Self hosting isn’t likely to ever get to the point of “plug and play”. It’s inherently incredibly flexible and different people will do different things with it. Some people just want NAS. Some people want to build a router. Some people want to have a modest compute farm that they physically own. Some people want a virtualization playground. Or pretty much anything else you can think of, or some combination thereof.

For instance, I custom built a 2-tier + optane cached NAS running proxmox, and I have a handful of old thin clients I can spin up for doing Beowulf things when I feel like it, and I also have another repurposed thin client with an old enterprise-grade SFP+ NIC running pfSense as my router that can support up to 10g (futureproofing).

GSV, and thank you very much for noticing

Nothing, they’re just being an ass. Don’t worry about it.

No u

DAS enclosures are super easy to set up. Disk won’t be a big issue if you go that route.

If you’re planning on running containers, tbh I would not. The required virtualization layer (due to macOS being BSD-based) is going to make containers WAY less efficient. You’re better off with a system you can easily slap proxmox (or whatever distro floats your boat) on.

+1 - GL.iNet is cheap as hell and perfectly functional. It runs DD-WRT under the covers, and it’s super easy to “unlock” the full powers of the distro (literally a toggle in the basic ui, iirc). Used it on a longer trip my partner and I took a few months ago, and it was great! On-device storage is paltry, but, well, that’s not what it’s for.

Holy shit dude. You can take like a quarter of that and make an absolutely silly system, and make a decent chunk of change selling the rest.

Lmao dude thats simply not happening at that price.

You could get part of the way there with an old Dell server, but you’re probably gonna be paying closer to 2-300 for a decently spec’d one like you’re describing. You’re probably gonna be looking at a 10 year old twin quad core setup with a tdp of like 500W combined for JUST the cores. Your power bill is going to murder your budget, even if you somehow find a magical deal on the box.

I will be driving my 03 1.8t 5mt Jetta into the ground, thank you very much.

Ok, let’s say that’s true. Which of the alternatives do you genuinely think are better?

It is 100% a great idea to see how you feel about the concept of self-hosting with an old machine. If it’s really old (and I’m talking like anything from before about 2008-2010), perhaps consider snagging an old “tiny”/1L-class box from eBay for cheap. Dell, HP, and Lenovo units can be found for WAY under $100 all the time, and slightly more modern units can still be had at a reasonable price, depending on the model. They’re great platforms to play around with. Just shove a cheap SSD in there and play with it.

Source: an old m920q with an i5-8500T is running pfSense for my home network

As long as it’s not error or critical to touch, you should be good.

What temps were you seeing before adding the fan?

oh, you.

It’s also piped to sudo so that’s super cool too

Fair enough. There are no rules for homelab; do what you want!

Out of curiosity, are you running a repurposed 1L OEM box? I’ve picked up a handful of those for dirt cheap, and they’re kinda fun to play around with!

Huh, proxmox on a i3-4130? That doesn’t choke on cpu? TBF, I’m assuming you’re running several other VMs. Also, why not docker?