Hello,

as you may can guess i am here because i need some help because i want to self host some stuff and i am pretty new to this stuff. I did a loto f research and i came up with a lot of stuff. I will present you my thoughts and maybe some people here can tell me if i am good or not.

First the Hardware.

I did a lot of research and came up with a HP Elitedesk 800 G5 Mini as my home server.

It can hold 2x NVME SSD and 1xSata SSD. It has an Intel 5 9500T and is upgradeable to 64gb of Ram.

I can get one from ebay used for maybe 150-170€. Then i need to upgrade the ram because it comes with 8gb only. I thought maybee upgrade it to 32gb for now. And buy 2 nvme ssds both 2tb dont know which brand is cheap and good there. The sata ssd could be my operating system i have 1 with 120 gb at home hope this is enough.

The NVME SSDs are 1 for storage of mainly photos videos and maybe a small audio collection. The other is to make a backup of all this. (Mirrored)

Second Operating System

I know there area lot of things out there and i know people can recommend a lot of stuff but …. I wanna keep it as simple as possible for my first homeserver … also i dont ´have too Much time with an 2 year old child. So my thoughts were using Ubuntu server with docker and portainer. Just that.

Third My apps and Stuff.

So mainly i wanted to run the following Applications on that.

-            Immich

-            Homeassisstant

-            Joplin

-            Audiobookshelf

-            Calibre Ereader

-            CalDav App for a Calender Sync with MY Phone and MY wife

-            Pi hole

-            Vaultwarden

-            And Homarr as a Dashboard for all of this.

Fourth Using all this from my phone

Thats the only part where i didnt have time to do some research how i use all off that safly from my phone.

I guess i need some kind of VPN for a secure use?

I hope that part is easy.

Son ow i shared all off my initial researches and thoughts. I hope i wrote not to much mistakes.

And i hope you guys can help me out a little.

Greetings

  • foremanguy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    Hi, first congrats for going the way of homelabing.

    Like you first the hardware :

    The elitedesk are great lines of prebuilt PCs mainly for little home servers BUT I wouldn’t recommend to you to take the mini version as it’s very very tiny and therefore doesn’t have great modularity nor upgradeability.

    You don’t need to take massive servers or towers but the SFF versions of these or the normal version (starting to get big) are way better and will permit to you to have more space to tweak it and more generally have some place to put storage or else.

    But if you can’t allow yourself to have at least a tiny bit bigger that’s okay and you can stay with the mini version that’s not a dummy choice.

    For the storage depending on what you’re going to run in 5 years, 120GB could be not enough, adding the backups, you should consider buying at least 256 to 512GB of ssd (preferable for system (SATA or NVME whatsoever)). When it comes to raw and dummy storage, use hard drive, old schooled at first glance they are dirt cheap when getting them on discount. For storing only some videos, photos and music, 2TB usable is nice and making it mirrored (RAID 1) is nice too. But maybe (if one day comes the idea off having larger sizes) using RAID 5 could be nice as you could expend storage easily, you cannot really adapt RAID 1 to RAID 5 without manually doing backups and restoring them.

    So buy some hard disks, if you want, you can buy them used (around 15-20 bucks for 2TB good used hard drive). Or you can buy them refurbished or new as you wish. When it comes to network storage hard disks are the best as you basically can’t max out basic NVME drives with your network, basic ones are at around 3000MiB/s so that means 24,000Mib/s of bandwidth so you would need a 25G network (thing that I think you don’t have).

    And using more reasonable sized PCs are going to help you fitting all your drives, and maybe putting external NICs in there.

    Secondly the software.

    Using docker to easily selfhost is a great idea but I really don’t like portainer and mainly the way they manage docker container.

    So I would suggest you 2 things if you want to get a bit into tech simply deploy your docker containers with docker compose file, once into you’ll see that it’s very simple.

    But if you prefer a simpler approach while not giving up features, as you said you’re a father (congrats), I wouldn’t recommend to you YunoHost it’s a out-of-the-box platform to self host stuff very easily without pretty much technical knowledge.

    If the apps are just for you and your wife (pretty close people) using a VPN that give access people to your whole local network (for really close people) or setting up an overlay VPN like tailscale (and selfhost headscale or use netbird) would be nice and pretty straightforward.

    If you prefer to make it available online you can also reverse proxy services to make it open to the www from your IP, or use Cloud flare tunnels (don’t like the idea of having cloudflare snipping out all my traffic) or you can use a vps to do the kinda same thing as with cloudflare tunnels without having them on your shoulders.

    That’s it for me, hope I guided you, and feel free to ask questions if you wish. Great homelabing journey to you! :)