Do you need everything running 24/7? Perhaps you could leave your more power hungry devices off and host the stuff you need 24/7 on those two.
Those could also be fantastic emulation machines connected to a TV.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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yeah a TV box was definitely pretty high up on my possible uses list.
TV box does what? IPTV or something else?
Video playback of local media server (jellyfin), gaming (emulators mostly, and some old games), kids games (gcompris), podcast and audiobook playback (audiobookshelf).
Thats what runs on mine at least.
It runs an HDMI cable to a TV instead of relying on a crappy abandonware TV OS.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread! A few additional ones that I don't think I've seen yet:
- Testing/QA server (eg: test existing software's major upgrades before upgrading your "production" environment, test new services without impacting your "production" environment, test new operating systems/virtualization software/etc.)
- Learn automation (eg: Terraform, Opentofu, Ansible, etc.) or horizontal scaling (eg: Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc.) to try improving future upgrades and/or high availability
- Media center PCs (eg: Kodi, LibreElec, OSMC, etc.) or gaming PCs for various TVs around your house to replace Apple TVs/Google TVs/etc. or gaming consoles
- Home Assistant
Do a giveaway of one of them. Ask for input on what is the best thing to do with the other and who ever gives you the highest voted answer gets the device, at their cost of shipping.
you could use them as backup for your storage
Thanks for the response. I currently am housing something like 24TB of data give or take so unfortunately I don't think they'd make effective backups. There's simply too much. I have my current storage array in RAID6 so that's my backup solution at the moment.
You don't need to backup all your 24TB of data, you can have a copy of a subset of your important data on another device, if possible the best would be a 3-2-1 approach.
"RAID is not a backup", is something that is mentioned a lot, as you can still lose data on a RAID setup.
lol I haven't heard the "RAID is not a backup" before but it's true I'll have to see how I would manage that and what data would be a good candidate for this implementation.
Ebay, Cragslist. Doesn't fully fit in with the sub, but, it's what I do when I get too many.
You can pretty easily build a MAME arcade with a mini PC, hyper spin, and a USB jamma controller and an old, non functioning arcade cabinet. You could also build a cabinet pretty easily
Secondary/Failover DNS or any other service that would be nice to have running when the main server is down for any reason.
Another good suggestion. I'll have to look into how to get this set up I haven't tackled something like this before.
Sounds like you're running too much crap already, so no not really. Maybe consolidate everything onto one box and use another for high availability failover if you want to experiment with that (on a home internet, lol).
I have all my home infra on one beefy box, except for two things. These are services that I deem critical enough that I don't want them to have an outage at the same time as anything else.
Opnsense gets a dedicated mini firewall pc, and Home Assistant runs on an old intel nuc
I have one main server with big storage and one little one. I have them in a cluster in proxmox so that I can move VMs around to minimize shutting stuff down during updates (and to give me some redundancy if one of them dies).
You could also use one as a hardware firewall/router with opnsense.
I've been curious about running a hardware firewall/router, I've seen it discussed but don't know much about it. I also hear a lot of people swear by their proxmox setups but I am a complete noob there so again more research would be required. What I've heard about running a proxmox setup has looked overwhelming at a glance.
Proxmox is easy. Install it, create a VM, install your OS in the VM, and you're off to the races.
If you want to use replication between nodes, you will need to use zfs for your VM storage. I think it gives you the option during the installer, but if not you may need to fix it afterwards. It's not hard, proxmox runs Debian under the hood.
If it has an sd card slot you can do some retro gaming with https://kazeta.org/
I have a ton of handhelds I usually use for this purpose and a pretty powerful workstation I use to run heavier games but I've thought about like a tv box setup for doing such activities in the living room. Could be fun.
Yeah DMZ game servers are a good idea. I'd image one with something immutable, get it all set up and then "have at ye!". If someone pwns it you just yank the cord. Since they are identical you can have them both set up, someone owns it, you yank/replace and your friends just go right back to it.
If I did something like this I wouldn't even ssh into them, just have them in some dark corner with a small kb/m/monitor. Totally different subnet.
Thanks I have a dark corner or two, this sounds like an interesting idea.