A free, very free server (and I like the sound of free)

The very webpage you're reading this on runs entirely on my own hardware. I truly love the sound of free, and I don't believe in monthly subscriptions, with two exceptions: my 2TB iCloud and Spotify Premium. And for the latter, I pay the discounted student price.

My motto could be "give me everything that's free," because I'll genuinely take it. So when I spotted a server in my boss's stockroom, I asked if I could keep it. The price was cheap: I only had to pinky promise to wipe all the data, or I could be liable for a variety of crimes, like leaking confidential software, with damages running up to billions of dollars. (I'd probably have to sell a kidney. Or two.)

That's how I got an Intel P4308CP4MHGC server for "free." I definitely noticed the heft. Considering I weigh around 60 kg myself, it was quite a thing to lug up to my second-floor apartment. Inside was a dual-socket motherboard with just one processor (8 cores, 16 threads), but at least it had 128 GB of RAM. It's only DDR3, but in the middle of this RAM crisis I was quite pleased to find it.

Why I wanted it

The plan was always to run NAS software alongside two websites, a Home Assistant instance and game servers for my friends. There's also a side quest: digitizing the 300+ DVDs my dad has collected over the years. That takes a whole lot of time, though, and right now the server lives somewhere I don't have daily access to, so the two DVD drives I installed are mostly waiting for me.

Why Unraid and not TrueNAS?

I'd previously used TrueNAS on an older machine, hoping to build a family NAS my parents could be proud of. After burning through two 2TB hard drives during setup (probably my own fault) and being traumatized by the process for years, I went with Unraid this time. So far I'm very happy with it, mostly because I haven't had to fight a duel with it the way I did with every TrueNAS instance. It's user-friendly without holding your hand, which suits me perfectly.

The upgrades (which were not free)

The server was free; the upgrades were not. But if I girl-math it hard enough and spread the cost over ten years, it's basically free.

First, I replaced the lone original chip with two Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 processors, each with 10 cores and 20 threads, so 20 cores and 40 threads for the whole system, which seems crazy only to me. I also needed a storage controller, so I added a Dell H310 SAS HBA (an LSI 9211-8i) in IT mode. It passes the drives straight through instead of hiding them behind a RAID layer, and connects with a Mini SAS SFF-8087 cable. That was crucial, because it lets Unraid handle the software RAID and read every drive's SMART data. The CPUs and the SAS card came to around 56€ together, and the extra SAS cable was roughly 28€, so about 84€ in total.

The drives

Then came the drives. I'm honestly a bit of a tech hoarder, so I already had two 2TB and two 1TB hard drives lying around, plus a couple of SATA SSDs, one of which went in as cache. In Unraid, the parity drive has to be at least as large as the biggest data drive, so one of the 2TB drives became parity. The other 2TB drive and the two 1TB drives hold data, giving 4TB of usable space, and if any single drive fails, its contents can be rebuilt from parity. That fills only five of the chassis's eight bays, so there's plenty of room to grow, which will matter once the DVDs start going in.

What it runs now

Its first real job is hosting this site. raunopeets.ee is a static site served straight from home. I first tried a Cloudflare Tunnel, but it wouldn't stay reliable, so I switched to plain port forwarding on my router, which turned out to be the most efficient option for my use case anyway.

Reaching it from anywhere

The website is the only door open to the internet. Everything else stays private behind Tailscale, which puts my devices on their own WireGuard-based network. From a lecture hall or a train, my laptop or phone can reach the server as if I were at home, so I can check on it, manage Unraid and fix things.

What's next

I haven't decided exactly what the server will become, and I'm fine with that. The websites, Home Assistant, game servers and that pile of DVDs are all on the list. For now, I'm just happy to have it.