Presi300
Professional Neckbeard
- 6 Posts
- 116 Comments
I’m biased towards TrueNAS scale, because in my experience, it’s been really rock solid, running on bare metal. It also allows you to setup things like Nextcloud/Tailscale/ a lot more, in 1 click from their “app store”. It’s also got all the virtualization bells and whistles. As for ZFS, again, just like everything else, it’s been rock solid and setting up a ZFS pool is pretty much done for you when you install TN Scale.
As for remote access, I’ve always personally done it via a local Wireguard server and can’t really compare it to tailscare or whatever cloudflare does… Because I’ve never used those.
If you need a GPU just for encoding, go on the 2nd hand market and pick up a used Nvidia RTX 2000/3000 card. Intel Arc could also work, but it’s a bit quirky afaik…
For desktop CPUs… Higher number = better. That’s it. i5 > i3 > pentium, 11xxxx > 10xxxx > 9xxx… etc. For laptop CPUs… Good luck
Benefits:
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Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for
piracystoring all my legally obtained files. -
Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.
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Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.
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Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.
As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.
SMB sucks, try NFS.
Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.
Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.
Yk, you can make fun of old programming languages but the average job offer with one of them is.
Needs to know fortran/cobol
Pay: 8000€/month + benefits and unlimited sick days
Compared to the average web dev job offer:
Needs to know react, redux, angular, PHP (for managing legacy codebases) with 5+ years of experience, needs to be affluent in at least 3 languages and must have a master’s degree in computer science.
Pay: 1500€/month
Not really easy to selfhost atm, but FOSS and we’ll get there eventually…
I have a big boi ProLiant DL380e Gen8 and it’s pretty good as long as you have a dedicated room for it as it’s really loud. If you get them for really cheap like I did (I got mine maxed out for less than 100$), then yeah it’s a good deal.
It’s not amazing on power consumption either with like 130W at idle… I’d imagine the smaller ones using use less power, but I wouldn’t count on it, as it is still old hardware. However, if the price is right, then it could absolutely be worth it… If you can withstand the noise.
And looking at the specs of the N36L, for the same price you could very easily scrounge together a custom build from 2nd hand parts, which will be quieter, faster and most likely use less power…
I feel like you have the wrong idea of what hacking acting a actually is… But yes, as long as you don’t do anything too stupid line forwarding all of your ports or going without any sort of firewall, the chances of you getting hacked are very low…
As for DDOSing, you can get DDOSed with or without self hosting all the same, but I wouldn’t worry about it.
It goes over all of the steps of setting it up.
My tip for saving money: buy as much as possible 2nd hand. You do not need the latest of latest gen hardware for a NAS/Homelab. This is excluding storage, and ESPECIALLY hard drives. Those you should absolutely buy new.
As for setting it up… My recommendation is to use TrueNAS scale with either RAIDz1 or RAIDz2, giving you either 1 or 2 drives of parity, in case something fails…
As for remote access, you can run a wireguard VPN server in a VM, allowing you to access it from anywhere, as long as you’re connected to said VPN.
For my main server only… If HP iLO is to be believed, averaging around 130W.
Running: deluge, homarr, jellyfin, lidarr, navidrome, nextcloud, prowlarr, sonarr, whoogle and a minecraft server (VM) on TrueNAS Scale.
As for everything else (my router, switch and DNS/DHCP server, which is a separate machine, you can add another maybe 50W on top of it…
I am very much into the nitty gritty of Linux (I use Alpine fyi) the problem is, pf/opnsense aren’t based on Linux…
And I also don’t really know how to set them up… Yk as routers, mainly because my internet comes through PPPoE and I just cannot for the life of me figure out how to pass that through to a VM. I bound the VM to its own NIC, did everything, did not work…
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150$ is rather ambitious for what you are describing as a custom made low power server. Managing to build something… Anything commercial out of new, hell even refurbished parts that has enough horse power to run anything more than a pihole/DNS server at this price point would be a challenge and a half. If you’re going refurbished/2nd hand, you’re likely gonna spend half of that on just shipping the parts to you.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the price of new low end parts and vastly overestimating the capabilities and availability of old micro servers. I’d say something like this would work at a price range of around 300~400$ (and even that’s ambitious imo).
And even then, that’s a NICHE audience you’d be targeting. It would be people who don’t wanna pay subscriptions, but also don’t wanna be bothered to spend a day or 2 figuring out how to set up a simple linux box on an old computer they have. I’m not saying that audience doesn’t exist, it’s just veeeeery niche.