About some months ago the idea to build myself a home server capable of handling a wide range of services appeared to me, the point was to be able to first host my medias and distribute them through plex, but also train my own LLM Model, self-host my applications and break free of the cloud and so much more.

All those point could be the subject of an article and some of them definitly will be

But first of all no matter what i need my machine to do, i need to build it first, so here I go stripping my old computer for parts, buying some more off of amazon / cdiscount and checking overall compatibility on PCPartPicker, in the end i ended up with the following planned configuration for a ITX build that will give me enough space for 6 hard drive bays:

  • CPU : AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Socket AM4 12 cores (3.6 Ghz) no GPU ==73€==
  • CPU Fan : Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black ==40€==
  • GPU : Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 ==salvaged==
  • Motherboard : ASRock A520M-ITX/AC ==118€==
  • RAM : G.Skill Trident 32Gb 2x16 DDR4 4266Mhz ==106€==
  • SSD (OS) : Crucial P2 ==salvaged==
  • HDD : 2TB Seagate Barracuda ==salvaged==
  • Case : Fractal Design Node 304 Black ==100€==

So overall planned on building a custom home server for a budget of less than 500€, and here i was starting of the build quite confidently on my kitchen counter

It took me about an afternoon to fully build it and to be fair i’ve never self built any computer before so i was pretty happy with myself being able to do it without so much trouble.

But a problem arised, once powered on nothing started working, the fans where running but not video output from the graphics cards, and since my CPU is GPUless i could not even check if it was my GPU that was faulty, but i was amazed by the fact that absolutely nothing could indicate to me what went wrong and that i was supposed to guess, so i did the rational thing which is to read the motherboard booklet and stubbled upon something that peaked my interest which was the presence of a speaker outlet on the mother board ?

So I’ve discovered that the quick “beep” that my old pc made each time i booted it up was actually a AMIBIOS Beep Code signifying that my motherboard passed the POST test responsible for insuring that every part of the computer works, and so i decided to also salvage from my old pc the tiny speaker module and plug it in my home server build to have some troubleshooting hints, and sure enough now that i booted it i got 3 beeps as error code which means :

memory read/write test error in the first 64 KB block of memory.

Usually changing the RAM modules does the trick but after switching to some of my old 2666Mhz DDR4 from an older pc, the same error occured, and so it could mean that either :

  • both of my ram sticks are faulty (unlikely but not impossible)
  • my CPU is faulty and is not able to recognize the RAM upon startup
  • my motherboard has faulty ram slots

it was a painful situation to be in because since i did not have a lot of spare compatible parts to troubleshoot lying around i had to buy a new CPU first and a new Motherboard from amazon and then send back the equipment i actually do not need.

Fast forward a week later

After ripping my machine’s internal organs out i got it to pass the POST test and load the BIOS Successfully ! turns out it was the motherboard that was faulty (which is funnily enough the last thing i tested because it seemed crazy to me that a brand new motherboard could be faulty)

And so thats how i built my own home server that I simply decided to call ==“Fire Hazard”== as the following cable management can indicate.

What next ?

Well now that i do have working hardware i will slap Ubuntu 22.04 on it and turn it in a fully functionnal home media server for starters that i will detail in further blog posts