Used office PCs are some of the best value home servers you’ll come across. The Lenovo ThinkCentre, HP Elitedesk, and Dell Optiplex are fantastic machines with oodles of official documentation available straight from the OEM, and many come with built-in OOB management in the form of Intel AMT.

I have variants of all three. Love them.

Fair points. My entire homelab setup of five PCs pulls a total of 90-120W at any given time.

I’m gonna go check that 6th gen now that I’m home…

Intriguing, but not within the scope of this post. I’m not asking for KVM solutions.

I’m already very familiar with the AMT portion of vPro, all three of my Proxmox nodes have it enabled and locked down. Really handy to get in there when needed. The KVM route is rather expensive as I would need one that supports at least 5 systems.

vPro’s out-of-band management is the entire reason I use it, because my little lab is tucked in a utility room all the way in the basement, where I would have to cross the treacherous lands of scattered children’s toys.

I’ve already built the “new” NAS. Just trying to figure out the CPU situation before I take the plunge and swap the data drives over.

As for documentation, it really depends on the vendor, but the general process is the same overall. Here’s a PDF guide from MeshCentral that goes into more detail.

I use the CPU lists on Wikichip (Kaby Lake linked) to figure out what CPUs are compatible with vPro. Something to keep in mind is both the CPU and motherboard require vPro support for it to work properly.

Also a good point. Speaking of, that generation Optiplex SFF had a 300W PSU as an option in the XE3 variant (basically a 7050 meant for point-of-sale use) vs the stock 180W PSU. It’s plug-and-play, too. One of my Proxmox nodes runs a 7050 SFF with that PSU. It’s rock solid.

Yes, exactly. The shop was probably thinking of the cheap Molex ones.

I went to a local computer store and they were not very helpful. I asked if I could use a splitter for the power port and they said I would fry my board.

They aren’t wrong. Those SATA power splitters can be problematic due to subpar wiring and have been known to burn/melt.

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There’s also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

I appreciate the up-front attitude here, legitimately.

Sounds like it’s time to fire up another dedicated VM

Card games and board games with people. New Year’s isn’t really the time or place for this kind of thing.

That makes sense to an extent, but sounds like it leaves a big, unorganized mess in the downloads folder.

Right, but the media management software (*arr stack, in my case) already knows what it has and won’t call to the downloader for duplicates unless manually triggered to do so. It just seems like an overcomplication to have hardlinks in multiple directories when you really only need the relevant files to be in the media directories…

I might be overthinking this.

Planka is fantastic kanban software. There is a 3rd party mobile app, but so far it hasn’t yet been updated to support Planka v2. Planka’s own mobile web UI is better than it used to be, but it’s not quite there yet.

The mobile app is 3rd party and has not yet been updated for Planka v2.

Source: I use Planka a LOT.

I never fully understood this concept. Why would I want my media files to remain in the “downloads” folder? It makes way more sense to move them to their appropriate “media” directories so their associated library software can see and properly catalog them.

Obligatory “they stole the music for that clip”

It always reminded me of the Batman: Beyond intro music.

No need to be antagonistic. I merely suggested the method I use for my home lab after learning the “hard way” to containerize and separate certain things.

OpenMediaVault is based on Debian. I think it’s currently OMV 7, but I’m not at home at the moment so I can’t check. Very solid system though.

This absolutely overkill

Hardly. Keeping the file server separate is good for reliability in case you bork an unrelated service, so you don’t take out everything else with it. That’s also partly why things like VMs, LXC, and Docker exist.