20 Home Server Projects You Can Start TODAY - CasaOS + ZimaBoard 

I came across your page recently and it's been really helpful! I'm taking classes right now and getting into virtualization and system administration. I want to set up a physical home lab so I'm not running too much on my main PC. I've been playing around with RHEL building DNS, DHCP, and different file share servers. Thanks for all of the useful information on what I can actually do with these devices and for the inspiration to get started!

Thx for all the ideas of how you can put this zimaboard to use. Keep up the great vids and look forward to your streams on twitch soon.

I use the Zimaboard to run Spinrite. I had an old Windows server that had failed drives on it. This was a great system to have Spinrite just work away on them, much like your use of wiping the drives.

Thanks for another top notch video, Tim! Always love your content.

WOW Tim you are awesome!!!! i'm an old dude 50 year old.commercial driver. I did a double major in unix/c in the 90's never finished my degree and only got a year of college with one unix admiin class andd one c programming class so never went anywhere with it as i could never come up with enoough money for another term of school. i did get win 95, win 98 and A+ certified but after a year as a tech over 3 jobs i went to school and became a weldor. long sotry short i never got an IT job but have been a geek at heart forever and hardcore PC gammer. but after my m.2 drive died my acer nitro last week. (currently your videos from usb ssd manjaro install) i am doing some homework to plan for nas build so i can run back ups. really liked your video on zimba board and am thankful there are IT pro's lik you out there that do a great public philanthropic service to society. Keep up the great work Tim !

Very cool … I have 2 Zima boards was using to run a flux node . Great to know much more to this great little box . Much appreciated

If you are willing to set things up from scratch and/or want an ARM board, the Orange Pi 5 Plus is a good alternative to this. You get dual 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, a nvme slot, and 16gb of RAM for about $100 less than the quad core Celeron Zimaboard, and it benches higher than it too. I have 3 and they’ve been great so far.

I like CasaOS and think it may have a bright future! Great video mate!

I’m using the 8GB Zimaboard for a low power DIY NAS using TrueNAS Scale. Running (2) 4 TB HDDs in mirrored with a 2.5g pci network card and I also attached a noctua fan to it (it has a “cpu” fan micro connector). In scale I have Photoprism, Nextcloud, and Homebridge running. The whole thing consumes on average 15-20 watts (drives included) and I can get speeds up to 180. Love it so far for backing up our cameras and phones!

I love your videos Tim. I just wish you'd make more! 😉

Man the UI team has done some amazing work on this It looks really good

These look great!!

Thanks for the good overview. I would be happy about hints or a short video on how to correctly install or configure the Tor Browser as a custom app/docker under casaOS.

Great video, Tim. I've been thinking of doing a video around a Zima Board for my channel. I wonder how it would hold up in my K3S cluster... That gives me an idea :)

The easy one would be a shop or garage PC. It looks to be sealed and passively cooled it should do pretty well in harsh conditions. I would think it would be a good robotics platform..

I actually used 2 ZimaBoards to build a high availability PBX using 3CX. It worked flawlessly.

Thanks Tim.

I could see this being useful for someone needing the port options, but for my use case I think the micro pcs from Dell/ HP/Lenovo would be better bang for the buck than the Zimaboard. Casa OS, on the other hand, looks pretty interesting.

Hi TT, I would like to see a video on how to setup and configure Teleport on a Linux server for my Homelab. You rock keep up the good work!

Super! I've the Google Coral TPU but not the Zimaboard or the pcI-e adapter

I saw N8N in that list... You should really give that a shot! I use it for ALL sorts of Automation stuff that Ansible could do, but I don't want to f with playbooks or learning another language I already use it to update my proxmox hosts and SELF UPDATE, which is nuts, but it's so powerful

13:56 😂🤣What a imagination /blue print of CORAL TPU....!!!

I see such type computers only Arm based for some reason, but sure, your video is quite inspiring.

Great video as always, thank you! Since you asked, here what I currently use my ZimaBoard for: It become my autonomous building station With a mix of Ansible + Ansible Semaphore, Bind, Uptime-Kuma, Git(ea), Wireguard, code-server, Guacamole and other useful tools and services I can create new ansible roles and playbook without anything else from home or outside with the wg connection to a VPS. And deploy/backup/restore new servers and services on the go and even bringing it to someone home to do the same easily. With the second network port and a drive connected I run a PXE server and FOG to help deploy new computers also from it. My next step will be to work on unattended partitionning and installation for WIndows and Linux to be able to deploy them automatically and to setup the Zima itself the same way. Currently the first part is done and in testing, while the second is starting to being built. While I am learning how to do the third for a usb installation then a PXE one. I am not sure if you ever done something with unattended installation in one or both way, but if one day you make a guide about it (or if I missed it), I'd be really happy to learn from you! WIth the Zima blade coming soon I hope to be able to have a nice pocket version of that whole project in the futur!

Just ordered one for 186 prime day. its time to create my own server 😝

I use this board with opnsense for my router. It's perfect. Got the PCIe 4 port nic card too. Just need a way to secure it.

I bought the 432 model for router (VyOS) purposes, could have done with 232 but there was a sale so.. :P Been solid since started it.

Thanks for a great explenation as to how to utilize this board! :) Quick question: Will I be able to mount a USB drive/DAS (NTFS formatted and with all my content already on it) to share in CasaOS and access as a network drive on my Windows PC (and use as media server)? I have a DAS (QNAP TR-004 in RAID5 and NTFS formatted) with all my media content on it that I currently use as an external drive on my PC, and so far I've been avoiding setting up a NAS at home (using e.g. a Raspberry Pi) as I didn't want to re-format my DAS and get it locked into a NAS ecosystem. Instead I'd like to keep the flexibility of having it as a portable drive that I at any time can detach from my NAS/ZimaBoard and mount on a Windows PC if need be. But would that even be possible?

Excellent, could use this to run SpinRite.

The low power nature of the ZimaBoard lends itself to be used for network wide services you don't want to go down even in a power outage. That's what I'm working on as right now putting a battery backup on my server isn't an option due to my basically non-existent budget. I do have some other, smaller, battery backups though.

What are the 20 projects, exactly? Nearest I can tell, this is a single project.

I gave up on setting this up as an Access Point several months back as the PCI-E card Zimaboard sells doesn't support AP mode in Linux. So how did you get an AP mode working with OpenWRT? Which Wifi hardware are you using? I want something that will create both a 2.4 and 5ghz Wifi network while I travel.

I would definitely run pfsense if I had one.

I am on Open Media Vault and plan to go for a new NAS System. CasaOS looks quite promising. Can it mount encrypted storage devices for I used Open Media Vault's built in encryption service...?

Another excellent and informative video! Thanks!

The Filedrop feature reminds me of Pairdrop :)

I have an enterprise server from HP. But it has a cvss vulnerability so I'm wondering, can I run promxox server on a windows server hypervisor?

Thanks for your videos, very helpful. 👍👍 I am thinking of buying a mini pc to run as a nas and server. Is it possible to use the usb 3 interfaces of a mini pc for the nas storage without any problems or will this inevitably lead to problems with omv or truenas or unraid because the usb interfaces might go into a power saving mode or something like that? I was thinking of a mini pc for my nas implementation because i would take one that has no fan and thus is silent. that would be very important to me. And on the other hand I don't need much storage, two 2TB ssd's would be enough for me, it's just for private use. And since in the modern mini pc's mostly have an NVMe ssd slot and a slot for normal ssd via SATA, i thought I just connect one or two external ssd's directly via USB 3 to be able to operate a simple raid with two or three storage disks. Do you think this can be done?

Any v2 should have POE (when not utilizing the expansion slot, perhaps).

I got a Zima Board a few months ago. Want to set it up as a dedicated SpinRite hard-drive recovery. But waiting for 6.1 to make it easier. But have loved playing in CasaOS.

Not sure if you have seen this problem I am having in my zima. I got a very beefed version and then installed plex using docker in casaos. The problems I am having is that using samba to access the zima and upload new movie content to the plex server drive, eventually samba dies, and I cannot access the zima either via web interface, or samba file system access. It seems to just die. Any ideas?

I have old HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 the four hard drive are connected via a Mini-SAS connector I am thin of taking out the motherboard and putting a Zima board or blade with a PCI-E to SFF 8087 Mini SAS 4-port or 8-Port will this work?

Does the Zimaboard power x1 3.5" HDD?

Hi there I am trying to set up a system for streaming media, home assistant, some containers and light virtualization. I am thinking about running TrueNAS Scale on Zima Board or Blade with Jellyfin container. I am a bit worried about transcoding 4K tho. Is it possible to run this system I described and still being able to access and display 4K content from other devices? What about Dolby Atmos? Thank you very much :)

Where would I look to find more documentation about NAS with CasaOs? Most places I have looked have said it’s not supported

[Not so] Patiently waiting for a rev2 with a tad better/modern hardware. I love the form factor but need a little more juice

is there zimaboards in Asia specifically in singapore? can't seem to find it anywhere

I live in a tiny house that i have smartified, just bought this to run home assistant on.. Been looking for alt. But this one dont take upp much storage..

Why I have not heard casa os after manually setting up my services on Ubuntu... thank you!!

Question... is any manufacturer currently making nvme NAS? I need a faster nas solution as my 100tb nas hdd's are excruciatingly slow, so I can move data quickly

12 node Proxmox cluster on Zimaboard incoming?

13:45 bro, just put 4090 into it and let's train some models 😍

Id love to see at least 1 x 2.5G network, if not 2 x 2.5G. maybe they'll have a next gen with a stronger CPU (same power class though) with 2 x 2.5G and more storage on board, perhaps none at all but a M2 slot?

show me what i can do with my r730 since vcp certs are expensive

I tried casaos on a a raspi 4 for my buddy. Unfortunately wasn't a great experience as I tried a dockerized OpenVPN tool to dynamically route app traffic through the VPN... while the dockerized part went swell, the networking options in casaos for apps is lackluster which made it so that I couldn't send qbittorrent traffic through my OpenVPN docker instance

How would the performance be on the Zima Board when transcoding movies and shows in Jellyfin. Would it also be possible to run some kind of raid card in that PCIe?

like the zima board, but the price is so steep (at least here in germany) that its just not a good deal. if it would be sold at a reasonable price here i would probably get one to tinker with

Wow, so cool, can you use CasaOS on a micro pc instead of a ZimaBoard? Please make more videos on it.

One more subscriber ❤

I am planning to run few apps in docker like jellyfin, home assistant, grafana may be file / picture backups. Is it worth it to replace casaos with proxmox in terms of performance / stability / resources or may be some other linux flavor? Proxmox allows zfs and eazy backup options with external NAS etc.

Beginner here.. Zima Board vs Intel Nuk.. Thoughts? I would like to setup ProxMox running a Linux Server and play around with some different Operating Systems. I currently have a Synology NAS running Plex Media Service which I store all of my music that i ripped from 30 plus years of CDs. 😁 I would like to learn and play around with Docker and containers as well. My head is spinning and I don’t know what to do first. How about a video or lesson of a good start and a something to build towards? Love your videos!

Ah yes, 12V power for the Amateur Radio Operator. Nice

I guess tinkerer projects aren't for me. I still don't know how to exit vim, unless power cycling counts.

The zema looks like a "pro" raspberry pi

You said it can transcode 4k video, but it says 1080p video transcoding?

Can this board replace normal server ? I mean HP proliant

Im a photographer that has Terabytes of Raw files, each file is 50mb-100mb. Is this personal cloud storage makes sense to me if im uploading 90gb file gallery? Thanks in advance!

Now I am more confused 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯to choose which system the ultimate MOBILE HOME LAB that you have shown.... or the tiny system that Jeff from @CraftComputing have shown or this....!!!😬😬😬

The only thing is that those processors are sloooow so don't expect it to do things quick. I'm sure it's fine, but speed is not it's strong suit.

Is this supposed to be a sponsored video?

It says 1080p video transcoding but you have said 4k

First!

I think the spec made it not worth the price. But the form factor is great

it is a shame NIC are Realtek. Really not good for a pfsense router. Still nice hw.

Can this thing run a minecraft server, and if so will it have better performance compared to a raspb4?

Does casa os have pi hole adblocker

I think we all ger into yhis for retro pi then look at all the in used power in there build and start googling

👏👏👏👏

Hello, I like your portfolio website with blog, it's clean and simple, would you like to make a video about develop own portfolio website?

Looks awesome but one of the main reasons to run many of these services is privacy and security. What troubles me is that the company is Chinese and thus has to comply with the surveillance demands of their government... effectively nullifying one of the biggest reasons to run these at home.

👍

Expensive.

The low RAM options make it ewaste for me unfortunately. I'd gladly pay more to have the SODIMM slot.

Can I install cause o x on my regular server for playing around

CasaOS looks fantastic and easy to use. Everyone does realize that CasaOS is a Chinese company, headquartered in Shanghai, PRC, right? Do not expect an ounce of privacy with your information and documents. Sad, because it is so handy.

Second (after Jeff)

“Server” - does not have ecc.

now can i run a gpu on it

Oh god, we just crawled out of under the RPi hype and here is a new contender. YT is filling with them too. For the same price you can find some Optiplex SFF with i5-6500, 8GB of RAM, basic SSD. Upgradable RAM, upgradable storage, more storage to begin with, more PCIe slots, a case. The processor is not that much older than the Zimaboard, either. It's still 3x more powerful. Sure, you lack the 2x ethernet ports. But for ~25$ you can get a NIC and still have another slot for another card. I'm not venting at you and I just gave you the standard alternative to all these overhyped, overpriced boards - a used office PC. I also outlined the perks/downsides and potential fixes. If you haven't bought the Zimaboard yet, my comment, while whiny, is more helpful than finding a niche case for a still niche hypeboard, IMO. If you bought it, can't do much. Assuming you haven't bought it, here are some pointers. Take a look at this comparison. Zimaboard CPU vs Optiplex SFF vs Optiplex USFF (T variant) vs Dell Wyse 5070 Extended (A thin client with PCIe). I'm listing 6th gen because they are being phased out of offices and are very cheap for what they offer. SFF PCs by Dell, HP and Lenovo are IMO the best for all-in-one solution for multiple drives and best price/performance ratio. USFF (or here we call them TinyMiniMicros) are 1L PCs that usually have the T variants with 35W TDP. They are great but storage is limited, no 3.5". Lastly, the Dell Wyse 5070 Extended is there because it's a thin client with a PCIe slot and comparable power draw. Again, storage is not great. All these options are in the same price range as the Zima and every single one of them is better in any way. I'm very much for helping people. I write a lot of stuff like this. But I'm also very annoyed with all these hypeboards. RPis and similar ARM stuff is made for tinkerers first - exposed GPIO, small form-factor, low performance. Not for servers. I understand why they exist though. On the other hand, stuff like the Zimaboard is DOA from a practical standpoint. There is no GPIO for thinkerers. There are much more functional/powerful/cheaper x86 devices. All it has is dual gigabit which can be added to any other device and low power draw (which is irrelevant in the

This looks similar to umbrel OS. I would love to see a comparison video.

My only concern here is that the company that makes this is registered in China; same for casaOS. Anybody else think that it is a bad idea to have this in your home network?

Just get a Intel NUC, way much better.

This would be a poor Plex server. Passmark score is only 1976

first

2gb of RAM, nah

Price: $119 to $199, should have put that in the description. Thumbs down and not interested.

Full stop. Single board computers have been available for 30+ years.

Got a zimaboard out of box the store wont load... generic error 'please try again'... I can do anything with it. help ! :)

Please have a look at Wazuh - Het Open Source Security Platform met Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Regards John 🤗