I have never homelabbed, and this is going to be my first experience. I want to set up a home server. My current goals are to set up a gallery using Immich, an ad blocker/DNS using Pi-hole, and a cloud service.
I want you to suggest what second-hand PC or laptop I should get. I researched a bit and found out that a PC is better because of 24/7 reliability, better cooling, no risk of laptop battery swelling, easy RAM and storage expandability, and low idle power consumption.
What I think the specs should be for me is 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. And my budget is 10k INR.
I want to hear your thoughts. Thank you! :)
I like lenovo thinkcentres I have a 700 series and a 900 series. At the time, one was less than $100 and one was $150. I put another ~$80 for old ram and old SAS drives. They’re working great and I have what I consider to be huge storage. Things are different now, but used office computers are always going to be plentiful, the only limitation is how old you want to go. Good news is that Debian will practically run on anything and doing docker via SSH CLI isn’t hard, especially if you get Dockhand or Portainer(for now) running first. If you’re serving data, 256gb won’t get though.