It all started with an old pc, decided to put it to work, maybe an ad blocker and a small NAS, it was far too broken to be used, so I went online and ordered an old office pc. (HP Elitedesk 800 G4 SFF)

Then I needed storage, a new SSD, then thought about redundancy, oh better get 3 of them... 1 OS 2 for VMs and LXCs, don't need to be big but 1tb seems cost effective for the VMs, can't get anything smaller than 256g for the boot, it'll be all right. 

The NAS needs HDDs for storage I reckon, ssds are far to fast for old photos.

Then thought about cold storage, old HDDs good old friend, 2 8tb Iron wolf's seem to be about, add them in. 

Decide to go with proxmox, adds truenas, muk says no to ad blocker, doesn't want me messing with the WiFi.

Then I look at this newborn PC turned server, looks at my shelves of DVDs, looks at my cheap dvd drive, thinks could put them on the NAS for safe keeping, use vlc to play them... 

Then I just can't get vlc to access the NAS, so I go and add jellyfin.

My friend then goes into hospital lends my steam deck to him so he ain't bored, realises he can't access the NAS, so I add tailscale to remote access it. 

Realises that some of the stuff I'm pulling from online using my pc and jdownloader needs transferring and it takes awhile to put on the nas, can't transfer it to the deck as I don't have enough external drives. So I adds jdownloader to the server and tell it to download on to the server.

Realises I may need to move and the networking would be hard, so I buy an opal travel router to act as a subnet, makes an entire isolated network to control and preserve the settings. No faf there. 

Realises I can add pihole on to the server now it's isolated and only affects my tailnet, so I add that to not see ads everywhere.

Realises this is looking messy, so I add dashy to have nice homepage to see everything easier and the like.

Releases the router I was using can't cope with the traffic, so I upgrade it to a berayl 7

Then I think dvds are getting harder to find, seems blueray is standard now, so I buy a blueray drive for my pc. 

I move rooms and mum wants the sever to go with me in the new one, no ethernet, no problem, use repeater mode, doesn't work. Then run a new cable, doesn't work, so I look around online and find powerline plugs to route cables through the wall via the electrics. 

So now I have a £100 old pc, with £1000 of drives and storage, with a £120 router and now £60 in cable routing. 

I can't stop and I love it to bits, she ain't winning any awards, she's small, held together by hope, a bad understanding of networking and a lot of money and effort. But she's my blackbox. 

Specs of Blackbox (Server):

Intel i5 8th Gen

16gb (2x8 DDR4)

Acer Re100 256gb SATA SSD (boot drive)

2x1tb Samsung Evo 990 Plus NVME (mirrored VMs and LXCs)

2x 8tb Seagate Iron Wolf HDD (Mirrored bulk storage).

Router: GL-MT3600BE (Beryal 7)

Powerline adaptor: TP link AV100 Pass through

(Sorry I don't have any photos of the beryal, and there's no photos of the powerline adaptor as I haven't installed it yet)

I just can't stop