Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3
You don’t need much to self host and don’t let people online gatekeep or exclude you or intimidate you with complex racks. An old PC repurposed to a home server gets you started and is enough for a lot of stuff. You can always expand as needed in the future.
Here’s my setup:
Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don’t need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I’ll just replace it when I get to that point.
Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc). I’m building a new machine and have yet to decide if I want to replace the server or use that as a gaming machine, but the has a Core 5 Ultra 125H processor and LPDDR5 RAM and is super power efficient and silent.
Docker containers:
actual (budgeting)
affine (note taking)
bentopdf (PDF editing)
beszel (server status monitoring)
dockge (Docker management)
guacamole (server remote desktop access)
immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)
jellyfin (video and music server)
jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)
kavita (comic books and ebooks)
kopia (backups)
floccus (bookmark backup and sync across browsers)
mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
papra (document scanning and OCR)
opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)
watchtower (automatic docker updates)
Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.
Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.
This is pretty much the same setup I have. 2 bay Synology NAS for storage, mini PC (8gb ram, currently at 48% usage) for applications. Also added an external SSD that I had kicking around.
I’m running:
And then using Synology packages for Drive and Photos.