Origin Story
Built from spare parts.
It started in 2020, during the lockdowns, with three spare PCs, bare-metal Ubuntu, and absolutely zero hypervisors — because who needs virtualisation when you can just throw another machine at the problem? Pterodactyl went on first to wrangle the game servers, then two or three Minecraft servers went up and somehow stayed up. Nobody expected it to turn into anything. And yet.
By 2021 it was obvious that one-machine-per-thing wasn't sustainable, so Proxmox entered the picture. Docker followed in 2023, which was a turning point from "it works" to "it works and I understand why." Jellyfin came in 2026 — because settling for twenty different streaming services is for people with less free time — along with a TrueNAS box, because apparently six years of winging storage on loose drives was enough.
The whole thing ran on 50/20 VDSL2 from 2020 until two months ago, when it heroically upgraded to 50/20 FTTP — same speed, different medium, same inexplicable pride. A 1000/400 plan is coming any day now, which will be approximately 20× the upload speed. All of this, past and present, runs on DDR3. Some things are sacred.
The Stack
The homelab.
A Proxmox cluster spanning multiple machines — running everything from game servers and media to Docker workloads and "I'll figure out what this does later" nodes. All of it happily chugging along on DDR3 RAM, because if it ain't broke, well, it hasn't quite broken yet.
Proxmox VE
Cluster hypervisor. Corrals VMs and LXC containers across multiple nodes with a worryingly large uptime.
TrueNAS
Network storage. ZFS pools for media, backups, and persistent container data. Recently acquired — because six years of improvising with loose drives was, apparently, not a long-term strategy.
Docker
Containerised workloads. Jellyfin, Seerr, and assorted supporting services — because running things directly on bare metal would be too simple.
Jellyfin
Self-hosted media server powering the Arcanum library. Hundreds of films and series, because subscription fatigue is real.
Pterodactyl
Game server management panel. Handles server lifecycle, resource limits, and console access — so there's at least the illusion of control.
WireGuard + Cloudflare
A WireGuard tunnel out to an Oracle Cloud instance exposes services without opening ports. Cloudflare handles DNS — unproxied, because it isn't needed. Previously serving all of this over a 50/20 VDSL2 line. Heroically.
Game Servers
The reason this whole thing exists.
Game hosting is the original sin that started all of this. Servers run on dedicated hardware — which is a polite way of saying repurposed machines that were too stubborn to die. To get a server address or a whitelist slot, swing by the Discord and ask nicely.
Currently running
Previously hosted
Server count fluctuates depending on what people are actually playing. New servers spin up when there's enough interest — just ask in Discord and we'll spin something up, assuming the hardware agrees.
Community
Join the Discord.
The Discord is the central hub — server addresses, media access requests, general chat, and the occasional complaint about something being down. Whether you're here for the game servers or just know me from somewhere online, this is the place to be.
All access requests for game servers and Arcanum go through the Discord. No Discord, no access. Those are the rules.
Join the Server