I'm in law school right now and can't pretend to know the first thing about programming or networking- I've literally just used Mac OS since like 2009 lol- but thanks to an earlier video of yours I got a Raspberry Pi and now a Mini PC to run Pihole, docker containers with -arr apps and Jellyfin, along with some network storage which I'm keeping backups on. It was a little bit of work but it's been a huge help! I *hated* being dependent on Google & Apple for everything from office applications to extra storage, and entering the world of Linux & open source has been SO refreshing
Welcome maybe you can use that law degree to fight companies abusing open source and licensees such as the GPL I promise you will become a Linux folk hero but I can’t promise much money from the ventures lol
I had no idea what I was doing but from watching your videos I got a mini pc running Ubuntu server with casa OS. Only utilizing the shared network storage features right now but I’m excited to dive into docker containers and learn more about that. Thank you for the content!
the paying for itself argument is really pointless for a lot of people who are doing this for the fact that you actually own the data and no one can take it away from you in a virtual sense. That is worth a price and to me its well worth more than the costs of hard drives and the enclosure, its beyond worth it. Im not buying just storage, I'm buying my own storage.
This is exactly what the technology is designed for. Not to kill the bandwidth trying to get to the main server in next continent for everything! Local caches/services like this and the edge technologies those many can share is the way to go! Well done! I'm going to try a few things too now with your inspiration!!!
We use our family home server as NAS and [matrix] chat server. It also runs torrent for movies, series and music, because streaming services keep region locking everything and it's often more convenient and simple to just download them. Plus they don't suddently disappear. Since a few months, it has a graphics card installed for remote access gaming, when not at home. Everything is installed on our "HTPC" setup, which uses a hypervisor and different VM's, similar structure to our business server. It is super silent in it's Silverstone Grandia case, bq fans and an aftermarket GPU cooler. //Edited: forgot to mention that it also has an HDCP bypass and 4K capture for recording international TV or any other video source. Since some media players allow for real time video upscaling using the graphics card, this became very helpful when playing back recordings of SD media such as VHS or DVD.
@@alexo5190 it depends how much you want to learn if you want to be amazing at it and learn everything you’re gonna have to have one just for practice but if you just wanna set it up, you could follow RUclips tutorials ask ChatGPT when you get stuck and that would get you most of the way
for anyone on a budget, you can find old mini PC's on your local marketplace for cheap and use them as a server compared to buying a new n100 mini pc. I've found a i5-6500t + 8bg ram Lenovo thinkcentre for $20 USD. what was wrong with it? just needed to reinstall windows lol. just today i picked up 2 of those same ThinkCentre + 2 keyboards + 2 mouses + 1 monitor for $60 USD. they were just missing hard drives which is cheap
I second the Thinkcentre. You can get them in a 1L form factor if you don't need drive bays and they are so cheap, I started using them for projects rather than the RPi because they were so much cheaper during the pandemic. Also, some 1L Thinkcentre's have an option for an 8x PCI-E slot that you can fit a half-height card into, but these ones are much more expensive than the regular Thinkcentres.
I am a graphic designer and aside from this uses I also have my accounting and receipt generation self hosted fkr my freelance work as well as a website for my portfolio. Home servers have use cases for everyone plus i feel like my own IT for my oersonal business
Agree about the value of having a home server. We are using a Thinkpad T420 laptop with a large drive in the DVD bay as a poor man's server. We are using it mainly as a source of automatic backups for my wife and my systems and file sharing for easy access by multiple computers. In addition it is running a NTP server to keep everything on our LAN time synchronized even if we lose internet access. Several of our DIY IoT devices default to firmware time and date so having a LAN based NTP server allows them get current time (sort of accurate) after a power fail even if the internet is down. It is also running a personal web server where we keep so common stuff.
@@adrielamadi952 If you are responding to me it is a vanilla T420 ThinkPad running Windows 10 pro. I purchased it on eBay as a refurbished off least computer.
@@adrielamadi952 a very much depends on what format you want because he use data centre one that’s fairly quiet but you wouldn’t wanna sleep next to it isn’t very different price point and often much cheaper than home grade available on Amazon
PLS EDUCATE MEEEE :( Why would you want a server over a big external drive that I would allow the sharing option to be checked? I see that the NAS external case thing alone is like $300 and then you have to buy a few HDD meanwhile a western digital external drive cost like 200$ for 14TB
@@AG-en5y festival just having one external drive you are going to lose all data and you cannot be upset because you haven’t looked after it as you were meant to have three copies and one of site . a server can make that easier but also you can do things the server like access it from multiple devices you can install certain software so that your large collection of video files can show up like Netflix there are lots of possibilities
@@AG-en5y In my case it stems from me being an experimental person and always wanting to self-host everyting and have an environment to experiment on. Plus have additional place to store a copy of my important data.
Interesting video. I like to see and understand how others use their hardware and software configs, but you made me more aware that I actually do not need any home server, or at least not for now. While I had planned to make one at one point and even have the necessary spare hardware, I still don't see any benefit for myself. I'm actually the total opposite. I don't care if the internet is down as I can bring one of my retro systems / configurations up and play in an already isolated / offline environment. I don't use cloud services, I don't watch movies, play online games, etc. My only use case would be for some programming related servers which can alredy be started on demand from a container, VM or a different bootble drive. But even for those, I find portable / enbedded versions more convenient even if they are more limited in scope.
In the UK, my unraid server costs me £4~£8 a month to run in electricity. This is on top of the hardware acquisition. Compared to the Hetzner server I was paying monthly for, its about 2 years for my hardware to break even compared to just paying for hardware running somewhere else. I strongly debated sticking with hetzner, since hardware ages fast and unsure how long it will be before due an upgrade.. but I did it anyway
I recently acquired a dead Cisco UCS C240 M4 server for free. It came with 120TB of 12GHz SAS hard drives and 240GB of SSD for the boot drive, a single Xenon CPU (motherboard can handle two), and 16 gigs of RAM (there are 24 RAM slots so plenty of room to expand). I've just about got it running again and will try installing TrueNAS or Windows. Haven't decided whether or not to keep it or sell it off. Maybe I'll set it up as a home server, if I can find somewhere to put it where the HD and fan noise doesn't drive me crazy.
Just ordered a sff system to start building a home lab and some servers. Trying to get into IT and having a homelab to put on my resume along side my certifications will be a huge boon. Plus of course im a networking nerd so more fun for me
When you said you should have your own internet I thought you were cooky for a second until I realized how much sense that makes. Tons of media , wikis, maps, etc. Hmmm. I stand corrected
Somebody on the internet said that first you start a small server and you increase and increase and increase you equipment till you reach a rack server
Hi there. I am not a computer person. So most of this does not make sense to me. I am starting a small business with my husband. We are landscape architects and work on big autcad or revit files that we need to share back and forth. I think what we need to create a home server to share these files is a NAS? So far none of the videos I've watched have this kind of scenario explained but I think your video is saying we could use it that way. I would love if you could give me a pro tip and let me know if I am heading in the right direction. Thanks so much!
I backed the 8-bay version of that UGreen NAS btw.. going to use it as my media server.. serving all types of media I enjoy! Videos, Movies, Mangas, Manwhas, EBooks, Music, Pictures, etc. Not sure yet if I'll have to install a 3rd party OS. Hopefully they improve their software. 😗
@@Khaled1425 Run docker and get the docker compose for Komga. I can't tell you how to get those files specifically. You need to be resourceful. Use torrent, Usenet, JDownloader, etc. Save the mangas/manwhas as .zip files and change the extension to .CBR so that Komga can pick it up. You will need to teach yourself how all of this can come together. Google will be your best friend for this. Good luck!
@@Khaled1425 you can torrent it There was some very easy torrent client apps you can use which will basically just allow to download it but you will likely have to use some software like handbrake to transcode it to an MP4 format if you don’t wanna have hundreds of terabytes because the MKV format is non-compressed
I'd love to hear what kind of setup you would suggest for those living in places where electricity can be quite expensive, would you use an ARM-based device?
Ultimately, all data is stored on a drive, regardless of its container or location. Cloud backup? A drive in a computer in a different location. NAS? On a local drive connected to your local network, doesn't matter. Using a home server for data backup is like going hunting with a semi-auto assault rifle, can be done but hardly the ideal tool for the job.
Semi automatic weapons by definition aren’t assault rifles. Home servers by definition aren’t cloud storage servers. Home servers can compute, run security or baby cams, store files that don’t need to be uploaded. All within your own home. It’s also important to understand that if you’re going to back up data with an ISP you are creating more traffic and time to the process than having iTunes run on a home server.
You might think that "if your Internet goes out that doesn't matter for your access to local files", but you may have a nephew who wants to be helpful and knowledgeable and tries to fix the ISP outage before you get home from work by pulling the boot drive SD card out of the NAS box because he knows it has something to do with the internet.
Everything is dependent because there’s going to be a standby usage. It’s gonna go up if you’re doing things but generally it is way more cost-effective than paying for something like Google Drive to store your files.
You'll love it, I bought the cwwk n100 nas board and paired it with 16gb ram, 500gb nvme for cache and running unraid with a modest 2 x 16 wd ultrastar drives for now. Using it for plex, rr suite, time machine and windows backups and eventually some game servers like minecraft or valheim. So far not a hitch and its running solid, its a beast considering the whole system pulls less than 50 watts under full load.
I literally got my n100 mini pc yesterday. Hooked it up today with CasaOS, running pihole as my dns server and even a Minecraft server with surprisingly good performance. Super happy with it. I'm sure you will be too
Setting up ANYTHING that is Internet facing AND access to your LAN is asking for trouble. You have to have ultra fast patches, available and installed. Imho not worth the risk in most cases.
I've been meaning to get a sata drive for my laptop for a while. Then, using some software to turn that into a network that I can connect to my phone, so I don't have to transfer music and books by the wire anymore. I heard somewhere else about downloading all of wikipedia and wikihow and having that in my backpocket as well. I keep seeing incentives like this video. Maybe soon, it'll be a reality.
I really wish I had a computer nerd friend. I understand the importance of this, but I'm not versed in it enough to make total sense of it. At best, I understood 40% of the total assignment.
It doesn’t take that long, but it definitely isn’t super quick. You can do it in about a day if you include all the installation time for software and operating systems.
I use one drive. It's convenient. The sync is much better than Google drive for me. Google gets on my nerves with sync issues. I like being able to seamlessly access and transition through files on my desktop, phone, and tablet like it's nothing.
Many videos say that you should have a home server, but this is not true. I have been dealing with computers (Laptop, Desktop, Server, Programming, C, Assembler, Windows, Linux, Virtualization) for over 20 years and have never had a real need to have a home server. (I have it because I like it, but I've had no real need to have it.) I don't store music because it's on RUclips, so why would I store it on hard drives? I don't save movies because they exist on multiple services, let's say for example Netflix. Why would you keep a movie for years if you're only going to watch it once or twice? So you need Plex or something similar? You don't need it! The only really useful thing you need a home server for is to share data, nothing else. No one talks about home server maintenance, which is not cheap, no one talks about faulty power supplies which are also not cheap, no one talks about faulty hard drives or solid state drives which are very expensive. Why do you need 10 - 20 - 30 terabytes of hard drives, to store movies that you will only watch once? Why spend so much money? Electricity is quite expensive and it's not worth keeping a home server running that doesn't contribute anything. - Ok, electricity is not too expensive, but if you don't need something like that, it is. Don't waste your money! People who record for RUclips need a lot of terabytes of space because they need to save their recordings in case they get deleted for some reason, nothing more. Also they get all the devices for free, as some kind of promotion and marketing, so they don't waste their money. You can do the backup on a USB flash drive, it's cheaper. You can't have home hosting because you don't have high internet upload speed and you can't fight DDOS or some other attacks. So you have no real reason to have a home server. Everything you want to learn about servers you can through virtualization. If you really want to have a home server, use a cheap mini pc that consumes little power. Don't waste your money on something you don't need!
So what happens when RUclips and Netflix no longer have the media you want to consume? If you don’t own physical copies, format shift, and host the media yourself you don’t own it. You are the whim of corporations w/ their ever increasing subscription costs. I understand if you don’t want to host media server yourself. But there are many valid reasons to do it.
They are definitely required for lots and lots of applications when you have 20 TB of films you definitely need a proper solution for viewing them as well as automating backups is very important for people who do not have enough time to physically drive hard drives to offsite locations and manually transfer files
They are definitely required for lots and lots of applications when you have 20 TB of films you definitely need a proper solution for viewing them as well as automating backups is very important for people who do not have enough time to physically drive hard drives to offsite locations and manually transfer files
It's more than enough! You don't really need a dedicated big brand NAS. My first NAS was an old Dell Optiplex that I got for basically no cost and a bunch of second hand 500GB hard drives. Is it ideal? Of course not, these drives can die any moment. But it's still better storage than a single drive in your PC. You can probably find people selling old computers on the internet for dirt cheap just to get rid of them. You can give them a second life!
There are some used off the shelf NAS devices on ebay that are discontinued or are not receiving software updates and most of them you can have a different OS installed to bring them back to life
First, check if your internet box doesn't have usb ports to share hard drives or printers. It's the easier solution. In case of buying a NAS, well as said previously by Cavi you can start with any machine capable of handling 2 drives, even a simple Rpi clone. If your old laptop got a disk reader, with a cheap adapter you can use this sata port to add a HDD/SSD.
Just one bit of info id like to share. Don't buy TP Link stuff. They are the worst for security updates. Do urself a favor and spend the extra money on a brand that supports there hardware
Sorry but I'm not sold on any of these points. For 90%+ of people none of these options bring much value, especially if they're not tech savvy. Maybe replacing google cloud with a NAS for file backup can be nice, although it's not gonna be cheaper and will require some maintenance. You don't need a private VPN on public wifi when using TLS encrypted sites, which is basically every site today.
What if I told you that you might already have a small server sitting in a drawer at your own house right now? If you have an Android phone you don't use you can use that as a very lightweight server. You just need an android app called Servers Ultimate or a WebDAV app and that can make the phone into a tiny server. Just know it's not going to have the power of.minipc. But it's possible to use that android device as micro NAS or a Media Streaming device via DLNA etc...
Don't get a mac with 256gb that's a joke, get a PC with a 2Tb drive that costs 20% the price for the storage, backup to the cloud, done. You have everything with you the whole time even offline, even out of your house. Simple is better.
That still doesn’t account for the 3 to one back up and you can’t easily run a bunch of services off the server such as DNS and Jellyfin because we’re so jelly you can make your own private content you own at the minute you set it up on a laptop and then move it somewhere you have a problem
My 18U enclosure along with some server rack cases are on order. I’m headed to the next level. Btw. I running kubernetes in place of Virtual Machines and docker containers. I feel it’s the future and the other technologies will go away eventually.
I don't like to backup my files through anything but a solid wire to an encrypted HDD. I also have a lot of files I've accumulated over the year (8.3TB total) and may often re-organize them, add a lot of new ones etc., so a server solution of any sort, even a home one is not useful to me at all Connecting to TV. Well I just said I have HDDs. I backup my computer's internal HDD to one external one and another internal one. I can take the external one and connect it via USB to the other computer I have dedicated for my TV (my older laptop)
Overall, despite of being in IT and quite advanced I've always disliked servers for anything but hosting public instances of stuff or shared stuff with coworkers. I barely ever used for personal stuff, and I just use VMs in most other cases on my main PC.
I'm interested in having my own local internet. So with the media streaming. You have to go through the trouble of downloading every piece of media and store it? Even though I prefer streaming off stremio. I guess when the internet goes out. I can still access my stuffs.
I started out with an Intel NUC I had. Installed OpenMediaVault on it, worked mostly great, just not the most stable thing to run a raid array based on USB-disks tho, so moved over to a Q-NAP NAS.
Depends on how you set up your home server. If you keep it entirely local then there is essentially 0 risk. My server is only accessible through my VPN.
You are discussing local storage vs cloud storage and cloud storage as a backup tool. But you don’t mention the possibility to automatically synchronize these . I do that for my critical data ( encrypted backups etc) . Having too many servers and locations to store data has been a nightmare for me during the 35 years I’m into computers. I’m sure that applies for many other people too. I have my own business server ( a pc with Linux virtual machine) in the office for bookkeeping and automation ( backed up with google drive) , use iCloud with all of my macs since 15 years, I have a dedicated vultr server that runs some special applications ( personal cloud and some dedicated software) and I have everything connected with zerotier, so I can connect safely to every part of my equipment as if I was sitting next to it from everywhere in the world. I don’t use any local nas for critical data since I’ve seen them crash before, hence the cloud synchronization. I don’t store media though.. It took me a while to get there but I’m pretty happy now with my setup
What Hardware would you suggest for someone running Jellyfin, Homeassistant, Frigate + 8 IP Cams and a host of lighter items. Currently running on a mix of hardware but wanting to simplify to 1 server with my NAS serving as Storage.
I had a decommissioned dual CPU Dell R740. That thing ate 110Wh on idle. But I could do real professional stuff with it. These days I just use Mikrotik router for VPN and dyndns, and Synology for entertainment and my own "cloud" storage. These use less than a quarter of it.
check your local used marketplace and see what's available, you can find really good hardware for a fraction of the price when businesses sell their "old" (a few years LOL) stuff. Dell, Lenovo, and HP have so really nice options. Serve The Home has a great series covering these devices, It's called tiny/mini/micro if I recall correctly
My first home server was a Raspberry Pi 3B and a 2TB USB drive connected to it, it worked very well for a couple of years but eventually I moved to a Qnap Nas with 24TB, it is overkill for my needs, will probably get a NUC once my Qnap dies
I went crazy and have like 5 nucs doing different jobs lol. Google drive only holds books for me to read out and about until i find a service i like locally.
I've got a Synology Nas hosting personal rips of DVDs and a mini Dell PC with Kodi (on Windows). Is it possible to use the same storage to drive kodi/plex/jellyfin? I'm curious to see how different the interfaces and features are without doubling or tripling the files.
Kodi, Plex, and Jellyfin all use the same folder structure for organising media, so yeah, there shouldn't be any issue with running all three of them at the same time.
You should be able to just point the applications to the drives needed so you dont actually need to duplicate data - It will just read the data from the source it is pointed to :)
I have a rasbery pi to have a vpn home. So I can stream my shows from my cabin or while traveling, and my parents can share user widaut the multiple house limitation.
If you host your own VPN, then why can't all data be tied to you in an unencrypted form? Even if you have an encrypted tunnel between any device and your device that is directly connected to the internet, since the latter device sends unencrypted traffic, your ISP for example can see all of your data. The only thing they can't see is which of your devices originated the data if the tunnel is encrypted. So why would this be like a commercial VPN?
i was at my gf’s place this past weekend and FKN CENTURYLINK had an outage or something and so the whole neighborhood didn’t have internet for TWO FKN DAYS and the whole time i was thinking about how long i had been putting off building my own media server, well not any longer
Dude, your own server only works in your home without Internet. When you get out of your local network, you rely on the Internet just like everyone else. "Internet at home" is only useful if multiple people frequently access the same storage on different devices. Otherwise, just unplug the hard drive and hand it to your pal.
@@Beryesa.That's a great idea! I've been looking into doing that in order to set up a Wireguard VPN to my home LAN as I'd like to expose my Jellyfin server to my siblings in a safe manner but honestly I can't justify the recurring cost when a free Tailscale subscription essentially provides the same service as the sponsor in this video for up to 20 hosts and all that it costs me is the one time setting up the clients.
If you’re going to do it quick and easy, you’re going to probably introduce some security vulnerabilities. I would highly highly recommend researching.
Server software has gotten easier to use. I've encouraged people for years to at least Use an old hard drive to keep their files Backed up. Sadly, most of them have Ticktoked out of reality.
You can watch a bunch of RUclips videos but I would recommend having one server to test stuff on. You can break it. You can then reinstall everything that you’re not actively using just to learn.
I'm in law school right now and can't pretend to know the first thing about programming or networking- I've literally just used Mac OS since like 2009 lol- but thanks to an earlier video of yours I got a Raspberry Pi and now a Mini PC to run Pihole, docker containers with -arr apps and Jellyfin, along with some network storage which I'm keeping backups on. It was a little bit of work but it's been a huge help! I *hated* being dependent on Google & Apple for everything from office applications to extra storage, and entering the world of Linux & open source has been SO refreshing
Switching to Linux from Windows or MacOS does give you that refreshing and liberating feeling~ ☺
Shedding a tear reading that, beautiful.
Try Immich and Tailscale next 😊
Welcome maybe you can use that law degree to fight companies abusing open source and licensees such as the GPL I promise you will become a Linux folk hero but I can’t promise much money from the ventures lol
Especially as a future law worker it will be nice to
I had no idea what I was doing but from watching your videos I got a mini pc running Ubuntu server with casa OS. Only utilizing the shared network storage features right now but I’m excited to dive into docker containers and learn more about that. Thank you for the content!
the paying for itself argument is really pointless for a lot of people who are doing this for the fact that you actually own the data and no one can take it away from you in a virtual sense. That is worth a price and to me its well worth more than the costs of hard drives and the enclosure, its beyond worth it. Im not buying just storage, I'm buying my own storage.
They're not mutually exclusive, but I do 100% agree, owning is always best.
Let us be clear, anything that is on Google Drive or similar shares is a COPY.
Original data should always be stored locally.
Plex, smart home, nas storage, local backups, docker containers for example vpn, retro gaming
Do you have a free VPN, bud?
This is exactly what the technology is designed for. Not to kill the bandwidth trying to get to the main server in next continent for everything! Local caches/services like this and the edge technologies those many can share is the way to go! Well done! I'm going to try a few things too now with your inspiration!!!
We use our family home server as NAS and [matrix] chat server. It also runs torrent for movies, series and music, because streaming services keep region locking everything and it's often more convenient and simple to just download them. Plus they don't suddently disappear. Since a few months, it has a graphics card installed for remote access gaming, when not at home.
Everything is installed on our "HTPC" setup, which uses a hypervisor and different VM's, similar structure to our business server. It is super silent in it's Silverstone Grandia case, bq fans and an aftermarket GPU cooler.
//Edited: forgot to mention that it also has an HDCP bypass and 4K capture for recording international TV or any other video source. Since some media players allow for real time video upscaling using the graphics card, this became very helpful when playing back recordings of SD media such as VHS or DVD.
Please share with me how u learned to do this
I would also know how you learned this if you are willing to share, thanks in advance!
@@alexo5190 it depends how much you want to learn if you want to be amazing at it and learn everything you’re gonna have to have one just for practice but if you just wanna set it up, you could follow RUclips tutorials ask ChatGPT when you get stuck and that would get you most of the way
+1 :)
You probably don't want to advertise that you torrent movies, lol.
for anyone on a budget, you can find old mini PC's on your local marketplace for cheap and use them as a server compared to buying a new n100 mini pc. I've found a i5-6500t + 8bg ram Lenovo thinkcentre for $20 USD. what was wrong with it? just needed to reinstall windows lol. just today i picked up 2 of those same ThinkCentre + 2 keyboards + 2 mouses + 1 monitor for $60 USD. they were just missing hard drives which is cheap
I second the Thinkcentre. You can get them in a 1L form factor if you don't need drive bays and they are so cheap, I started using them for projects rather than the RPi because they were so much cheaper during the pandemic. Also, some 1L Thinkcentre's have an option for an 8x PCI-E slot that you can fit a half-height card into, but these ones are much more expensive than the regular Thinkcentres.
Those thinkcentres are a dime a dozen and there seems to be an endless supply of them.
They're great for all kinds of projects.
Depends on where you live I think. For me, the n100 is cheaper, because electricity is expensive here and the n100 is way more efficient.
Where do you buy "i5-6500t + 8bg ram Lenovo thinkcentre for $20 USD"?
I am a graphic designer and aside from this uses I also have my accounting and receipt generation self hosted fkr my freelance work as well as a website for my portfolio. Home servers have use cases for everyone plus i feel like my own IT for my oersonal business
Agree about the value of having a home server.
We are using a Thinkpad T420 laptop with a large drive in the DVD bay as a poor man's server. We are using it mainly as a source of automatic backups for my wife and my systems and file sharing for easy access by multiple computers. In addition it is running a NTP server to keep everything on our LAN time synchronized even if we lose internet access. Several of our DIY IoT devices default to firmware time and date so having a LAN based NTP server allows them get current time (sort of accurate) after a power fail even if the internet is down. It is also running a personal web server where we keep so common stuff.
Can you send me link to some home servers
@@adrielamadi952 If you are responding to me it is a vanilla T420 ThinkPad running Windows 10 pro. I purchased it on eBay as a refurbished off least computer.
@@adrielamadi952 www.google.com/search?q=home+servers&sca_esv=e29bad09a751d822&sxsrf=ADLYWIKi3L_X429mkyulDEQ0zH_I8n028A%3A1716332323322&source=hp&ei=IydNZqPhEISu5NoPz9uPgAY&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZk01M1LO_8hUPcFbCyP36QqdkrVJfDAU&ved=0ahUKEwjj_seT7J-GAxUEF1kFHc_tA2AQ4dUDCBc&uact=5&oq=home+servers&gs_lp=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&sclient=gws-wiz
Make sure we’re using a laptop if there’s a bias option to disable battery or something you do because they can become dangerous
@@adrielamadi952 a very much depends on what format you want because he use data centre one that’s fairly quiet but you wouldn’t wanna sleep next to it isn’t very different price point and often much cheaper than home grade available on Amazon
Linux enthusiasts don't ask why you need a server, linux enthusiasts search for excuse to have a server.
PLS EDUCATE MEEEE :(
Why would you want a server over a big external drive that I would allow the sharing option to be checked? I see that the NAS external case thing alone is like $300 and then you have to buy a few HDD meanwhile a western digital external drive cost like 200$ for 14TB
@@AG-en5y festival just having one external drive you are going to lose all data and you cannot be upset because you haven’t looked after it as you were meant to have three copies and one of site . a server can make that easier but also you can do things the server like access it from multiple devices you can install certain software so that your large collection of video files can show up like Netflix there are lots of possibilities
@@AG-en5y In my case it stems from me being an experimental person and always wanting to self-host everyting and have an environment to experiment on. Plus have additional place to store a copy of my important data.
@@AG-en5y you dont need to buy the case thing, a regular pc case is fine
@@waltuh6984 Don't even need a PC case, an unused cabinet works too
Interesting video. I like to see and understand how others use their hardware and software configs, but you made me more aware that I actually do not need any home server, or at least not for now. While I had planned to make one at one point and even have the necessary spare hardware, I still don't see any benefit for myself. I'm actually the total opposite. I don't care if the internet is down as I can bring one of my retro systems / configurations up and play in an already isolated / offline environment. I don't use cloud services, I don't watch movies, play online games, etc. My only use case would be for some programming related servers which can alredy be started on demand from a container, VM or a different bootble drive. But even for those, I find portable / enbedded versions more convenient even if they are more limited in scope.
I am in the same boat. But setting up a server just sounds cool. Too bad I wouldn’t benefit from it :(
You don’t read? How about listen to audiobooks? I self host servers for both.
In the UK, my unraid server costs me £4~£8 a month to run in electricity. This is on top of the hardware acquisition. Compared to the Hetzner server I was paying monthly for, its about 2 years for my hardware to break even compared to just paying for hardware running somewhere else. I strongly debated sticking with hetzner, since hardware ages fast and unsure how long it will be before due an upgrade.. but I did it anyway
I recently acquired a dead Cisco UCS C240 M4 server for free. It came with 120TB of 12GHz SAS hard drives and 240GB of SSD for the boot drive, a single Xenon CPU (motherboard can handle two), and 16 gigs of RAM (there are 24 RAM slots so plenty of room to expand). I've just about got it running again and will try installing TrueNAS or Windows. Haven't decided whether or not to keep it or sell it off. Maybe I'll set it up as a home server, if I can find somewhere to put it where the HD and fan noise doesn't drive me crazy.
120TB? Man, that's dope. 😄 But power-wise probably a very hungry machine.
Just ordered a sff system to start building a home lab and some servers.
Trying to get into IT and having a homelab to put on my resume along side my certifications will be a huge boon. Plus of course im a networking nerd so more fun for me
This is warming, it's like doing homesteading, but digitally.
When you said you should have your own internet I thought you were cooky for a second until I realized how much sense that makes. Tons of media , wikis, maps, etc. Hmmm. I stand corrected
I feel like if the internet goes down for good I'm now living in a world I don't care about those things anymore
@@ex0ja That's a silly thought. You would have an information oligopoly
Got one up with Jellyfin and Plex up and running thanks to your vids. Great stuff
Have to expand now 😊
That "What happened to the internet" hit home lol
Somebody on the internet said that first you start a small server and you increase and increase and increase you equipment till you reach a rack server
6:19 domain name system !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
I can hear Jeff Geerling blame DNS for the outage
You have a good teaching style.
Hi there. I am not a computer person. So most of this does not make sense to me. I am starting a small business with my husband. We are landscape architects and work on big autcad or revit files that we need to share back and forth. I think what we need to create a home server to share these files is a NAS? So far none of the videos I've watched have this kind of scenario explained but I think your video is saying we could use it that way. I would love if you could give me a pro tip and let me know if I am heading in the right direction. Thanks so much!
I backed the 8-bay version of that UGreen NAS btw.. going to use it as my media server.. serving all types of media I enjoy! Videos, Movies, Mangas, Manwhas, EBooks, Music, Pictures, etc. Not sure yet if I'll have to install a 3rd party OS. Hopefully they improve their software. 😗
How can you download movies with high quality or manhwas is there an easy way or do I need to use Turrent?
@@Khaled1425 Run docker and get the docker compose for Komga. I can't tell you how to get those files specifically. You need to be resourceful. Use torrent, Usenet, JDownloader, etc. Save the mangas/manwhas as .zip files and change the extension to .CBR so that Komga can pick it up. You will need to teach yourself how all of this can come together. Google will be your best friend for this. Good luck!
@@Khaled1425 you can torrent it There was some very easy torrent client apps you can use which will basically just allow to download it but you will likely have to use some software like handbrake to transcode it to an MP4 format if you don’t wanna have hundreds of terabytes because the MKV format is non-compressed
@@Khaled1425 there is an easy way to do it, and it is torrenting.
@@kiwihumanso u torrent and save it on the server?
I'd love to hear what kind of setup you would suggest for those living in places where electricity can be quite expensive, would you use an ARM-based device?
Ultimately, all data is stored on a drive, regardless of its container or location. Cloud backup? A drive in a computer in a different location. NAS? On a local drive connected to your local network, doesn't matter. Using a home server for data backup is like going hunting with a semi-auto assault rifle, can be done but hardly the ideal tool for the job.
Semi automatic weapons by definition aren’t assault rifles. Home servers by definition aren’t cloud storage servers. Home servers can compute, run security or baby cams, store files that don’t need to be uploaded. All within your own home. It’s also important to understand that if you’re going to back up data with an ISP you are creating more traffic and time to the process than having iTunes run on a home server.
You might think that "if your Internet goes out that doesn't matter for your access to local files", but you may have a nephew who wants to be helpful and knowledgeable and tries to fix the ISP outage before you get home from work by pulling the boot drive SD card out of the NAS box because he knows it has something to do with the internet.
That is why locked cabinets exist.
How much electricity are you using if your server is on all the time? how much does it cost in nyc electricity prices?
A server can pull 24watts from the wall and do all kinds of stuff. It depends on what you want to do. For perspective lightbulbs used to use 60 watts.
Everything is dependent because there’s going to be a standby usage. It’s gonna go up if you’re doing things but generally it is way more cost-effective than paying for something like Google Drive to store your files.
Home server electricity bills are negligible
Glad I came across your video! This is EXACTLY what I am looking to do at home! Great video!!
My minipc with an n100 is on its way.
Awesome, I love the N100 chip.
You'll love it, I bought the cwwk n100 nas board and paired it with 16gb ram, 500gb nvme for cache and running unraid with a modest 2 x 16 wd ultrastar drives for now. Using it for plex, rr suite, time machine and windows backups and eventually some game servers like minecraft or valheim. So far not a hitch and its running solid, its a beast considering the whole system pulls less than 50 watts under full load.
I got a n100 poe one to tuck away, got most of my stuff (plex, roon, homebridge etc) running on proxmox
@@AustinsMindwill this be enough to store all your pron? 😂
I literally got my n100 mini pc yesterday.
Hooked it up today with CasaOS, running pihole as my dns server and even a Minecraft server with surprisingly good performance.
Super happy with it. I'm sure you will be too
Do I need a server? Not really..
Is it crazy cool to have a network of computers for doing a bunch of stuff at home??
ABSOLUTELY FKN YES!!
Setting up ANYTHING that is Internet facing AND access to your LAN is asking for trouble. You have to have ultra fast patches, available and installed. Imho not worth the risk in most cases.
Well, this video doesn’t cover it, but he has made great tutorials on how to set up vlans and firewall rules
I've been meaning to get a sata drive for my laptop for a while. Then, using some software to turn that into a network that I can connect to my phone, so I don't have to transfer music and books by the wire anymore. I heard somewhere else about downloading all of wikipedia and wikihow and having that in my backpocket as well. I keep seeing incentives like this video. Maybe soon, it'll be a reality.
I really wish I had a computer nerd friend. I understand the importance of this, but I'm not versed in it enough to make total sense of it. At best, I understood 40% of the total assignment.
Valid points if you have a lot of free time to set things up.
It doesn’t take that long, but it definitely isn’t super quick. You can do it in about a day if you include all the installation time for software and operating systems.
U will make free time if u love to do these things like on a sunday
As a longtime Linux user I have a simple philosophy for why to have a home server: never rent what you can own.
As for DNS, I really like quad9
yep, I use their unfiltered DNS for quite a while, complemented with DNS from local associations.
I use one drive. It's convenient. The sync is much better than Google drive for me. Google gets on my nerves with sync issues. I like being able to seamlessly access and transition through files on my desktop, phone, and tablet like it's nothing.
Many videos say that you should have a home server, but this is not true. I have been dealing with computers (Laptop, Desktop, Server, Programming, C, Assembler, Windows, Linux, Virtualization) for over 20 years and have never had a real need to have a home server. (I have it because I like it, but I've had no real need to have it.) I don't store music because it's on RUclips, so why would I store it on hard drives? I don't save movies because they exist on multiple services, let's say for example Netflix. Why would you keep a movie for years if you're only going to watch it once or twice? So you need Plex or something similar? You don't need it! The only really useful thing you need a home server for is to share data, nothing else. No one talks about home server maintenance, which is not cheap, no one talks about faulty power supplies which are also not cheap, no one talks about faulty hard drives or solid state drives which are very expensive. Why do you need 10 - 20 - 30 terabytes of hard drives, to store movies that you will only watch once? Why spend so much money? Electricity is quite expensive and it's not worth keeping a home server running that doesn't contribute anything. - Ok, electricity is not too expensive, but if you don't need something like that, it is. Don't waste your money! People who record for RUclips need a lot of terabytes of space because they need to save their recordings in case they get deleted for some reason, nothing more. Also they get all the devices for free, as some kind of promotion and marketing, so they don't waste their money. You can do the backup on a USB flash drive, it's cheaper. You can't have home hosting because you don't have high internet upload speed and you can't fight DDOS or some other attacks. So you have no real reason to have a home server. Everything you want to learn about servers you can through virtualization. If you really want to have a home server, use a cheap mini pc that consumes little power. Don't waste your money on something you don't need!
So what happens when RUclips and Netflix no longer have the media you want to consume? If you don’t own physical copies, format shift, and host the media yourself you don’t own it. You are the whim of corporations w/ their ever increasing subscription costs.
I understand if you don’t want to host media server yourself. But there are many valid reasons to do it.
Why whould someone DDOS your homeserver?
@@armirgashi4236 Why not? (Because he can.) I'm the IRC generation and we did all that crap, over 20 years ago. Memories, memories, memories...
They are definitely required for lots and lots of applications when you have 20 TB of films you definitely need a proper solution for viewing them as well as automating backups is very important for people who do not have enough time to physically drive hard drives to offsite locations and manually transfer files
They are definitely required for lots and lots of applications when you have 20 TB of films you definitely need a proper solution for viewing them as well as automating backups is very important for people who do not have enough time to physically drive hard drives to offsite locations and manually transfer files
Short answere: bc its fun as hell.
Long answere: watch this video
Awesome , I've been trying to find reasons to build a home server
Finally, someone that makes sense. Thank you!
I had zero idea Wikipedia had readily available snapshots. I could easily get sucked into endless browsing loops if I self hosted that.
I've been thinking of getting a home server all the time but I don't have the funds to buy a NAS.
At least I have some hard drives and a laptop :)
It's more than enough! You don't really need a dedicated big brand NAS. My first NAS was an old Dell Optiplex that I got for basically no cost and a bunch of second hand 500GB hard drives. Is it ideal? Of course not, these drives can die any moment. But it's still better storage than a single drive in your PC. You can probably find people selling old computers on the internet for dirt cheap just to get rid of them. You can give them a second life!
There are some used off the shelf NAS devices on ebay that are discontinued or are not receiving software updates and most of them you can have a different OS installed to bring them back to life
First, check if your internet box doesn't have usb ports to share hard drives or printers. It's the easier solution.
In case of buying a NAS, well as said previously by Cavi you can start with any machine capable of handling 2 drives, even a simple Rpi clone. If your old laptop got a disk reader, with a cheap adapter you can use this sata port to add a HDD/SSD.
If you buy a enterprise grade server used very cheaply, you can buy special hard drives that do not work on desktops and they are very cheap
Just one bit of info id like to share. Don't buy TP Link stuff. They are the worst for security updates. Do urself a favor and spend the extra money on a brand that supports there hardware
Agreed. I’m a network engineer.
Thank you for this video, this made me want to start a server in my home. 😄 Probably gonna try!
Sorry but I'm not sold on any of these points. For 90%+ of people none of these options bring much value, especially if they're not tech savvy.
Maybe replacing google cloud with a NAS for file backup can be nice, although it's not gonna be cheaper and will require some maintenance.
You don't need a private VPN on public wifi when using TLS encrypted sites, which is basically every site today.
Great video family I'll add this to my saved playlist and subscribed
What if I told you that you might already have a small server sitting in a drawer at your own house right now? If you have an Android phone you don't use you can use that as a very lightweight server. You just need an android app called Servers Ultimate or a WebDAV app and that can make the phone into a tiny server. Just know it's not going to have the power of.minipc. But it's possible to use that android device as micro NAS or a Media Streaming device via DLNA etc...
Don't get a mac with 256gb that's a joke, get a PC with a 2Tb drive that costs 20% the price for the storage, backup to the cloud, done. You have everything with you the whole time even offline, even out of your house. Simple is better.
That still doesn’t account for the 3 to one back up and you can’t easily run a bunch of services off the server such as DNS and Jellyfin because we’re so jelly you can make your own private content you own at the minute you set it up on a laptop and then move it somewhere you have a problem
My 18U enclosure along with some server rack cases are on order. I’m headed to the next level.
Btw. I running kubernetes in place of Virtual Machines and docker containers.
I feel it’s the future and the other technologies will go away eventually.
I don't like to backup my files through anything but a solid wire to an encrypted HDD. I also have a lot of files I've accumulated over the year (8.3TB total) and may often re-organize them, add a lot of new ones etc., so a server solution of any sort, even a home one is not useful to me at all
Connecting to TV. Well I just said I have HDDs. I backup my computer's internal HDD to one external one and another internal one. I can take the external one and connect it via USB to the other computer I have dedicated for my TV (my older laptop)
Overall, despite of being in IT and quite advanced I've always disliked servers for anything but hosting public instances of stuff or shared stuff with coworkers. I barely ever used for personal stuff, and I just use VMs in most other cases on my main PC.
But servers can be connected by wire, mate. :D
I'm interested in having my own local internet. So with the media streaming. You have to go through the trouble of downloading every piece of media and store it? Even though I prefer streaming off stremio. I guess when the internet goes out. I can still access my stuffs.
I started out with an Intel NUC I had. Installed OpenMediaVault on it, worked mostly great, just not the most stable thing to run a raid array based on USB-disks tho, so moved over to a Q-NAP NAS.
Love your content. Glad your channel is growing so fast. I wait & watch all your new videos almost when they come out.
You're awesome thank you
Why advertising Twingate and not mentioning ZeroTier?
As well as Tailscale.
your videos are a breath of fresh air in my feed!
I bought the NAS with the biggest CPU I could reasonably get, maxed out the RAM, and I run containers on it.
Is a home server better or worse for privacy? Can your online presence be more easily tracked because your presence is coming from your own server?
Depends on how you set up your home server. If you keep it entirely local then there is essentially 0 risk. My server is only accessible through my VPN.
how do you get your movies
You are discussing local storage vs cloud storage and cloud storage as a backup tool. But you don’t mention the possibility to automatically synchronize these . I do that for my critical data ( encrypted backups etc) . Having too many servers and locations to store data has been a nightmare for me during the 35 years I’m into computers. I’m sure that applies for many other people too. I have my own business server ( a pc with Linux virtual machine) in the office for bookkeeping and automation ( backed up with google drive) , use iCloud with all of my macs since 15 years, I have a dedicated vultr server that runs some special applications ( personal cloud and some dedicated software) and I have everything connected with zerotier, so I can connect safely to every part of my equipment as if I was sitting next to it from everywhere in the world. I don’t use any local nas for critical data since I’ve seen them crash before, hence the cloud synchronization. I don’t store media though.. It took me a while to get there but I’m pretty happy now with my setup
Thank you 👍🏽
Get on to roof undetected? I am confused. You guys mentioned that secret service spotted him 20 minutes prior to the shooting.
What Hardware would you suggest for someone running Jellyfin, Homeassistant, Frigate + 8 IP Cams and a host of lighter items. Currently running on a mix of hardware but wanting to simplify to 1 server with my NAS serving as Storage.
Im all for a server but i also really do recommend hetzner, 3.50 is easy to just not worry about at all
Casa server best project ever!
I had a decommissioned dual CPU Dell R740. That thing ate 110Wh on idle. But I could do real professional stuff with it. These days I just use Mikrotik router for VPN and dyndns, and Synology for entertainment and my own "cloud" storage. These use less than a quarter of it.
Thank you for the info
What mini pc do you recommend using as a starting home server?
Also interested...
check your local used marketplace and see what's available, you can find really good hardware for a fraction of the price when businesses sell their "old" (a few years LOL) stuff. Dell, Lenovo, and HP have so really nice options. Serve The Home has a great series covering these devices, It's called tiny/mini/micro if I recall correctly
I bought a used Lenovo m920q which has a ton more resources than I would need with it's i5 CPU and 16GB's of RAM.
My first home server was a Raspberry Pi 3B and a 2TB USB drive connected to it, it worked very well for a couple of years but eventually I moved to a Qnap Nas with 24TB, it is overkill for my needs, will probably get a NUC once my Qnap dies
I went crazy and have like 5 nucs doing different jobs lol. Google drive only holds books for me to read out and about until i find a service i like locally.
Have you considered virtualising it on one machine which would probably save you a lot of power
Is it possible to have a NAS set up for media streaming but also torrents?
Yes
I've got a Synology Nas hosting personal rips of DVDs and a mini Dell PC with Kodi (on Windows).
Is it possible to use the same storage to drive kodi/plex/jellyfin?
I'm curious to see how different the interfaces and features are without doubling or tripling the files.
Kodi, Plex, and Jellyfin all use the same folder structure for organising media, so yeah, there shouldn't be any issue with running all three of them at the same time.
You should be able to just point the applications to the drives needed so you dont actually need to duplicate data - It will just read the data from the source it is pointed to :)
Excellent video
@10:40 that’s a fun fact
Wikipedia in it’s entirety is only 109GB
Some good points. Subbed
What Nas do you recommend for plex/jelly? I’d like to store 1080p/4k tv and movies. And have maybe 2-4 streams at once.
A quad core raspberry pi using samba as file share server. Plentiful hardware resources for your needs, just attach an external HDD
I have a rasbery pi to have a vpn home. So I can stream my shows from my cabin or while traveling, and my parents can share user widaut the multiple house limitation.
You don't need much to get started. An old Raspberry pi 3B+ and a basic Synology is enough for me to play with
Great videos man 👏👏
If you host your own VPN, then why can't all data be tied to you in an unencrypted form? Even if you have an encrypted tunnel between any device and your device that is directly connected to the internet, since the latter device sends unencrypted traffic, your ISP for example can see all of your data. The only thing they can't see is which of your devices originated the data if the tunnel is encrypted. So why would this be like a commercial VPN?
Vpns are just computers too...
@@WalterHeseinberg
So?
@@alittax a simple Google would awnser your question
@@WalterHeseinberg
No, it wouldn't. :) But if you care to elaborate after reading my comment again, maybe that would be different.
@@alittax you are a bozo💀
i was at my gf’s place this past weekend and FKN CENTURYLINK had an outage or something and so the whole neighborhood didn’t have internet for TWO FKN DAYS and the whole time i was thinking about how long i had been putting off building my own media server, well not any longer
Dude, your own server only works in your home without Internet. When you get out of your local network, you rely on the Internet just like everyone else.
"Internet at home" is only useful if multiple people frequently access the same storage on different devices. Otherwise, just unplug the hard drive and hand it to your pal.
I have a pi4 with 64G flash drive tunnelled to a $1 VPS for ipv4 and it's ok 😅
Is the VPS for private dns? What is it for?
@@aopen130Likely to safely expose services to the wider internet.
@@aopen130 Nope, getting static IP is more expensive than getting a tiny 1vcpu 1GB ram VPS I'm just tunnelling
@@Beryesa.That's a great idea! I've been looking into doing that in order to set up a Wireguard VPN to my home LAN as I'd like to expose my Jellyfin server to my siblings in a safe manner but honestly I can't justify the recurring cost when a free Tailscale subscription essentially provides the same service as the sponsor in this video for up to 20 hosts and all that it costs me is the one time setting up the clients.
Great video and ideas! I like the idea of your "own internet at home" idea.......grin
Smart people don't know how to save things in simple terms... This is another mountain in learning technology
5:48 R suite of tools?
*arr suite (aka sonarr/radarr/lidarr/readarr/overseerr)
@@chaasetech sweet thank you! ARR!
Arrrrr
Never back up things to Google Drive. They have full access to the content of all your files. You want that bro?
All go back up, she’ll probably be encrypted if anyone could access them you would encrypt them using a very high security method
Proof????
subbed!
One more item to add to server: Password manager.
My first time getting into DNS was DYNDNS to setup a private server for World of Warcraft: WotLK.
@techhut, what’s the easiest way to get a home server up and running and connected to all my macs?
If you’re going to do it quick and easy, you’re going to probably introduce some security vulnerabilities. I would highly highly recommend researching.
Server software has gotten easier to use.
I've encouraged people for years to at least
Use an old hard drive to keep their files
Backed up. Sadly, most of them have
Ticktoked out of reality.
🙃
What did you study to know how to do all this? Advice on aquiring this knowledge?
You just need
1. an internet connection
2. a lot of curiosity
just search and get your hands dirty, this is the best way :)
You can watch a bunch of RUclips videos but I would recommend having one server to test stuff on. You can break it. You can then reinstall everything that you’re not actively using just to learn.
As a linux user Watching this video to justify why i bought a refurbished dell optiplex .
Bought 2u server...now must find a use..
“There’s no internet exposure” how are you connecting to your stuff when you’re not on your home network then?
I think he means his local devices arre proxied through secure cloud domain
@@antdr01d If you have any sort of remote access you're exposed to the internet, there's no way around that.
Got my follow good content
DNS = Domain Name System
I like your comment "SELF hosting movies" that's very politicaly correct ;)
Nerdy but fun, good vid!! +1
Good video!
I too like to hide my IP address when downloading linux ISO's 😉