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Goodbye Google - I self-host everything now on 4 tiny PCs in a 3D printed rack (CaptainRedsLab) (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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[–] 73 points 8 months ago (11 children)

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.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    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!

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Having a GPU is nice if you start letting other people access your Jellyfin server; transcoding 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!

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    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).

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    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.

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    [–] 25 points 8 months ago (1 child)

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

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    [–] 37 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [+] [S] 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    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.

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    • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (1 child)

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

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    [–] 27 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    A bit ironic to post this on YouTube 😅

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    • [–] [B] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
    NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV)
    Plex Brand of media server package
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
    VPN Virtual Private Network

    9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

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

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    [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    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...

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    • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    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

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    [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I'll do it for $1000 and less wattage

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    [–] 1 point 8 months ago

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

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