My hardware setup#

Using Linux since approximatly 1994 on nearly all my PCs I also run a homeserver since 2015. Energy consumtion was always an issue, so I started with a Banana Pi (like a Rasberry Pi 1 plus GigE and SATA), but replaced it in 2020 with a Asus Deskmini.

• AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (4 cores, 8 threads)
• 32 GB RAM
• 1 GB NVMe SSD
• 2 GB 2.5" HDD

Another Raspi is inastalled in the garage, to control the doors and running a camera looking into the garage to determine the state of the doors. (by human observation)

Internet access is managed by a Fritz Box 7490 at a Telekom DSL line (Tlekom assignes routable IPv4-Address, Dual-Stack with IPv6 is optional, no CG-NAT).

OS and Service setup#

The base OS is Ubuntu Linux 24.04 LTS (today2026-08-10) to be upgraded to 26.04 LTS in the next months. Because I uses it as workstation from time to timeit ist Ubuntu Desktop, not server.

To run real virtual machines if required, libvirt / virsh with KVM+QEMU is used without any special configuration. At the moment, these VMs are deployed but only started if needed:

• Kali Linux for security scans
• Windows 11 for any legacy usage like Garmin Express to update Garmin devices.

After the classical phase of hosting services directly on the OS like Apache + Nextcloud, I migrated all services to podman, learning to manage containers.

In December 2022 I decided to learn Kubernetes following a tutorial of ct-Magazin. Since that time many services grew on that single node pseudo cluster.

• Nextcloud
• paperless-ngx
• Immich
• Dawarich
• Gitea
• Traefik (as ingres router and cert resolver)
• Openhab
• Databases for all the services
• Nginx (2x)
• Hermes-Agent

All configuration is done in manually crafted (copy + modify) manifest files, versioned in Gitea.