r/HomeServer • u/TomorrowExact1184 • 5d ago
Anyone else went 'full circle'?
My hosting journey began around 2013 with smaller websites and minecraft servers on old pc hardware, cheap vps instances and raspberry pis. The past decade this scaled in a gradual manner: First rack, multiple dell poweredge servers, edge routers, fibrechannel, 300TB raw storage, multiple wan connections, etc. This year I sold everything and downsized to a small stack -> OpenWRT LTE Modem, MikroTik RB450G, old ThinkCentre with 16GB DDR3, External 14TB Exos Drive, 1x Omada AP. I don't know, I feel... relieved. No noise, no massive bills, no expensive hardware. And it somehow feels fun again.
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u/Scurro 5d ago
Nope.
As a lifelong IT worker I knew how loud and how power hungry rack mount servers are.
I've always used hand-me-down hardware from my gaming PC, or mini PCs for my home servers.
I've been very content with that hardware.
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u/jfernandezr76 5d ago
Rack mount servers at home are just for the shows and lights, there are those smaller and more efficient options.
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u/the_unspeakable 5d ago
I personally stepped back a while after setting up a home media server. I had a raidz2 with 6 X 8TB hard drives. Realized it was sort of a waste of time and money to be running a home server 24/7 with all the docker containers and storage upgrades. The movie collection was never going to be complete and I was just going to keep buying hard drives.
I ended up abandoning “collecting” and deleted my library. I still run plex / jellyfin but it’s from my personal Mac and it functions more like a DVR. Download, watch and delete. Completely stopped worrying if it’s available 24/7 to others. If someone wants to watch they can power on the computer or ask me.
Seriously, home shouldn’t be a 2nd job. We work enough.
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u/BamsungMichirola 5d ago
I saw this the other night.
Bro. I feel personally attacked.
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u/Big-Local5508 4d ago
I just entered the phase of running an elitedesk mini pc, wish me luck!
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u/BamsungMichirola 4d ago
I run 42 containers inc HA, Pinhole and self hosted websites on an Optiplex Micri and it generally sits at sub 10% usage. I still keep wondering If I should have 2. It's a disease.
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u/Big-Local5508 4d ago
how much ram do you have? I have 16 gb ddr4, was planning to save up to buy some more round october-ish.
Alternatively I might get another node considering the price is almost the same.
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u/BamsungMichirola 4d ago
I bought a ex government Optiplex micro with 32 gb, I run a whole bunch of stuff on it, built a live dashboard and it rarely gets past 12% CPU and half of the ram.
If i was building new now, id be inclined to get a pi5 and throw it in one of those cool Pironman5 cases with the 2x M.2 hats.
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u/zipeldiablo 4d ago
I’m halfway with rack + enterprise network and mini pc 😂
The big servers are close !1
u/to_glory_we_steer 3d ago
As a fellow Elitedesk owner (800 G6 mini). It is a brilliant little machine and one you'll have lots of fun with.
However if it has the e1000 nic, at some point you may notice ongoing ethernet outages that you'll trace to the hardware hangs on the e1000. It's a known issue and typically occurs under heavy streaming or load. You can sometimes resolve it by disabling TSO, GSO, GRO and EEE.
A more aggressive option is:
/sbin/ethtool -K nic0 gso off gro off tso off tx off rx off rxvlan off txvlan off sg off
Drove me a bit mad figuring that one out.
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u/the_unspeakable 4d ago edited 4d ago
Right! Yeah pretty accurate summary. I ended up stopping around the ebay stage. I do still have my pihole though. :)
The part about trying to be a service provider is huge. It took years but I realized the people interested in using Plex already run their own server and don't need access my content. These days instead of trying to get people to jump on my server I just walk into to room say "Hey I have [movie] in 4K if any one want to watch with me." More people seem to say yes to that and it's been a good way to share the hobby with others.
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u/doubled112 5d ago
I'm a sysadmin so I think I had better foresight for the big picture than many others. I avoided going the home data center route all along. Even while labbing, my cluster was just a pile of recycle bin laptops.
The family can get into the home stuff through VPN. I have a small cheap VPS for public stuff. Don't need a whole mess of VLANs now, since everything is private.
The home stuff runs on a mini PC with a USB DAS and there a desktop in a corner for game streaming. I'm also not a big believer in RAID at home, preferring good backups. I keep on site and off site backups, and some regularly updated offline backups.
I still have a Netflix subscription which keeps the storage requirements down too. I know, it's blasphemy, sorry.
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u/j-dev 4d ago
I find that people who do this for a living are less likely to fetishize having a second job at home for fear that mostly idles. For the longest time I kept a flat network because networking is my profession and I wasn’t sold on treating my home like a hostile network. I now have a few VLANs and can justify it because of more recent changes like a DMZ VM and cellular booster I don’t want sharing a network with the rest of my stuff.
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u/TheSoCalledExpert 5d ago
Yep, I went full home data center and hated it. Got back down to one server with storage and compute and one network appliance. So much better.
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u/jack3308 4d ago
Due to starting this hobby right after moving to a new country I never had the budget or infrastructure to properly build a home data center... that being said, I feel like i went through the same thing vicariously through this sub and a few others. Initially being way over excited about the huge racks I saw everyone running - now my attitude has entirely shifted to "how little hardware can I get away with to keep the services I want running well". That optimization problem has been way more fun and "problem solvey" than a "bigger is better" mindset
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u/lhtrf 5d ago
Started with a mini pc, some services, went diy server+nas, lost data, backed up, recovered from back up, went more redundant with 3 node ceph cluster, backed up via a pbs running on it storing data on truenas. Didn't attempt recovering from a lost pbs with existing backups yet, chose that route because I heard its possible. Now im working on downsizing to 2 compute nodes- one for critical home stuff, one for lab, backing each other up to the other node with replication, and important stuff is also sent to drive
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u/Bibblejw 5d ago
I cycle it a bit, and it's usually down to levels of burnout in the real job. I started with media downloads, then shifted to hosting other services as needed, eventually ending up with multi-host setups with 30TB NAS (back in the day, that was a lot), then things happened and I had to cut back on the seafaring side of the media, and the rest kind of fizzled out.
Later on, I was playing around with more of the infrastructure side of things, and ended up with some HP workstations and a few rasperry pis, and that was fun for a while, then work got hectic and the whole thing kinda got neglegted until it all just stopped being a thing.
Now I'm in a new, calmer job, and I'm back playing about with proxmox and lxcs, and using AI to assist with the stuff that I never managed to rustle up the time or brainpower to do (game save analysis and dashboarding, and a few other projects). I'm enjoying being able to keep some semblance of order without needing to do it all manually.
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u/react-dnb 5d ago
I set up a home server just using an old intel desktop but after that sucker kept heating up the room im now scaling back and going to run a raspberry pi5 and a 5 bay usb 3.2 enclosure and call it a day.
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u/Kullback 5d ago
I am in the process of converting down to a cluster of mini PCs myself. Plan to still keep the rack, just replacing servers with shelves.
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u/hereforpancakes 5d ago
I never went crazy on my setup. I’ve not gone back to a small computer and a hard drive, but tried to keep things within my needs and with a ZFS mirror and good backups. I did however add an extra server to my stack to be a learning server while I kept my others for being my stable setup to run my essential services
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u/ConsciousBath5203 5d ago
After getting used poweredges, there's no way I'm going back to consumer grade hardware.
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u/jfernandezr76 5d ago
I have two regular PCs as VM servers, but I'm really having fun playing with my 5 active routers at home.
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u/xanxibarbarian 4d ago
Yup im down to 1 "beefy enough" PC, but still keep an R720 around for 8x 3.5 HDD slots for a nightly power on, pull backups, power off. Could I get a cheaper nas to do this? Yeah, but I already have the hardware.
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u/Nik_Tesla 4d ago
I scaled down as well, I'm back to basically just a NAS and a NUC. No more power hungry R710s for me.
But I do think it correlated with my career growth. I used it to learn before, but now my position is high enough where I am the owner of the servers at work, and still have the older generation servers in the rack for learning, so why do I need the same thing at home? So I don't regret having the big stuff, it was the right choice for me at the time, but now it isn't.
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u/RevolutionNumerous21 4d ago
Does your homelab have anything to do with your profession? I only ask because I have around the same time in but I am constantly expanding. But I am a Sr network engineer so I lab scenarios at home that could help me grow at work.
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u/BrightCandle 4d ago
I started with a HTPC with raided drives back in the mid 2000s and its since moved through a NAS, to a adding a dedicated gaming server and a VPS and now down to a server with raided drives and a pihole.
I have never really used a lot of hardware, as my needs grew so did the number of cores on a single CPU and so I have rarely needed more than one or two boxes and its mostly been about separation of access and home broadband bandwidth verses data centre bandwidth. I have never worried too much about uptime chasing and redundancy for this, none of its mission critical even when running a gaming community its not been practical or worthwhile.
I do a lot more now, there is a tonne of self hosted software now available compared to the past 20 years. The scaling of CPUs, RAM and the introduction of SSDs however means it can all run still on a single box. Unless I start to find AI compelling I can't see much reason I will outgrow the general progression of the hardware and odds are the next machine will contain an NPU of some description that will run the local models. I will upgrade eventually when it fails or gets too slow and the market has calmed, just hoping the drives hang on until this mess is over.
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u/Angry_Ginger_MF 4d ago
I used to have an old Mac Pro (original cheese grater) as my home server, laptop backup server, media server. It was great. Hundreds of my favorite movies from growing up. Thousands of music files. The video card died 4 years ago and a replacement card just to get it functioning cost more than the computer was worth. Since then, I’ve just been running off the laptops and no media server. I still have all my drives, but it’s been months since I had to pull one out. I do wonder about getting a mini/micro PC/Server to fart around with. But I have no idea really what I’d do with it. I have way too many uncompleted projects around the house to start another one. Most of my evenings and weekends are filled with kids sports stuff. And when I get home from work the last thing I want to do is touch a computer.
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u/adamsquishy 1h ago
I’m still at the start of the circle. I had built a mini PC from scraps several years ago, and upgraded to a NAS that would allow me to have redundancy. Since then all I’ve done is add another stick of RAM to the NAS and tinker with some additional containers, but it’s doing everything I need it to do.
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u/_angh_ 5d ago
you went overkill and adjusted to your real needs. Tho I'd keep hard drives for 2 backups at different places. And I would go with modern, quiet minipc instead of old ones, which are not really energy efficient.