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!
That’s a welcomed thing, often it’s daunting to do it from scratch when all guides assume you’re a masters student in computer science lol
Yeah as someone that was just getting into it not that long ago I definitely kinda struggled through it even though I’d feel pretty confident saying I’m a bit more technically literate than most. Figured I’d try to help others with the process as much as I can! I appreciate the validation lol
Thanks! I’ve been wanting to set up something like this
You’re so welcome friend I wish you the best of luck :)
I’ve been using Yunohost for a while, it makes all the stuff soooo much easier. Especially reverse-proxying.
I want a future where communities self host their media and circumvent media companies like Netflix and Disney. Local film clubs, TV clubs, hobbyists, etc. can come together and host as a collective bringing down costs and making this more accessible.
Like ham radio ppl
We can do this, once we transition to socialism, and cut out the corporations. Run nodes on the community-owned fiber for free access to the citizens.
We should have never lost the capability to have LAN parties for all games.
You’re spitting rn
Just yesterday I wiped the drive and installed Linux on the 3rd old PC for the LAN setup I’m putting together, literally “for the children!”
It’s an i7-920 from 2008. It has TRIPLE channel ram, baby. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and it was as quick and painless as usual.
I already get the warm fuzzies when I walk into the room and find my 3rd grader playing on my PC instead of their tablet or even the console. Our first LAN party is gonna be sweet.
I used to dream once that I would be able to give my future son Q4OS to grow up with and if a daughter, something like PuppyOS. Alas, I’m a single 30-something guy living in his parent’s basement with no real prospects of owning my own home or getting laid—so go figure. At least somebody out there is living the dream! 🤝
You still can. By setting up a VPN.
Though it doesnt bring to couch closer.
Started my own home server about a year or so ago. Currently hosting Immich for me and my gf. Jellyfin for archiving movies shows and downloaded YT videos. Forgejo for local git where I backup my work. Homeassistant to manage lights in the appartment and some other small stuff. Linkwarden to archive important websites and links I might need in the future (docs for work, how-tos for the server itself so I dont loose all that setup kbowledge). Syncthing to sync files between multiple devices - which is awesome, easy to setup and pair folders. Seafile to share files.
It has been great, it draws around 20-30W idle.
I am currently in search for Obsidian and Bitwarden self hosted alternative that can be run in docker container - if anyone has some ideas I am all ears.
Vaultwarden is what you’re looking for.
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I’m syncing the files from Obsidian using Syncthing as well, works fine.
That’s the primary draw for plain text files for me!
Joplin is a good Obsidian alternative.
Trilium is nice as an obsidian alternative
I have tried trillium, it looks good but mi y main issue is that the notes are not plain text markdown. It using its internat l database that makes syncing to other devices with syncthing harder. But yeah, otherwise great alternative.
I often see LogSeq, and to a lesser extent Silver Bullet, mentioned as self-hostable alternatives to Obsidian that people actually appreciate using.
I use Bitwardens self hosted option, VaultWarden, that I run in a docker. works fine. I use it with the bitwarden CLI since I’m using QuteBrowser on all my machines. I then run a weekly backup of my vaultwarden to an external ssd.
Beauty of it is that it will also work with Bitwardens extension on chrome or firefox. So if I’m on another machine and I need access to my PW’s I can just install the extension, add my self-hosted vaultwarden, then remove it when i’m done.
Obsidian and Bitwarden self hosted alternative that can be run in docker container.
Well not 100% sure about Docker but Tiddlywiki is pretty easily hosted! It’s got some quirks, but in the end it’s just an HTML file (or slightly more complex if hosted as a website), so it should stay relevant for a long time. I enioy making notebooks with it for various things!
Nextcloud has a pretty decent passwords manager and I think firefox plugins for it. I personally use SyncThing to sync KeePass databases and use the nextcloud passwords app for low-risk things we share, like streaming service passwords. :)
Not sure if you already knew but Bitwarden does have a self hosted option, the docker-compose stack runs great and they have been working on a singular image that just needs a DB. It all runs great depending on what you need and supports the actual bitwarden team.
I have my own server and it’s great, but the real product these streaming services sell isn’t access to content—it’s discoverability and recommendations. We need a better solution for that!
Yeah I use jellyseerr with jellyfin and they work great together
I need to learn more about the *arr stack.
Tbh, I pretty much never use site recommendations. I almost always learn of shows and movies via social media and memes
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.
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.
loose all your data
yeah i hate when my data gets loose and out of the specific drives i put it on
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.
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?
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.
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.
Because plenty of us do have space and have good internet. You don’t have to, and that’s totally fine.
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
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.
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.
Every video guide should be only suppliemtary to a complete text article
My entire life is Linux and self hosted, aside from Email. I may get to that one day too. Love my Plex server, even with the more recent baloney the company’s apparently been up to.
I should be using Jellyfin but once I get home from work I don’t want to tinker any more, I just wanna play a game or dick around.
Agree with the message in the video, these companies should be told to pound sand the minute they do a single anti-consumer thing.
I set up jellyfin recently. Haven’t tinkered with it any more than plex to be fair
Is there a way around the problem that plex only feeds from ex fat/nt drives but Linux has permission issues networking such a drive? I wanted to have one computer where I’m doing all the formatting and the other being the standalone plex server with them both connected. Samba is being a pain.
Curious about your problem. I’m using NFS instead of samba now, but legitimately never faced any problems doing what you’re describing previously.
There’s two problems. I’m new at setting up the network so no doubt that is mostly my problem. I’m just switching over to nfs now.
But the exfat drive that only works on plex (can’t upload from ext4) is the weird bit I don’t get. Are you storing everything on ext4 for plex? If so how did you trick plex library into seeing it?
I’d urge u to retitle to:
How I host my home server
I had PTSD over that phrase, and how many naïve self starters got doxed, swatted, murdered, thrashed, DoS, pwnd, bitlocked, sued, deISPd, excomm.d, raided, wormed, subpoenaed, etc., etc…
And with fascist laws being enforced, basic guides need extreme darknet praxis updates.
I would be interested to see a figure of people with home servers that have had that happen to them. DoS & pwned yes, especially 15+ years ago before there were good resources, TLS, reverse proxies, or authentication front ends.
I would be very interested to see any stat whatsoever of selfhosters that have gottened murdered specifically because of their server.
It is extremely important to note that in those days, people just opened their, often out-of-date, servers completely to the internet via a DMZ or port forwarding, let ssh be open to the internet, didn’t harden ssh at all, and most people didn’t use a VPN for downloading.
That is literally like saying that people who light wall torches in their wooden home burned their house down, so let’s not use lightbulbs or electricity.
The problem is that now you can automate pwning, in batches. And given that there it’s at international scales, you need defense first before host.
Heck, Salt Typhoon pwnd nearly the entire world.
Coming up on a year of self hosting the worst I’ve had happen is a copyright letter from my isp from dry downloading torrents lmao. Threw I behind a vpn and it’s been fine since.
So lost.
Thanks for using peer tube
Having my own server is sooooo cool. There are so many services I’m running for my friends and family that are just incredible. That includes this piefed instance! Which is public if anyone wants to register here
The first disclaimer in the video is the most relatable thing I’ve read in a while
That’s a pretty vague title. What kind of server? I run emby. I also run a ton of other servers.
did you try clicking the link? titles aren’t meant to convey all relevant info.
A 30 minute be video is a big ask when I don’t know what it’s going to be about
Hey @SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world, your yawning emojis aren’t very convincing when I see that you are still actively following my account.
Telling that you haven’t considered that your comments might just be equally useless in the same circles we inhabit
Considering you are the sole downvote on all of my comments it’s doubtful we inhabit the same circles.
But if you want to spend your time following me around that’s less time you’re spending posting useless unhelpful comments, so that’s fine by me.
You’re the one apparently stalking and invoking me, sweetie.
🙄
ok, did you read the body of the post?
Yes, did you try just telling people what kind of server instead of leaving passive aggressive replies?
Hosting email just saved the day! My ex got locked out of her email account and password resets were blocked. However she still had one “home” forwarding email configured as a recovery address, so we were able to redirect it somewhere accessible and unlock her email account!
I just have my old PC’s running Linux connected directly to the tv or projector.
I use a super basic webdav server or free arr matey streaming sites.
I sometimes sftp into devices.
That’s my setup.
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Agreed. It’s time my occasional minecraft/PZomboid server got a nextcloud upgrade.
