A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Only use jellyfin. Have a list of things want to update... but it works for now.
Yes that is a laptop usb cooler used as supplemental placebo cooling. Also a pc fan I have propped up against the hard drive feeding into the pi.
Can't recall last time used the ps4 or switch. But they're there
Runs Debian Bookworm
Hosting:
Probably some more stuff I'm forgetting. It's basically my everything box.
My main server cabinet at my parents house. I have one old Synology for backups, one home built Xpenology for streaming and one small server with old gaming hardware for steam link, but its barely running anymore. Theres one HP server with 2x Xeon E5 and 128GB missing in the photo that I got for 100€ at an auction, which I use for occasional game server hosting.
At home I have this setup, my main synology NAS and a thinkcentre with an i7 and 16GB of ram for Minecraft and FiveM.
Can't but join in the fun. Meet the Egg Mini. Does all sorts of humble servitude, but the coolest thing is a webserver only accessible via Wireguard through HAproxy running on a Digital Ocean droplet.
I’m in the middle of moving so everything is packed up. But this was the rack before we moved.
Networking, 3D printer, black and white laser printer and a color laser printer, several servers.
I had home assistant, Plex, Minecraft server, 7 days to die server, and many other services.
Servers are Ryzen 5950x and the other is a threadripper 24 core.
The other side of the rack was HDMI switchers and some game consoles.
Going to miss the 1gbps fiber internet, we now have Starlink.
Wait so you have like rack mounted server but only run jellyfin? Am I missing something here ?
There's no rack mount server there. I see a UPS, switch (network and Nintendo varieties), PS4 and mini PC
Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 that I bought refurbished for ~€130
Custom build
(Not the Proliant Microserver Gen8 on top, the device below)
The antennas are from a Sonoff Zigbee dongle and a bluetooth dongle for Home Assistant.
I've mostly focused on power usage, price, and reliability since I'm a student and don't want to spend a month's worth of income on a "home lab".
It's running the following:
It's using about 10% CPU and is running below 40°.
My tech stack:
And my storage NAS:
Bottom NUC: General compute
Top NUC: Proxmox with homeassistant, windows server and debian
Raspberry Pi4 inside N64 case: PiHole
Access Point: Unifi Pro
PC for gaming: R7 7800X3D + Nvidia 3070 inside Fractal North
NAS: Ugreen 4800+ with 4x 15TB drives for a total of RaidZ2 30TB usable storage. Used as NFS storage for proxmox.
How it started: 2 8TB external HDDs connected to my bottom NUC.
Primary applications:
*arr Suite, Jellyfin, several minor apps.
From top to bottom:
Some context shots. This is in my garage which is directly below my living room. Everything leads back here and the cat cable from the fibre ONT leads here from the other side of the garage also. I have 2 redundant gig links to a switch in the living room where it was weirdly easier to go outside the garage, up the outside wall and then back in to the house.
There is a rack mount standard desktop with a 4 port Intel NIC and an IT mode HBA, 6 spinning HDDs, an SSD and 2x NVME drives. This is my main Proxmox server running Opnsense and a whole host of other services, including email. On to of it I have a monitor, 3 external HDDs used for backups and another desktop I picked up cheap which runs as the Zoneminder CCTV box.
At the very top there is a cheap POE dumb switch that powers the CCTV camera and then a Netgear 24 port switch with VLANs configured for various networks - Main, IoT, VoIP, CCTV... I have the same switch up in the living room also.
At the very bottom almost invisible is a Belkin UPS and a strip adapter that has several smart plugs in which I use to power my backup drives. That way my backup drives are off, not just unmounted unless a backup is running. The aim was to avoid any attacker / system wide issue taking down the backup drives. I sleep a smidgen better at night for that.
Not pictured is an Odroid HC2 that lives upstairs and that I had hoped to rig up as a remote backup device, but I've never really got around to setting it up properly or putting anything other than a small capacity HDD in. It does run HomeAssistant though so that's pretty useful.
A bit more context
More guts showing the mess.
Lets just appreciate how damn lucky I was when I picked up this server rack. It doesn't fit with the carpet down, so had to peel that back. Millimetre perfect.
Ikea shelf instead of a rack, but I used metal shelves for better thermals!
Top to bottom:
You people are such nerds. Wish I could self-host too.
Well you are here so that's a start
You can get a setup going on whatever personal computer until you throw ~$150 on a mini PC.
Running TrueNAS with 4TB usable mirrored storage, 32GB RAM, and an i5-7600. Mostly holds backed up files from my switch from Windows to NixOS. I've got it running Frigate with a Coral TPU, Gitea, Homer, Unifi Controller, and Uptime Kuma. I was managing some helm charts on the TrueNAS k3s cluster with flux but conveniently dialed back to only using their built-in apps right before they removed it in favor of docker only.
For the network I'm running OPNSense on a Protectli device with Ubiquiti Unifi for the wifi. The native WireGuard integration on OPNSense is pretty nice.
My dusty Intel NUC 10:
With a 2TB USB drive plugged in on the right there.
Runs all these services via Docker like a champ: AudioBookshelf, Dockge, File Browser, Forgejo, FreshRSS, Immich, Jellyfin, LemmySchedule, Memos, Navidrome, Paperless NGX, Pihole, Planka, SideQuests, Syncthing, Wallos
Some of yall just need to stop with your "cable maintenence" and "airflow" or you're gonna give the rest of us a complex. 😁
A number of these setups are tight. I'll post my janky ass "comm closet" when I get home later.
Edit: (1) Fanless MiniPC running pfsense (2.5gbe); (2) 8 port dumb switch; (3) modem; (4) 8 bay NAS running OMV; (5) random USB HDD.
Used it for Minecraft server for a week then never used it again. Don't know anything it would be good for that my computer can't already do better tbh
