I am interested in tech and would say I have more knowledge about networking than the average person, but there’s still a lot that’s way above my head. I’ve played around with Pis a little and have set up things like home assistant and foundry VTT before.
I got my hands on an old machine from work and want to upgrade it with some of my spare hardware, and ideally have it set up as my single home server. I would like to host plex, a few foundry servers, home assistant, and use it as a NAS. Basically combine everything I have right now into one more powerful machine.
Thing is… It feels really overwhelming to try and start. I’m not sure really sure how to go about the whole endeavor. What OS do I use? Do I use VMs, docker containers, is there pro or cons one way or the other? How can I make sure they’re all accessible from the web securely?
Is there anything you guys can tell me to get me started? Some resources to walk me along setting a multipurpose home server?
Personally, after I graduated from pis I went to proxmox, for the simple reason of if I wanted to experiment with anything I could just spin up a new VM and test it out. Everything I have running in my lab is a VM. The only thing I run bare metal is opnsense, truenas and one pi.
Don’t be afraid to nuke everything and start again. Also make sure you take notes on what you do, what sites you visit, code you copy and paste. Obsidian and SilverBullet have been a godsend when it come to learning from my own mistakes.
I was on the same boat few months ago. Went for Debian OS and then docker containers for almost all services. Portainer is awesome web UI to manage all containers so thats what I install first. Starting up new services is about copy paste docker-compose with slight modifications for your needs. My server is accessible through wireguard connection and that should be one of the most secure ways and probably the easiest to setup afaik (downside of wireguard is that you have to setup each device to allow connection - AKA scanning qr code)
Just saying what I did, most people here are more experienced and Im still learning.
GL and HF
This depends on the machine you have.
I would choose a hypervisor, if I had plenty of RAM (32 GB+) and CPU and wanted to have everything properly separated with the option to easily redo things, backup VMs and container, experiment with different setups and also wanted to learn new things. There are plenty of options. Proxmox might be the easiest to get started with and also to get help from the selfhosted community.
If I had limited resources, I would just use docker/docker-compose directly. It is more commonly used than lxc and doesn’t have the overhead of a VM.
Regarding safe and secure access: This is a rabbit hole.
I personally don’t use cloudflare, a lot of people do. Use a reverse proxy and generate a ssl certificate for all domains used. (Traefik, caddy, npm et cetera). Try to keep services up to date. Separate networks from each other. Think about which services you really have to expose publicly.
I can’t point to any decent resources, but in your shoes I’d probably download a Debian based distro that’s similar to what you used on your pi’s (Ubuntu server or Debian itself), learn how to use docker (see the other post where a user is asking about containerisation today for community responses) and set up a reverse proxy like Caddy to safely host your content on your lan and once you’ve got it working on there then think about internet access and whether you want to go down the VPS/Cloudfront route for public access to your goodies.
Given how Plex is trying to diversify away from self hosted content, give Jellyfin a spin - it’s surprisingly good and supported by anything with a browser, iOS, android, firestick, kodi or whatever!
I feel you. I was where you are 2 years ago and it was really hard to start off.
I’d suggest starting installing Debian as an OS. Then, go for Docker.
If you feel lost, you can take a look at some videos from DBTech on YouTube. Look at his playlists to sort what you need.
Remember to document everything you do, because you’ll forget what you did to make things work your way.
Have fun !
