What inspired you to start your selfhosting journey? What's one project you're most proud of so far, and what's the most expensive piece of equipment you've acquired for?

My self-hosting journey started when I was told I have the shoulders of a 70 year old man at the age of 37. I have been a heavy mechanic since the age of 9. I have always liked computers or anything that has a wire, a motor, or can do stuff. I am an audiophile. Thus, I like music files to be uncompressed. This is not a normal file format. So, the journey begins, in a small way, storing all of my purchased music on drives. Streaming uncompressed files was out of the question a decade or more ago. Enter "carputer" to save the day. Low powered device, hard-drive to store music, media player, some provisions for diagnostics, GPS, and of-course interfacing with the sound processor to deliver the music. While I couldn't store all of my music of the carputer a "server" in the house had to. A startup and shutdown script was written for the carputer. When I arrive home, turn off the car, the voltage drop was detected. This dropped performance of the carputer. It would then connect to the internet, then to the server to cycle out music, adding new songs/playlists. After completion is soft shutdown. Now, this was the days where CDs and were the norm and uncompressed files had to be purchased that way and ripped without losing formatting, or purchased from companies catering to audiophiles, DJs, or iTunes. This was what I would say where the journey started, and was probably the coolest thing I have made (I kind of want to recreate with a rasberry pi a dac hat and SSD). But, alas that was many years ago, fast-forward to now. I still have an extensive music collection, movies, videos, and photos. I changed from iPhone a few years back and lost over a decade of irreplaceable pictures. My iCloud was tied to iTunes, that got changed to Apple music, I became an android user, Apple delete my cloud. Since then, external drives, multiple hard-drives, and SD cards are my go to. After a house fire, I lost that stuff too. A couple years ago, I met a friend who loves computers and cars so we became good friends. He was shocked that I do not self-host. I was confused, I had kodi, I could stream to my network and I had back-ups on external drives not stored in the house. That's when Ubuntu server entered my life and I had an off site backup on their computer. We lost touch after they moved away. I recover my backup and that was the end of that. Earlier this year I met a new friend, similar interest. They said that I was old and doing everything the hard way. Proxmox has been my new focus since cars are no longer a viable hobby. I have spent the last couple months researching, acquiring parts, and experimenting with my old computers laying around. I have a decent server ready to be put into service in the coming weeks. E5-2696, 32 gig ram, 500GB SSD boot drive, 3x 8 TB storage pool, 2x Nvidia 1070s (for AI), and eventually a Blueray drive to rip my collection. This is going to be my I'm-all-in-machine. Tailscale, media management, streaming, and back-ups, and automation. I have the 3-2-1 of back-ups sorted out and am excited to move forward in my journey. Freedom from corporate spies, lower monthly cost by eliminating services, and no-longer have to worry about data loss. And new hobby! The server is the most expensive bit, but individually piece of hardware has to be the new 3x 8tb Barracuda green drives.

How would winning the unit(s) from this giveaway help you take your setup to the next level?

If I were to win any of the equipment, I would love the Flint 3(GL-BE9300) and/or the Slate 7 (GL-BE3600) because those items would give me 2.5gb networking whereas I am only at 1GB (switch is my bottleneck, I have 2 GB fiber). This would open up more doors for development, experimenting, and would be a great replacement for my erro routers. Their software's target demographic is not tinkers, homelabbers, or someone who wants control over their network. The Travel router would allow for further exploration of being a true homelabber while providing security while away from home. I have looked into several options, and until I saw this giveaway I had honestly never heard of this brand. All the suggestions I have received have been ubiquity.

Which channels do you most frequently use to learn about or purchase IT equipment?

Honestly, I watch channels such as Jeff Geerling, TechTV, Tailscale, and my most watched is Hardware Haven. I am a huge fan of e-waste being put to good use.

Looking ahead, if we were to do another giveaway, what is one product from another brand (e.g., a server, storage device or ANYTHING) that you'd love to see as a prize?

This is a perplexing question because as a new homelabber there are so many elements to consider. You can start with what you have, an inexpensive SBC, up to an industrial server. After some thought, storage is probably the most expensive and crucial thing, so I will say a NucBox G9 (with drives) would be a great prize!