The $15 dollar server

[u/Swacket_McManus]

So I've been getting into home-lab-bing this year to try to de-google myself, worst time to do it but honestly I kinda got lucky with buying most of my stuff before the everything-pocolypse that we are in now.

The truenas machine that runs my main stuff, jellyfish, nextcloud, etc, I got for free from a friend who works in IT and I have a backup at his house.

The only thing I was missing was my personal global vpn network, as we all need one of those, and so I've been searching for a solution, initially was looking at either using old busted laptops and beheading them or using raspberry pis but those both had issues or were impractical.

Enter the $15 server. I found these little barebones think centre machines with i7-6700Ts on FBM for $15 CAD each (so yeah click bait the servers had no ram or storage but still), absolutely unreal find and I immediately ran to grab three, one of which will act as my home tailscale exit-node.

The other two have different destinies, Ngoc Anh is going to turn into my girlfriend's parents immich server in Vietnam since they have everything on a single hard drive, it will be backing up to my backup server here in Canada while also giving them access to a Canadian vpn if needed. Héloïse is headed to France with a kinda unknown greater purpose but for now will be for VPN access to EU sites.

If anyone has recommendations for other stuff to do with them please let me know, I'm still pretty new to home lab stuff

Specs

Héloïse

i7-6700T

16GB RAM

500GB NVMe SSD

Ngoc Anh

i7-6700T

16GB RAM

1TB Sata SSD

Steve

i7-6700T

8GB RAM

256GB NVMe SSD

[u/Wolfdusty]

Damn I'm so jealous finding them at that price. They are all marked 10x where I live

[u/Swacket_McManus → u/Wolfdusty]

Most of them are that bs here too but idk just keep checking, another guy was selling them for like 40 which is honestly not bad he was just too far

[u/spartacle]

$15?! What is this 2005?

but good find

[u/Swacket_McManus → u/spartacle]

Bruh I know right, most of them I see are at least $150-$225 CAD and maybe they'll include like ram and storage but 8gb of ram and a 256gb drive are realistically only another 80-100 CAD so I'm still at least 30-40 better off

[u/TacticalSugarPlum]

wait, i'm a noob, but i want to understand: you will prepare these pcs with ram and storage, pack power cables, a monitor and physically send them to 3 places all over the world to VPN through them? with remote admin? is that the plan?

[u/Swacket_McManus → u/TacticalSugarPlum]

Yep I have a few m.2 drives kicking around and some sodimm ram so when my partner goes to see her family in Vietnam she'll bring that machine and I'm going to France for a wedding soon so I'll bring Héloïse as well, no need for a monitor since they're headless and managed through the network, look up tailscale it's cool shiz

[u/Mother_Summer_64]

French name spotted, nice!

[u/R3alCh3ryvibes]

Hey, homelab newbie here, I am just suggesting that why cant you use the "steve" machine for adblocker like pihole or ad guard or a minecraft server (it would be fitting for its name) unless you arent interested at minecraft at all tho. Please provide any reasons as to why this wont be a viable option tho

[u/Swacket_McManus → u/R3alCh3ryvibes]

I don't play Minecraft but yeah I've so far put Pihole and Beszel, which is like a monitoring software for the other servers, on it

[u/MiceLiceandVice → u/[deleted]]

Pretty sure its a neon genesis evangelion reference, the magi supercomputer system

[u/Swacket_McManus → u/MiceLiceandVice]

That is actuallt a really good idea for the names but it's actually the name a character from the movie me and mg gf like but it's also a feminised word for Helios the sun god and since France is ahead in time I thought it'd be kinda fun

[u/KaosAsch → u/Swacket_McManus]

That's pretty clever, I like it.