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Home server Original
Please note: If you are going to run ANY services that can be accessed from the external internet, beyond the confines of your home, please secure your system per Setting up a Server.
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 or Big Tech censorship.
Contents
Hardware
What hardware you get depends mostly on your use case. A simple file server can be run on an SBC with a couple hard drives attached. If you want to do more fancy things like virtualization, streaming 4K movies, etc you are going to want better hardware. If you plan on using ZFS or Btrfs, server grade hardware and ECC ram are recommended but not required.
Server options
There are many roads to the Home Server. Each one has upsides and downsides. It's up to you to decide what works best for your requirements.
SBC and NUC
For simple home server use, such as a file server or single user direct play PLEX server, these options might be an appealing and inexpensive and energy efficient option for your home server. Expect performance issues if you try to scale though, and don't expect to be able to run multiple virtual machines or do heavy transcoding. Connecting hard drives via USB docks may have some performance impact. Use USB 3 where possible and don't attach to many drives to a single port.
- Raspberry Pi
- Rpi4 recommended. Better Ethernet and more powerful than the 3b
- Odroid
- Odroid N2+ recommended
- Ondroid HC4 storage server - Cheap two drive system
- Intel NUC
- Search your NUC here for more information on it
Repurpose Old Hardware
If you have an old gaming PC, or laptop, or spare parts lying around, you might be able to get away with using them as your server (provided they are not too old). Performance and capability will vary wildly 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 to a certain extent. Preferably use one with USB3 or better, older laptops might only have USB2 ports which will bottleneck any attached HDDs.
Build Your Own
If you have the money, buying new hardware is a viable (but expensive) option. Knowing exactly what you are getting and peace of mind that you can RMA any DOA items, as well as reasonable shipping prices are good reasons to buy new. A combination of new hardware and repurposed older hardware is also an option if you are on a bit of a budget.
If you are looking to build a ZFS/FreeNas server be sure to get a motherboard and CPU that support ECC ram. Server motherboards are recommended as they have many features such as IPMI, Intel NICs, NIC teaming support, and more.
Supermicro/Asrock Rack are good options. "Prosumer" boards are usually incredibly expensive and not worth the money.
Modern AMD Ryzen CPUs all "unofficially" support ECC ram, just make sure your motherboard supports it. Pretty much all AMD CPUS also support virtualization.
If using Intel CPU(s) Check ark.intel.com for information on your CPU. Some features to look for:
- Intel Quick Sync Video allows for hardware accelerated transcoding.
- VT-x and VT-d are must haves if you plan on using virtualization of any kind.
- ECC Ram Support
Buy Used
Buying Used enterprise hardware can be a cheap, but somewhat unreliable option. Waiting for a good deal might not be for everyone but the rewards are great. Tremendous amounts of storage potential at a relatively cheap price. Some listings even come with drives preinstalled. Be aware though, rack mount hardware is usually pretty loud and older Xeons can be extremely energy inefficient.
- Good place to find old server hardware:
Prebuilt NAS
Only buy a prebuilt NAS if you want to spend more and get less. They are typically woefully under powered for the price and you’re better served with a $65 odroid than a $300 QNAP/Synology. That said, they are the most noob friendly option with a GUI interface for setup.
Storage
Shucking
It's massively cheaper to buy WD Easystores or WD Elements (when they go on sale) than it is to buy an equivalent size NAS hard drive like WD Red/Iron wolf. Just remember: YOU VOID YOUR WARRANTY. If your drive fails you are most likely fucked. When you buy regular NAS drives you are basically paying more for the warranty.
Some other things to consider if you decide to shuck:
- Shucked drives under 8tb might be SMR drives.
- Shucked drives lack the middle mounting hole that most other drives have. You may need an adaptor for your HDD trays if your case doesn’t support them. Some cases might not have adaptors at all, research before buying your case!
- Some 8 and 10TB drives are air-filled rather than filled with helium. These air-filled drives can run significantly hotter than the helium ones. Check the model number with Crystal Disk Info before shucking, if it has an H it is most likely a helium drive. If you have airflow constraints in your case, it might be better to try and get Helium drives, otherwise it shouldn't be much of an issue.
3.3v pin issue
Shucked drives WILL NOT BOOT with most consumer power supplies. This is because of a feature on enterprise drives that lets administrators reboot hard drives by powering the 3.3 volt pin which isn’t used on consumer hard drives. Consumer PSUs, of course, always power this pin, so the hard drive will be stuck in an infinite boot loop and never power on. This can be solved by covering the first three pins on the hard drive with insulating Kapton tape.
- DO NOT use liquid electrical tape. This can damage the drive.
- DO NOT cut the Sata power cable this can damage the drive and your PSU.
- Molex to sata adapters DO work but be careful, as some of the poorly made ones can catch fire. I wouldn’t risk it.
SMR v CMR
SMR stands for "shingled magnetic recording" It's an alternative method to conventional magnetic recording (CMR) that traditional hard drives use. While SMR technology allows for greater data density, they are also slow compared to CMR. These drives are bad for NAS use cases and especially bad for ZFS due to compatibility issues. Just avoid them all together. WD Red guide for which models are SMR and which are CMR. All Seagate NAS drives are CMR. Easystores/Elements 8tb and above should be safe.
SSD
SSDs are recommended for the OS and programs only, or for use in cache, or ARC cache in ZFS in place of expensive ram. Don't buy SSDs for main storage unless you want to spend tens of thousands. Check out the SSD buying guide for more on SSDs.
Expanding Your Storage
If you find you have 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. The best and recommended approach is to use a SAS HBA with SAS to Sata breakout cables. Each SAS port can support up to 4 Sata drives (or even more if you use an expander). You can find used LSI SAS HBAs on eBay for relatively cheap which have ~2 internal ports, or 8 total Sata drives. Avoid SAS1 cards as they are far too old by now and have some limitations. If your case can no longer support more drives, you may want to look into buying an External SAS HBA, which will allow you to connect drives in an external enclosure directly to your server.
- Some videos on SAS controllers and cables which I found very helpful. If you are new to using SAS you should watch these:
Sata HBAs and port multipliers/Expanders are not recommended. They are garbage and not worth buying. Sata port multipliers specifically can cause issues when you try to us any kind of Raid with them.
There are some counterfeit LSI cards on the market, avoid Chinese sellers, sellers with no return policy, etc.
Racks and Cases
- Case guide
- Lack rack - Meme-y but practical and cheap solution for rack-mount equipment. Be wary of putting too much weight on them though
Operating systems
OMV is good enough if all you are storing is rarely accessed (pirated) media. Even standard Linux like Ubuntu supports software raid and filesystems like OpenZFS. TrueNAS CORE (formerly FreeNas) is BSD based and fairly simple to install and use but server grade hardware and ECC memory are recommended.
Linux
Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS are recommended if you want GNU/Linux.
- Debian based distros like Ubuntu are easy to work with and have plenty of documentation.
- Ubuntu usually does retarded things with their packages and versions (lib*-ubuntu1.l2), and pulls unstable software from Debian Sid.
- CentOS is a free alternative to RedHat and is also fairly popular.
Rolling release distros (Arch, Fedora) are not great options for a server. Servers are supposed to continuously work and shouldn't break/change their behaviour on updates.
Gentoo is usually too much trouble to be worth it, but it's ok.
Use Mdadm + LVM, ZFS on Linux (ZoL), or Snapraid + mergerFS for RAID.
TrueNAS CORE
TrueNAS CORE is the free version of the premium TrueNas and successor/replacement for FreeNas. TNC is a FreeBSD based OS that utilizes ZFS for storage and has many available plugins for things like PLEX, bitorrent, and more. Has simple, easy to use GUIs to set up your services such as samba shares, etc.
Keep in mind it will install to the ENTIRE DRIVE and you won't be able to use the install drive for anything else. A small, cheap, M.2 SSD is a good option for the OS drive. Server grade hardware and ECC ram is recommended.
Open Media Vault
Good for storing infrequently changed files like media files.
Website doesn't have much to show for. Check the forums for guides.
Supports Snapraid as a plugin. Can be used with mergerFS to pool drives together. Needed for mergerFS.
Proxmox
A Linux based Virtualization Environment that has built in ZFS support, Linux container support, and more.
Your CPU must support Virtualization in order to run Proxmox. (VT-x on Intel, AMD-V for AMD).
ECC Ram is recommended as per usual with ZFS.
Xpenology
A free version of the OS Synology uses for their NAS products. Obviously you won't get any support from Synology if you use this.
Supports differently sized physical disks and adding hard drives to expand as needed.
unRAID
Comes with it's own RAID solution that technically isn't real RAID because all parity is stored on one or two disks. 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.
File Systems and RAID
You may want to consider a RAID array for long-term file storage. RAID is not a backup. Not even RAID 1. RAID doesn't protect against accidental deletion or total failure of an array. We STRONGLY recommend a 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 Copies, 2 on site, 1 remote. If you cannot afford that, backing up to external drives or the cloud is better than nothing.
Rebuilding a raid array is an intensive process and it's not uncommon for a second disk to fail during the process. Raid 5 and equivalents only offer 1 disk redundancy, so if a disk fails during your rebuild you're fucked. Try to aim for at least two disk redundancy, or do a raid 10 instead.
Software v Hardware
Software raid typically has a number of features that are more beneficial than just standard RAID. Best in class at this moment is ZFS which has automatic file self healing and file system level checksums to combat bitrot. Btrfs is also good if you want an alternative to ZFS, but is still in development so be careful. Unraid is more noob friendly (but you pay for it). Snapraid + merger FS is a viable (free) alternative to Unraid if you don't feel like spending money on your OS.
ZFS
A long standing, reliable file system and software raid solution that works on BSD and Linux.
Supports up to 3 disk redundancy (RaidZ3) and has checksums and self healing to prevent data corruption.
Has some limitations, one major one being expansion is cumbersome.
If you plan on using RaidZ make sure you know what your array is going to be beforehand, you won't be able to add to it later.
Server hardware and at least 8gb ECC memory recommended. Using old hardware or consumer hardware is not recommended.
MDAM
A tool for creating and managing Linux software RAID arrays.
You can create file systems directly on the raid arrays, and then use mergerFS to pool the file systems together.
Technically supports disks of different sizes, but it requires multiple partitions on the drives and is not recommended.
No built in checksums, Can use dm-integrity to detect errors, but has no way of dealing with them.
LVM
Required learning for management of drives on Linux.
Can be used with Mdadm to pool multiple arrays into one logical volume.
A bit more confusing than partitioning drives normally but is very flexible.
XFS
Another reliable file system. Unlike ZFS it doesn't have built in software raid features.
ext4
Default file system for most Linux distros. Does everything a good file system should do and more.
Btrfs
It's "B-Tree", not "Butter". Has many of the same features as ZFS, including checksums and self healing. STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT USE AT OWN RISK. Potential for data loss.
Raid 1 features are stable on the most recent Linux kernels.
mergerFS
A Union file system that pools multiple file systems together under one mount point, allowing them to appear as one.
Has some advantages over LVM, you can use multiple disks with data already on them instead of having to create LVM volumes/groups. If a disk fails, since the data is not striped across multiple disks (like with LVM), data loss can be less drastic.
Works with multiple different file systems at the same time, including Windows's NTFS. Use with Snapraid or mdadm for disk redundancy.
Available as a plugin for OMV.
Snapraid
Has an impressive list of features including up to 6 disk redundancy and the ability to add hard drives to expand as needed.
Supports differently sized disks, allowing for more flexibility with expansion (your data disks must be equal to or smaller than your parity disks! If you try to add a new data disk that is larger than your parity drives you will run into issues).
Technically not "real" raid and has some limitations. Read the manual.
Can be used with mergerFS to pool drives together while retaining a level of redundancy.
Available as a plugin for OMV.
Containers
Containers are a method of isolating running software from both the host OS and other software. You may also hear them called Jails or Chroot Jails if you are running some variant of BSD (such as TrueNas CORE/FreeNas).
There are a number of reasons why you would want this:
- Less overhead than standard virtual machines because you aren't virtualizing the kernel.
- Isolated software cannot interfere with each other or the host. If a container crashes it won't effect anything else.
- Like VMs, containers are portable. You can create a container, configure it however you want, and deploy it anywhere.
- Like VMs, removing containers and starting from scratch or a backup in the event of a fatal crash is easy.
- Docker and Podman containers are incredibly easy to deploy and you can find pre-configured container images online.
Best practice is to keep the base OS as clean as possible and install each individual application (such as Plex, Samba, etc) in their own container. This makes your server much more stable since there is virtually no chance of a containerized application crashing your server, or an installation gone wrong from ruining your host OS.
LXC and LXD
LXC is the standard Linux containers. Available on most distros. You will likely be using these if you are running a Proxmox server.
Since Linux containers are essentially just separate instances of Linux, you can't run Windows programs in them without using WINE.
LXD is a newer, more user friendly version of LXC. Has better management options for containers.
Docker
Instead of running as though it was an entire OS like LXC, Docker only virtualizes a single application. Can run on Windows as well as Linux. You will still need WINE to run Windows apps on Linux. Freemium software. Base software is free for individuals (you).
Podman
An alternative to Docker. Those using Docker can easily switch without issues. Unlike Docker, it does not use a single large server daemon. Uses "pods" which can contain more than one container.
Jails
Jails are BSD's version of containers. Since TrueNas CORE/FreeNas is freeBSD based you will be using these instead of LXC/LXD.
- TrueNas Jail documentation
- Give Jails access to host storage - Jail version of Bind mounting
- FreeBSD Jail documentation
Remote access
SSH
Server software
For a greater range of self hosting solutions and services see awesome self hosted software.
System administration software
For a greater range of sysadmin solutions and services see awesome sysadmin software.
External Links
- Home server hardware - Hayden James' home lab setup
- STH Forums - Good general resource for server questions
- Script to secure Debian and Debian based Linux installs
- Setup pfSense
- Raspberry Pi KVM for managing servers remotely
- Learn Command line
- HP T620 plus - Decent cheap computer. You can use it as a VPN, pfSense firewall, and more:
