I hope this counts! 🙂
I don't have a home lab or any hardware yet, but I've been researching the topic over the last few weeks.
I have a Synology 2 bay NAS (DS220j) rocking a Realtek RTD1296 (1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A53) - it was only when I tried to put docker on it, I realised how underpowered it was. I tried running Plex but it was impossible.
I'd love some real hardware so I can run Jellyfin, and de-Google my life with a mixture of TrueNAS, Nextcloud and Proton Mail.
I had no idea home lab was a thing until recently and I'm already hooked. I've built my own PCs in the past, so I like tinkering with hardware, but I gave away all my old hardware before a house-move recently so I don't have anything at the moment.
Thanks for the channel, your videos are really helping me to put my thoughts together and understand what is possible with a home server.
My eyes have been opened 😊
Regards,
James
p.s. I'm not in the US but have family in Boston.
Not long after posting this I found myself a Dell T420 locally. I don't think this thing had been updated since it was deployed so my fist few days were just me hitting wall after wall trying to update the lifecycle controller and BIOS without the luxury of an iDRAC license. I finally gave up and bought a license from a seller on Ebay (sketchy but worked) and then no troubles getting the rest of the updates done. It only came with 32Gb or ram so I went back to Ebay for a 96Gb upgrade (glad DDR3 is still reasonable). Finally I also found an lot of 10 2TB SAS drives and and filled out the rest of the bays running everything in RAID-10. I've been playing all weekend with this thing and loving it. No real comparison to a desktop PC.
So far I've spun up Proxmox with vms for Technitium, casaos (with Crafty Controller) to run a Minecraft server and am just now finishing up a Jellyfin install. Next up will be Cisco CML and then....who knows.
