Welcome to my first server tour. I’ll show you the few things I’ve made before starting this blog.

Networking

Just the modem/router/switch/access point, all in one, my ISP provided me with. It works (edit: most of it works).

I used to punch holes on it for accessing my services outside my LAN (through port forwarding), now I know better (Tunneling. If you’re broke, playit.gg works ok. Cloudflare offers more security tools, and it’s still free if you give a domain name). I wanna upgrade it for something more homelab-y like pfSense, but I don’t live alone and I would annoy everyone (plus, I don’t have the money to replace everything).

The big boy at the back (bare metal minecraft server)

The black and gray pc at the back was my first server, and I still use it. It’s an i7 3770 with 20GB of ddr3 and a 512GB sata SSD, with one 160GB HDD for backups (from a netbook). It idles at 30w, it’s not bad at all.

It runs a minecraft server for 2-10 people, it’s a bit overkill in terms of RAM, but hey I didn’t pay for it, I just hoard it from old stuff (also, if you know who’s Aura, you might know this server and you probably hate me a bit).

Over this past 6 months I’ve learned a lot with this server, actually. First of all, I’ve learned that I suck at this and that I have to be up front about it. Also, I’ve learned how to make simple scripts, for rebooting, backups to the HDD, things like that, and in general I’ve learned to deal with requests from people (resetting passwords, or the classic “I was just standing there, why did I die?”, type 2 fun of log-digging).

The small pc (proxmox)

The black pc with a ryzen sticker is la pièce de résistance of my homelab. I finished buying all the parts about 3 months ago, but didn’t finished setting it up until last month. It’s got an intel i3 8100 (4c4t, 8th gen is expensive) with 8GB of ddr4 ram (single stick) and a 256GB nvme SSD + 1TB HDD. It idles at 30w, which is a bit disappointing taking into account it’s much newer than the old one, but it’s also running a lot of services, so I forgive it.

It’s running proxmox, an OS based on debian that allows you to make virtual machines and containers (so, more machines with just one machine, win win). It’s running a new minecraft server (I might migrate the old server to this one in the future, that could be a fun post), jellyfin (media server, mainly for shows I had in other drives, now I can stream them as if it were netflix), qbittorrent for downloading pictures of my cat (duh) and wordpress for, you know, this page. The services fit nicely in the 8gb of ram as long as I’m not doing everything at once, because most services run on LXC containers (they share some parts of the OS with the host, unlike VMs which are isolated).

It’s super powerful compared to anything I’ve had before, but it’s also not very reliable. Why? I don’t know, but the NIC smells like realtek (Maybe future post?).

Other junk I have in a closet (apart from flags)

Apart from the main computers, I also have some crap that’s either not connected or not working.

• Laptop-server: Old celeron laptop with ubuntu server, I don’t have enough ethernet ports on the router for it, maybe if I see a use for it I’ll plug it in.
• Raspberry pi: 4b, with 2GB of RAM. Currently I don’t have a usb-c charger powerful enough, but I wanna get it working to be able to use rpi-connect, basically a free and convenient tunnel so that I can access my LAN ifwhen something breaks and I’m not at home.

What next

Now, what are my plans for the future?

First of all, I need to fix my network stuff. The proxmox server breaks when it feels like it and I don’t have enough ports for all my devices on the router. That’s fixed by figuring out what’s wrong with the server (in a future post) and buying a switch (maybe managed, so that I can break it in a fun way).

Next, come upgrades to my current servers. The proxmox server needs more RAM, maybe I’ll buy 8 more GB, maybe I’ll max it out with 64. We’ll see what can I fish out of fb marketplace. Also a cpu with more cores/threads would be nice (intel for some reason forgot hyperthreading on 8th gen).

Long term, it would be cool to rack everything and leave it looking pretty under my desk, but if eurorack taught me anything is that racks are expensive pieces of metal.

Well, that’s about it. Thanks for reading, and remember to apt update from time to time!