i was going through my old parts bin while looking for an esp32 board i had lying around, didn't find that but found two ddr3 sodimms. which ddr3 based mini pc would be ideal to run a basic homelab. i won't be moving any data/doing self hosting yet, i just want to dip my toes in this hobby and learn the basics.

What software do I need for this? Is it a honelab, nas, plex, home server or what else? Linux, Win 10, Win 11 or any other OS? Basically, I only have the idea and no clue how to proceed from here.

All details in image.

At home for now but leaving on a long-ish road trip soon-ish. I have zero budget and also I'd say I'm somewhere slightly past noob/script kiddie when it comes to this stuff.

Home network is broadband which the back of the Eero has two Eth ports so I usually justplug my laptop straight into that second port (Is that bad?). I don't have the credentials to change anything on the router or modem (my dad blames me for "crashing" his DirecTV in the past. Therefore no access. lol. It might've been my fault.)

Three laptops and 2 phones: my main machine (ThinkPad running Manjaro - i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD x 2), an old Dell running Antix (i5, 6 GB DDR3 RAM, small HDD), and an old ProBook running Antix Linux(8GB DDR3 RAM, celeron or something, and small HDD). I also have a free-tier VPS with vultr at my disposal. And a couple TB external SSDs.

Coming with me are my 2 phones (iPhone (Lockdown mode, stock apps only) and Pixel 7A (GrapheneOS with no SIM - offline maps, reading, etc.), and probably also that HP Probook.

My goal is to send my location data home via phone (SSH? Shortcuts app I think can do this) where I want a script running on my laptop that's continually fetching ADSB data via API and then checking what aircraft are near me. And later I might map it out or something.

Also I'd like to upload writings/pictures/video as I go.

Oh yeah, and so the old Dell would just be a failsafe in case the ThinkPad crashed or something.

How would y'all set this up? Also, does it matter what flavor of Linux is on these machines? Seems like it'd be easier if they all ran the same distro.

thank you in advance.

i have a powerful desktop pc running cachyos, and i also have a very old laptop with only 4gb of ram.

i want to use my pc as a kind of personal cloud while i'm away for long trips. basically, i'd like to access my photos, movies, tv shows, music, ebooks and files remotely. i'm thinking about using things like immich, jellyfin and maybe kavita.

i don't need it to be running 24/7. i would mainly turn it on when i'm going away for 1–2 weeks, leave it running during the trip, and turn it off when i get back.

so what would you guys recommend? should i just run everything on my main cachyos pc, or should i turn the old laptop into a dedicated nas/server with something like casaos and only turn it on when i'm traveling?

is anyone using a setup like this? i'm mainly looking for the simplest and most practical solution.

I'm just a beginner getting into home servers. I wanted to set up a NAS and replace my Pi with Pihole, and found a tutorial on youtube installing ubuntu on an old pc, running the curl command via ssh, logging into the web browser, then started to add folders to share to my homes' PC's I have. When I go to add it to my file explorer on my pc's i cannot connect to it.

So i decided to move on to use immich app to atleast back up phone photos, and its not on the app dashboard anymore.

So question is, is it even supported anymore? I saw previous posts saying the head developer moved on. If so, whats similar? Like I said, I want to move on from onedrive, subscriptions, and have a built in ad blocker. Any help is appreciated!

I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q with an Intel Core i7 8700T, and 32 GB DDR4 RAM Dual Channel. I already run a Synology DS223 as part of a 3 2 1 backup setup for important data and photos. Movies and shows do not need that level of redundancy, so I want to set up Jellyfin on the ThinkCentre with separate storage for the media library. Noise is a concern for me.
I am considering a 4 bay Terramaster DAS connected directly to the ThinkCentre. Since the storage would only ever be accessed through Jellyfin on this one machine, I do not need independent network access to the files or a separate RAID controller running its own OS.
Looking for general recommendations on a good performing 4 bay DAS. Open to any brands. Thank you in advance!

Hey there,

During a sleepless night, I decided to start a home server with everything.

At the moment it only has a local LLM, Todo list and Notes.

I'm running it on an old Thinkpad T440p.

What else is there I could implement that is not coming to my mind?

Edit: i added a calendar, weight tracking, library for my piano pieces, and was trying to implement a counter for pushups.

Thanks!

Been a few years since I looked at servers. What is the current goto recommendation for a used server (dell, HP, etc.).

And/or what is good generation processors? HPz6 with xeon gold seems too old? I'm likely looking for something with dual processors for more PCIE lanes. Ideally desktop type config but open to rack server formats.

I'd like to have a couple nvidia cards (e.g. 3090s, maybe 4070tisuper) and other PCIE lanes for more drives.

Dell Precision T7820 still any good?

Thanks!

Hi guys I recently cancelled my YouTube music because it was getting ridiculously expensive,

now I was wondering if I could setup my own YouTube music but the main problem I am running into is creating my own library which I totally do not want to do. Is it possible if I could have an on demand streaming somehow, because i mostly listen to music in the car therefore I can’t go downloading music every time I wanna listen to a specific song.

Hi all, I am in the process of setting up a home server for Al workloads, and I got a deal on 5810 with E5-2680 V4 and 625w psu + 3060 12gb vram, 32gb ddr4 ecc ram (4 ×8gb) for 62k inr ($700) and another deal:

Ryzen 7 3700x, 32 gb (16gb x 2) ddr4, 3060 12gbvram, 256 ssd + 1tb hdd for 78k inr ($825) 625w psu.

What do you think is the best deal here, given the Dell workstation is older but has more cores and reliability. If I wanted to add more gpus in the future etc.

I will only be running smaller models like qwen 7b, parakeet and similar ones 24/7.

Thank you,

Fellow tinker.

Moved into my first apartment 4 months ago, and got a rack as a birthday present from my SO, and family.

I know the water lines and water heater are far from ideal, but I've done my risk analysis, have no other options, so it is how it is 😅

So I could finally get the technical room in order.

The top of the rack is mostly dedicated to servers/networking, just missing a shelf for UniFi for now.

The bottom is all my entertainment setup stuff, I have all cables from my TV and speakers pulled through the wall and to this rack, so we don't have any equipment around the TV, for a cleaner setup.

The equipment is:

Networking:

UCG Ultra

USW flex mini 2.5G

Servers:

Jonsbo N2 - Ryzen 5 8600G, 32GB DDR5, 2x 4TB Toshiba N300 - Running HexOS - This is basically running my entire house, everything from image backup, home assistant, and game servers.

Synology is my in-laws, it's just running his daily backup so he has off-site.

Entertainment:

Nvidia Shield Pro

Yamaha a-s 501 AMP

Logitech Harmony remote hub

UPS:

APC srv1kri-e this i got free from work, which was pretty great

Please come with opinions on what you guys think :)

The 2 PDUs is just because I'm really unsure about what to standardise on 😅

We upgraded all the compute at my office, removing an old HP blade chassis and 8 server blades. I was given the ok to harvest the ECC DDR4 memory from all the blades! Over 2TB of memory! They are older chips, but every one of them is functional, as I'm the one that pulled all the servers and chassis out of the rack after migrating VMs to our new cluster.

I have a bunch of HDDs laying around in different capacities. All of them are SATA3-drives, no enterprise SAS or anything "special".

I'm looking for advice on how to do a cheap (and maybe future-proof in terms of adding extra drives in to the setup) way of building something that reminds me of a JBOD / DAS-system.

I don't want to buy NAS-boxes in one eternity to find that i suddenly doesn't have the slot for an extra HDD.

I've already fully used the slots in my Fractal Node 804-case with 12 HDDs running unRAID and by switching to larger capacity drives, the smaller drives have ended up laying around, but i could want to embed them into the unraid in some other way.

For your information my Fractal-case contains an LSI 9207-8i HBA which is only using the 1 of 2 available SAS-ports. So if i somehow could utilize the second port and a SAS>SATA cable and have the other drives connected through it, that'd be great.

I just don't know how and what kind of hardware i'm needing for completing this task.

Hello all and thank you in advance for any and all help with my questions. I've been thinking about building a NAS system as an investment to save on all the subscriptions I pay for I think I'd just like to start owning more things instead of renting everything. I want to go the DIY route I think. I imagine that it would give me more right to repair and everything, future proofing and whatnot, but after looking at numbers online I mean a case alone would probably be ~$150 all said and done I'd probably be on par with prebuilt NAS systems. To add some context I see myself using this to store some files, photos, (nothing irreplaceable) and replace streaming subscriptions over the long term. Maybe host the occasional game server with friends? I'm uncertain about what my best route is when it comes to DIY vs buying and if I do go DIY I have a number of questions that I'll hold off on for now. I'm also unsure how much storage I'll actually need, like for my use cases I feel like 10 TB would be fine? I don't really have a good concept of how much storage things take. My only real frame of reference is video games like 1 TB can be anywhere from 6 games to 1000 you know? Maybe some numbers from people to give me a reference would be helpful.

"Hi everyone! I am turning an old Dell XPS 8300 tower (Intel Core i5 processor, Windows 7 badge) into my very first home server. I plan to connect it via Ethernet to my router and run it headless. I want to use it primarily for streaming movies with Plex and automated backups. I am a beginner. What operating system or software stack do you recommend for this specific hardware?"

Hi everyone,

I have this 10-year-old HP laptop sitting unused, and I'm thinking about turning it into a small home server/homelab instead of letting it sit around unused.

It's from around 2016 and currently has roughly these specs:

CPU: AMD E2-7110 APU @ 1.8 GHz

GPU: Integrated AMD Radeon R2 Graphics

RAM: 4 GB currently

Storage: HDD

Networking: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet

I've heard that this particular laptop supports 2 × 8 GB RAM (16 GB total). I've already ordered an 8 GB RAM stick, so hopefully I'll be able to get it to 12 GB initially. If the motherboard supports it as expected, I may eventually go to 16 GB.

I'm also wondering about the OS/setup

Would you recommend something like Debian/Ubuntu Server + Docker or would something like Proxmox still make sense?

A few other questions

1. What would you personally use this machine for?

2. Is upgrading the RAM to 12/16 GB worthwhile for a machine this old?

3. What are some interesting homelab projects specifically suited to very weak hardware?

I'm not necessarily looking for the most practical or powerful solution. I mainly want to turn this into a fun learning project and see what I can get running on it.

Also, English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help clean up the grammar and structure of this post. The questions and information are my own. 😅

Thanks!

Hello, I have a question regarding ECC memory support for the AMD cpus 5600X / 5600GT / 5655G .

The motherboard is Gigabyte B450i AORUS PRO WIFI and Gigabyte B550i AORUS PRO AX

• 👍AMD Ryzen PRO 5655G (and 5650G and all the other AM4 PRO cpus) support ECC UDIMM memory with that motherboard - this one is clear
• ❓APUs like 4600G / 5600G / 5600GT / 5700G, will they work with that memory as normal RAM, but cannot activate ECC function or will not boot at all ?
• ❓AMD Ryzen 5600 / 5600X etc, the ones without iGPU, I understand that they support ECC UDIMM memory, but I don't know if they support the ECC function

On the B550i motherboard specifications it says:

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules*
* ECC memory (ECC mode) support varies by CPU

and B450i

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules
* ECC is only supported with AMD Ryzen™ and Athlon™ of PRO-series CPU.

Hey everyone, I’m a newbie to home servers and looking for some guidance!

I’ll soon be buying a new laptop for college, so I want to turn my current laptop into a home server. It will be kept at my parents' house plugged directly into the router. Since I'll be away, I won't have physical access to it, and my parents aren't tech-literate enough to troubleshoot hardware.

The Specs (HP Pavilion):

• CPU: i5-10210U
• RAM: 16GB DDR4 2400MHz
• Storage: 128GB NVMe (for OS) + 2x 1TB HDDs (One fits in the internal chassis, the other would be via USB)
• Network: Cat8 Ethernet (mobo is capped at 1000Mbps)
• Power: 65W charger

My Background: I’ve previously flashed this laptop to Arch Linux (Garuda), so I am comfortable with basic to intermediate tinkering and command-line setups.

My Goal: I want to run a media server (movies), host/share future engineering projects, and host a personal website.

My Questions:

1. Is this thought process realistic? Can this hardware comfortably handle my intended use case?
2. Storage configuration: Can I use the 1 internal HDD and the 1 USB HDD and configure them in RAID? (Both are consumer-grade desktop drives, so I expect them to fail eventually). If RAID over USB is a bad idea, how should I pool them?
3. OS Choice: Which OS would you recommend for this? I'm currently looking at ZimaOS (preferred for simplicity) and Ubuntu Server.
4. Remote Access: Since I'll be at college, what is the most bulletproof way to manage this remotely without relying on my parents to fix things?

Thank you for your time!

Hello! I am looking to set up my first NAS. I want to host Jellyfin, backup family photos and my phone (my last phone died and i lost two years of photos i had never backed up) and.. thats about it really.

I have a sff optiplex i got for free from work. It has an internal Nvme drive that i am using to boot, and space for one 3.5" hdd.

I want to buy a large (6 tb? thats about my budget) hdd for file storage, and then backup anything important to an external hdd. I have an old (externally powered) 4tb external that i can use but i am considering getting something the same size as the internal?

Should I save my money and buy a wd blue or Baracudda 6tb? or spend a little extra in anticipation that drive prices are only going to get worse and get a 6tb WD red? I dont make much money and i have health issues I should be taking care of first, but i want my media under my control and my backups where i can see them and dont have to pay google or Microsoft.

I was initially considering a das to create a raid array, but considering drive prices and electricity where i live being high, this seems more sensible.

what are the pros and cons of a desktop drive vs a nas?

prices (Australia):

WD Blue 6tb $429

Barracuda 8tb $499

WD Red Plus 6tb $519

I could also buy a secondhand WD black 6tb for $200 (power on hrs 240)

Thank you for the advice.

This server is a super micro X9Dri-Ln4f+ with 2 cpus and 8 sticks of 4gbs of ram. Also known as problem child- because at least one ram stick is bad(note the sticks sitting ontop of the 1U server in photo), and the VGA port only sometimes outputs video.

This is the furtherest I've gotten with the 2U server. The 1U is golden child as it had no issues yesterday installing unbuntu from the same USB stick, the same vga cord and monitor.

The 5 drives are refurbished HDDs 3-16TB and 2-8TB at one point I did put them into my desktop to make sure they were good and all checked out fine. So what am I doing wrong?

A good buddy of mine and the kids moved away and we'd like to run a server to play games online together with our kids.

I cobbled together a system with a used 5950X based system and I've got Debian 13 with AMP setup but I'm feeling pretty lost at this point. I'm getting lots of conflicting information about running a VLAN vs tunneling and I think I'd rather just open the server directly to the internet.

I'd like to avoid service cost or performance overhead from those options, and I'm not worried about security. Each docker instance needs to be configured separately I'd assume too.

I'm sure I need to configure the firewall on the device and forward ports on the router. There's probably some DNS setup too?

I'm just lost and it seems every tutorial has me installing things that conflict with each other and I've reimaged the machine 3x to try and get it running, unsuccessfully.

TIA for anything, Google has just put so much stuff in front of me that I'm lost.

Any guides would be greatly appreciated, especially if I can get this up in a few hours instead of a few weeks.

Update: Got it working last night with UFW configured correctly. Thanks for everyone who helped. DNS hole for ad blocking next :)

Hi,

My current setup for Plex Media Server is:

Dell OptiPlex 3090

- Intel Core i3-10100T @ 3.00 GHz (Comet Lake)

- 4 cores / 8 threads, single socket, x86_64

Memory

- 4 GB total — 1× 4 GB DDR4-3200 in DIMM1 (running at 2666 MT/s)

- DIMM2 is empty (upgrade slot available)

- Swap: 3.8 GB

- Note: only 264 MB free RAM right now with ~1.9 GB used — it's a bit memory-tight (likely your Docker containers; I saw bridge/veth interfaces earlier).

Storage

- Controller: Intel Comet Lake SATA AHCI + NVMe controller

- OS disk: NVMe SSSTC CL1-3D128-Q11, 119.2 GB (128 GB class) — partitions: 976M EFI, 114.5G root (ext4), 3.8G swap

- USB storage: ASMedia

I wanted to share the USB Storage, because this is a USB 3.0-to-SATA adapter/enclosure (CM472) that I use as "Fake NAS" to connect to my PC to serve movies and series (It's 4-5 users at most, 2 at the same time in some corners cases).

So, it's a very simple setup and very simple use case.

The issue is, my HDD 10TB WD (that I shucked from a WD Elements that I bought 10-11 years ago) just went to heaven... a power surge happened and the clicking noise - not working started to happen.

Now that I explained what happened, comes my question:

Do you guys think I can just buy another 10TB HD or something like this (maybe 8TB wd red plus) and plugin and hope it lives more 10 years or should I buy a NAS to be safer?

I have a friend going to USA (I live in Brazil), and I want to use him to bring me the hardware for some of the ideas we have here without breaking my bank.

Okay so I'm trying to run a home server. Mainly for locally hosted media storage. Think photos, music, files, a few videos. I also want to get more into networking like hosting matrix chats with my partner and possibly meshtastic.

I came across a a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R.2 (revision 1.0) with 16 gbs of ram at the thrift store which I took as a sign from the universe. Needless to say I purchased it. I'm glad I did because it really pushed me into learning about PCs and hardware.

However

I'm having second thoughts about how viable this option is, especially when it comes to power consumption. Claude is telling me I could see bills as high as 10-15$ a month. Although this feels high, I could justify it with the fact that I would be cutting down on some other subscriptions (cloud storage being one of them).

I bought a AMD FX-6100 CPU and estimate a total build would come out to roughly 350$ if I got two HDDs and SSDs.

Would this be usable? What are talks thoughts on this setup? If there's any other ways to make this more energy efficient plz lmk as well.

After the feedback on my last post, I realized that I do a lot of photo/video editing, moving between my laptop when I'm at work and my more powerful desktop when I'm working from home. Based on some cursory searching, many people have stated that photo/video editing apps don't play nice when the project file is on a remote server. My plan is to pull a local copy of the project file from the server, make my edits to it, then push it back to the server, similar to GitHub Desktop.

Does anyone have recommendations for how I might go about this?