Buying A Home Server Because I Have Adult Money
June 2025
Basically how this started was, I was having my own fun little project building something for my own learning (more on this in another post). I didn't tell anyone about it either, I was just doing it for shits and giggles. Then just on a random Monday, a friend from my university days dropped me a message asking if I was interested in buying a home server.
As anyone would think, wtf this is so random why would I want a home server?
But then I was like fk Im not gonna spend my money on travelling, clothes, food, or entertainment anyways. I just so happened to connect my debit card to my AWS account and im already being charged like RM20-30 a month. Besides that, my RedPanda kafka cluster which I was using for my learning-ish personal project is also on a free trial.
So I was like, lets just go balls deep into this.
I didn't bother much about the specs of the bare metal server since I just wanted something to run a few containers here and there for my personal projects. So i entirely trusted my friend on it and gave him ~RM700 to buy and build it for me. Specs :
CPU - i3-8100 RAM - 8GB DDR4 Storage - 500GB SSD
So how we got to the name Polaris was because the case was "white" and we wanted to be cool and not name it "Home Server" or some normie bs.
Basically my friends helped me flash ubuntu server on it, installed k3s that comes with all the cool in built traefik which handles your ingress setup and other things that are baked in for your simplicity. They then explained to me about all the things I have to do which I have never heard about before. The guy even wrote my manifest file for me to host my own service registry. Crazy times we live in.
Big words started coming in like proxmox, OpenLens for monitoring, setting up WireGuard if im not slapping a VPN on my port forward and many other big jargons. But currently im stuck on the WireGuard part because I am lazy to setup the cloud tunnelling because apparently my ISP is doing me dirty with the CGNAT (I have no idea what i am talking about). So I have to use a VPS to tunnel the connection back to my home server.
To conclude basically I am a lazy mofo that decided he wasn't that interested in deploying his containers after all. Because I need to stay at home to use the home server and that ain't my lifestyle chief. I can't be confined by the four walls of my room. Therefore I am now stuck in limbo.
Thanks for reading.
As anyone would think, wtf this is so random why would I want a home server?But then I was like fk Im not gonna spend my money on travelling, clothes, food, or entertainment anyways. I just so happened to connect my debit card to my AWS account and im already being charged like RM20-30 a month. Besides that, my RedPanda kafka cluster which I was using for my learning-ish personal project is also on a free trial.
So I was like, lets just go balls deep into this.
I didn't bother much about the specs of the bare metal server since I just wanted something to run a few containers here and there for my personal projects. So i entirely trusted my friend on it and gave him ~RM700 to buy and build it for me. Specs :So how we got to the name Polaris was because the case was "white" and we wanted to be cool and not name it "Home Server" or some normie bs.
Basically my friends helped me flash ubuntu server on it, installed k3s that comes with all the cool in built traefik which handles your ingress setup and other things that are baked in for your simplicity. They then explained to me about all the things I have to do which I have never heard about before. The guy even wrote my manifest file for me to host my own service registry. Crazy times we live in.Big words started coming in like proxmox, OpenLens for monitoring, setting up WireGuard if im not slapping a VPN on my port forward and many other big jargons. But currently im stuck on the WireGuard part because I am lazy to setup the cloud tunnelling because apparently my ISP is doing me dirty with the CGNAT (I have no idea what i am talking about). So I have to use a VPS to tunnel the connection back to my home server.
To conclude basically I am a lazy mofo that decided he wasn't that interested in deploying his containers after all. Because I need to stay at home to use the home server and that ain't my lifestyle chief. I can't be confined by the four walls of my room. Therefore I am now stuck in limbo.
Thanks for reading.