point it became an impossible task to try and manage, since I didn’t use docker at this time and I didn’t write anything down so I had no clue what was running on it at all.
After accepting I needed to start all over and migrating data to a temporary external drive, I started from scratch with ProxMox. I don’t remember the exact way I categorized it and at this point I’m getting pretty long winded so I’m good for not going into too much details there.
This machine ran sonarr, transmission CLI + webclient, a samba server and nextcloud. This was thrown in some levels of docker containers, with occasionally running some game servers, or other services I temporarily needed (including Foundry VTT).
It started however, with a small Dell Optiplex (that my dad now uses to play music in his livingroom) that had an eSATA port and an external drive plugged into that. This thing ran FreeNAS before they did the whole Corral thing and then rebranded to TrueNAS.
Honestly, a really neat little learning machine, and if someone mainly needs a NAS and wants to learn from there, TrueNAS gets a big recommendation from me.
Edit: The reason I mentioned what kind of hardware each was is to show that you don’t need anything beefy to get started/learning.
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