I have 2 laptops, 1 desktop, 4 “servers” running, and one media center PC that is not currently set up. Not counting raspberry pi’s.
The main laptop that I use is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th gen, which is running Fedora 43. It is used for when I’m configuring things and for when I’m doing some programming.
This is the type that I am using:
X1 Carbon 5th Gen – Kabylake (Type 20HR, 20HQ) Laptop (ThinkPad) – Type 20HR – Model 20HR0022MX
It is dual-Core (2 cores, 4 threads) with a base Frequency of 2.5 GHz with a maximum frequency of 3.1 GHz, and 8 GB of ram.
Second laptop is an Lenovo T450s with 8 GB of ram, running Fedora 42 at the moment.
It is used as an work station in my garage, so that I am able to search for things when I work on my cars.
The plan is to also use it to update my todo-lists while I’m working on them, and when I get my minimal viable product (MVP) of my todo app (web interface) up and running, it will be used to update while I’m working.
The desktop was built in the autumn of 2025, luckily before the price hike on ram, ssd and everything else that can be used in a datacenter.
The specs are:
- MSI B760 Motherboard
- Intel Core i7-14700K – 3.4 GHZ with maximum frequency of 5.6 GHZ – 20 Cores + 8 HT cores.
- Kingston Fury Beast RGB DD5 – 64 GB
- Kingston NV3 SSD – 1 TB
- Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 OC – 12 GB
The desktop is running Fedora 43, and is used for gaming (Steam), programming and just normal PC use. I’ve had some strange instability with the Nvidia card and Fedora 43. On 42 it was rock solid, so still looking into what could be the fault of it.
The instability is that it sometimes goes into a powersave state (blanks screen and stops), where it never comes back or if it comes back it goes to the powersave state again.
Moving forward I will also use it to test different things using kvm/qemu to run virtual machines, just to get more run time and experience of using that.
The media center PC is an Lenovo ThinkCentre M60e with 8 GB ram, running Debian and not much else at the moment.
The plan for this one, is to set up some sort of media player so that I’m able to use it in my living room. Today I don’t have anything that I can play my stored media from. I do have a blueray/dvd player, but all my media is ripped and stored on my fileserver, so I would much rather use the stored media instead of looking through all my dvd’s to see which one I want to watch.
Servers – not actual server hardware, more their function in the network.
The Fileserver is a Intel Core i5-7400 cpu and 32 GB of ram. It has 4x 4 TB disks set up with ZFS on ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It has 2 network cards running in LACP mode, mostly for throughput. Gives the network the ability to use 2 Gbps of bandwith for my SMB traffic.
The only reason for the amount of ram, is that it was used as a virtualization host, now it sits idle with only samba running on it.
Virtualization server 1 is an Dell Optiplex of some sort, not sure which iteration it is. It runs the VM’s in KVM/Qemu, and is the host for the VM that holds my Unifi Network controller and PI-Hole, and the VM that holds my internal Wiki.
PVE 1 – Virtualization server 2 is a Intel Core i7-8700 CPU with 64 GB ram, and some SSD storage. This is used as my main virtualization server for running services that are to be used for internal and external services. Running Proxmox
PV2 – Virtualization server 3 is a Intel Core i7-6700K CPU with 32 GB ram, and some SSD storage. This is used as an testing server, where I’m not in any way afraid of losing anything that is running on the server. It is not used for anything critical. Running Proxmox
The network consist of a mini pc running PFSense as my router and firewall, which is connected to a Cisco 2960 switch, which again is connected to a 8 port Unifi switch. The mini pc is powerful enough to route the full bandwidth of my internet connection which is 250 Mbps, whit some traffic analytics running on top.
This gives me the ability to separate things into different VLans and manage the network in a way that gives me more options on how I can design the various services that I want to run.