My Homelab setup is a mixture of diffrent out of commision server equipment, gear that was once high end and is now sold for very little money. It serves my needs perfectly, with a small low powered server for my website and nextcloud instance, along with some legacy gigabit cisco equipment to connect my devices to the internet and intranet.

The server

The Main server that I have running is a HP G6 Microserver. Its got a AMD Turion II Neo N54L, a mobile CPU that wasn't particularly fast when it was new however it has a TDP of 25W so it ends up being very power efficent. I've got two 1TB drives installed, configured in raid 1 to ensure my files are somewhat safe. The server runs my website in a docker container, along with my nextcloud instance also hosted in a docker container. I use caddy for my website which allows for easy reverse proxy so that my nextcloud and website can both work. Thats all that runs on that Server and I never seem to have any issues with slowdowns.

The Raspberry pi

The raspberry pi does exactly one thing: It runs pi-hole for a DNS server and ad blocking. I sometimes run local python projects on it just because it seems to never go down.

The Cisco Gear

I have a Cisco 2921 Router and a 2960-S Switch. Both of these were gotten for very cheap off marketplace, I paid $35 for each of them. The router is a gigabit model with no expansion cards but that is fine for my needs. I have the WAN cable from the Fibre ONT running out to the garage to where the router is, this is quite a lengthy cable but I get full speed over it. Setting up the router was a rather difficult job, I had never used any cisco equipment before so setting up was quite the learning exprerience. After lots of googling and combing over fourms, I had got the router setup with a basic WAN in LAN out config. Port forwarding was quite easy to do, which is required for HTTP & HTTPS for the site and nextcloud.

The Switch is a Gigabit 48 port PoE switch, it's 750W so each port gets around 15.5W of power. This is super overkill for my needs but its super cool to have, at the moment there is only two PoE capable devices connected, two wireless access points. I haven't done much to configure this switch, basically just reset it and powered it up. Works great out of the box and thats good enough for my needs.