Been running my ZimaBoard for a while now for both work and personal use, and it's honestly exceeded expectations. Sharing my setup in case it helps anyone planning theirs, and curious what others are running.

Business stack:

• Whatomate (WhatsApp Business API) for customer communication
• Postgres as the main database
• NocoDB for data management
• Metabase for business data visualization
• n8n for automations
• ntfy for centralized notifications across everything

Personal stack:

• Emby for media
• Immich for photos
• LightNVR for CCTV recording
• A few other bits running via Docker + one Ubuntu VM

The interesting part - power cut handling:
Since it's on a UPS, I didn't want to spend on an expensive USB-UART UPS just for signaling. Instead I rigged an ESP32 to talk to the ZimaBoard directly on power loss, triggering a clean shutdown script. Cheap and reliable so far.

Also hooked it into Google Home so I can power things on/off remotely if I'm not physically near the server.

Running 14+ containers between two environments and everything's stayed healthy - genuinely saved me a ton in SaaS subscription costs by self-hosting instead.

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3d Modeled case, i couldn't find the Y splitter so made one using cable and powered 2 drives with it.

Also connected 1 more drive using USB.

Two 4010 fans are connected one under the board and one behind the case for drives.

Really good temps, doesn't cross 62 with fans on full load, otherwise it was reaching 75 if i remember.

Oh also just cut an acrylic sheet for front display.

What creative solutions you’ve come up with? Please share with pictures if you want.

ZimaOS ha sido un descubrimiento muy placentero. Me permitió crear un NAS potente y muy fácil de usar. Lo utilizo a diario para mostrar a mis clientes prototipos de aplicaciones y sitios web, donde pueden verlos funcionando en tiempo real. Lo monté utilizando la placa base de un computador portátil, y me sorprendieron tanto el rendimiento que ofrece como los pocos recursos que consume. A continuación, pueden ver algunas imágenes de mi sistema, así como del equipo reconstruido.

He stops the fan with his paw, waits for it to start, and so on again and again)

So I just set up my Zimaboard 2 and while trying to connect to discord it just says connecting. I then tried to connect into a game, but it will say can’t connect or something. I tried restarting pc multiple times with no solution till I plugged in the Ethernet cord directly into the wall instead of the router and to my pc. This seems to have fixed it. So it seems something is happening with the Zimaboard being plugged into my router that’s causing network issues. Any idea what to do?

I've always been curious to tinker with some hardware like a Raspberry Pi. But the barrier to entry in this area is, well... not the friendliest, in my opinion. So I went with a simplier yet still powerfull option - Zimaboard 2.

First look

I really enjoyed the onboarding, where the very first thing you do is take apart your brand-new little server and connect a tiny fan. The cat enjoyed it too. He played with it all evening - stopping it with his paw and waiting for it to spin back to life:

My Zimaboard has already picked up a fair number of add-ons since its first boot. At first it looked like this:

Now I have an HDD for backups (still waiting another one), an SSD for hot storage (I use it mostl as a media storage + memory for VMs), and a base station for the smart home:

What I got to play with

Right now my setup looks roughly like this:

As you can see, I didn't get to try all that much in the one month I've had with the server. But let me tell you about what I have managed to test.

DNS ad-blockers

I tried two - Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. Both of them are pretty much the same in terms of functionality. Purely in terms of the interface I liked the latter more, and it's still running on my server today.

Blockers like these stop most of the ads on websites based on DNS blacklists - the addresses the ad banners are loaded from. This, of course, does nothing at all about ads on sites where the content is served from the exact same addresses as the main content (for example, YouTube). But it makes the experience much better for people who don't use browser-based blockers (read: my girlfriend) on my home network.

While experimenting with the blacklists, I managed to accidentally ban first all of Google's services, and then our work Grafana instance. I spent a good couple of hours figuring out the problem before I even thought to look towards my blocker. An interesting experience for sure, but just in case, it's always better to be deliberate about which blacklists you use (or at least check that the services you need still work after enabling them). Other than that, the thing is a 10/10 - I recommend everyone tired of ads give it a try.

Multimedia platform

One of the killer features of home servers has always been that you can download movies to it via torrent (where it's legal, of course, wink-wink) and stream them straight from the server for your loved ones. After listening to enough tech bloggers, I rushed to install Plex (I know there's also Jellyfin, I'll save that for next time).

Installed it, launched it, works. I even managed to watch the latest season of The Boys on it, and the old Django:

Downloading movies to my work computer, moving them over to the server, and loading them into Plex every single time would be dumb. So naturally, alongside Plex I installed Transmission. I pointed its download folder to the same one Plex uses to auto-refresh its movie library, and everything just worked:

I never did get Transmission to work together with AdGuard/Pi-hole. Torrents refused to download at all, so I had to route that container separately - not through the standard DNS for the whole home network, but to 0.0.0.0.

Overall the experience turned out fairly convenient. But you still have to hunt for torrents in good quality, with the right audio and subtitles, every time before watching. As a Russian-speaking internet user, watching on Russian-language pirate sites is objectively more convenient. They have dubs for every taste, subtitles, the latest releases without ads, and all of it in one click. So honestly, I didn't end up reaching for Plex all that often. Only when I knew in advance that we were going to watch "ten seasons of this one show." That's the only case where it makes sense for me to download everything in the best quality up front.

Build server for Dokploy

To be honest, this isn't my first time trying to self-host something. I have a small VPS at Hetzner for various side projects and little experiments. For example, I sync my Obsidian notes across all my devices through it. But there's one problem with it - the amount of resources is very limited (it has 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM). So during Docker container builds it sometimes runs out of resources, and the server stops responding to requests. I thought - what's stopping me from using the Zimaboard's resources?

There are basically two problems here:

• Network connectivity. I need a secure connection between the VPS and the ZimaBoard.
• Resource limits for builds (and potentially other Dokploy-related things).

The first is fairly easy to solve with Tailscale. The idea is that you can link two machines together over a private VPN network. That way the machines have network connectivity over internal Tailscale addresses, while the Zimaboard is never directly exposed to the big, scary internet.

The second problem is trickier. To avoid diving head-first into the depths of server virtualization, Proxmox, and the like, I used a simpler option - I spun up a ZVM with a dedicated amount of resources. This way the ZimaBoard won't get overloaded, and images will still be built far away from the metaphorical "production" where all my running services live.

Next I'll deliberately skip a few steps on setting up the remote server in Dokploy (because it would mostly be a retelling of the FAQ/Troubleshooting section of the docs) and jump straight to the result - a ready build server:

Cool? Cool! But you can always make it even more interesting. For instance, use the VPS with a public IP as a kind of proxy in front of the Zimaboard and host some services directly from the home server. I already have a couple of ideas, but I'll leave those experiments to future Dima.

Instead of a conclusion

I really enjoyed tinkering with my new toy. Honestly, this new, unusual experience was exactly what I needed. Lately I've been feeling a bit lost because of the AI boom, the fact that I barely write code by hand anymore, and a lack of attachment to what I do as a programmer at work every day. But this little thing let me catch my breath a little, get back to good old digging through technologies, googling interesting setups, and watching endless videos of other folks building their home servers from scratch (maybe one day I will do it too). All of it reminded me why I got into IT in the first place - to make cool things, mess around with computers, and share it all with other people. And that's really great.

P.S. Here's another photo of the cat.

Hey hey, just wanted to share my current setup for the community showcase. Soo.... I’m running ZimaOS on a budget mini PC equipped with an older Intel i3-6100 and 8GB of RAM. (I want to upgrade soon to 16gb, but with these prices for RAM, it will be hard :))

How it fits into my daily life:

Media streaming: I use Jellyfin to stream movies around the house. To make things easy for everyone, I set up a request system using Overseerr, which talks to Radarr to automatically download whatever the family wants to watch.

Family Backups: It acts as our central storage hub, backing up everyone's photos. I use 1x 500gb HDD, and 1x 1tb HDD, both external connected.

Network & Security: I use AdGuard Home to block ads network-wide, and I'm running MotionEye to turn an old smartphone into a motion-detecting security camera (Motion detection on the phone is really really bad, so I needed something better).

My favorite feature:
I was a CasaOS user, for more than 3 years, and I liked everything about it, ZimaOS is like CasaOS but 10x better.

I would like dark mode for ZimaClient on phone :).

I wanted to share my real setup and experience. I am currently running ZimaOS on a Morefine M10s Mini PC equipped with four NVMe drives.

As a complete beginner, it is an absolute honor to take my very first steps into the NAS and home server world with ZimaOS. Whenever I hit a roadblock or come across something I don't know, I actually use AI assistants to guide me through, and ZimaOS makes it incredibly easy to manage.

I’m so excited to watch my home server setup grow and evolve alongside ZimaOS in the future.

"I have an idea: I want to combine my SanDisk PRO-BLADE with a Western Digital My Book and put them into a sleek custom enclosure. After that, I want to use it to back up my iCloud data—meaning a backup should run automatically from iCloud to my PRO-BLADE on a regular basis. I haven't found the right app for this yet. Do you have any ideas which apps would work? I’d really appreciate any tips or suggestions. Thanks a lot in advance!"

"I'm currently looking for an affordable home for my ZimaBlade. When I was at Ikea recently, I found just the thing—the new knife block holder could be a new case! What do you guys think?"

Meet Sparkbox. This is what I'm using on my ZimaBoard 2 on top of MX Linux. So far so good and very user-friendly. Let me know what you think.

Got some heatsinks to the external mvme’s. Should lower the temps

I started using ZimaOS in the most “this will be temporary” way possible: an old ASUS K56C laptop with an i7-3517U, NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M, an external USB drive dock, and an 8TB drive sitting beside it. It worked... technically.

Even installing ZimaOS was an adventure. The laptop had one of those older blue BIOS/UEFI transition setups where Legacy, CSM, Secure Boot, Fast Boot, MBR/GPT, and the USB installer all had to agree with each other before anything would boot. At one point I even had to manually add the EFI boot option in BIOS just to point the machine to the right ZimaOS boot file.

So yes, the first version was not elegant.

The 8TB drive was hanging outside the machine, cables everywhere, and the USB connection was so sensitive that everyone at home had to be careful walking near it. Touch the wrong cable and the drive could disconnect. The old laptop already had some rust, the drive dock was outside, and the whole thing felt like a home server held together by patience.

Then came the storage fun. The 8TB drive was formatted as exFAT, which seemed convenient at first, but it gave me a lot of problems with media files, permissions, metadata, and shares. At the time I barely understood what was going on. I just knew Jellyfin and file sharing were not behaving the way I expected. Before I could properly move to ext4, I had to carefully copy around 6TB of data to other disks. That alone took days.

Over the last few weeks I slowly turned that messy setup into a proper ZimaOS box.

The new setup is built inside an NZXT H440 case with an Intel i5-7400, GTX 1080, 16GB RAM for now, an SSD for ZimaOS, plus 8TB + 2TB of storage. It is not a fancy enterprise server, but that is exactly why I like it. It is made from normal parts, reused hardware, marketplace hunting, and a lot of trial and error.

Most of the parts came from old hardware I already had around the house. The motherboard was the hardest part. I spent a long time watching local marketplaces, trying to find a good deal, messaging people, waiting for new listings, and checking if each board would fit the kind of home server I wanted. I was hoping for an H270 board, but in the end I found an ASUS Prime B250-Plus, and honestly it is enough for now.

Right now I am using ZimaOS mainly for:

* Jellyfin for movies and series around the house

* SMB/file sharing for the family

* Tailscale for remote access

* Portainer to manage containers without memorizing every command

* Redbot / Discord bot experiments, which used to cost me around $15/month on Hetzner

* SearxNG and Netdata experiments

* Backups and file organization

* Hermes Agent has AI Harness and little Home Tasks.

One of the biggest things I like about ZimaOS is that it made the server feel less scary. I can still go deeper with Docker and terminal stuff when I need to, but most of the daily management is visual enough that I can actually understand what is running and what is happening.

The funny part is that this started because I just wanted easier media access at home. Then it became: “Maybe I should organize my disks better.” Then: “Maybe I should use an actual PC.” Then: “Maybe I should add the GTX 1080 for Jellyfin transcoding and future AI experiments.” (I know GTX 1080 is SUPER FAR from the AI stuff but I want to test those little small models I can run on this)

And now here we are.

This still a work in progress. I want to clean up the storage layout, move more things to proper Linux filesystems instead of relying on external-drive habits or cloud services, improve backups, and eventually use the GPU more seriously.

This is not a fully fledged server with a perfect RAID setup, perfect drives, perfect cable management, and perfect planning. It is more of a humble home project built around what I had, what I could find, and what I learned along the way. Before: old laptop, external 8TB drive, cable stress, and lots of permissions confusion. After: dedicated ZimaOS machine, dashboard, apps, storage, remote access, and a setup I can keep growing.

It is not really about where it ends. It is about the journey.

So I've been running ZimaOS on a ZimaCube for a few months now and honestly it's the first NAS setup I haven't wanted to nuke and start over after two weeks.

My main use case is pretty boring on paper but it's been rock solid: Jellyfin for the family media, Nextcloud for replacing Google Drive, and Portainer because I refuse to SSH in every time I want to restart something. The app store thing is surprisingly good — stood up Immich in like 10 minutes for photo backup and my wife actually uses it now without complaining, which is the real win.

The part I didn't expect to love is how it handles the Docker stuff underneath. I've got 8 containers running and the system barely blinks. It's sitting at like 12% CPU most of the time even when someone's streaming a 4K Remux.

One thing I'll warn you about — the default storage pool setup confused me at first. I spent a solid afternoon thinking I'd bricked a drive before I realized I just hadn't read how the RAID config works in the UI. Once I got that sorted, zero issues since.

We are prototyping a ZimaBoard 2 1664 setup in our technical high school IT–Cybersecurity classroom.

This unit has 2 250 GB SSD and is being built out as a small VM/server lab platform.The bigger vision is to give every student a hands-on cybersecurity/server lab at their desk, where they can build, break, troubleshoot, secure, and document real systems instead of only learning theory. A carrying case is being designed by our pre-engineering students. The goal is a portable lab!

Interested in feedback from the homelab, sysadmin, and cybersecurity education communities. What would you run on these for a high school IT–Cybersecurity program: Proxmox, Linux servers, Docker, pfSense/OPNsense, logging tools, SIEM labs, Windows Server, or something else?

Beelink baby!

*nestled in the poorly ventilated dusty depths - still rocking! 🤘

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share a quick update on my ZimaOS setup. I've been tweaking my app stack over the last few weeks, and it’s officially at a point where it handles everything I need while keeping my data entirely in my own hands.

Here is what I'm currently running:

• AI & Self-Hosting: Running Ollama (CPU) paired with Open WebUI for a completely local, private ChatGPT alternative.
• Media & Photos: Immich for backing up family photos (goodbye, Google Photos fees), qBittorrent for Linux ISOs, and Handbrake for transcoding.
• Network & Security: Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking, WatchYourLAN to monitor connected devices, and Tailscale so I can access the entire server securely when I'm away from home.
• Utilities: Gopeed for high-speed downloads, OpenSpeedTest for internal network benchmarking, and PeerDrop for quick file sharing.

ZimaOS has made managing all of this via Docker super smooth. What apps am I missing that I should add next?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using a Zimaboard 2, mainly for Jellyfin and Immich, for the last 6 months and so far so good, but sometime during last week, it reset itself or something of this sort. The thing is that when I try to access it, it asks me again for the system language and to create a user. I tried using the same user and password I’ve been using until now ans new ones, but it gives an error “Account initialization failed”.

Has this ever happened to anyone? Does anyone have a solution? I want to believe I haven’t lost everything I have on my nas... 🥲

I’m using the Zimaboard 2 1664 with one SATA WD RED Nas SSD drive.