Hey guys! Like many of you here, I’m fed up with further encroaching enshittification and I’m tired of paying for subscriptions, so I decided to turn a 10-year old laptop I got for university into a home server. I’ve been tinkering with it for around a week now and I’ve spent many evenings and hours on figuring stuff out, but I’m at a point where I’m mostly set up and content with what I have. I thought I’d write down some of my experiences :)
- The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire E5 with a 1TB HDD, 8GB of RAM, I think an Intel Core i5 CPU and an on-board graphics card - very low-key stuff but sufficient for my setup. In order to make the server a little faster and snapper, I’ve removed the CD drive and instead added a 9,5mm caddy to connect the HDD via the caddy and a 2,5" 250GB SATA SSD as the main drive for a total of 1,25TB storage.
- The extra drive cost me 25€, the caddy another 7€
- I’m running Ubuntu Server LTS as my server OS and it’s been working pretty flawlessly so far. I’ve had a few minor hiccups here and there (for example, my laptop won’t just outright boot and always says that the boot drive isn’t mounted correctly or something, so I always have to manually select the drive to boot the PC from; or sometimes when I boot the PC, it’ll boot into emergency mode for some reason - a couple reboots and it goes away) but all in all it’s fine
- I was mainly looking for a way to get rid of Netflix and maybe Spotify, so naturally, I gravitated towards setting up an Arr stack to get access to all the media I’d want.
- However, in order to not have to work with the terminal at all times, I installed Casa OS to have an intuitive UI to manage all the little self-host programs I could be interested in.
- To install all of this, I followed a guide on YouTube to get started in the first place as well as another guide to set up the Arr stack. It took me a whole while to get a grasp of things, and I’ve spent a lot of hours to figure out how I want the host and container volumes to be set up, but I got it now (mostly)
- Current programs I’m using: Prowlarr, Sabnzbd, Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr to get access to the media I want to watch and listen to as well as Jellyfin and Navidrome for playback. I’m also getting my feet wet with Portainer because I want to host a Teamspeak server for my friends.
- Programs I want to set up in the future: a Minecraft server possibly, a network-wide adblocker, and Tailscale to access my media outside my home network.
- Little bonus tangent: before I started working on the server, we’ve been having problems with our internet - think constant outages where regular restarting of the router was required only for another outage five minutes later. A technician came by and fixed it, but I was told to get a new router because a newer router would be able to fix some of the common issues you get internet access on its own. That’s what you see further to the back by the wall (50€ used, Fritz!Box 7510). Unfortunately, it only comes with one (1!!!) singular LAN port, so I had to buy a switch for 5 LAN ports in total (another 12€) which is sufficient for all the devices we use at home.
- If you’ve been keeping count, all this cost me ~100€ including a few subscriptions to get access to some of the content I’m downloading. Definitely a worthwhile investment considering Netflix costs us like 18€ a month or so? We’ll get that cost back easily.
That’s pretty much all I think of sharing right now! Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any tips for a newcomer :)
Backup backup backup
You spent time setting it up, now keep that time investment safe.
Create a disk image at least once and keep a more regular copy of your important files.
Oh nice, a fritzbox. Ive gotten one the week it was legal to bring your own modem here ( not germany ) and i have not looked back since. There is a build in vpn server you can enable to access data from anywhere :)
Got one provided by my ISP, great free router! On a new ISP now, but still using the old ISPs router!
Comes with automatic dynamic DNS built in if needed too!
Word of warning - I wouldn’t be running anything with a battery in it as a home server. If you can disable battery charging that would be much better, or removing the battery would be best - but don’t make this a long term thing.
Sweet, one word of caution though…
Keep an eye on the battery, see if you can run the server without it installed, if it starts swelling, that means it has started to become unstable, and may become a fire hazard.
So I’d just ditch the battery and leave it plugged in, which it is regardless, to not strain the battery due to constant trickle charging?
I’d normally be fine doing that if the charging port wasn’t a little finicky at times when it comes to stable charging. I have to wiggle and twist the charger at times and if I move it, it’s not being charged again. Maybe I should just fix the charging point or switch it out - should be relatively cheap and easy
My even older laptop ran like this for many years and the battery never swelled. It couldn’t hold a proper charge, but I always saw it as cheap surge and microblackout protection.
See if that laptop model allows you to limit the battery charge. If the battery’s still holding a charge, isn’t swollen, and is kept at room temperature you have about a 1 in a million chance of a battery fire.
Parking your car in your garage has hundreds of times more fire risk.
The battery life isn’t amazing, but it never really was even when the laptop was younger. Maybe like a couple hours, likely less today
Battery charge limit will allow you to set it to stop charging at partial charge. Doing so greatly increases the battery lifespan and can reduce possible fire risk even further while still leaving far more backup time that a UPS would provide.
I’m pretty sure there’s some software to prevent what the other user said from happening as well.
Now that would be pretty nice
Look into a piece of software called
tlp. If your hardware is supported, you can use it to limit the charge of your battery to 80%, which seems to help with that issue.I’ll look into it!
In general, laptops are good about keeping the battery charged properly, but lithium batteries does not like to be charged to 100% constantly.
Would limiting the charge to 80% help? I think a lot of laptops have that ability.
It absolutely might, but you should still keep an eye on the battery’s physical condition.
Good call.
Dude! Welcome to the club. That’s an awesome set up. For the total price, you’ve done very well.
a total of 1,25TB storage.
Wow! That will hold a lot of Linux ISO’s
in order to not have to work with the terminal at all times, I installed Casa OS
Pretty solid platform. Admittedly, I am a sucker for a good UI, but don’t neglect learning the terminal tho. One thing that helps me is documentation. I document everything I am doing at the time. All the terminal commands, etc. That way, I can always go back to any point of administration, especially when the wheels fall off. There are so many commands and multiple commands to do the same. I’ve had a computer in front of me since the mid 70s and I still feel like a noob when it comes to my terminal game. Documentation helps me out a lot.
I’ll get to seeding 8-)
I definitely see the value in documenting what I’m doing. What constitutes a documentation-worthy action to you? I feel like I could get lost in the sauce a little :D
What constitutes a documentation-worthy action to you?
For me…everything. I’m 71, and the brain doesn’t recall as well as it once did. So, my mantra is: If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen. Even if you are a young buck, don’t get sucked into thinking ‘yeah…I can remember all this shit 6 months down the road. No worries’. That’s the devil talking Bobby Boucher. LOL
Okay, I see what you’re saying :D I’ll think about it the next time I need to do some tinkering. Might come in handy the next time I break something which is likely happening soon :P
Even if you just take screenshots before making changes, this can really save you from an extended downtime while you try to retrace your steps after a failed configuration change. Screenshots take up very little space and can be moved to written documentation (even less space) or deleted (no space!) as needed. ShareX is a great FOSS tool for this.
I was holding off on tailscale, with the intention of doing it eventually as I thought it would be a chore. Took about 5 minutes. Do it now. Before you set up local address bookmarks that you’ll have to change.
If I may suggest, run proper cable management, including labeling both ends of each cable (so you know where the other end connects to).
How do I do that for longer cables? As you can see, the distance between the ports isn’t too long but the cables are. I don’t wanna break any of the cables by mistake. Any ideas?
Get a giant roll of hook and loop (shouldn’t need wider than 1.5cm) and cable labels, then very carefully bunch and label everything. Make sure you don’t pull on any connection as you neatly bunch.
Can’t quite find what you’re describing but the labels look cute
Something like this.
So velcro straps kinda, gotcha 👍🏻
I don’t recommend getting the straps, though. Get the roll. And Velcro is a brand for a hook and loop product. You can get the Velcro brand, they’re pretty decent, albeit expensive.
TIL
It felt natural to call it velcro because that’s how I’ve always heard it being called, but I didn’t know it’s a brand name. German has a proper noun for these, and I assumed velcro is the direct translation
If you have an android phone, you’re welcome to use my app for your music and audiobooks :)
Free and open source and completely private. Called it StillShelf. Have been working on it for a long while.Edit: fellow self-hoster here, to be clear. I built this app because I host my own music and audiobooks and wanted an app to my liking so I got to work. AI was used to help build this app. Just to put it out there because I know some people aren’t fans of it.
If you can do all that, a Minecraft server will be easy peasy to set up.
Thanks for the encouragement - I’ll give it a try! :)
That’s what you see further to the back by the wall (50€ used, Fritz!Box 7510). Unfortunately, it only comes with one (1!!!) singular LAN port, so I had to buy a switch for 5 LAN ports in total (another 12€) which is sufficient for all the devices we use at home.
7510 is an extremely bad router, it doesn’t even have 5Ghz WiFi which is like standard for 10 years now. The router is your core access to the internet. Saving money in this place is definitely the wrong choice. You could have gotten a used 7520/7530 (has 4x LAN and proper 5 GhZ WiFi) for like 10€ more and wouldn’t require the 12€ switch…
You should maybe do more research before doing stuff in the future…
Possibly. It’s what the technician suggested getting if I’m on a budget
As a networking guy, for homelab setups the router is not core of your network. That role falls on the switch. In a perfect world, you’d have a layer-3 switch handling traffic between segments and only send traffic to the router for egressing the network or a few other cases. But in the real world, you have to start somewhere and that’s what you did. Don’t let anyone tell you that you did it wrong. If someone can’t make things work without having the perfect equipment, its probably the wrong hobby for those people.
Regarding network-wide adblocking, I had a squid proxy running that did this. Every machine was issued a self-signed certificate and the connections were basically MITM so I could check the calls being made. You can run into some issues with SSL-pinning in Android or things like HSTS for common websites sometimes, but overall it did function pretty well after tweaking.
If you do decide later to replace your existing router, I’d suggest trying to build your own. My current router is a mini-PC with dual NICs running Arch configured to do packet filtering, routing, a few automations, etc. It was refurbished and cost me about $80 USD. Its a really good experience in building servers and learning how various routing protocols work.
Don’t worry, I bet you’re still gonna have a great time with your home server, love seeing people set up stuff like this for themselves
SO MUCH great information here! Bookmarked for later, so I can pick through it later and absorb all of your knowledge. Because I’m like a sponge. Or maybe more like a leech…
That’s such a huge compliment, thank you 😱✨ I hoped that my post might inspire someone, but I didn’t actually expect that to happen that quickly :)
I’m still very very new to this, so I’m probably doing stuff wrong - using guides like I did you could do all that too, I’m sure :)
Enjoy the journey. I had a great time spending two years setting up, tearing down, and resetting everything up until it worked and ran in a way that felt good. Start setting money aside for some more drives. I started with 2tb and I’m up to 40tb now lol
Hooly. Considering the rising prices of drives, I’m not sure how feasible that will, sadly, considering I’m on a tight budget. Plus I’m not sure how easy it would be to connect the extra drives to the laptop. Got any ideas?
External drive docks are fairly cheap and easy to use. I’ve got a 2 bay dock for my large hdd’s that I got when I switched to a micro form factor box. I got it at micro center for maybe $25 but if you don’t have one around you I’m sure you can find one online when your ready. Hopefully the AI industry collapses before you need a new drive
I’ll keep it in mind, thanks :)
Not looking forward to getting one, but I’ll deal with it should it come to that I guess D:
Sorry… I meant “self hosting virus” 😂😂😂
You will never heal from self hosting once you get it 😉
I guess my point still stands :D
