I started with a Pentium 1 200mhz with 8MB RAM, running Apache along with PHP4 and Debian Woody. Wrote my own blog on that machine.
Started running more and more services on it, e.g. IRC server, file server, print server, DNS server. Later on, I upgraded my deskop and turned my old AMD K6 300 into my router.
Wish I had blogged about the things I had done on the blog that I wrote back then.
What year it was?
2001 i think
Hah, pretty much the same for me. Pentium 200 MHz but with 48MB RAM, Debian 2.2 „Potato“ but upgraded to Woody soon. LAMP, FTP, Samba. Hosted my own website and a friend’s PHP project, some sort of newsletter management software iirc. Another Pentium machine got repurposed into a router running off a single floppy disk with the fli4l project. No disk drive, fanless, yet rock stable. I still have a screenshot of it reaching 1y uptime. This stuff really got me into IT. Good times.
Proxmox, TrueNAS, and Pi-Hole. Looking into spinning up an AD/Windows Server environment on my Proxmox for the exp currently.
I started with unifying my zigbee devices so that I would need only one dongle, using zigbee2mqtt. Very quickly came home assistant and node red (node red being the brain for everything, home assistant being mostly the UI and sensor/device-exposer. I can recommend customizing the home assistant dashboard to make it look and feel better.
It started with a laptop with a broken screen (a Compaq Armada something).
It was my work laptop and instead of throwing it on the scrapheap I adopted it and took it home.
It was trash for my Company. For me it was:
* A small NAS (one harddrive and one cdrom)
* A UPS for that NAS (laptop battery)
* A printer server (It had a LPT port)
* A router (US Robotics Courier modem on the serial port)
I was truly sad when its motherboard failed a number of years later.
The favorite is not in the homelab but my workstation. Built on a HFX mini chassis with a Ryzen 3600 and a 1650 graphics card - zero moving parts and zero noise. You have to look at the power led to know if its on
I got started cause I stumbled across this sub and thought, ohh that looks like fun, and my therapist told me I needed a hobby other than trolling people on Reddit.
I guess the thing I use most is Navidrome since it allows me to have tons of music with me where ever I go, and save 14 bucks a month on Youtube music.
Seems I spend a lot of time setting stuff up and it not working or deciding I want to do it another way, wiping everything and starting over.
Like most people I feel like my Lab got started from what should have been E waste and the previous owner had already determined that. Overall I continue to like my Unraid server because I keep adding disks and recently got a parity drive set up and It is shaping up nicely. Currently working on setting up a picture backup service for my family’s apple devices.