Home Server v2

What a homelab inevitably devolves into...

Tip: This page is still being written.

Home servers are about learning and expanding your horizons. De-botnet your life. Learn something new. Serving applications to yourself, your family, and your frens feels good. Put your /g/ skills to good use for yourself and those close to you. Store their data with proper availability redundancy and backups and serve it back to them with a /comfy/ easy to use interface.

Most people get started with NAS. It’s nice to have a /comfy/ home for all your data. Streaming your movies/shows around the house and to friends. Know all about NAS? Learn virtualization. Spin up some VMs. Learn networking by setting up a pfSense box and configuring some VLANs. There's always more to learn and chances to grow. Think you’re god tier already? Setup openstack and report back to /hsg/.

Things that are online today might not be online forever. It's good to have a copy of something because you never know when it might get taken down due to copyright strikes.

—Anon, Standard /hsg/ OP

Welcome to /g/'s comprehensive guide on home servers! This guide is designed to assist you in setting up and managing your own home server, effortlessly navigating through the complexities that come with running servers in your personal spaces such as your basement or closet.

"Homelab" is a term you may have encountered, but what does it signify? Essentially, it refers to a personal data center located within your own home. It serves as a platform for acquiring new skills and solving technical problems in your own life. Many are drawn to this hobby by the promises of freedom from the winds of the larger internet. Within this homelab are your home servers. There can be as many, or as few, as you want.

Contrary to what some may suggest, there are no hard and fast rules in this hobby. However, there are certainly less effective ways of doing things. This guide aims to help you steer clear of common pitfalls that beginners often encounter.

All pages in the home server topic are categorized here: Category:Home_Server

Tip: This guide is intended to be a concise overview of the most important concepts involved in running a home server. It is recommended you at least skim each section.

What Can I do With a Home Server?

There are two reasons a man will run a home server:

1. Solve a problem. Maybe he was fed up with cloud storage or maybe he was tired of the constant service outages? Or maybe the solution to his problem doesn't exist yet? Either way, he knows he can do it better himself.
2. Learn a new skill and get a new hobby. Home servers and homelabs can scale infinitely. There is always room to learn something new or do things slightly different.

If you're here and considering building a lab, you probably already have a purpose in mind. If not, check out awesome-selfhosted for a gigantic list of applications you can host yourself. Some applications popular with /hsg/ anons include:

• Media streaming
  • Jellyfin
  • Plex
• File storage
  • Nextcloud
• NAS servers
  • TrueNAS
• Game servers
• Personal websites

For sysadmin solutions and services see awesome sysadmin software.

Your First Server

A good example of a rack using older enterprise equipment

The first step to setting up your homelab is to acquire your first server. You have a few options to choose from:

• Old desktop machines
• Single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, Intel NUCs, or thin clients
• Used servers
• Build your own

Your old gaming PC, workstation, or laptop is a great option for a home server (provided it is not too old). Performance and capability will vary from machine to machine. When in doubt, post specs in /hsg/ and ask. Laptops are not really designed for 24/7 use but their battery does act as a built in UPS.

Hardware you already own is free, which is very appealing and a great way to get started. Keep in mind that older hardware can be less energy efficient and if power usage is a concern you may want to purchase newer hardware.

There is a lot of discussion about power efficiency in the homelab world. Part of that is because some people live in regions where electricity costs significantly more. But more often than not it's because our homelab has grown to the point where it eats a third to half of the power bill. This is a worthy investment for some but others aren't willing to spend that much. You need to decide how important power efficiency is to you.

Building a NAS

"uh guys, how do i build a nas?" is the most frequently asked question on /hsg/. Here's a dedicated section to point to when someone asks this question for the tenth time in a row.

Pro-tip: you will want a separate boot drive to install the OS onto. Your storage pool will be used exclusively for storing data.

If you are interested in a prebuilt system, check out Synology or QNAP. Many anons rag on Synology for being "underpowered" and "not worth the money" but what Synology does best is being a complete functional package that just works. Sure, it may be more cost effective on paper to build your own NAS but if you want something that will run forever with no maintenance then a Synology device could be perfect for you.

Building a Media Server

This is the second most asked question on /hsg/.

Basically, a media server can be as complex as something like Jellyfin and Plex or as simple as a network share that you play using VLC. The media server route is suited for serving multiple users at once (such as family and friends). It also works well when traveling or streaming on many different devices. On the other hand, the network share excels at simplicity.

The most common applications in the media server landscape is Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi and Emby.

If you want a feature comparison between these to find out which is right for you, check out THIS handy table

Want to transcode multiple streams simultaneously? Check out these hardware requirements

Have an Intel iGPU and want to offload transcoding? Check out this resource

Operating Systems

Looking for a server operating system? Check out the full list of the popular server operating systems or SBC operating systems.

Hypervisors

A hypervisor is a system that creates and runs virtual machines. The machine the hypervisor runs on is called the host machine, and each virtual machine (VM) is called a guest machine. Virtualization is the process of running an operating system in a virtual machine and allows for a more efficient use of computing resources.

Instead of installing all your services and applications on a bare-metal server, instead run each in its own VM. This makes management much simpler (and contains any mistakes you make to only that VM).

In order to run a hypervisor, your CPU must support virtualization. The tech is called VT-x on Intel and AMD-V for AMD. Directed I/O support is required if you wish to pass devices from the host machine to the VMs (VT-d on Intel, AMD-Vi for AMD). Nearly every CPU and motherboard made within the past 10 years supports these technologies, but older hardware may have compatibility issues and lack more modern virtualization tech.

Proxmox Virtual Environment

Proxmox is the premier open-source virtualization platform. If you're looking for a hypervisor, Proxmox is it.

Features:

• Built on Debian.
• Utilizes KVM, QEMU for virtual machines.
• Runs containers using LXC.
• Built in ZFS support and other advanced storage technologies.
• Tight integration with Proxmox Backup Server.

VMware ESXi

Those who work in IT will almost certainly be familiar with VMware ESXi. It's the most popular, feature rich hypervisor available. Unfortunately, it is a paid product and has a limited free tier with a limit of 8 cores per VM. No vSphere or most vStorage options like vMotion and distributed switching. These restrictions are probably fine for the non-professional homelab user but if you find yourself limited, try Proxmox.

If you use version 6.5 or 6.7 you can use this key to unlock all these features:

• vCenter: 0A0FF-403EN-RZ848-ZH3QH-2A73P
• vSphere: JV425-4h100-vzhh8-q23np-3a9pp

VMware 7.0 has dropped support form westmere-EP/gulftown (x5xxx) CPU's. If your system has these old CPU's you should consider upgrading to something later than Sandybridge if you want to use the latest version of ESXi.

SmartOS

If you are looking to get back to your roots, check out SmartOS. An open source spiritual successor to Oracle's Solaris. Home_Server/Operating_Systems#SmartOS

Storage-Focused (NAS) Operating Systems

These are operating systems that are designed to store and serve data over a network. While some of these have minor virtualization capabilities, if you are looking to run VMs and/or containers you should consider a true hypervisor like Proxmox. You could always virtualize your NAS.

TrueNAS

TrueNAS is a NAS appliance operating system that uses ZFS.

TrueNAS has two versions: CORE and SCALE. Both accomplish the same task.

CORE (formerly FreeNAS) is based on FreeBSD. This version is considered more stable.

SCALE is more recent than CORE and based on Linux. This version sports better hardware compatibility and stronger virtualization features. Can host Docker containers.

unRAID

UnRAID advertises itself as the "NAS OS for gamers". Not free, you need to fork over some money to buy it. Supports differently sized physical disks and adding hard drives to expand as needed.

Unraid 6.8.3-6.9.2

• SHA256: 18F75CA34A39632DC07270510E453243753CFF302F3D5ADD4FA8813D4ADB304D
• magnet:?xt=urn:btih:180782e4ff3e00b7efc8a0529239b896e0557f72&dn=unraid692.7z

Containers

Containers are a method of isolating running processes from the host OS and other processes. BSD calls them "Jails".

There are a number of reasons why containers are neat:

• Less overhead than standard virtual machines because you aren't virtualizing the entire kernel.
• Process isolation.
• Containers are portable (even more so than VMs). You can create a container, configure it however you want, and deploy it again somewhere else.
• Like VMs, removing containers, rebuilding from scratch, or restoring a backup is easy.
• Containers are incredibly easy to deploy and you can find pre-built container images online.

There are two types of containers: application and system. Application containers, such as Docker, are designed to package and run a single service. Once the application is packaged, it can be tested and deployed to different environments without any changes. This makes it easy to scale and manage the application.

System containers, on the other hand, are designed to simulate a full system. They are more like lightweight virtual machines. They can run full-featured environments, system services, and even contain their own process space, users, network stacks, and file systems. Examples of system containers include LXC.

Regardless of the route you decide to go, the best practice is to keep the host OS as clean as possible and install each individual application (such as PLEX, Samba, etc) in their own container.

Docker

Instead of simulating an entire Linux OS (like LXC), Docker virtualizes a single application. This makes management easy and safe since your applications never touch the base file system.

While popular and easy to learn, Docker has some downsides. Some people go overboard with Docker containerization and make things more complicated than they need to be. But Docker can excel when used in the right situations.

There are a number of platforms that make managing your numerous Docker containers easy:

Portainer: provides a GUI to "manage all your orchestrator resources (containers, images, volumes, networks and more)".

Podman: not strictly Docker. A platform to run all sorts of containers.

LXC

If you are considering LXC, take a look at Proxmox and its built-in LXC support. It offers a very convenient platform that makes container management a breeze.

benefits of lxc containers

what are unprivileged vs privileged containers and why privileged containers break the container philosophy and introdcue security risks (just use a vm if you need a privileged container)

BSD Jails

Jails are BSD's version of containers. Since TrueNAS CORE is FreeBSD based you will be using these instead of LXC and Docker.

• TrueNas Jail documentation
• Give Jails access to host storage - Jail version of Bind mounting
• FreeBSD Jail documentation

Hard Drives & Storage

The slang for the spinning type of hard drives is spinning rust and its abbreviation is HDD.

Ever come across anons arguing over SMR vs. CMR?

Hard Drive Recommendations

See Home_Server/Hard_Drive_Recommendations

SSDs

While SSDs are very fast, they cost significantly more than HDDs. As such, the standard procedure is to store your data on HDDs and install the operating system on an SSD.

Check out the SSD buying guide for more on SSDs. If you skipped the HDDs and have a large SSD array, post the details in /hsg/ so we can all drool.

Shucking

Hard Drive Shucking is the process of purchasing an external hard drive enclosure (such as the WD Easystore) and splitting it open to extract the drive inside.

Home_Server/Shucking

Adding More SATA Ports

If you run out of SATA ports on your motherboard but require more storage there are a number of options for increasing the number of drives your server can support.

See Home_Server/Storage/Adding_More_SATA_Ports

RAID

Warning: RAID is NOT a backup. Not even RAID 1. RAID doesn't protect against accidental file deletion or the complete death of an array. See the Backups page for more on backups.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a technique where multiple physical hard drives are combined into a single logical unit for the purposes of redundancy, speed, or both. Data is stored in different places on multiple hard disks to prevent loss in the case of a drive failure.

Raid is an expansive subject so it's gotten it's own page.

Backups

specialized backup servers make backups effortless and automatic and restoring easy

Networking

Switches

Connecting your server to the internet requires a physical ethernet line. But what if you run out of jacks on your router? Get a switch!

There are two types of switches: managed and unmanaged. Managed switches can be configured and support advanced networking concepts while unmanaged switches are plug and play with no configuration capabilities. Unmanaged switches are cheaper than managed ones.

Don't cheap out on switches or else you'll be wondering why your network is much slower than it should be. Expect to pay at least $20.

Switch comparison table

Ethernet

Ethernet cables come in different types, each designed for specific networking and data transfer needs.

Cat 5e supports up to 1 Gbps at 100 meters. This is the standard choice for most networks and building wiring. Higher categories such as 6, 6a, and 7 support faster speeds and reject electromagnetic interference better. Even if your LAN (your internal network) only supports 1 Gbps, using higher categories is beneficial. For more info, see the detailed Ethernet CAT Specs page.

The speed of your LAN is based on the network interfaces of your servers and the capabilities of your switches.

You will see numbers like 10/100/1000 on networking hardware. This refers to the data transfer speed of network hardware and is measured in megabits per second (Mbps). Make sure your hardware supports 1000 Mbps (1 Gbps). If you only see 10/100 the hardware only supports a maximum of 100 Mbps. Trash it.

Routers

ISP Provided: these types of routers can be very locked down, but most have the capability to enable "bridge mode". This is where all router functionality is disabled and it only serves as a simple modem. You then plug your own router into it.

Consumer: Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, Asus, etc. Base firmware is usually subpar but OpenWRT can turn them into a powerhouse.

Prosumer: Ubiquity, EnGenius, MikroTik. These should handle whatever you throw at them.

Enterprise: Usually overpowered for the homelab. All the caveats of of used servers apply.

Custom: Custom hardware (ie. a thin client or desktop) running OPNsense or PFsense. Very powerful machines capable of performing all network tasks. Steep learning curve.

Network Interface Cards (NICs)

Intel network cards are considered one of the best for servers due to their high performance, reliability, and advanced features. They are designed to handle heavy network traffic efficiently, making them ideal for server environments. Intel cards usually start at $30 used on Ebay.

Cheaper network cards tend to use Realtek chips in them. The key difference is that Realtek network cards offload much of the network processing to the CPU. This means that the CPU has to do more work, which can reduce the overall performance of the server under heavy load.

If you build a OPNsense/PFsense router, make sure you use Intel network cards. In addition to the performance concerns, BSD and the router software has compatibility issues with Realtek.

Monitoring

Monitoring allows you to detect and send alerts when things break rather than having months go by before discovering something is wrong. Even if you have only one machine, a monitoring platform can be helpful. Some good options include Icinga2, Zabbix, and Uptime Kuma.