Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3


There’s not much of it on lemmy yet, but smaller racks (10") have become popular in homelabs for some years now. Many people print encasings for their mini PCs etc. It’s /r/minilab on reddit, on lemmy there’s the not very active lemmy.world/c/minilab
I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.
Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).
I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)