I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that’s off the table. I’ll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
Anything that does the job is good enough. At its core a server is just a regular PC with a dedicated purpose and software. Sure, there are specialized hardware better suitable and purpose built, but it’s not a requirement.
I for one prefer 19" rackmount stuff with disk bays in the front, but that’s more of a convenience than anything.
UPS is nice, but it’ll work without it.
I’ve had to deal with the Brazilian computer market and how it’s ridiculously overpriced due to import fees, so in your situation I’d just get any hand-me-down computer. Servers generally don’t require much unless you’re doing something special or intensive.
Get your hands on whatever you can find for free or dirt cheap (laptop or desktop doesn’tmatter), install linux, and you have a basic setup that you can work with. If your use case requires more, then that’s something you can accommodate in the next iteration of your server.
This.
Almost all of my gear is bought used: switches, server, even memory. My main server is an old Dell C6100 blade server I got for $250. My disk array is a 12-bay SAN that I found for $50 and took a chance on being able to get it working. It’s power hungry but it’s got redundant everything and I have spare parts on the shelf next to it.
I’ve been branching into ARM servers a little and right now I’ve got an RK3588 board with 32G of RAM. That’s new (and expensive for me) but I got a fibre channel array for $20 that I’m going to try to make work with it. $8 FC HBA and a $12 cable along with a $30 m2-to-PCIe adapter intended for eGPUs. I’m not going for speed here, but used data centre equipment is nice and some of it is dirt cheap because it’s too slow for “real” work.