my home server that does everything died many weeks ago so i’ve been making due with VASTLY inferior backups that literally haven’t received updates in over a decade because the manufacturers stop supported them.
i’ve rebuilt this server many times from old e-waste i had laying around and my last attempt to solicit feedback on the last rebuild yeilded some VERY useful advice so i’m hoping to lightening strikes twice.
my constraints are that i can only use hardware that i have on hand; with the exception of a motherboard since i don’t have a functional one this time around, so i plan on buying one used off of craigslist or one of the many local repair shops.
also: deepseek tells me that this hardware are the only things i have on hand that are compatible with each other (and i’m crossing my fingers in the hopes that some of them still work):
- CPU: socket LGA1200 era Intel Celeron
- RAM: 64 gigs DDR4 3200 on 2 128 pin sticks
- CASE: mini itx steel case
- POWER: ATX standard
- DRIVES: 4 SATA, 1 PATA, 2 NVME
i also have a wifi3 router/ap and a wifi4 router/ap combo boxes; these are the backups i’m currently using and they are crazy slow.
i need this build to do the same thing its predecessor did which were (ranked in order of importance):
- router (i used a pfsense virtual machine last time)
- wifi access point (i last used a wifi nic in AP mode)
- DNS adblocking (i used pfBlockerNG last time)
- live kernel patching (used ubuntu last time)
- vlan segmentation (via pfsense)
- vpn routing (via pfsense)
- jbod drives (aka no raid nor HA and permanently mounted on the host)
- backup capabilities (last used rsync initiated server side to laptops & - gmail)
- per device firewall rules (for the robot vacuum and security cameras)
- IDS & IPS (via pfsense)
- home cloud storage (last used pfsense + nfs + sshfs + ddns)
- multimedia system (last used kodi + old plasma tv)
Sorry it took a little while to get back to you, I wasn’t in the workshop till today.
Just powered it up and did a quick memtest and pi, the case has three 5.25 bays, eight 3.5, the motherboard has eight sata ports and has a i7 3770 cooled using an aio with 16gb of total ram in four slots.
The front bezel of the case is missing. For a server the front bezel shouldn’t matter too much, nothing is exposed in an unsafe way, just a metal grate instead of plastic transformer face.
I use the little brother of this configuration, with half the cores and a slower clock, as my primary nas/jellyfin/rtorrent server/arr stack/many other tasks and it handles 150+ tb of disks (using an hba and expander) and transcoding 1080 content no problem. I wanted to do 4k I’d add a surplus workstation gpu to transcoding.
I’d like to not get completely destroyed on shipping, so lmk your zip (or some other way of talking if you don’t wanna give that out here) and I’ll see how bad it is.
E: I just wanna say, you’re probably best served by thrifting a recent wireless router that’s supported by freshtomato, openwrt or pfsense and doing your network stuff on that.