It's Critter Time!

In this day and age of everything being rent seeking behavior and owning nothing, it's never been a better time to dust off that old laptop or desktop sitting in the corner and turn it into a home NAS, plex, or really any other applications you want to run.

There's dozens of videos on YouTube about the topic, so I won't go into how to do it myself. Instead, I want to show off some of the things I have running on mine.

I have a standard desktop as my home

• ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI Motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor
• 4 x 32GB for 128GB DDR5 CL40 5600MT/s RAM, running at 3600 MT/s
• Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe Drive
• 2 x Toshiba N300 Pro 8TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
• 1 x 8TB WD Red Plus Internal NAS HDD 3.5

On it, I'm running Proxmox and a few VMs (1 x ubuntu, 3 x windows). The 3 HDDs are set up in a Raid Z1 configuration. On the Ubuntu VM, I have a lot of docker containers where all my self-hosted services live.

Some of the notable self-hosted services are:

• Portainer CE - A GUI for managing docker containers
• Plex - Netfix for your own movies and tv shows. Does music too.
• Jellyfin - Same as Plex but the subtitles works better sometimes.
• Immich - Like Google Photos but better
• Synapse - A matrix chat server
• Crafty Controller - a free, easy-to-use self-hosted minecraft control panel
• Deluge - A torrent client for all my legally acquired Linux ISOs.
• Homarr - A dashboard to see all your service statuses at a glance.
• Mealie - A recipe and grocery list repository.
• Home Assistant - Home automation for smart devices.
• Several WordPress instances - None of them are personal instances, I'm hosting for a few people.

That's not a comprehensive list but most of the ones I thought should be mentioned.

How about you all? Do you have a home server? What services are you running on it?

my first foray into home servers was turning my previous gaming pc into what is currently a very overspecced NAS using a normal desktop installation of linux mint (as I'm most competent with GUIs)

I also use it for torrents, sending wake on LAN signals to my desktop, and I've previously run a minecraft server on it

I've got a Raspberry Pi 4 that I'm running Samba on, and before I bought a big second internal SSD, I was using it to give myself a bunch of extra storage that I could access without an external drive dangling off of my laptop. Still a good place to put backups that are physically separate from my laptop.

I'm also running a silly Discord bot on it that can do do image transformations, and at one point I was having it automatically make a Minecraft world backup every every week. I was excited to have a home server with 8 gigabytes of RAM and have that be a one-time-purchase, but in practice for the kinds of things I would want to host, you either want lots of RAM and power (games), or you don't need either (chat, simple websites, bots), and there's not a ton of use case for something weak with 8 gigabytes. Plus my VPS with 1 gigabyte of RAM has been plenty for everything so far short of hosting like, a Minecraft server or something.

I have sometimes used my Pi for a very long download that I want to have running while I'm asleep without keeping my laptop on, and I've used Deluge for that before, but often it's just wget running in a screen.

Galuade wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 2:58 pm my first foray into home servers was turning my previous gaming pc into what is currently a very overspecced NAS using a normal desktop installation of linux mint (as I'm most competent with GUIs)

I also use it for torrents, sending wake on LAN signals to my desktop, and I've previously run a minecraft server on it

Heck yeah! No shame in sticking to a GUI. Glad to see you sticking your paws into the waters that is Linux.

sometimes I even use SSH like a real grown up!

Haha nice! Gotta start somewhere.

Yes, but today I decided I wanted to test Tmobile Home Internet again so its a bit broken, all my home network stuff is fine but all my external access software is broken, its a fun adventure I think I'll probably need to learn tailscale to fix this.

Build:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz
64 GB RAM (i don't recall the speed its not that important)
1 x RAIDZ1 | 3 wide | 3.64 TiB (for total 7.2 TB storage)
Intel Arc A380 Discrete Card
ZSUS X99-8D4 Motherboard

linuxavali wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 2:28 pm

• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor
• 4 x 32GB for 128GB DDR5 CL40 5600MT/s RAM
• Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe Drive
• 2 x Toshiba N300 Pro 8TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
• 1 x 8TB WD Red Plus Internal NAS HDD 3.5

How are you running 128GB of Ram on the AM5 Platform, did MOBO manufacturers finally update their BIOSes to support 128GB of Ram or are you using custom RAM timings? It used to be ram stability was an issue when you slotted all 4 channels with 32gb for each slot unless you handicapped your clock speed down to 3200MHz.

Here's mine just for fun

System:
Kernel: 5.15.0-139-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Console: pty pts/0
Distro: Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: ASRock model: Z370 Pro4 serial: <superuser required>
UEFI: American Megatrends v: P1.10 date: 08/30/2017
CPU:
Info: 6-core model: Intel Core i5-8400 bits: 64 type: MCP cache:
L2: 1.5 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 800 min/max: 800/4000 cores: 1: 800 2: 800 3: 800
4: 800 5: 800 6: 800
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] driver: nvidia v: 535.230.02
Display: server: X.org v: 1.21.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.1 driver: X:
loaded: nvidia unloaded: fbdev,intel,modesetting,nouveau,vesa gpu: nvidia
tty: 80x24
Message: GL data unavailable in console. Try -G --display
Audio:
Device-1: Intel 200 Series PCH HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: NVIDIA GP106 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-139-generic running: yes
Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
Device-1: Intel Ethernet I219-V driver: e1000e
IF: enp0s31f6 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
IF-ID-1: tailscale0 state: unknown speed: -1 duplex: full mac: N/A
RAID:
Device-1: md0 type: mdraid level: mirror status: active size: 3.64 TiB
report: 2/2 UU
Components: Online: 0: sdb1 1: sdc1
Drives:
Local Storage: total: raw: 7.5 TiB usable: 3.87 TiB used: 1.7 TiB (43.9%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung model: SSD 850 EVO 250GB size: 232.89 GiB
ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Seagate model: ST4000VN006-3CW104 size: 3.64 TiB
ID-3: /dev/sdc vendor: Seagate model: ST4000VN006-3CW104 size: 3.64 TiB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 227.68 GiB used: 60.09 GiB (26.4%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
ID-2: /boot/efi size: 512 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat
dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 435.5 MiB (21.3%) file: /swapfile
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 27.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 28 C
Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: nvidia fan: 0%
Info:
Processes: 274 Uptime: 67d 5h 37m Memory: 15.55 GiB used: 1.8 GiB (11.6%)
Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.13

Having a home server is one of those things I've always thought was really cool, but the few times I've had extra hardware laying around and made one... I couldn't think of a single thing to do with it that wasn't more convenient to keep on my desktop. Do y'all have a ton of devices spread across a house or something? I'm curious if there's something I'm missing or of it's a project car for nerds type deal.

Well, I didn't/don't have the heart to throw out/sell my old desktop PCs. I have an even older tower that's been sitting unused. I wanted to at least use my retiring gaming PC for something useful and I thought it would be fun to learn home networking and have a NAS/backup setup

SwiriKo wrote: Mon Jul 14, 2025 3:19 am How are you running 128GB of Ram on the AM5 Platform, did MOBO manufacturers finally update their BIOSes to support 128GB of Ram or are you using custom RAM timings? It used to be ram stability was an issue when you slotted all 4 channels with 32gb for each slot unless you handicapped your clock speed down to 3200MHz.

Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention i did turn down the RAM speed. Between all the things I was running, the amount of RAM was the bottleneck so I decided a RAM speed sacrifice was okay for now. This system barely hits the CPU as it is, and I have noticed no lag or slowdowns in anything. According to dmidecode the effective memory speed is currently 3600 MT/s. I'll update my post to reflect this.

Mixi Blacksand wrote: Mon Jul 14, 2025 3:51 am Having a home server is one of those things I've always thought was really cool, but the few times I've had extra hardware laying around and made one... I couldn't think of a single thing to do with it that wasn't more convenient to keep on my desktop. Do y'all have a ton of devices spread across a house or something? I'm curious if there's something I'm missing or of it's a project car for nerds type deal.

I for one specifically wanted to get things off my desktop, having the server store my media and files and send them out so I can access them easily from any device I have or even remotely is great. I also like to be able to turn off and reboot my desktop without that also cutting off my ability to access stuff through my phone or laptop.

Mixi Blacksand wrote: Mon Jul 14, 2025 3:51 am Having a home server is one of those things I've always thought was really cool, but the few times I've had extra hardware laying around and made one... I couldn't think of a single thing to do with it that wasn't more convenient to keep on my desktop. Do y'all have a ton of devices spread across a house or something? I'm curious if there's something I'm missing or of it's a project car for nerds type deal.

Kinda the problem I've had before. I've had a spare MacBook and a RasPi used for home networking stuff before, but other than PiHole and some very context-specific use cases, it didn't seem worth the effort of keeping it all up and running—and when it failed it was a pain in the butt.

I have a home server!
I built it using spare parts and whatever I could find that was cheap to fill the gaps.
End result is a very overspecced NAS.

I use it for quite a lot of things
Hosting my website
File sharing with my long distance partner and between devices
Syncing files between devices (mostly for Obsidian)
Hosting game servers
And likely more to come.

I've only had it since the start of the year but I've already made a lot more use out of it than I expected I would.

I've got a few remote servers, but I've also got my home server as well. I used to run a few home servers in tandem, but a critter in the area sold me a rather nice dual CPU workstation that pretty much has more than enough resources for what I want to run on it, so I managed to consolidate them.

It's a Dell Precision 7810 with two Intel Xeon E5-2678 v3s and 128 GB of RAM. It's also got a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, which is both necessary for some form of video output and also helps a bit with video (en/de)coding at times as a little bonus. (Also, just have to say, passing through a graphics card to containers is... fun )

It's running Proxmox, and while I plan on hosting more services on it for myself (such as staging servers for projects and the like), right now it just runs three VMs/containers:
- Jellyfin (media server, mainly to watch stuff with friends)
- Neko (Basically a web browser you can share with friends, kinda like rabb(dot)it if you've ever used that)
- Windows VM (basically just used as a game server, but it might do more in the future.)

It also serves as a storage server - it has a disk shelf (a Netapp d4246) which currently has 3 12 TB drives in a RAID array, as well as a few SSDs I had lying around.

Additionally, I have a PiKVM v1 I cobbled together with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Pico I had lying around, and I use it to restart it whenever it crashes without having to go to the basement and plug a bunch of stuff in. Recently that's been a little more common, I'm still trying to figure out the root cause of that. (Triaging that has been partially why I threw together the PiKVM in the first place ^^")

I've had reasonably good luck just running TrueNAS scale as my "primary" server. I've never had a big use for full fat VMs, which is good because it's on a circa 2015 or so workstation with 16GB of ram, and it's also managing a pretty large ZFS array. But it runs qbittorrent and serves up the network shares just fine. I have a few spare pis for other stuff too.

Old OEM PCs make very very good servers, they're dirt cheap (at least here in the US, you can get early intel 6 core stuff for close to $100 now) and low power, great reuse-recycling too. Sometimes requires a bit of DIY depending on what you're doing but it's absolutely worth it.

I'm looking forward to when I finally get bothered enough to set up some sort of actual media sharing system and learning about what kind of codec support the typical end device has nowadays. People put a lot of work into doing local encoding and I think I'd rather just use an army of 1L office PCs as dedicated media boxes rather than trying to support the average smart TV...

I kinda stumbled into homeserver ownership due to my partner getting me to replace their TrueNAS install with a proper Linux...
I did already have a VPS before that for a couple of websites and Nextcloud, now that grew to also include Dendrite (Matrix HS) and GoToSocial on the NAS box.

I used truenas briefly on the server that now runs mint. it was cool and having a web interface was nice but it was waaay too complicated/powerful for me

I turned an old laptop into a temporary home server and it fried within six months.

I don't know what I was expecting tbh.

RueAzure wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 1:29 pm I turned an old laptop into a temporary home server and it fried within six months.

I don't know what I was expecting tbh.

What were you running on it? Generally running light server tasks in a non-gui environment uses less resources then running a full fat desktop OS

i bought a used Optiplex last year to convert it into a home server running Ubuntu, as a way of learning about servers and how they work. at this point i primarily use it for Soulseek and file storage, and it works great for that. i once ran a modded Minecraft server on it as a test but the server died out :(

i'm not really sure what else i could do with it, honestly? i haven't done anything super advanced with it, it's practically just a Docker/Portainer machine for me... if anyone has some recommendations for other cool images i could run on it, that'd be neat!

I'm always a bit surprised when people say TrueNAS is too complex, I use it specifically because it's easier than setting up a ZFS NAS box manually! ZFS absolutely racks your head around at first though, but that's not an issue specific to TrueNAS and at least it helps you a little bit.

I have very strong, very negative feelings about a recent project which amounts to a paid frontend on TrueNAS that is supposed to make it "easier". I'll save those for another time.

It does start becoming a chore if you want to set up multiple VMs and such. Works a lot better when you can get by with whatever is available in the apps section. The usual software thing of "If someone set up a path, best to try and stay on it."

>home server
>"LinuxAvali"

This is my home

I do have a very simple home server, it just runs Xubuntu (I needed a light desktop. Terrible choice, but it works) and has a Ryzen 3 3200g as its brain.

I store media and host two or three game servers per week in there, but I *never* figured out how to put a gallery module in either CasaOS or Portainer. Like, there's none in the options, and I couldn't for the life of me find a way to configure one from scratch.

Got a dang big stash of media in here that's still in CDs, and I want to try and protect them from being lost to rot. I mean, I *paid* for it, I should be able to just store it however I want, right? Also, being able to tag those photos and cliparts to be able to search through them properly would be great. Specially if it's something that also supports browsing fonts, but that's a bonus.

Long story but I started off with an old laptop running kodi plugged into the HDMI on my TV, moved on to a refurbed business mini pc that I installed Linux on, migrated that hard drive to a slightly better PC, then in 2023 I bought a QNAP NAS. This was a mistake, there were so many performance problems it was untenable, it was too slow over nfs for Plex to play back videos without buffering every minute or two. Currently the QNAP is only good as a warm backup.

Then I did a full fresh build in a full atx tower chock full of spinning rust disks and set up zfs for the first time.

In doing this, I learned some very important lessons like you shouldn't have more than 4 drives on a single sata controller otherwise zfs will run into data errors and make your life miserable.

Currently this box runs all of my shit. Plex, jellyfin, navidrome, my *arr piracy stack, a custom Django app I wrote to help organize local movie nights, it's fun to tinker with stuff.