In 2018, I decided to build a server to run at home which marked the start of my “homelab” journey. I wanted a machine I could test services on without risking “real” computers. I installed the Proxmox virtual machine hypervisor and generally have about 10 virtual machines running on it at any time.

• Intel i7-7700K CPU, no overclock
• 40GB DDR4 RAM
• MSI B250M Pro-VDH Motherboard
• 1x 1Gbps single-port ethernet NIC
• 1x SCSI Ultra320 PCIe card
• Corsair Commander Pro fan controller
• Corsair Smart Power Supply; 850W
• 6 Cooling fans, varied.
• 1x 128GB NVMe SSD
• 2x 1TB Samsung SATA EVO SSD
• 2x 4TB WD Blue HDD
• 1x 4TB Seagate BarraCuda HDD
• 1x 1TB WD Blue HDD
• Full-Tower CoolerMaster case

I wanted a machine which would use a somewhat low amount of power. I opted for a Corsair smart power supply which reports power consumption over USB. In addition, I am using a Corsair Commander Pro which is a piece of hardware which gives me good control over the fans and gives the system 4 ambient temperature sensors.

I use some software called Corsair Link running in a Windows VM which collects data from my Corsair hardware and saves the data into a file. I wrote a script which continuously monitors this file for changes and sends the changes via MQTT to Node-RED (also running on the server in a VM).

The data is regularly pushed to a service I wrote called IoTPlotter where I can monitor the power consumption, temperatures, and fan speeds of the server at any time.

Overall, the system consumes around 105 watts under average conditions.

• Network Monitoring
• Grafana
• Indoor location services
• “Staging” servers for my websites
• Node-Red and rtl_433 for my sensors
• Pi-Hole for network-wide DNS filtering/caching
• File storage, including Plex media streaming
• Graylog for syslog logging/archival/searching
• CCTV recording and streaming
• pfsense for hardening some devices/VMs
• Private game servers, varied and not running 24/7