I’ve been running this gig since over 3 years, so thought why not write a blog that describes the setup and what it takes to build and operate one. Here is a glimpse of what the setup looks like
The home setup as you see is powered by 3 Lenovo Thinkcenter m9xx and m7xx series each hosting
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500TE CPU @ 2.30GHz 4 cores
- 2 TB SSD – 1 TB SATA SSD and 1 TB NVMe m2 ssd
- Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS x86_64 edition
- 64 GB DD4 Ram
Each of these cheap refurbished Lenovo Thinkcenter which are connected to unmanaged TP link switch via ethernet cables and one ethernet cable from the switch to the main router which connects to the internet.
In order for you to gain access to the internet, you need to buy a static IP from the ISP which is provided at a nominal charge. Once you have a static IP, you need to protect your internal network by putting them in a DMZ zone and open ports that you wish to access. For example, if you wish to open a web server, you need to port forward port 8080 or a port of your choice on the router.
I run microk8s on each of these servers, one of them master/control plane and other 2 as worker nodes where I run my personal website and other side projects.
Cooling and Power Backup
The servers are placed in a 15U server rack enclosure with 6 fans each running around the clock to prevent the devices from overheating.
The servers are connected to a united power supply/power backup which backups the servers upto 12 hours incase of a power failure.
Deployment
I use Ansible to manage server updates, deployments any configuration changes required on these servers. More on Ansible here.
Observability
All of these servers have site24x7 agents installed which stream golden metrics and provide me real time updates including health, cpu, memory, disk, thermal metrics, etc and alerts me if something goes wrong. For example, one of my server rebooted unexpectedly all of all sudden and site24x7 send me an immediate notification to my email,
Billing
My charges to run this setup costs about 1000 INR/ 11.99$ per month and one time setup cost was estimated around to 420$.
It’s so fun to have this mini setup at home so I could run and experiment my personal projects without having to worry about cloud cost. If you are interested to setup one or you already have one, feel free to share/comment or email me [email protected], we could have a discussion on how I can help you to setup one.
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