I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
For someone completely new to self-hosting things, what is a good entry hardware setup look like? Or am I just keeping my daily PC on all the time?
Old PC that can be on all the time.
If you dont have one and want dedicated hardware, I would recommend a used server, or something you can whitebox (like using as asrock rack mobo that takes a desktop ryzen but supports ecc memory)
Put proxmox on as the host OS, two ssd’s in raid 1 is good for a boot drive / VM storage drive. Raid 10 if you want real high performance, but probably unneeded.
Look for a case that has a SAS backplane, and then connect the backplane to a HBA card. Pass this card through to freenas for storage shares and stuff.
I recommend not virtualizing your router. So, if you want togoet away from Soho gear, either flash a Soho router with openWRT, or build a separate box for pfsense or opnsense. If you go that route, you will need a separate switch / access point. Unifi gear has a good balance of features and affordability, and can all be managed from a single ui (let’s say you have 3 switches and 2 access points… You dont need to go to 5 web UI’s, its all in one spot - and you can self host the web ui in proxmox)
Most of these would run just fine on a Raspberry Pi.
Get one of them mini PCs that they attach to the backs of monitors at office desks or receptions or whatever. Something like a Lenovo m720q for reference, though there many other similar products from other companies. They can be had for pretty cheap on the used market where they are abundantly available, they’re very power efficient (obviously not as efficient as a pi but still pretty damn good), and they’re surprisingly powerful for how small they are. I’d actually recommend a machine like that over a raspberry pi. Pis are great when you want the smallest and most low power machine you can get, but at the end of the day it’s an ARM based machine with very limited IO. A regular ol’ x64 machine with bog standard sata and m.2 ports all inside a neat enclosure is also great.
Old laptop. Has a battery backup, is likely x86, you can always get easy local shell access, and they’re really cheap. You can get an old Dell laptop online for next to nothing if you don’t already have something lying around. But you or someone you know probably do have one lying around.
You can get yourself a 1L pc from Dell, Lenovo, or HP 8th gen or newer for pretty cheap. Great little work horses. You can find Dell Optiplexes on any second hand sites in your area really cheap too.
But in all reality, the old machine you already have is the best solution. If you got an old computer from an upgrade years ago, that’s great to play on
7th or 8th gen NUC with as much ram as you can stuff in it.