A couple of weeks ago I spat the dummy with windows and shifted to Linux. I think I am now ready to drink the coolaid.

What I have available currently is an ISP router and a decade-old gaming PC with a failing hdd that used to host games. I also have some budget to spare so that I can set things up nicely or in a way that I can add on it in the future.

Here are my goals are in order:

  1. Proper onsite and maybe offsite backups - my migration to Linux illustrated gaps and I expect in the future I will run VMs that should be backed up
  2. Home security cameras (Which I don’t own yet)
  3. Replacing something like onedrive. I expect this will be NextCloud
  4. Yarr. Sonarr/radarr/jellyfin
  5. Hosting game servers
  6. Block adverts and maintaining privacy
  7. Improve the latency of my steam link to my TV via chromecast
  8. Hosting webscraping and analysis of data off some local websites
  9. Maybe set up some some smart home automation things
  10. I’d like to get solar power and monitor how the whole setup is doing.
  11. Self host my bit warden
  12. I dunno, backup Wikipedia or something. Give me ideas

So where would you recommend I start off with hardware? Simply replace the old pc hdd or look to having a NAS? A better router to handle VLAN? Go all in with Ubiquiti products which I have heard mixed things about? About the only thing I know is that a UPS would be a waste for an aspiring enthusiast like myself.

Any advice or pointing me at wikis or other resources would be greatly appreciated.

  • ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    I would get some cheap maybe even used X86 hardware to start with. Depending on your backup needs, you might need more than one M2 or SATA port. If you plan to use it as an always on device, I would keep the power consumption in mind. A celeron N could be the way. The cpu processing power is, in my experience, not the limiting factor for a self-hosted environment. Give it lots of RAM, every virtual machine and every running service needs space.

    Using arm, like a Raspberry Pi, is not bad if you can find all your Docker images and binaries, compiled for this platform. I went away from it.

    There are many possible distributions and software you could use, it really depends on personal preference.