Hi there! This is a video that I made that I’m hoping can act as a beginner friendly entry level point to the world of self hosting and running a homelab. Just thought I’d share in case anyone is interested, and I hope it can be a resource to share with noobies. I don’t claim to be an expert at all so I’d also love some feedback. Thanks!
This is a 32 minute video that starts with a text card and robo voice. Is there any kind of summary? I don’t have a home server and don’t know what I’d do with one if I had it tbf. I have several vps and other hosted servers and find them much less hassle than a home server. But, maybe I’m missing out on something.
Every video guide should be only suppliemtary to a complete text article
Persist with the video! The text-to-speech is only for a couple of quick screens - the rest is very personal, and they cover a bunch of use cases.
If you really don’t want to, the server OS they recommend around two-thirds of the way through is YunoHost, a beginner-friendly way to run services as containers on any capable spare computer. The YunoHost website has a bunch of use cases that are also covered in the video.
I’m pretty comfortable running Debian on servers. I just don’t understand why I’d want the hardware at home instead of remote. I don’t have much space at ome, and my home internet is crappy.
Also addressed in the video! Neither I nor the video creator has any stake in what you choose to do, and I’d prefer not to rehash the whole video for you since it’s right there for you to watch if you’re interested in this topic, but the main points were generally about reducing subscription costs and gaining better control of content (e.g. no surprise removals of music, videos, and ebooks).
I’m not into video, I didn’t want a rehash, I was hoping for a 1 sentence summary or the like. I don’t have any subscriptions and my music and ebooks are on the client and I don’t understand the attraction of putting them on a server. I guess the thought is that many people use their phones for media consumption, with limited local storage particularly on old iphones, but I’m not set up that way. I like having the files local instead of streaming them.
It’s not about me personally but rather (regarding media) about how a streaming setup is better than local file storage for stuff like ebooks. Even for a phone user, phone storage is cheap now, especially if your phone has an SD slot. One big attraction of servers for me is fast internet, but that means hosted servers rather than home since my home internet is slow.
I’m something of a a luddite but I’ve generally tried to stay away from “smart home” stuff, streaming subscriptions, etc. So I’m trying to figure out if home servers are more of the same.
Because plenty of us do have space and have good internet. You don’t have to, and that’s totally fine.
The main difference is that having a home server means You are in complete control over Your data. You can run home server and isolate it from the internet, running only on local network. Great for privacy and You are not relying on some external provider being reliable and available.
It also has it’s downsides. You have to maintain the server, keeping it up-to-date. Checking if some components need upgrading or replacing - which is mainly about having healthy drives so You do not loose all Your data.
yeah i hate when my data gets loose and out of the specific drives i put it on
I my a laptop for that, no remote access, I mean what services would I want to run and what would the clients be?
Such a weird argument, but how about this one: show me a laptop that holds 80Tb or so in RAID? You can do that on a home server and stream to and from it at a gigabit (when you are at home). If you are home more than remote, storing that data in a data center will be both costly and slow to access.
Yeah for 80TB you’d want either a server or a NAS and at that point I’d have to weigh the cost against a rental. Still though, how will you back it up? What’s going to be on it anyway, e.g. video editing? You’re more in professional workstation territory than home server. If it’s datahoarder type stuff (archived sitcoms or whatever) then yeah ok I guess. Certainly a DIY box with a say 6x 24TB desktop HDD’s will cost less than a few years of renting Hetzner boxes with that much drive space. Those drives are very cheap now, $300 each on newegg. But still, this is very much a niche use, nowhere near “everyone should have” territory. Unfortunately it’s still not enough data to think seriously about a tape drive.
Hmm it looks like a 160TB Hetzner server (10x 16TB drives, Intel W-2245 CPU with 128GB ram and also 2x 960GB SSD) is $150/month in the Hetzner auction. Could you build and run a comparable home server for less, say spreading the cost over 3 years? Probably yes but it would take some effort. And how much do you pay monthly for that two-way 1gbit internet pipe? Can you really open public ports on it and serve files in much volume at that speed?
Honestly I was in the same boat. I ended up just buying a raspberry pi and following the dead simple tutorials on this site and now I can stream my audiobooks or TV wherever the hell I want
https://pimylifeup.com/
Again though, why a server? I don’t understand the concept of streaming really (I mean why I would want it, not how it works). I have some music files but they are on my laptop’s internal SSD (plus a few on my phone). No need for streaming. The idea of a server is generally to run some network services 24/7, or serve multiple clients, or have more hardware resources than would normally be found on a client PC. I don’t see a raspberry pi at home helping with much of that.
I guess I could imagine wanting some kind of centralized media server at home if there were multiple people using it, but it’s just me, and I’m generally not into video so I don’t have a huge video library or anything like that.
You don’t understand the concept of not having to carry your laptop everywhere with you to listen to your music? What?
I mostly listen at home, but I do have some music files on my phone. I could put them all there in principle. The phone has 256GB of local storage and an SD slot that can take a 2TB card. It’s a cheap phone too (Moto G series). I have a few GB of music that I listen to plus some archived.
If I’m going to stream to my phone away from home though, that means the streaming server has to be on the internet, and wasn’t one idea of a home server to be off the internet? I do have a bunch of such files on a bare metal dedicated server at OVH. They have better things to do than examine my files and delete stuff with the wrong kind of lyrics. I do understand not wanting to use stuff like Google Drive where they do mess with the files.
Even if I wanted to totally control the hardware I’d probably look into colo. But dedicated servers always end up being cheaper.
No, home servers aren’t made to be off the internet.
Well that was one idea mentioned by one of the other posters: better security by having the server off the network.
I think my luddite tastes in software are part of it, but if I have a server on the network, it might as well be in a data center where I don’t have to worry about space, power, noise, ICE raids (my servers are in several countries so they’d at least have more work to do), etc. I can add or delete new hardware with a few clicks. I actually do have an old Supermicro 1U server in my kitchen but it’s just sitting there unpowered. I had intended to colo it but it’s just not worth doing that. I had forgotten about it.
Even if I have a server at home, I probably want to back it up over the network, so then what? There are remote copies of the files then either way.
The benefit of having it at home on your hardware is that you have way more control, and it is on your local network so it can control local network stuff without going through the internet, while also being connected to the internet for things that are internet-requiring.
Yeah that is kind of vague though. I don’t really have other stuff on my LAN (https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired) right now unless you count my phone.
I’m in another thread right now where a guy is running a simple encrypted chat server on his phone under tmux. That is pretty cool and using an old phone is an interesting alternative to a razzleberry pi if you don’t mind running Android and don’t need much compute or storage.
I think I see, you’re suggesting using a local server as sort of a jump box to the internet, with otherwise disconnected clients. I guess that has some attractions, though in practice I use web browsers all the time, with the usual bug-ridden software stack that surrounds such things. If I were doing anything really sensitive I wouldn’t use that approach.
For me personally, I share this with several other people. So my wife can stream movies or TV that we own from anywhere. We can share the same audiobooks like as if it were audible but I only need to own one copy. Things like that it’s really a convenience thing. That and digital backups of my failing DVDs is a bit of comfort
Aha, yeah, sharing with people at home is an attraction and it’s good to not have to rely on your home internet being up for that. DVD backups though (unless they’re being shared too) seems like they can be handled either with client storage or remote servers. You want off-premises copies of your backups anyway.
Ai will summarise it if you watch in edge.