gaasc
Desperately looking for a title
Maybe best for the tech random thoughts but what kind of storage capacity are you thinking of? If money is no object, stuff like the Radxa Taco exists and would be extremely efficient at the expense of raw power. If you're just storing small files and don't care about speed then this will be fine.
Alternatively a Pi or Intel NUC with desktop USB drives could work, only the ones with a full size hard drive and external power though. I don't recommend portable external hard drives because the USB controller is often integrated on the hard drive controller board and that's the weakest point, if it dies your data is unrecoverable without professional help. With a desktop drive you just take the disk out and connect it up.
Cheapest would probably be an old HP Microserver with internal disks or a small form factor Dell PC with the USB drives.
Edit: I rarely get anything through the post/mail unless it has a card attached to it. Companies like to send me reminders for insurance but those get shredded as do car tax reminders once I've paid.
What I was considering was something like a 2014 Mac Mini (I use one for general computing already and a second one would be the perfect form factor for the table of internet stuff in my house). Unsurprisingly, power draw numbers for it are very hard to find. Apple tells you it will idle at 6W and consume 68.5 at full clip. Being most of them are intel chips with a 65W power envelope, I expect it will be somewhat more than that.
I would connect an enclosure (let's call that an additional 40W for a dual-enclosure one with a fan) and plug the entire thing to my network. Docker can then deal with pihole and openVPN, SMB can deal with the file sharing to actually use that VPN.
That's the intended base use case. I'm sure I could come up with others. I've never actually built a home server or used docker. But I enjoy learning things, besides...
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how hard can it be?
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