That Time I Built a Homelab from an Old Gaming PC

Initial Journey

My journey into homelabbing started all the way back in 2024 when I started my training and received my certification for RHCSA, which primarily focused on enterprise Linux and server management. Right after that, I felt it was such a shame that I wouldn’t be able to use any of my skills since my work at the time mostly focused on software engineering and application development. That feeling stuck around even while I tried to alleviate it by ricing new Linux flavors every month in VirtualBox. Once September 2025 rolled around and I started having serious talks with my friends about buying a mini PC or a Ras Pi so I could at least experiment and try new things, I had the most wonderful epiphany: I had an old gaming PC collecting dust back home. So me, @Vinay Rajan and @Avinash formed a simple WhatsApp group to figure out how we could do that and, in the future, once the market stabilized somewhat, pool in for a larger server rack we could work on together. My inspiration for building this was to be free from paid mainstream services while still enjoying them at the same quality. What started as curiosity has evolved into a fully functional, highly secure mini-datacenter running on a modest gaming PC. I want to share this with you all in the hopes that I might inspire someone else to do the same. If you guys wish to try out the services listed, DM me or email me :)

The rough idea was simple: turn the old machine into something I could reach from anywhere, keep it flexible enough to grow over time, and use it as a place to try services without worrying about breaking my main setup.

It was also the first time the project felt bigger than a toy lab. It was a way to keep learning the same tools I had studied, but in a setup that I actually controlled.

First Setup

We ended up working on my gaming PC until that came to be. So by the time I finally came back home mid-semester to attend YC Startup School, we sat together to plan out exactly how we wanted to build the base of the server. It mattered that we made the right decisions here without any rush so that we wouldn’t regret anything later. Vinay suggested we go forward with Proxmox VE as the base hypervisor since it offered a lot more control and features than a regular Ubuntu Server. It was the best decision in hindsight. We sat in front of the rickety old machine with a bootable Proxmox USB, and it didn’t take that long since I had already decided I wanted to dual boot it with EndeavourOS in case I wanted to use it as a regular desktop at some point. It never happened. Anyways, once that was ready, all I had to do next was deploy an Ubuntu Server VM we could use as a testbench. We called it Lady Midnight after a book we found on Avinash’s desk. It was such an easy process that I can’t help but praise the design behind Proxmox. I attached a trusted repository, found a template for Ubuntu Server, and watched it unbox itself.

Once that was done, I experimented with services like Tailscale as a private VPN that would let me access the server from anywhere. But the problem was that it had limited seats, and that would not allow my friends or any other guests to join.

So I went with a readymade reverse proxy like cloudflared. It allowed me to install a daemon onto the system and use the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard to configure gateways, access points, and policies in a very simple manner.

The best part was that I could assign it my own domain, which let me expose my services to anyone I chose as a simple website.

That was the first time the lab felt genuinely useful instead of just experimental.

Current Setup

Once that was done, my short trip in Bangalore was over and I had to go back to campus to finish the rest of my major project and internship. So on the side I kept working on the homelab by adding more services and features. Services that you might find interesting:

NextCloud Suite VM (OneDrive alternative): A dedicated Debian VM acting as my private cloud for file storage, office tools, and calendars, hardened with a ClamAV antivirus pipeline.
Arr Stack LXC: My alternative to any TV or movie streaming service.
Gitea: A self-hosted Git provider alternative to GitHub and GitLab.
Discopanel: A managed Minecraft hosting service with as much RAM and CPU as I want.
BentoPDF / Omnitools: Two services that take care of any media or PDF task I want.

Some of the supporting infrastructure behind it all:

I was able to set up a certificate authority through Proxmox ACME and Cloudflare DNS, so all of my services are encrypted through ACME.
I was also able to set up notifications through SMTP to me and other trusted individuals about any alerts that might show up in Proxmox.
Security in Proxmox is also quite solid. I had the option to set up an LDAP service, but that would be a headache to maintain, so I stuck to non-root users and all active users must have 2FA set up. Proxmox also handles that.
I am currently sandboxing my LXCs and VMs by using the inbuilt SDN feature. It allows me to set up VLANs and VNETs and move all my services to those subnets instead of using the direct network bridge.

At some point in time, I wiped out the unused EndeavourOS and could use that freshly wiped space for more things. So now I am running services like Jellyfin, Immich and Nextcloud and a lot more, and that gave me so much experience on how hobbyists and professionals work with servers. And now that my homelab looks something like this, I can talk a bit more about what I am running and my future plans.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a free software media system, It allows you to stream your media to any device, ie. you can get the netflix experience for free. So what I did was configure my server to provide about 180GB and a good setup to work as my jellyfin instance. I finally was able to put to use all my DVD and Blu Rays that were just sitting around in storage, I spent some time to rip them and transfer them to my server and I can now play my movies and TV shows for free from anywhere in the world without any ads!

The cool thing about Jellyfin is that it does not just support Movies and TV shows, it supports music and books too (planning on adding that later on). It also has a very passionate community and vast ecosystem of plugins and clients outside of the main jellyfin products. My Favorite (after experimenting with everything) is Fladder which just looks so good!

It has so many useful and noteworthy features and tweaks, It allows me to add plugins to automatically download subtitles, allows me to use hardware acceleration to make my streams as clean as possible, It also automatically populates the metadata for the files by connecting to IMDB or TVDB. The web client has a slightly iffy feature called SyncPlay that allows you to create a watch party and watch stuff with friends! Speaking of friends, I can create many accounts and give them to my broz so that they can watch movies and tv shows as needed. Now We come to the additional things which makes the ecosystem stand out as the ARR Stack. First up is obvious, We need a way to invite our friends and families without having to manually create their accounts as an admin. Wizarr acts as a invite manager such that you can create personalized invites and show the user a sign up page. It even allows you to customize the invite page/messages such that you can inform them of the process ahead of time. Once you are invited, you can access the web page and stream movies, but it would be a hindrance if you want to watch it on your tv or your phone. Here clients likd Fladder would help out and allow you to get a native feel to watching your shows. Then the next things people would say is that they want to watch a particular movie or a show, and its not listed here yet, We have Seer (used to be called Jellyseer), It shows us a large directory of movies and tv shows by directly connecting to IMDB and the users can simply pick a movie and click on request and I can approve and add it to the server for them to watch!

There are a lot more services I have that are part of the ARR stack but these are the most useful.

Gitea