As other said. If you want to see if you can. Yes fun go for it.

Don’t use it for anything important. And know that your ISP will very likely have that port blocked already. And if you call them to ask them to unblock it they are unlikely to be willing to.

This is to prevent scammers and spammers.

Also. Know that even if you were able to. Getting other mail servers to not instantly junk your mail is actually quite difficult or impossible. So your emails would always land in spam, be outright blocked, or be in junk.

Get a half decent mini pc for like $200. It’s a small box and “looks nice” and will connect to any printer you want. It will be virtually silent and use almost no power.

If they ask what happened just say it always looked like that.

I just buy refurbished spinners that are enterprise.

Exos. Ultrastars usually. I’ve had not problems and they are cheap as chips.

My server runs a LOT of things. Including numerous crypto nodes. So it is not a total loss.

Plus I do love all the room for activities and use it constantly for making videos on YouTube.

I forgot there is also a gtx 1650 in there as well.

But honestly. I’m fairly sure the majority of the power draw is the 4 CPU’s.

96 cores and 192 threads on older architectures was a bit of a power suck. If I had it all to do over again I would for sure have gotten an epyc chip instead.

I have an r930.

With 4x e7-8890 v4’s. 9ssd’s 2x SAS drives 4x m.2 drives on a pcie card 512gb of ram across 32 ram sticks

Pulls about 400w like all the time even at idle.

You can usually find good rack mount servers used on like eBay for cheap. I’ve gotten two over the years. Both were good and still running to this day.

Usually you can pick them up at almost any price range. But they tend to start around $500 or so. And they are normal x86 processors usually older xeons. And then with that you can run something like proxmox. And get a decent number of cores.

Or. Alternatively. You can also pick up a tiny mini pc with like a ryzen chip that might have like 8 cores and 16 threads for only like $300 or so. I use one of these as my daughters computer and I am endlessly impressed. Like no power draw. Basically silent. And overall very inexpensive.

Raspberry pie are great. But the arm architecture can present challenges sometimes.

Made an entire video about how to do this with your pihole and unbound.

https://youtu.be/D2Z87W7Znr8?si=RASe65epZ7BPcbee

I have used a bunch of these types of drives without issue. Usually I get ultra star or the hgst ones. I have them in several servers and a NAS. You can’t beat the price. And for me. I would not have any big concerns with using these. If you get one with some type of problem just make sure to return it within the window.

A server with one of those massive epyc bergamo CPUs with like 128 cores and hyper threading. I run a lot of VM’s and for the cost I had to get 4x Xeon 8890 v4 chips. They just use a lot of power and the bergamo would cut down power usage by a decent amount. Along with 22x 4tb SSD drives. For storage. Right now my storage is all over the place. 4x 2tb NVME’s on an asus hyper cars 4x 4tb NVME’s on another asus hyper card 9x 2tb crucial SSD’s in the bays 2x SAS drives for proxmox operating system 4x 8tb drives in an actual NAS although I would love to get rid of this as well.

And an entirely unrelated dell r620 server that I would also like to remove to cut down on power at some point. I am in the process of moving everything over to the dell r930 as we speak.

Think of a reverse proxy as a middle man.

Internet comes in to your internet connection and immediately asks “cool story bro…where do I find XYZ service?”

A reverse proxy works by your modem or router saying “ffs bro I have no idea, all I know is you need to go talk to Apache”

So the internet traffic walks over and says “the modem told me to talk to you about getting to XYZ service?”

Apache goes ahead and responds “dude I got you…that service. It lives over here at 192.168.0.12:1234. In fact let me go get it for you so that you don’t have to go anywhere else. Here’s what you are looking for, you can just go through me and I’ll get you the things you want.”

So the internet traffic continuously goes through Apache, Nginx proxy, traefik etc to get the things it wants and Apache Nginx etc just work as a middle man.

I have a lot of not very good YouTube videos explaining how to reverse proxy from Apache to a bunch of services…unifi proxmox esxi and others. As well as videos explaining how to get star certs setup and things like that.

But in a nutshell. That’s what’s going on.