I’ve also recently gone this way. I used my old gaming PC motherboard, ram, and CPU. Put Ubuntu server on it and it’s been running great. Mine is running in software raid5 and has room for 7 drives (though I’m only using 3 at the moment). I did put a gtx1650 in it for Plex transcoding and that works great as well.

Lab Gopher is a great way to check out eBay listings for used servers.

Thanks for the recommendation. I added watchtower to my docker compose config.

I’ve been struggling figuring it out for the first time in a home server. Without understanding how a config file works it seems like magic.

I’ve had a rough time getting permissions to work right for each container and am still not entirely sure how upgrades work. Though I do have to admit that once I had it set up once, moving it to a new server when I changed operating systems was much easier than the initial set up.

It’s my first time running any kind of containerization service, and my first time running a Linux server (though I’ve used Linux off and on for over a decade) so maybe it’s just how new the idea is to me.