Debian 12 "Bookworm" Ancient 2007 Quad Core Intel Q6600 ASUS P5N-T Deluxe Motherboard 8 GB RAM 64GB SSD for the OS and a few applications 6x2TB Laptop HDDs in RAID 5 - scavenged from electronics scrap All wrapped up in a spare full tower I had from an old build
For now, the few services I have running are local network only. They are simply a few Docker containers running PiHole and Portainer. The RAID array is set up as a network share via SMB for my various personal devices to dump files to.
I am very new to the whole self-hosted thing and enjoying learning. Really, new to Linux, servers, networking, etc. Would love to hear some recommendations on what services I should look into, resources for learning more, critiques, etc. So far, browsing topics on here has been pretty helpful.
Currently I have a pi4b running Home Assistant, Adguard, influx db, Maria db, Grafana, node red…
I have a pi3b running my main Adguard and Raspotify.
My main Pi can’t handle Adguard and HA together, keeps crashing. So I just bought a Dell Optiplex 7050 mini to be an actual home server instead of having everything running as Home Assistant add-ons.
Planning on using it for Arr, Plex, HA, anything else I can think of, with my Pis being my Adguard and Raspotify instances and maybe get some Bluetooth tracking going in the house while I’m at it.
Might run a little Minecraft server for the kids too
Build - Intel server board & CPU based on old serverbuild naskiller guide
OS on SSD
ZFS ON 8 6TB DRIVES, YIELDING ~36TB of storage, recoverable with up to two failed drives
Runs (via docker)
Navidrome (webui used daily @ work, dsub on phone, feishin on desktop)
Jellyfin (used almost exclusively locally on my TV, occasionally to watch with friends on web)
Nextcloud (used occasionally, mostly backs up password files, etc or to share. Thinking about replacing.)
QBitTorrent with glutun VPN
Audiobookshelf - used frequently for audiobooks. Occasionally for podcasts. Often more convenient to use antennapod/pocket casts on phone for active podcasts)
Kavitas - used seldom. Thinking about stopping. I like using obps on my rooted kindle to access my library.
Changedetection.io -watch some sites for new products, etc
Kiwix (local wikipedia copy I use shortcuts in FF locally to search for things)
Homepage (local links I use on local machines to my services)
Raspberry pi
Adguard home & unbound - block most garbage for any traffic from my home
Thoughts - I’m considering downsizing. I don’t really need all that much space, and it can be a headache at times. With drive replacement costs on top of power (~$320 a year) I consider either going to a vps or downsizing to what could run on a small compute like the n100 or a raspberry pi5, etc.
Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup. Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.
The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you’ll make up for any new investments within the first year.
Thanks! I need to look more into what the power implications of 8 drives is - they never spin down, so I assume they are a non-trivial portion of my power consumption.
That said, I’ve been considering upgrading to something recent and low power anyways. It would be a good opportunity to sneak in some useful features too,
Maybe the possibility of transcoding a video stream
USB3 (not a huge deal)
Non VGA display (useful, for when connection issues arise)
Audio jack (I could use navidrome jukebox mode!)
Which the old hardware wouldn’t support without adapters, cards, etc.
Oh okay that’s a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can’t get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool. My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.
Self built Proxmox server (5600G/64gb ram/1x2tb nvme+4x4tb hdd) with 2 nics running litrally everything. List of services I run is long and Im too lazy to type them.
2 mirrored 4TB HDDs and 1 12 TB HDD, luks encrypted and on 2 zpools (I have an “unsafe” mount path for data on a single drive like media)
removable flash drive with boot partition and main SSD keyfile
-Zwave dongle
That’s it.
I can run everything I need to on it and my home internet is only 100/30 still because I don’t live in a city, so 2.5gig networking isn’t worth the cost. a380 does all of the hardware transcoding I need at a fairly low power. It isn’t as good as just getting a newer NUC, but it was cheaper and a fun project.
Also doing a full renovation, so KNX will be connected for home assistant to control my lights and things and my smart home stuff will probably balloon.
N100 that just got built today with only Ubuntu and portainer installed. I still gotta migrate what I had in my main PC, which was emby, sonarr, bazarr, qbittorrent and prowlarr. It’ll be…fun
Proxmox VE on a machine that I got almost for free. Intel i3-4160, 10GB RAM, 240GB SSD for the OS, and a non-redundant 1T HDD for storage. The only things I paid for are a second NIC and an 8GB RAM stick.
PVE is running a pfSense VM, and a bunch of Debian containers:
Samba
Jellyfin (still setting it up)
Twingate Connector
All internet traffic goes through the pfSense VM. Unfortunately the ISP has put me behind CGNAT and disabled bridge mode, so my internet-facing things (mostly Wireguard and SSH) are pretty much crippled. Right now my best no-cost option is to use Twingate, but I don’t trust it to handle anything other than SSH.
If behind CGNAT and forwarding is not an option, Headscale, Tailscale or ZeroTier may be an option. I use Tailscale and it have ZERO forwarding on and can access anything on my network when connected through it. Think of these as Wireguard on Steroids. :)
I tried Tailscale once, but it introduced some massive latency because apparently I got connected to my machine through a gateway in Frankfurt. It was the Tailscale Funnel service though, so maybe that’s not what I needed.
Also, are any of the services you listed end-to-end encrypted?
Tailscale is but since you already tried them, maybe headscale that’s supposed to be the self hosted version of Tailscale that someone wrote, so you have better odds at less latency! headscale.net
Zerotier? Not sure -https://www.zerotier.com/ can speak more to this.
Great setup! Be careful with the SSD though, Proxmox likes to eat those for fun with all those small but numerous writes. A used, small capacity enterprise SSD can be had for cheap.
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