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.