Home Server Guide

Are there any good Home Server Guides I can use to build my own home server?

Basic linux stuff, dockerization and networking. Thats it. Permissions, users, VMs, dockers, firewalls, VLANs, port forwarding, VPN setup and thats it to be honest.

Home datacenter expert here. What do you plan to serve? Does any of it need to be externally published? If not, this is very simple. Buy a used desktop or even a laptop (4th gen Intel or 1st gen Ryzen or newer) and install Linux (or a hypervisor for multiple VMs if you wish, e.g. Proxmox). Give it a static IP. Do not attach a monitor after you have remote access. Have fun. For published services, perhaps a VPS would be better suited for this. Publishing things off of a home connection is not ideal.

>>9333 >Publishing things off of a home connection is not ideal. Can i still do this with something like no-ip if my ISP doesn't allow port forwarding?

>>9334 Dynamic DNS has nothing to do with port forwarding. All DDNS does is help give you a static reference for your services hosted on a DHCP IP. If you have ports blocked at the ISP layer, this does not get fixed. If you want to know what I do, I set up VPN servers on VPSes. I then tunnel connections from the virtual machines to those VPSes. Published services are then iptables masqueraded back to those internal VPN addresses that the servers sit on. For web services, I use nginx reverse proxies. For even better results, have the VPN connection maintained via pfSense and use pfSense to do NAT for VMs behind it, as an isolated network inside your home network.

So I think I need to give some context , my Hard Drive is facing some issue with access and other stuff I am thinking of making a home server so I can just put my stuff in a place it is safe , don't really trust big tech with stuff like this.

>>9336 That's fine. If you don't need it publicly accessible than just do what I said earlier - get a basic desktop/laptop and use storage off that. Serve it on your home network via Linux (NFS/SMB) or, for a more guided experience, install TrueNAS. Add disks as required. If you want some data durability, opt for a two disk RAID1 (mirrored vdev) or three disk RAID5/RAIDZ1.

>>9336 https://wiki.r-selfhosted.com/explanations/ I actually found this site for stuff related to self-hosting but I feel like it is incomplete. Is there any good guide like this out there?

>>9338 >>9338 The website you linked gives decent enough explanations of concepts you will encounter in a home server journey. But yes, it does not tell you where to start. I already did, however. What else do you need clarified?

>>9335 thank you for such informative reply!

>>9340 Meh, I thought it would be a good excuse for me to learn Networking , I slept during my networking classes kek.

I very rarely hear anyone talking about probably one of the most important parts of having a home server... the power requirements. I don't want to run something that is constantly draining money.

>>9344 It will draw less power than a standard pc, because you don't need a gpu or a beefy cpu most of the time. Assuming you live in a 1st world country with server drawing 30w at idle, we are talking about less than $5 per month. I mostly use mine to seed torrents from private trackers and automate backups but it's still handy to run other software like bitwarden or nextcloud.

>>9331 >get PC >install Linux or BSD >install nfs/smb >install some docker soykaf to share movies and music like jellyfin >???? >Profit

>Ctrl F >wft, no install gentoo wiki yet? https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Home_server

>buy literally any computer, can be a thinkpad even >install Linux/*BSD on it without a DE >check the box to install sshd during the install process (don't be a retard, disable root login and password authentication; use ssh keys) There you're done. Congrats lain you have a server.

>Links & resources Server tips: https://anonbin.io/?1759c178f98f6135#CzLuPx4s2P7zuExQBVv5XeDkzQSDeVkZMWVhuecemeN6 RouterOS's: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Home_server#Custom https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://old.reddit.com/r/datahoarder https://www.labgopher.com https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/index https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Features List of ARM-based SBCs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PGaVu0sPBEy5GgLM8N-CvHB2FESdlfBOdQKqLziJLhQ Low-power x86 systems: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yl414kIy9MhaM0-VrpCqjcsnfofo95M1smRTuKN6e-E Cheap disks: https://shucks.top/ & https://diskprices.com/

>>9355 Does jellyfin actually work yet?

>>9369 it's been working for awhile now

>>9331 Never understood this particular reddit's obsession of with power hungry servers honestly. What is the point of buying latest GPUs and core i7 for transcoding when all movies are distributed encoded in HEVC through torrents already? Nobody forces people to stuff their precious hard drives with raw 100GB blu-rays.

Can someone explain how to make a homeserver to a complete retard, like talking to a kid? Dont get i how i should set up the network.

>>9382 Because Reddits mentality is if you do it the most complicated way that you are somehow better than everyone else. Reddit is a big ego game for no god damn reason.

>>9390 I see same attitudes on few non-reddit forums and 4chan. They build these generic 100-watt idle servers with latest intel core i7 and call it a day. For them a home server is either a gimmick Raspberry Pi with mandatory shovelware like Homo ASSistant or Pi Hole (these people have never heard of uBlock Origin apparently) or a "VM home lab" (heavily implies corporate wageslaving) rack server, nobody explores affordable cute and compact builds that mimic commercial 2-bay NASes. Although, at some point it's probably cheaper to jailbreak one of those and install a regular OS since they have Intel CPUs already. Maybe the reason is that most available compact motherboards and fanless barebones have ditched SATA ports long ago, II've noticed some obscure embedded Supermicro boards come with Slim SAS which is kinda cool as it allows 4-8 SATA cables in SATA port size. Basically I want to have something that barely exceeds a volume of 3/4-drive bay, something i can pick up and move by hand in case of emergency, something that can run off the UPS battery for few hours, something that won't cost me a fortune to power off the wall doing meaningful server work 24/7. All these Mini-ITX builds I see are huge and ugly, I am in pain.

>>9400 >these people have never heard of uBlock Origin apparently I'm going to be honest with you. You are coming off as very sure of yourself, but completely unaware of the context in which uBlock Origin may not be used. Something like PiHole was very useful for blocking ads on things like a smartTV, as well as for avoiding malicious sites (This, of course, can be used by pf and I tended to just use this after I started to use OpenBSD as my main system.)

>>9401 >smartTV People still subironicallly use this consumerist gimmick from 2013? Any modern motherboard or SoHo NAS has an HDMI out and easily decodes HEVC video, there are Kodi, Plex and Jellyfin for TV-friendly GUI, hence there is no need for dedicated "Media" device when I can plug the "NAS" into my TV and get an "HTPC", or as you say "Smart TV", and a modern television device still does work as simple display as it should. https://web.archive.org/web/20160322161656/http://technology.siekerman.nl/post/133644449664/the-perfect-tv >as well as for avoiding malicious sites This is what Ublock Origin does perfectly regardless of what network I'm on since it's installed on a machine I want to (or not) avoid "malicious sites" on. It cuts ads on web pages without breaking their layouts and I can trim their elements further interactively or permit "forbidden" pages immediately without doing a round-trip between my computer and another one, a sinkhole (what PiHole really is sans the useless "statistics" masturbatory interface) does not offer such flexibility. Besides, all home routers have been coming with DNS sinkhole function since 2005, they also offer transparent filtering if you really want to wrestle nasty proprietary home-phoning surveillance devices which might be smart enough to ignore your custom DNS server settings when needed. Why would one need a dedicated computer (even is small) or operating system VM for such a simple function is beyond my comprehension. Also, you mentioned BSD operating system, from what I know it works only on Intel hardware and coincidentally among redditors Intel-based firewalls and routers are very popular, made on base of chinese fanless barebones or "appliances" and "thin clients" manufactured by some American companies. I would like to avoid such affair as having a device with known remote management vulnerability working as a network gateway is a big no-no for me. Are there any good low power non-Intel all-in-one (wireless access point, SFP module for passive optics to avoid ISP hardware, a non-garbage ethernet switch preferably included in single package) routers? I'm only aware of Turris Omnia, which is rather outdated already.

>>9400 Apparently there is this fresh iteration of 110*110mm Korean board called Odroid H3 (+) with Intel Jasper Lake 5105 and 6005 processors: 2 SATA, full 4-lane PCIe M.2 drive slot, 2*2.5G Ethernet (Realtek tho), 64GB RAM, eMMC bootable drive, under 20W motherboard power consumption under stress test. Seems perfect for small NAS with 2 spinning disks and a cache SSD. It's pretty affordable if you don't live in a warzone (150-200$), at same price as those strange firewall-esque multi-ethernet fanless boxes from Chinese factories on Ali but with some semblance of community forum support, BIOS updates and open source schematics.

>>9383 Lain I am going to be converting my old pc to server, server is basically a computer which you can access from other computer.

>>9383 Youre going to need a install a linux distro, setup SSH and/or VNC to control it remotely, make it use a static IP, after that it really depends what you want to do with it... maybe make it a file server with smb, syncthing, nextcloud or a vpn server with openvpn or wireguard, maybe a tor node...

I had something similar in mind. Intending to use the small Zotac mini computers I got for free some time ago. I still don't know how to approach this. I want to access a VPN provider to seed torrents but at the same time run OpenVPN on it. How do I do this?

>>9466 Guess docker is my only bet. The qbittorrent instance connecting via openVPN to the VPN service would run in a separate container and I could access the Computer network via openVPN. It's getting kinda frickly.

>>9400 >Pi Hole (these people have never heard of uBlock Origin apparently) Pi hole blocks DNS network wide and it's useful if you combine it with unbound and just completely ditch an external DNS server altogether. You probably haven't looked at the documentation but it suggests installing an adblocker to get rid of the frames where an ad would be cause Pihole can't do that.

>>9647 >combine it with unbound and just completely ditch an external DNS server altogether That is a legitimate use, but 1) Caching records from external DNS is still using external DNS, with one or two simultaneous users per household it barely justifies the use 2) A household computer server is too underpowered to store and serve entire world's DNS records to aleviate the previous point and make the LARP worth it's name 3) It does not legitimize use of bing-bing wahoo fischer price reddit web interface inside a (excited soying out sounds) Docker container Proxmox Kubernete, every SOHO router can cache DNS entries since 2005 or so.

I am one step closer to feeling safe hosting my own websites at home. I got Docker set up last night and it just werks on Ubuntu Server. nginx-gunicorn-flask is a breeze to set up with it. Now I just need to dedicate some time to all the configs. Basically, I think I need to only allowing certain requests (http, https, specific URLs, specific ports) which will be done with UFW and Nginx. I don't think the web app should handle this stuff. Right?

>>9390 these are the people that make the whole corporate world a fuarrrking mess. They spread bad tech as their wives spread herpes to all her boyfriends. funny that most of them have no clue of what they are doing, and even being complicate in the end the soykaf looks like total amateur.

>>9911 >I am one step closer to feeling safe hosting my own websites at home. I got Docker set up last night and it just werks on Ubuntu Server. nginx-gunicorn-flask is a breeze to set up with it. Now I just need to dedicate some time to all the configs. Basically, I think I need to only allowing certain requests (http, https, specific URLs, specific ports) which will be done with UFW and Nginx. I don't think the web app should handle this stuff. Right? Heads up, have you checked that your ISP is not blocking outbound HTTP/S activity? This happened to me, now I need to find some other use for this cruddy laptop-server, and need to get a hosting service I guess.

My fuarrrking ISP blocks all ports. Can't even host on HTTPS. I don't know what to do. I can't port forward either. I have access to a VPS. I was thinking I could maybe just forward traffic from my servers to the VPS. Any ideas lainons?

>>11330 A Tor onion service can bust through NAT. It's extremely easy to set up. VPS with nginx pointing at your hardware, bridged through wireguard, is a setup I've used before, but with port forwarding. You can look at this page for advice on NAT traversal using a STUN server but it sounds like a bitch https://www.jordanwhited.com/posts/wireguard-endpoint-discovery-nat-traversal/

>>11330 I'd just host on the VPS if you have one and all you're doing is static pages. Datacenters usually have better uptime and DDOS protection than home connections anyway. >>11342 Seconding Tor as well. I run a hidden service for SSH into my desktop because I got lit the fuarrrk up by botnets and script kiddies the one time I exposed it to the clearnet.

honestly i like hardware haven on youtube lains, at least just for watchable content about this stuff. hes definitely normal person but like, he built a budget build nas and home lab that were actually budget and for that i respect him. really what you should build depends on what you want to run and how much you like building, i love repurposing "old" tech and diy so my server is just my old desktop in a new case and im planning for my nas to be built out of an ex lease pc with added drive bays and a sata card with an ikea lack table rack

>>11367 This is basically what VPNs are intended for (in an enterprise sense, not a "buying a mullvad account to CYA" sense) Check out Tailscale also a steady stream of bruteforce / shellshock / etc. attempts is normal. Just configure fail2ban, write a firewall policy whitelisting the origin IP ranges that can happen in your country (or use a jump box), and/or put sshd on a different port (if you don't have a webserver running, 443 can be good for this as it can bypass firewall policies that restrict traffic by port number but don't inspect application layers)

>>11379 Okay so my plan of action is. I have my servers with Zerotier, yes Zerotier is 'cyberhumped' but I can't get tailscale to work. Then on the VPS I will have NGINX Reverse Proxy. What do you guys think?

>>9336 > So I think I need to give some context , my Hard Drive is facing some issue with access and other stuff I am thinking of making a home server so I can just put my stuff in a place it is safe , don't really trust big tech with stuff like this. Why not just buy a new hard drive? Or add a usb drive? Easier than setting up a file server or whatever. Less fun, though. :)

>>9334 Heyo Lainon. If you're willing to spend a little money you can get a really cheap VPS and use something like Tailscale (headscale if you want to self host) a connection from your internet network to a VPS both running tailscale. Then on the VPS you'll want a reverse proxy NGINX proxy manager is good, and a domain name. This is currently what I do.

One way to run a web server on the internet without exposing your ip address, paying for a domain name, doxing yourself to the domain name registrar, struggling with dns records, paying for a vps, or going to jail is to set up a tor onion service. The other advantage is that it takes about ten minutes. Here is one way to do it. These instructions are for a Debian-based linux, but easily adaptable to any linux. I don't know anything about Windows. ## how to install a tor onion service running weborf web server ## create a non-root user (eg: "web") to run the web server: su - adduser --disabled-login web ## ## create a base directory for the website: su web mkdir /home/web/html ## ## copy website files to base directory cp <website-stuff> /home/web/html ## ## get the uid and gid of user "web": id web ## install weborf web server apt install weborf ## ## run weborf as a daemon on port 80, as non-root user "web" weborf -d -p 80 -u <uid-of-user-web> -b /home/web/html ## ## test browse to localhost (as a non-root user) ## ## additional weborf command-line options: ## enable authentication: -a <unix-socket-of-auth-program> ## enable cgi: -Y -m -c .php,/usr/bin/php-cgi,<more-cgi-types> ## enable ssl: -S </path/to/ssl-cert> -K </path/to/ssl-key> ## set up tor onion service access: apt install tor nano /etc/tor/torrc ## append the following two lines to torrc: ## ---------------------------------- HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/web/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80 ## ---------------------------------- service tor restart ## retrieve your onion address: cat /var/lib/tor/web/hostname ## test browse to your onion address with tor browser ## give out the onion address to friends or the public

Skimming back over my instructions for installing woborf as a tor onion service, I noticed that I left out something that might confuse somone. After su'ing to user "web", you need to su back to root. To fix the instructions: Right after the line: ## install weborf web server insert the line: su -

>>11435 You can also use bruteforce to get a domain which resembles something related to you.

Mainly used as network storage, access via samba. I can access it from the internet using vpn installed on my vps.

>>11477 how did you build/buy that mount for the hard drives? I tried looking for something like that (basically a box that I can screw the drives in on top of each other) and I found like... 1 listing on Amazon. I figured I didn't use the right search terms. What is that called and where can I buy one?

>>11479 Not >>11477, but it looks like a generic hard drive cage from a PC case (?). You can buy them on Amazon, or you can find them for cheaper on Aliexpress and similar sites. You can likely get one for free out of an older PC case.

>>11479 >>11481 i built this cage myself. just found dimesions of 2,5hdd and how are holes for screws spaced, then drilled holes in correct places. holes are drilled in two pieces of material that are attached to the bottom using angles.

spotted russia doing this in kursk the other day, looks pretty cool, but not sure what its purpose is. if any lainons can elaborate or run a similar setup, plz share

>>12584 Soldiers have to be on the move all the time, sometimes very suddenly. Then they often have to use their equipment quickly after arriving someplace. They don't have time to take apart computer setups, plug cables in and out, and then take the components piece by piece to the next place. They put it into that rack and can carry or roll or put it on a truck as one piece. The same setup is often used in industry, for example i saw similar in automotive industry. A laptop or some kind of embedded computer is a good alternative sometimes, but sometimes specific components are needed, like network devices with lots of ports, or specific pci cards or external devices. Data recorder is one of such a device often used in industry, radio equipment is an example often used in military. Not to mention sometimes the power of a laptop or embedded just isn't enough and you need a powerful desktop CPU with a soykafton of RAM, or one or several powerful video cards.

>>12603 cool insight lainon! It's a lil ragtag and idk why the whole rack is out there in the open like that, but sounds about right, nonetheless.

Hello, is this the server/NAS thread? I have a NAS and I was looking to upgrade. Currently it’s a very old MSI NUC with a crusty Celeron, 8gb of ram, a 128gb SSD running the system and a USB3.0 dock with four 3.5 inch bays. The bays are populated with 4x 8TB disks, two of them acting as backups of the other two (using rsync, not RAID). It’s running OpenMediaVault and a few containers. The next upgrade will be an UPS (I’ve had a power outage causing a total corruption of the OS, thankfully I’m doing monthly backups of the whole system and was up and running again after 15 minutes). Are there some cost conscious x86 boards nowadays with SATA or PCI-e?

>>9334 The way I do it is by using SSH tunneling and a NGINX as reverse proxy hosted on a cheap VPS. I basically tunnel FROM my local server TO my remote server, then tell it to listen on 127.0.0.1:8080 and then I configure NGINX to route requests to 127.0.0.1:8080. The only problem I had was that the connection kept dropping because of inactivity. Enabling keepalive worked (Dropbear has '-K timeout' for that, where 'interval' is the interval)