Mine is definitely a hobby… possibly a borderline addiction. I am an IT person by day and then selfhost a bit at home. Most of my equipment is good old eBay specials (R720xd, R610), or just accumulated over the years (a few HP Microservers, RAID enclosures, etc).

The uptime is decent but my ISP isn’t great, plus one of the servers has been having issues so until I find a few hours to focus on it, it is not something I would consider “acting like a paid IT”.

Not to make myself sound like a bad IT person, but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down. One day I’ll cluster some lower power proxmox systems with portainer and ensure everything important has a way to fail over and backed up offsite (no, I’ll probably just take a nap if I get a free afternoon lol).

Sometimes people in these communities don’t realize how they come off, tone is hard over text, and I’m just as bad in person (thankfully I work remote most days).

Late to the party and after reading through some of these setups I may have to expand mine soon (it never ends does it?), here is what I have right now.

Unraid (Dell R720XD, dual Xeon E5-2670 v2, 64GB RAM, 12 x 6TB in 12 disk array with 2 parity disks, 800GB SSD cache pool)

-NextCloud

-Plex

-Emby

-Gitea

-Backrest

-MariaDB

-Netbootxyz

-Trillium

-Traccar

-Vaultwarden

-Adguard-Home

-Unifi

-Homebox

-Nessus

-Headscale

-Collabora

-*arrs

-Jupterlab

-Mealie

-SearXNG

-IT-Tools

-EmulatorJS

-Youtube-DL-Material

Proxmox (old Intel server S2600WT2, dual Xeon E5-2620 V2, 768GB RAM, 5 x 2TB disks):

-Zap2XML

-Immich

-Mumble

-NextPVR

-Stirling-PDF

-WebTop

-Frigate

-MCServer (gameserver)

-SDTDServer (gameserver)

-SFServer (gameserver)

There are some other things floating around in my homelab that aren’t really ‘selfhosted’ things, just important to the home network:

3 HP Microserver Gen8’s

-x1 with ESXi hosting pfSense

-x2 with TrueNas Scale for backups

R610 with ESXi for a few remote desktops and Home Assistant (which I’m sure I’ll move to docker at some point).

I’m still using my PRS-505 I bought in 2009, it’s amazing and l don’t think I’ll ever give it up.

Hell yeah LMDE

Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don’t like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

… on a proxmox host in another room.

That’s a really awesome idea. If I ever need an actual Windows install I’m totally going that route!

Or, you set your steam account up as a company. Still a “person” for legal purposes, but can be handed down.

Totally just joking, but maybe…

Silly to even mention it but… Early game consoles could be used wirelessly depending on how good of an antenna you had and if you were willing to ignore silly FCC rules regarding transmission power. As they literally broadcast a standard frequency (for channel 3 or 4 depending on your switch position), it could pick it up OTA.

Just to add; prior to the coax we had two screws into the back of the TV for an antenna. You would attach a pigtail to that, which would give you a single coax connection. VCRs were game changers because most of the ones I saw had built in tuners so the more tech savvy could hook those up to the antenna and TV, then use the VCR remote to change channels without getting up (volume was another story). A lot of VCRs also had a power outlet on the back so you could plug your TV into it and be able to use the remote to turn the TV on too.

Man old tech was great.

My title has changed so many times, Sysadmin is so much easier and to the point.

That looks awesome man! Congrats!

I used to frequent a thrift shop that gave books away for free, I saw a copy of Cloud Atlas and thought it would be a good read (it was). I accidentally for the dust cover a little then looked at the title page, signed first edition. Not worth much, but cool nonetheless.

Personal opinion, but it should show a single state and if it is active.

Don’t give up too easily friend. I’ve been slowly moving some of my hone systems away from Window’s, and much like you, I’ve spent close to 20 years as a Windows admin. I have the advantage of using Linux on my always ancient laptops over the years and it is my personal opinion that Debian is the way to go.

Give LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) a go, it is very familiar to navigate coming from Windows and isn’t going to have constant updates breaking stuff (looking at you Arch).

First thing after installing run apt-get update, then add the Nvidia drivers (add the source to your sources and install, if you need help, post back and we’ve got you!) and reboot.

My goal is to move to nice IP cams one day but for now I have analog cameras and a DVR in the closet hooked to a cheap monitor that’s paid for.

Try the app IPCamViewer by Robert Chou (here is a link to the lite version, I think there is an iOS one as well https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcreations.ipcamviewer). It can view damn near any brand DVR, that at least let me view stuff remotely.

If you want to up it another level, if your old school DVR supports RTSP, you can probably feed that into something like Frigate for real time alerts and object detection.