Proxmox VE on a machine that I got almost for free. Intel i3-4160, 10GB RAM, 240GB SSD for the OS, and a non-redundant 1T HDD for storage. The only things I paid for are a second NIC and an 8GB RAM stick.

PVE is running a pfSense VM, and a bunch of Debian containers:

• Samba
• Jellyfin (still setting it up)
• Twingate Connector

All internet traffic goes through the pfSense VM. Unfortunately the ISP has put me behind CGNAT and disabled bridge mode, so my internet-facing things (mostly Wireguard and SSH) are pretty much crippled. Right now my best no-cost option is to use Twingate, but I don’t trust it to handle anything other than SSH.

looks like this and runs NetBSD

Services:

• OpenSSH

Internet:

• 1G fiber

Router:

• N100 with dual 2.5G nics

Lab:

• 3x N100 mini PCs as k8s control plane+ceph mon/mds/mgr
• 4x Aoostar R7 “NAS” systems (5700u/32G ram/20T rust/2T sata SSD/4T nvme) as ceph OSDs/k8s workers

Network:

• Hodge podge of switches I shouldn’t trust nearly as much as I do
• 3x 8 port 2.5G switches (1 with poe for APs)
• 1x 24 port 1G switch
• 2x omada APs

Software:

• All the standard stuff for media archival purposes
• Ceph for storage (using some manual tiering in cephfs)
• K8s for container orchestration (deployed via k0sctl)
• A handful of cloud-hypervisor VMs
• Most of the lab managed by some tooling I’ve written in go
• Alpine Linux for everything

All under 120w power usage