How did I get into this hobby?
I have been interested in technology since I was a kid. When I got my first computer, there wasn’t anyone in my household to guide me. So, like a typical kid, I learned by experimenting.
After the first Raspberry Pi the second, and thereafter the third joined. Services I used at this time were Pi-hole (adblocker via DNS), Home Assistant (home automation), and SMB. As I began to see some limitations of the raspberry’s ARM architecture the services I wanted to use, for example TeamSpeak 3 at the time was not available as an ARM application. I switched to a ‘real’ server: an HP Microserver Gen 8 😂
I first installed FreeNAS (nowadays called TrueNAS) onto this little appliance. The available community apps introduced me to microservices that ran in FreeBSD jails. Later, I installed Unraid on it to have even more options for quickly trying out services run via Docker. Skipping some further iterations, these days, I’m running all these fun little services on something I built completely myself.
What are the specs?
- Ryzen 5 2600X
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
- 2x 4 TB HDD and 2x 250 GB SSD
- 4 Port Ethernet PCI-E Card
- Fractal Design Define R5
What is it running?
General
- Proxmox (Hypervisor)
- OPNsense — Firewall and for PPPoE to connect with the ISP (using Telekom fibre)
- Debian 1 — Just for an SMB share
- Debian 2 — Docker host
- Debian 3 — Whenever I need a VM with a GUI, for example to run some Python scripts using browser automation via Selenium
- Ubuntu — Coolify as a self-hosted platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for a POC
Docker
- AdGuard Home — Ad-blocking via DNS
- ArchiSteamFarm — To get steam trading cards of games I won’t play
- Authelia — Identity provider (IDP) for single sign-on (SSO), but I still need to implement this someday
- Borgmatic — To back up the SMB share to Hetzner’s cloud storage
- Caddy — Reverse proxy and Let’s encrypt certificates for HTTPS (even for local-only services)
- Changedetection — Notification for changes on specific websites
- DDclient — Update DNS entries whenever my IP address changes
- Filebrowser — Web-interface to access the SMB share (not so happy with it, will probably change it)
- Ghostfolio — Portfolio tracker, mostly so I keep be motivated to save money as an ETF for retirement
- Gitea — Git repository / version control
- Home Assistant — Home automation platform
- IT-Tools — Web-interface with some handy utilities for developers
- Mumble — Voice server similar to TeamSpeak
- Paperless NGX — Document management system to transfer paper documents to digital ones (still need to do this someday when I’m especially bored)
- PDF Stirling — Web-interface to perform various PDF manipulations
- Portainer — Web-interface for seamlessly managing the containers
- Pure FTPD — To offer an FTP service to my scanner
- Syncthing — File synchronization from client to server
What will be my setup in the future?
I’m thinking about moving the services to the cloud. However, since I use the system as a firewall and for internet access, I would like to replace it with a more power-efficient option. For example, I’m considering a small Opnsense firewall appliance with an Intel N150 CPU.
I’ll keep you updated on my decision.