This may be a good place to ask for advice, since I’m new to running a server myself and am now looking to set one up with old hardware I have lying around. I have a raspberry pi 5 lying around and an x230 laptop + an expresscard to pci-e x16 converter (I used it to run games with a GPU), which of these would be more worth it to invest in? I would like to run a file server with some hdd’s in raid 5, and use it to stream media and maybe run a Minecraft server. I would need a pi sata hat or a pci-e sata card.
“But why? You can just do that with a <big tech company> account.”
Searches for “shit in a toilet bowl” in Immich in front of them, shock and awe ensues.
I stopped sharing when I realized noone wanted to join my jellyfin server
I gave like four of my friends an account available from the clearnet, with transcoding and request capabilities and they’ve watched maybe two episodes of a show between them lmao
My home server is my pet! Yesterday I migrated my nextcloud from docker compose to kubernetes (k3s). That’s like playing with your cat or taking the dog for a walk.
Spoken a truth that resonates to the depths of my heart.
That money goes into a new home server.
10x that money goes into the home server.
points to the right jar
No big tech company account allows me to download and manage vast sums of linux ISO’s automatically.
And no big tech company account allows me to brag to everyone who doesnt want to listen but has no choice that I am not being spied on when everyone else is, and that I am saving so much money from not paying for cloud storage that I can further upgrade my server! Also I can fill up the right jar at an allarming rate.
No big tech company account allows me to download and manage vast sums of linux ISO’s automatically.
And no big tech company account allows me to brag to everyone who doesnt want to listen but has no choice that I am not being spied on when everyone else is, and that I am saving so much money from not paying for cloud storage that I can further upgrade my server! Also I can fill up the right jar at an allarming rate.
to brag to everyone who doesnt want to listen but has no choice that I am not being spied on when everyone else is
Lol, lmao even.
I’ll convince my wife of this one day. Currently she rolls her eyes and shakes her head at any mention of server related stuff. “What’s the point of all this effort when you can do all this easily with google/netflix/spotify, etc”
Now what do we do when people at our house just scoff and say “This is bullshit”, then refusing to elaborate? (And this about downloading Signal.)
As someone who JUST got jellyfin working, I’m sorry for my coworkers when I get back…
Get a jar. You’ll be rich. You’re a member of an elite community now and everyone needs to know.
I clicked into the comments for one fucking reason. And was left very disappointed.
What do you run on your home server? What sort of hardware is it running on?
Oh dang, someone asked and I don’t have to talk about my server uninvited. Hype!
Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don’t need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I’ll just replace it when I get to that point.
Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc).
Docker containers:
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actual (budgeting)
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affine (note taking)
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bentopdf (PDF editing)
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beszel (server status monitoring)
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dockge (Docker management)
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guacamole (server remote desktop access)
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immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)
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jellyfin (video and music server)
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jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)
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kavita (comic books and ebooks)
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kopia (backups)
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linkwarden (saving weblinks)
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mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
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paperlessngx (document scanning, OCR and Al organisation)
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opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
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prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
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samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
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syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
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tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
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vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)
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watchtower (automatic docker updates)
Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.
Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.
Really interesting! Thanks!
Part of the reason I ask: I bought a Synology (4-bay, 1 TB each in Synology’s RAID 5–like format) a while back with the intention of using it as a hybrid NAS & server. But have been repeatedly struggling to get it to do actually run the applications I wanted to run. And then started trying to get some of the things I wanted to run on my Synology to instead run on a Raspberry Pi…same problem. The weird architecture and distro makes some things not work smoothly. So have been thinking about getting a Mini PC with a standing x86_64 processor running a standard Linux distro to be a proper server, and using the Synology more exclusively for file storage & sharing.
Some of the things you listed there are definitely things that were on my radar to get around to running myself anyway (e.g. Immich, Watchtower). Others I had never heard of, but was already considering looking for an equivalent (Affine, Jotta—though for notesI was hoping Nextcloud would have a suitable app), and others I didn’t even think of (Linkwarden looks very interesting).
Since you’ve got a Synology already, I’m curious what value you see in the Mini PC running a Samba server? I’m also curious why you go with the Synology as your reverse proxy. Just the ease of the included tool? Does it also handle TLS termination, or how does that work in your setup?
I started with just a Synology NAS as well and struggles with Docker containers constatantly causing problems and not starting up (or shutting down). Turned out that the Synology hardware didn’t have the muscle to run so many services (I had a lot fewer services back then, but it still kept stumbling). The mini-PC seperates the computing portion to be able to do the heavy lifting. Used 7th gen mini-PCs are going to be cheap as they flood the market in coming months as companies ditch machines that can’t upgrade to Windows 11. Although be warned that these might not do the video transcoding you want…check on your requirements.
Mariushosting.com is the single best resource I’ve found for Synology docker deployments. Here’s a more complete guide once you have a mini-PC.
Unpopular opinion: AI helps quite a bit when you get stuck (Claude has been the best in my experience), but you need to know how to use it (i.e. let it diagnose problems to point you in the right direction to read about solutions…don’t try to just execute everything it says because it doesn’t understand your setup. It’s great to feed it log outputs to allow diagnosis).
Once I got into it, I started looking for more and more self-hosted solutions that would be relevant to me. You can fire up a Docker container, check it out and delete if you don’t like it.
Mini-PC running a Samba server: this is to share the storage connected to the mini-PC. Drives in the Synology are already easily shared through the Synology interface, but I am using these for bulk media storage and backups so don’t usually need to access these directly. I use the server PC storage for small amounts of live network storage.
why go with the Synology for reverse proxy: It’s very easy to do through Synology’s baked-in solution. I’m conscious that I don’t know a lot about security yet, and my reading tells me that the Synology solution is safe. I didn’t want to take the risk of exposing services to the open internet through DIY solutions till I know more.
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My previous laptop is my home server. It was retired as a laptop because the screen died, but the rest was fine.
I run a lot of services.
Plex and Calibre are the two that I share with my friends.
Home assistant is the main one that’s only used by my household.
I have a bunch of other stuff like audiobookshelf, gramps, etc. that aren’t used much, but are kinda fun to have.
Then there’s the stuff that is used to manage the services, like portainer, watchtower, uptime kuma, etc.
Yeah I’d have bot jars at similar levels, and usually they both would get added money simultaneously
Transcription
A photo of two jars. The left one is labelled “Swear Jar” and contains a small number of coins.
The right one is labelled “Telling people about my [home server] when I wasn’t asked jar”. “Home server” is edited over the top of whatever was originally written on the jar. This jar is filled to the brim with lots of coins and paper notes.
