Home

Just came across this post on Reddit (yetch, I feel sullied and unusual) and am sharing it because…god damn…that’s the endgame right here -

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rmfwoa/goodbye_google_i_selfhost_everything_now_on_4/

If you’re on here CaptainRedsLab, that’s an amazing rig.

Nb: I am not the creator of this project, I have no affiliation with them and I cannot answer any questions based on their build. I just think it’s cool as a shit and am sharing. YMMV

A bit ironic to post this on YouTube 😅

But also kinda punk. Promoting de-googling on googles own platform.

You don’t need an amazing rig to do this. Don’t get fooled by the content creators with their sponsored content. Learn and buy only after researching what you need. Build for your own needs not to some crazy spec someone on the YouTube tells you need. A simple old pc with right software and working backup solution is all you really need. Just learn how to make it work safely.

100%.The strongest PC in my homelab right now is my old gaming PC featuring an i7-4790k, 16gb RAM, and sometimes it has a GTX 680 and others a 730 (neither right now though, for Reasons). 2nd place goes to a dual-core, 4-thread laptop from 2012 with hinges so broken I have to lean the screen back against the wall behind it. And before I retired that old gaming PC last year, that laptop ran my personal Jellyfin server for well over a year with no major issues!

Yep just use what you’ve got! I’m running my server off a little workstation I got for free from work. I’m working on setting up another server for my sister on one of her old laptops then we’ll use each other’s as off-site backups and for redundancy. Work with your friends and family to get them off big tech too! Pretty much everyone has some old system sitting around that could be brought back to life and act as a server.

I love the fact that your example of a “small-ish” homelab is way more overpowered than mine. Because my entire 40+ containers homelab runs off of a 13 yo NUC with a 10+ yo HDD and a (new!) SSD plugged into it. I regularly want to replace it by a more recent NUC but… there is not good reason, yet.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Also, I agree with phant. It’s punk as fuck.

Of course. I posted this for inspiration, because he walks it through step by step. As for crazy spec…well…you tell me

• 12U KWS Rack V2 (3D printed — designed by Ilan Kushnir) • Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Cluster (3x nodes running Proxmox) • Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q running pfSense (router/firewall) • Terramaster D5-310 HDD Enclosure (12TB + 18TB + NVMe SSDs) • 10-Port 2.5G/10G Ethernet Switch • Google Coral USB Accelerator (AI inference)

Probably only the 4th one down is the exxy one…and someone one should tell him the Coral USB accelerator is for Vision not inference (IIRC).

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #166 for this comm, first seen 15th Mar 2026, 12:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

also funk as puck

Awesome stuff but here I am with my single mini PC that has Jellyfin and Immich wondering why I would need such a big setup.

At some point I realized that the more complex I make it, the more resources it needs and the more maintenance it needs so I only get things I think I really need.

“Why did you climb Mt Everest?”

“Because it was there”

• George Mallory

But also

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - some dude named after a Ninja turtle

Can’t even watch it with my always on VPN.

Right, I run almost the same stack as this guy, but on a dumpster dive office PC turned into my NAS, and three used, micro form factor pc’s I picked up for 60 bucks. My most expensive thing is the hot swap silverstone case for the refurb 4 and 10tb hdds.

Also, why pfsense when opnsense exists (j/k, just my preference).

That first rig is the exact specs I have for building my first self hosting set up (with a GTX 970 or radeon r9 290x if I need a GPU, but I have yet to learn of a reason I would), so that’s good to know I’m starting out at a good level.

Its an interesting build and cool, but this seems overpowered and overspecced to me?

From his reddit post he’s hosting: Immich, Nextcloud (file sync across all devices), Frigate NVR (Coral AI detection + Home Assistant integration), Plex (with full *arr stack), pfSense (firewall, DNS, DHCP, WireGuard VPN, ntopng monitoring), Vaultwarden and Pfblocker. He says on the Youtube video: Plex, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Immich, Nextcloud, Frigate, and more.

Does this really needs 4 Lenovo PCs (1 used as the router) to run all this? Maybe he has multiple users and is going hard on the Immich and the security camera set up (including video processing?). Even then I just can’t see how this would make full use of all this hardware?

AI bro content creator shows off his AI setup without getting pummelled for promoting AI.

To me it’s separating services, which I’m getting ready to do. I’ve got 40-50 containers running at any time on my Unraid server, and I’ve been meaning to migrate some of those stacks to their own dedicated machines, mainly for downtime/maintenance on my main server.

Now I’m not going to go out and buy several PCs just for that, but I do have some old unused laptops that would love having Linux thrown on them…

Good demonstration project though.

Thanks for linking to an archive of a Reddit post. Fuck Reddit.

I’m with you. I don’[ NEED a 5-node VM cluster on top of all the other crap.

But I wanted a 5-node VM cluster.

Having a GPU is nice if you start letting other people access your Jellyfin server; encoding for some video files can be tough on the CPU, and if it’s trying to do more than one at a time, stuff can get laggy. But unfortunately, trying to get my ancient GPUs to do anything has been a nightmare! Besides the architecture itself being old, it seemed as though Nvidia deprecated some of the features I needed on the official drivers, and the Nouveau docs have been a headache to sort through. I think, maybe, probably, it’s technically possible, but I’m burned out on messing with it at the moment.

That 970 might be recent enough to work with a little less hassle though!

I went to a tech convention and a rancher dev had a demo backpack with a 5 node kubernetes cluster and I really wanted it. Just to have fun in a weird nerd sense.

$3700? So he just bought a 4GB DDR5 stick?

This solution might be too hard for all people, but damn this is a step in the right direction, I wish there were a thousand options we could choose from instead of just google

I guess he includes the >40TB NAS.

Here I am, with my Raspberry Pi 2B and a few Orange Pi Zeros. Plus one Intel Atom 230 (an obsolete thing from circa 2010s if not older, it has DDR2 memory) as a file server. Most of my servers are at Intel Atoms old motherboards with these integrated processors. They are decent for what I do.

For the rebellion!

I couldn’t even get immich to work properly :(

I need to spend another weekend starting from scratch but network protocol just completely evades me.

Oh I am right there with you, beratna

https://lemmy.world/post/41398418/21528414

2 x 2GB. Bargain, really.

stern nods

We just became blood brothers. R’amen.

I run a lot of services on a single old NUC I got for less than 100 dollars. I added some RAM (back then when you could buy some) and a new NVMe stick later when, but since then this single machine could handle all I asked it to do.

I also appreciate that

If you know someone in IT, it’s worth asking them what their company does with old computers. At my last place, we sent off old PCs to recyclers, old often only being 3 years or so. Most of them were basic i5s with 16GB of RAM, but they were more than powerful enough for a good docker host. I’ve got small stack of them that I rescued from the recycle pile.

Not to mention the laptops that went to the recyclers. Of course, many of you might think that is wasteful, but the recyclers were refurbishing them and reselling. We got them off our hands for free, and they got to make a few bucks off them.

I’ll do it for $1000 and less wattage