Last year, as a result of a small windfall, and my beloved iMac finally falling apart, I decided to build myself a large PC, not just physically large, but large enough that I probably won't ever need to do much in the way of upgrading... I knew it would be stupidly expensive, and I knew I would probably only scratch the surface of it's capabilities, BUT, I had come into some money, I had nothing else to spend it on..and I damn well wanted it

I had a chat with my resident computer friend, Matthew who sketched out a few scenarios, and in the end I ended up with the bits to build a monster.. I won't bore you with the details, but

24 Core CPU (AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900X3D × 24)

192 Gig of RAM

68 TB of Spinny Disk

4 TB of SSD

NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 5080

So stupidly over specc'ed

It runs Ubuntu LTS and the disks are ZFS arrayed to provide some redundancy.

Ok so far so dull, but one of the first bits of kit installed on this monster was Qemu which allows virtual machines to be installed, configured and run with remarkable ease. This was key, because as part of the deal to get this, the SLM, had specified that no more computer hardware was permissible, thus my 4 upcycled Dell Optiums had to go. They had been running a variety of home servers (More of which later) but the idea of virtualising them seemed too good to miss..everything in one place, and if an upgrade goes west..simply drag back one of the VM images I had backed up previously

So what services do you host, and how did they work for you?

I'll expand this as I add extra services or decide to drop services.. so it will be a dynamic list (Well, not that dynamic)

The first service installed as a VM was

VaultWarden

GitHub - dani-garcia/vaultwarden: Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust, formerly known as bitwarden_rs

Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust, formerly known as bitwarden_rs - dani-garcia/vaultwarden

GitHubdani-garcia

VaultWarden is an unofficial server compatible with Bitwarden, and allows you to use the official Bitwarden clients & Desktop widgets, It's a password manager that puts security & simplicity at it's heart, and because it's self hosted, it is yours and yours alone. Password management is the internet's biggest problem, this goes a good way to solving the problem. Available as a docker, it's pretty easy to set up... This is a great first project

Nextcloud

Nextcloud - Open source content collaboration platform

The most popular open source content collaboration platform for tens of millions of users at thousands of organizations across the globe

Nextcloud

The Thing about Nextcloud is that it replaces so many of your commercial and out-hosted services, Dropbox or Google drive for file storage, but also Google docs as you can work on any of your stored files with nothing more than a standard web-browser

Sickgear

GitHub - SickGear/SickGear: SickGear has proven the most reliable stable TV fork of the great Sick-Beard to fully automate TV enjoyment with innovation.

SickGear has proven the most reliable stable TV fork of the great Sick-Beard to fully automate TV enjoyment with innovation. - SickGear/SickGear

GitHubSickGear

This is (IMHO) the best TV PVR system, it's ability to search and find upcoming TV series you might otherwise miss is truly exceptional. It maybe doesn't have the slick integration of Sonaar, but I think it's a nice, lightweight and smart bit of kit

Paperless-NGX

Paperless-ngx

logo

Now you might be wondering what use this is, well, on a day to day basis, I'm not sure, but since I have been sorting out a family legal thing, and EVERYTHING in Scots law is on paper, then a searchable digitised system that allows me to link to the physical file I have assigned the paper too, has repaid the time spent in setup and actually scanning many times over. It's a clever bit of kit that reads your document, so you can do quite fuzzy searches, and also links seamlessly with Nextcloud, so you have safety copies available

Docker & Portainer

Kubernetes, Docker and Podman Container Management Platform

Portainer is your enterprise container management platform to deploy, troubleshoot, and secure Kubernetes, Docker and Podman environments across Enterprise IT, and Industrial and IoT use cases.

Neil Cresswell,Portainer CEO

Docker: Accelerated Container Application Development

Docker is a platform designed to help developers build, share, and run container applications. We handle the tedious setup, so you can focus on the code.

DockerSimeon Ratliff

Docker is a brilliant way of containerising Linux apps, allowing easy control, and simplifying their management. Most of the services I run are dockerised in one way or another. Portainer simplifies the management of docker. To be quite honest, using a Gui is probably not the way forward, but it does allow you to develop skills, and confidence. Why spend ages in the guts of a MySQL database when this neatly set up container can be used?

Mealie

GitHub - mealie-recipes/mealie: Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend application built in Vue for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recipes into your database by providing the url and mealie will automatically import the relevant data or add a family recipe with the UI editor

Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend application built in Vue for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recip…

GitHubmealie-recipes

Mealie is a great app, It allows you to nick other peoples recipes and build your own cook book...Highlight a URL of a recipe on loads of websites, import it and then you can display it on your phone, iPad or Laptop in the kitchen while your cooking... Simple, wonderful genius. Add in the ability to generate shopping lists, and this seems like a powerful bit of kit that I have hardly scratched the surface of

Ghost

Ghost is the software that allows me to write this blog, Its self hosted so avoids the hosting costs, and thus the monetisation bowl is not out, yet! I am curious to see what the costs work out to be..But at the moment the self hosted route seems best fit for me

Introduction - Ghost Developer Docs

Ghost is an open source, professional publishing platform built on a modern Node.js technology stack — designed for teams who need power, flexibility and performance.

Ghost Developer Docs

If you have any comments, happy to hear them, and I will attempt to update as things change