My home ‘IT-strategy’

So I have a bunch of stuff at home using Linux, and it covers most types of things. Let’s look at each one, and see what I use my home IT equipment for.

Laptop

This is my daily driver running fedora cosmic spin. It’s an 11th-gen ThinkPad x1 carbon with an Intel i7 13th gen CPU, 16 GB RAM, 500GB nvme drive, and a great 2K OLED screen. It’s where i create my blog posts, manage everything on my network, surf the internet, and use social media etc. As my daily driver - it’s my go to for well, pretty much anything.

Mini-home server

This is sitting on top of my freezer (in the kitchen), plugged into the back of my unifi Max router. It’s a mini-pc with an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, and 1TB nvme drive. I bought it off amazon for like £270, or something. It’s running Fedora Server 43.

This is where I plan to host things that are used just for me, so currently that’s adguard-home, and caddy. I plan to install a bookmark manager, a personal matrix server, and maybe have a minecraft server running. I can access all of this via my tailscale network when I’m out and about. Via tailscale and adguard-home then I have all my LAN dns queries running back to this, so I get ad-blocking where-ever I am.

Moode audio server

This is a raspberry Pi5 with a DAC hat (HiFiBerry DAC+ 2) that’s connected to my amp via an optical cable, so I can stream international radio stations direct to my HiFi. I use this a lot too, there’s a lot of features in moode that I simply don’t use, but it’s great, and absolutely simple enough to set-up. It’s currently running Debian 13 (Trixie) - I don’t get any say in the matter, as this is what moode, has optimised the audio for. I installed ‘moodeOS’ - for want of a better expression - via the standard raspberry pi imager. I just can’t find a handy way to include the nvme hat and the DAC hat, so I can loose the micro-sd card totally.

VPS

This is a spiffy little VPS (1 core, 1GB RAM, 10GB nvme) from upcloud.com. I use for external stuff like hosting my gemini server. It costs like €3 a month. It also runs Debian 13 (Trixie). It’s still looking for more of a purpose, if I think about it.