This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/kristianpartl26 on 2026-05-18 12:40:31+00:00.

---

HP EliteDesk

The machine

Box	HP EliteDesk (SFF office throwaway)
CPU	Intel Core i5-4570 @ 3.2GHz, 4 cores, no hyperthreading, launched Q2 2013
RAM	24 GB DDR3
OS	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, everything in Docker, managed via Portainer
Power Consumption	12.72 kWh/month

No GPU. No NVMe. No ECC. A CPU older than some of the people in this sub. It just refuses to die.

It physically lives at my parents' place. I run and maintain the whole thing remotely from another city over a Cloudflare Tunnel, with Tailscale as a fully independent backup path. Zero ports exposed.

Fully automated, hands-off

This is the part I'm proudest of. The box runs itself:

• Container updates are automated via Watchtower (rolling tags auto-pull, pinned versions stay put), with Telegram notifications on every update.
• Backups run nightly with zero config: auto-discovery of every named volume and database, DBs dumped before snapshot, AES-256 encrypted, pushed off-site to Cloudflare R2, 4-day retention.
• Security: weekly Trivy CVE scan across every image.
• Add a new stack and it gets backed up automatically, no changes needed.

I haven't physically touched the box in months and rarely have to log in at all.

What it's actually running (20+ compose stacks, 46 containers)

Infra & ops

• Portainer, Pi-hole, Cloudflared tunnel, Tailscale, Watchtower, Trivy CVE scanning (0 CRITICAL/HIGH across every image)
• Automated nightly backups of every volume and DB, AES-256 encrypted, pushed to Cloudflare R2

Monitoring

• Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf
• Speedtest Tracker (hourly)

Smart home

• Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquitto. The entire house is run through Home Assistant: cameras, Zigbee devices, automations, the lot.

Finance

• Firefly III (plus MariaDB, custom importer, auto-classifier, recurring cron) with rule-based merchant normalization and 14-category auto-tagging
• Ghostfolio for the investment portfolio

Automation & AI

• n8n
• Evolution API (WhatsApp gateway)
• Self-hosted AI email triage agent: pulls my Proton Mail over the Proton Mail Bridge (IMAP) into n8n, then through a 5-tier LLM fallback chain (Groq Qwen3/Llama, then Claude Haiku). It classifies and files mail, sends WhatsApp digests, and learns from manual corrections.
• AI Garmin analysis: family fitness data syncs into InfluxDB, then n8n runs an LLM post-activity analysis after every workout plus a weekly AI Garmin report, delivered over WhatsApp.
• Langfuse self-hosted (web, worker, Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis, MinIO) for full LLM observability. Yes, on the Haswell i5.
• Hindsight (AI notes), Outline wiki, n8n MCP

Plus pgAdmin, IT Tools, Webtop (browser desktop), Homepage dashboard.

The flex

46 containers on a 12-year-old quad-core: 6 Postgres instances, MariaDB, ClickHouse, InfluxDB, multiple Redis, and a headless Chromium renderer all running at once, still 15% disk with RAM to spare. Fully automated updates, backups and scanning, monthly cloud cost for the AI pipeline ~$0.30 (Groq free tier does the heavy lifting), and I manage the whole thing remotely.

Old enterprise mini-PCs are the most criminally underrated homelab hardware. AMA.