Is it worth it after that's all said and done?

I'd love to power gaming in my house from a central server, but I keep imagining that it would be spotty and frustrating as hell.

I've got 2 proxmox servers and I'd never have the courage to try that, seems hardcore as fuck

Holy shit you just described my setup to a T

I converted my gaming machine into a server a while back. I like to live dangerously though, no proxmox. Baremetal. If my blog is slow, sorry y'all, I'm gaming. Deal with it.

You seem to have similar setup
Though for gaming I still use it mostly "directly"
Sunshine only when Im bored on work laptop
The VM still outputs to same display and has keyboard/mouse/etc. passed

I've been happy with the setup for the last year and half or so

Ive been thinking about this for a while, but I imagined it could become hell on earth, thanks for the warning! It will keep the idea away from my head for another week or so

Isn't that what they're for?

An sqlite database is a perfectly fine portable data format.

Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.

I mean.. if you stick to standard SQL...

This is why my self created apps all use Markdown files instead if DBs.

You can get an PCIe HBA on ebay for $50-60 bucks and will allow you to connect 8 disks to a single system. Look for ones that specifically say they have been flashed to IT mode which will let the host system address the individual drives and enable you to use MDADM for RAID. My "Server" is literally just the old motherboard from my gaming PC with 4x 8TB drives connected to one of those ebay HBAs.

I bought a second hand Intel NUC and put a big harddrive in it (I think only.some models have a slot). Works pretty good.

To piggyback off of OR3X's comment, I purchased a LSI 9300-16I for my Plex server which will support 16 data/SAS drives with the 4 way cables. They make a 8I version as well that's cheaper. Power is still something you have to work out though, but that's a single PSU.

I purchased my unit on eBay for $53 a couple years back. I use unRAID to host everything and would recommend because it's fairly simple to setup, and works very well with mixed disks and parity. I've had 5+ old drives fail over the past few years and never lost any data.

For a lot of purposes, an old slow system is great. Craigslist (if you're in a country that has it, otherwise use your local equivalent) is a great place to find super cheap old equipment to build server infrastructure from. Thrift shops too, I regularly find old UPSs that just need a new lawnmower battery chucked in to work at my local thrift shop, they charge like $10 for em. Usually found near power strips.

Surprisingly those dual-ended USB-A + USB-C flash drives can be pretty decent, especially for stuff like this.

No lie, they're awesome. I've got two R720s, and they really aren't bad. I leave one off. The other runs 4-5 VMs and doesn't spin loud at all. Lack rack, surplus drives, a refurbed UPS and it just goes.

Had an R710 in my bedroom for a few years, do not recommend

131 containers seems crazy to me. How many actual services does that translate to? Is it actually closer to 50 services running in parallel on three different nodes for redundancy?

Me too but now I'm afraid

I’m also in stage 2 but getting closer to stage 3 😂

Same, been there for a decade.

I'm careful about what I want to host because I know I'm the asshole that needs to fix it when it breaks, and password managers that my wife uses are 100% off the self-hosted menu.

Vaultwarden requires Bitwarden to keep on allowing client access. Even if there are FOSS plugins/clients, I still need ot host it between my house and a cloud and it needs to be highly available.

I'll keep paying for that one.

I’m trying to figure out where to put my server, currently it’s on my desk. I want to avoid the garage because of exhaust/dirt/temperature swings. The understair closet is next to the shower, so humidity could be a concern, and also it’s a small awkward shaped space. I would prefer to set it up in the utility room, but there’s humidity and dust from the dryer and washer. Maybe I’m just being too precious though

Tried that for a while. The battery turned into a spicy pillow and nearly broke the keyboard from how much it puffed out.

If you do that, make sure the laptop has a feature to keep the battery from charging to 100% at all times. UPSs with lead acid batteries handle sitting at 100% much better.

Just wait till stage 4 - I've got a 12u server rack, separate 6u networking cabinet, 80+ containers running on multiple VMs managed by multiple Proxmox nodes and all my infrastructure is transitioning to OpenTofu and OpenBao so I can spin up new VMs, manage the containers with Komodo, etc and all managed with single sign on. I've got ~$12k sunk into my local AI server alone. I have like 2 active users besides myself...

The difference between 2nd and 3rd is about 24h

One encrypted backup to the cloud or trade space with a friend.

rsync.net, borg, rclone.

Or get an s3 bucket on AWS, linode, digital ocean and dump things there.

My solution is to have a mini PC in a remote location which boots at a given time each day (BIOS option using RTC Clock). It autoconnects via Wireguard VPN to my home network. I have rest-server running in a container.

Locally, I have a cron job for restic backups to the remote rest-server, followed by an ssh command to update and power off.

Has been solid so far!

Gift a NAS to one of your friends or someone in your family who lives in a very secure location and has very good internet.

Except tell them that the condition for you giving then a few TB on your hardware is that you sync your NAS to their NAS daily

Aim for step 2.5 and be the middle guy but hosting it all on a retired PC in the closet. It's almost like step 3.

Alternatively, I guess you could use a VPS but those can get expensive quick.

I use podman + quadlets (just contianers hooked into sysremmd) maintained mostly via hermes and claude so I don't have to fuck around with nerd shit at home and trouble shoot.

Will any of your family members leave beta?