After years of breaking things, I think I'm finally at a point where I'm genuinely proud of my setup -so naturally, I have to share it with you all.
This is my single-server do-everything box. The whole point was to kick as many big-tech cloud services out of my life as possible. Photos, passwords, code, chat, even ML -all running in my closet/corner.
The guts:
- Ryzen 7 3800X (8 cores, 16 threads)
- 48GB of RAM (Channel A: 16GB+8GB, Channel B: 16GB+8GB | still dual channel with stock timings and clocks.)
- RTX 3050 8GB (handles GPU-accelerated processing with GPU passthrough to said LXC's)
- A couple of storage pools (Fast-Thin-LVM (Nvme) for stuff that needs speed, TB-Thin (Sata) for the bulk)
- Proxmox 9.2.5, kernel 7.0.14
Nothing crazy by today's standards, but honestly? It handles everything I throw at it without breaking a sweat.
The services:
Everything runs in LXC containers. If a service needs Docker, I run Docker inside the LXC - so each service gets its own dedicated container with its own Docker install. A couple of other things (like OpenWrt and DSM) live in VMs instead.
I've got the usual suspects - Immich for photos (goodbye Google Photos), Vaultwarden for passwords, and Matrix Synapse for chat. Networking side is Nginx Proxy Manager, WireGuard, Pi-hole, and OpenWrt routing traffic as well as DDNS-Updater to keep my domain up to date. Also running Gitea for my little coding projects, Kiwix for offline Wikipedia (because why not), Trilium for my scattered notes, homarr as the dashboard and of course lemmy, your reading this on it haha.
On the heavier side, I've got Ollama + Open WebUI running locally with GPU acceleration - the 3050 gets the job done.
Snapotter is in there too - it's an open-source, self-hosted file toolkit with 200+ tools for images, video, audio, PDF, and document processing. I use it so I don't have to rely on sketchy file conversion sites anymore. Convert, compress, OCR, strip metadata - all happens on my own hardware, files never leave my network. The GPU helps with some of the heavier image tasks too.
And yes - I'm running DSM (Arc Loader) in a VM with PCIe passthrough for the NAS. It's a bit overkill, but I wanted proper storage virtualization with direct hardware access.
I also will not lie- the GPU sits idle most of the time, but it's nice to have the acceleration.
Why LXC + Docker instead of just Docker?
I just like having each service in its own isolated container with its own Docker daemon. It makes backups and snapshots stupidly easy in Proxmox - when I inevitably screw something up at 1 AM (and I will), rolling back takes two clicks. Plus, it keeps dependency hell contained.
Dive into the Details
If you're curious about the configs, the philosophy, or just want to see the messy reality behind the setup, head over to organic-server.org. You'll find some more of my ramblings there.
Or, if you have a specific question, I'm always happy to chat here.
