150$ is rather ambitious for what you are describing as a custom made low power server. Managing to build something… Anything commercial out of new, hell even refurbished parts that has enough horse power to run anything more than a pihole/DNS server at this price point would be a challenge and a half. If you’re going refurbished/2nd hand, you’re likely gonna spend half of that on just shipping the parts to you.

I believe you are vastly underestimating the price of new low end parts and vastly overestimating the capabilities and availability of old micro servers. I’d say something like this would work at a price range of around 300~400$ (and even that’s ambitious imo).

And even then, that’s a NICHE audience you’d be targeting. It would be people who don’t wanna pay subscriptions, but also don’t wanna be bothered to spend a day or 2 figuring out how to set up a simple linux box on an old computer they have. I’m not saying that audience doesn’t exist, it’s just veeeeery niche.

Benefits:

• Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for piracy storing all my legally obtained files.

• Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.

• Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.

• Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.

As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.

SMB sucks, try NFS.

Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.

Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.

The main things for me are: Wireguard, NextCloud and an NFS/SMB share and a torrent client (Deluge)

I feel like you have the wrong idea of what hacking acting a actually is… But yes, as long as you don’t do anything too stupid line forwarding all of your ports or going without any sort of firewall, the chances of you getting hacked are very low…

As for DDOSing, you can get DDOSed with or without self hosting all the same, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

Check out this video

It goes over all of the steps of setting it up.

GPU passthrough has been pretty good for a while. The reason why Linus couldn’t get it working reliably was because iirc, he tried to do it on windows… I’ve done it before with a single gpu and have very recently set it up again, now that I have a 2nd one and gotta say, it’s pretty damn good…

For my main server only… If HP iLO is to be believed, averaging around 130W.

Running: deluge, homarr, jellyfin, lidarr, navidrome, nextcloud, prowlarr, sonarr, whoogle and a minecraft server (VM) on TrueNAS Scale.

As for everything else (my router, switch and DNS/DHCP server, which is a separate machine, you can add another maybe 50W on top of it…

Can’t you just bridge the 2 NICs?

I’ve been running TrueNAS scale for a while and my only issue with it has been having to create a virtual bridge so that my VMs can ping the host and vice versa, been a pretty smooth experience other than that. As for the performance overhead… my replacement server is VERY beefy, compared to my old one so I couldn’t care less lol.

laughs in truenas

My situation with data backup is… well I have none, nor can i really afford to invest into more hardware at the moment. I am running RAIDz1, on my NAS so that gives me a small amount of protection in case a drive in it does go bad ig.

That is one of the things I’ve thought of doing with it, like a dedicated game streaming machine. It’s got gigabit LAN and a dedicated, even if not latest gen GPU, so yn

That is a neat idea, however I don’t really have a “media center” or a TV for that matter, as I always just watch stuff on my PC… That and I am not the type of person who’s gonna go buying movies on disc… I just pirate that sh!t

No, as it’s just my main desktop, my laptop and an isolated PiHole VM

Mine’s pretty simple, I have a “don’t open ports until ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” policy, wireguard works well enough for everything else I need to access remotely. I also keep SSH disabled on any machine that has direct access to the internet.

+1

VSCode… No, that’s literally it. You can self host code-server.

I’d try opening a nfs share along side the smb one. It’s much better supported on linux.

I don’t selfhost very much compared to other people and my hardware’s pretty much either all literally found in the garbage or 2nd hand, but here it is

PiHole

WireGuard server that passes trough pihole adblocking

Homarr (lol)

Deluge

The system is mostly a NAS that I also run the occasinal general purpose VM off of, here are the specs for the 3 ppl that care:

CPU: AMD FX-8320E

RAM: 16GB

Storage: 5x2TB Seagate something something 7200RPM in RAIDz1, 128 GB random chinese SSD (mostly for VMs and apps) the, OS runs off of a flash drive

OS: TrueNAS scale

My whole “homelab” is made of either things I literally found in the trash, hand-me downs and 2nd part stuff I got for extremely cheap. It’s no speed deamon, but it’s got 8cores, 16GB ram and gigabit… What I’m trying to say is, that is most likely also an option for you and there is no reason to buy the latest and greatest of hardware for running simple things like pi-hole. As for the electricity bill, unless you’re running something computationally intensive 24/7 or just a ton of hard drives, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I got that I need to do something like that but… I have no idea how, I’m very new to TrueNAS

All my disks are 2TB so it shouldn’t be a massive issue

I’ve mentioned it in another reply, but read/write speed isn’t terribly important to me, as the whole thing is gonna be bottlenecked by a 1GBPs connection anyways. From what I read from the other replies and online, RAIDz1 sounds like the thing I’m gonna go with, as it seems robust enough and my NAS is powerful enough for the performance hit to not really matter…