Does anyone have their own homelab/homeserver?

[Onio]

I had a ThinkPad T430 sitting around and I decided I would try turning it into a home server on its own separate network, a LAN. This resulted in digging around the house for some old ethernet cables, purchased a cheap Netgear unmanaged switch, and installing Fedora 43 Server Edition on the server. I've learned how to explore the file system and a lot of commands thru bash CLI, I installed docker and setup a little Minecraft server, and I used SSH to control the thing through cmd prompt on my main machine! This whole process has been surprisingly fun!

Of course, while doing this, I discovered the world of homelab/minilab, where networking geeks create mini server racks to experiment with different hardware and setups. I'm now wanting to build a small tower myself, with a little ThinkCentre Tiny pc, a handful of old 3.5" drives I have laying around, maybe add in a PC to host a website on as well.

Does anyone else play around with homelabs/home servers? Can I see pictures/learn more about the cool things you do with yours?

edit: whoops    I meant to post this in ⛽︎ ∙ Technology & Archiving. I tried to delete but it told me I couldn't 

[stellarfieldanomaly]

I don't have a fully fledged homelab, but the itch is there. I do have something known as a Pi-Hole, which is a raspberry pi hooked up to my router that serves as a DNS filter, to the end of blocking internet traffic to all known advertisement domains on my network.

It's not completely universal(can't block ads that are served from the same place as a sites content, like youtube) but it might be a nice next project if you want something inexpensive!

[Loebas]

I've a raspberry pi that is currently running my nextcloud server, and my website. Bit since my VPS became a thing, the website will be removed from ky homelab.

I need to migrate my homelab back to YunoHost instead of HestiaCP since nextcloud is breaking with every update now.

The whole hestiaCP thing was just to see how the software works. I uad a lots of difficulties hosting a website with yunohost. But since i have a bps now, i can now fully dedicate my homelab to my nextcloud.

This is all for the future though since it still runs my old blog, and a lot of people did not update their feeds yet. So i want to keep it up for a little while.
And i need to find out how to migrate everything over with nextcloud

[Dan Q]

Over the winter of 2019/2020 I built Fox, an unRAID-powered NAS and Docker/VM server. She's had a few upgrades over the years (she now sports ~50TB of storage, plus a middleweight GPU for realtime video transcoding, for example), but she's still going strong.

Right now, her primary purposes are:

• General network storage for me and my family
• Centralised backups: all our computers Syncthing important things to Fox, and then she backs them up offsite (bonus: this helps me take advantage of "per device"-based backup pricing schemes - I only back up one device!)
• Hosting a dozen or so small websites
• Running my personal Mastodon instance
• Running a link shortener
• Running an OpenTrashmail gateway (infinite disposable email addresses, created automatically as soon as they receive an email!)
• Running my uLogger server (I've been tracking my GPS location pretty-consistently since 2016)
• Running HomeAssistant, Huginn, and an MQTT broker to do offline-first "smart home" like things (I don't trust any of the companies that offer "cloud"-based smart home tools)
• Using CalibreWeb to maintain an ebook library for my home
• Running a document management system for my home (when we receive postal mail it can just go into the scanner and it gets OCRd and becomes searchable by its recipient; it's epic)
• (Until recently, running my RSS reader; I've since moved it elsewhere)
• Running a Jellyfin media server (it's awesome; it's like running my own Netflix for me and my family!)
• (A variety of services: Sonarr, CouchPotato, SabZBD, qBittorrent etc. to help "feed" Jellyfin.)
• Hosting an uptime monitoring service
• Intermittently, running a FoundryVTT server to host RPG games with friends

It's absolutely wonderful, and I love it.

If you want to set up a home server, I can recommend unRAID as a platform for it. You don't need to start with all these purposes, of course: just start with what's most important to you, make that work first, and then keep building!

[mittens]

my homeserver is a raspberry pi on my desk with a terabyte ssd attached by usb

it runs an rss reader (freshrss my beloved), a markdown notes wiki, a metasearch engine, a reddit frontend (and a tumblr one if i can get it to work  ), a music server, offline wikipedia, a storage thingy, and a couple of other stragglers

i have absolutely no clue how reverse proxy works so i access all of it by vpn outside of my home network

isnt the most high-spec machine, but it works for everything i need it for :]

[brisray]

I've been running a web server from home since June 2003.

It predates things like Cloudflare and Docker and it's as simple as I can make it. I think the hardest part of it was learning how to protect it. There was certainly a lot of reading involved. What takes the longest is documenting everything I've done to it. From when I made the first server to the latest hardware upgrade.

It runs an SSH server, so I can edit and add to the sites it hosts wherever I happen to be. For most of the time it sits in the basement doing its thing until I think of something else I want it to do. Even after all these years, I still get a kick knowing I own and run a tiny bit of the web.

[Onio]

It's been a while since I posted this (approx 6 months) and this is what has changed (not too much!)

I've 3d printed a small rack with the option for expansion if it fills up, I've got a managed switch installed and two ThinkCentre Tinies.

The top ThinkCentre Tiny is an M700 with an i3 and 8gb of ram. I initially purchased this thinking it would be my server, and I would just upgrade the memory and the cpu, but then I found an M900 with the i7 and 16gb for $50 (about $2 less than what I paid for the M700!)

Thankfully, the M700 has plenty of power (perhaps overkill) to serve as my router. I installed a second Intel based NIC in the back, removing a displayport and replacing it with an ethernet jack connecting to the wifi slot on the motherboard. It was detected by pfSense, and the whole thing has worked pretty effortlessly. All internet access on my main rig is currently moving through this machine. I'm very pleased with this utilization of this machine.

The M900 I'm hoping to use as my server. I'm not sold on which services I'll be using, or how I'll connect additional storage aside from the 2 <1tb ssds I might stuff inside of it, but I would like my rack to eventually serve as the central hub for all my files. I think a DAS, like a USB 3.0 enclosure holding a couple of 3.5" hdds connected to the M900 will be fast enough for my purposes.

Thank you for your responses, I did read them, I just didn't have an adequate response at the time.

I don't have a fully fledged homelab, but the itch is there. I do have something known as a Pi-Hole, which is a raspberry pi hooked up to my router that serves as a DNS filter

This is one of the things I initially wanted to do! pfSense has a similar feature available, pfBlockerNG, which I've installed. Very seamless and happy to have it!

I've a raspberry pi that is currently running my nextcloud server, and my website. Bit since my VPS became a thing, the website will be removed from ky homelab.

Part of me still wants to host a website on a Raspberry Pi server, just because it's fun to me? Like there's my website! It lives on this little system. Naive, I know, haha. Between now and this last post, I also set up a VPS which I'm using to host a forum, and that has been a fun experience.

Over the winter of 2019/2020 I built Fox, an unRAID-powered NAS and Docker/VM server.

DanQ, always a fan of your input, I was impressed when I first saw this list and I still am, thank you for all of the great ideas!!

my homeserver is a raspberry pi on my desk with a terabyte ssd attached by usb

Awesome! Raspberry Pis are so cool and versatile! I wish I had picked one up back when the price was reasonable!!

I've been running a web server from home since June 2003.

What takes the longest is documenting everything I've done to it. From when I made the first server to the latest hardware upgrade.

Brisray, you're a true OG! Really cool to see the documentation behind your builds!