Chassis: HP-Elite Desk Small Form-Factor
CPU: AMD A10-7800
RAM: 14GiB
Running on Arch Linux kernel version 6.0
About
What do you do when you're gifted old office computers? You turn them into personal servers. This particular server was built on a modded version of 1.19.2 using the FTB-one modpack on a minimal Arch Linux installation that I had built from scratch. While the server is now offline due to cost constraints, it had taught me valuable lessons in server management.
A Simple Gift
I was gifted these old HP-elite Desks from my father in about early 2023. At the time, I had no idea what I was going to do with them. A few ideas popped to my mind including: A cryptomining setup, a VPN server, or even just a simple testing computer where I can test malware isolated from my home network. But that's when I settled on the golden opportunity of making a dedicated minecraft server for me and my friends to play on without impacting the performance of my host machine.
Starting Out
When I was initially designing the minecraft server, I had to plan out what was the most efficient way I can manage, setup, and secure the server properly in order to make this project happen. All of which also had to be built on basic principles of being lightweight considering the hardware limitations set. So here's what I initially decided on early on in the project:
It was going to be running on Arch Linux.
It was going to use a modpack that uses optimized mods like embeddium, or sodium.
There has to be room for upgrades.
From here, we can establish a baseline for what the project will entail:
Installing Arch Linux (of course)
SSH-keys to securely connect from my desktop to the host machine.
FTB-One has all of the mods that I wanted to play + uses the optimization mods listed previously.
Port Forwarding the port 25565 to connect to the IP hosting the minecraft server.
I honestly didn't mind using my personal public IP to have my friend's connect to the server, so I didn't feel the need to host the server through DNS or a VPS provider. However, this was also done to reduce the cost of hosting.
Pictured above is me playing on the server, including a whole nuclear reactor I had built using Mekanism.