Intro

Ghost is my primary application server. These are the specs…

I wrote about some of the specs in homelab-journey-part-1 but here is where I will keep up to date information

Why #

Why ghost? I don’t know… I was going for a theme at one point it time, or several points rather… and after giving up on the theatrics of a fully consistent harry potter naming scheme across all my homelab entities, I decided to just come up with some short aliases that were easy to type. So ghost was born, and the backup server is ghost-vault.

CPU #

I have a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics @ 16x 4.426GHz in this bad boy… why this chip? Well I knew I wanted many cores, and I was previously on a Ryzn 5 3600, which was fine but I noticed that as I started to develop with containers more that I was going to want to take advnaatage of more cores…

I also was pretty sure that the built-in graphics would be enough for the acceleration requirements I had in mind - which was primarily Jellyfin.

At this point in time, I think AMD was still beating Intel on most of the benchmarks I tended to care about (I was watching channels like Bitwit and LTT at the time of building this machine)

So because of the moderate amount of cores and built-in GPU, I paid $229 for it according to my Amazon history, and it’s currently priced at $174, so that’s a pretty sweet deal if you’re on AM4 and looking to upgrade in July of 2025

Memory #

I maxxed her out at 128 Gee Beez. I snagged that kit of Crucial that’s all black that we’ve all seen on Amazon. I paid aboaut $90 for it, it’s currently priced way high for some reason, which is unfortunate. It’s been totally fine for me as far as memory performance goes - in that it’s stable and I don’t think about it…

Boot #

I have a 1 TB NVMe in here to boot from. I think it’s a Crucial P3

Storage #

Storage is the interesting bit, it’s supposed to be the most rock solid but it’s also been the most fluid for me from a hardware perspective, and as of my most recent case migration I think I’m in a good spot..

The case is a Sagitatius 8-bay NAS Chassis from aliexpress

I use zfs and recommend you do to…. but this isn’t a post about that

My primary zpool is a 12TB ZFS Mirror, and I have another 12TB ZFS Mirror as an on-prem replica plugged into this same box.

There is a 4TB drive that serves as frigate’s media directory - I wanted a dedicated drive due to the write-intensive nature of the NVR.

I backup to an offsite box using syncoid

OS #

I am currently running Ubuntu Server 24.04

I am eager for Ubuntu to get zfs in their release that contains the zfs data corruption with encrypted datasets but I don’t expect to see it until 26.04 at the earliest fingers crossed.

KVM #

I recently purchased a jetkvm and it’s exactly what I need for both my main server and my backup off-site… An amazingly simple and elegant solution to remote KVM.

Applications #

Currently I use docker compose to manage practically everything. Stay tuned for more about those things

I also have a few ansible playbooks for setting up my shell and some utilities on my computers, including the server. They’re in github

Find more at The Homelab