Mastodawn

i now have enough money in my account for an entire home server setup, but i have no idea where to start.
i want to host things like a website backend, qbittorrent, and jellyfin, just a general use setup. (edited to remove mail server because i've learned this is a bad idea on a home server)
where should i get hardware? what hardware should i even get in the first place? anything i should know about choosing a distro to host a server on? i'm completely new to this and would appreciate advice.
please boost for visibility :3

@lexi sorry to disappoint but you're not going to host a mailserver from your home

neocat_floof__w_

almost no server would ever accept mails from residential IPs

there's a price comparison site i use for server hardware but it's german and wouldn't be of much use to you, and as distro you can use pretty much anything you want, i use arch just because every other distro caused me issues

hardware, no idea :3 I'd just get a good but not too expensive ryzen cpu but i have no clue what to look for when picking a power supply and motherboard

Lexi 🌸Jun 18, 2024

@lea alright, so no mail server

@lexi i think you can tell how much of a pain it is to maintain mine, so unless you want to rent a VPS then probably not

stupid hot girl Jun 18, 2024

@lexi @lea you can get a really cheap vps from racknerd for like $10/yr (this old promo code is still active) and then set up a reverse proxy (i use frp) to host your mails locally! you could also even put your entire server behind this vps proxy to not expose your home ip

@zvava @[email protected] i did a setup like that (mail hosted at home but tunneled through a vps) except i fucked it up and it barely worked. if you run something simpler than mailcow it should be easier though :3

I'd let you use my vps as email proxy but I'm already running a mail server on that

🌸 lily 🏳️‍⚧️

θΔ ⋐ & ∞Jun 18, 2024

@lea @lexi proton does iirc

@lea @lexi wolfgang's channel also has a lot of stuff on this, but here's my opinion (please correct me if i'm wrong):

adding onto the ryzen cpu part, newer ryzen apu's are better for hardware video decoding for jellyfin afaik and dont require an external gpu to see any video out at all, and the allow for lower C-states which results in way lower power consumption on idle, i guess just google "cpuname linux cstates"

also dutchies/belgians: tweakers.net is great

@lea @lexi for hardware id actually suggest Intel over AMD, some older Ryzen chips have issues with power consumption and stability under Linux. i've been running a i7-6700k server and i've never seen it go above 20% cpu utilization in normal operation. (of course depends what you're running)

> almost no server would ever accept mails from residential IPs

except gmail and outlook?

⬡-0xd67b0f Jun 18, 2024

@lexi be careful with email. You can basically forget about it if your homelab is behind NAT. And even then you have to keep in mind that emails will bounce if there is an outage in your WAN or power supply or if you just silly your Mailserver a little too much.

Lexi 🌸Jun 18, 2024

@izzie i see

⬡-0xd67b0f Jun 18, 2024

@lexi feel free to hit me up on Matrix! I love giving tech advice and I have experience from my own homelab ^^

Imikoy Jun 18, 2024

mailserverFrom what I've read, this is a perilous path, since other, more reputable mailservers can block yours for any/no reason, and even regardless of what you do.

Lexi 🌸Jun 18, 2024

@imikoy yeah a few people have said that, and now i know
i removed it from the list of things i want to host since i'm more interested in the putting a server together part

@lexi depends on what you want and need.

I got great mileage out of #amd64-based, #fanless #ThinClients so far but I also don't run a small business off them but merely basic stuff...

What are your limitations in terms of budget, space, power, cooling, noise and what are your must haves and nice to haves...

Lexi 🌸Jun 18, 2024

@kkarhan i barely have anything in my room so space isn't much of a concern, budget would be a max of 3.5k, i would prefer that the server is quiet so i can actually sleep at night.
i'm not sure everything i would do with it other than what i listed, maybe a personal fedi instance?

Urban Hermit Jun 19, 2024

@lexi @[email protected] besides noise, think about heat. It could throw off more than most house hold appliances. So air conditioning in the summer. Other than that I don't know xhit, I have put some racks together at work a few times, but that is it. Good luck.

As @kkarhan said: it depends: is the webserver only to be accessed by yourself, or by some of your friends, or do you want to address all the world and have houndreds or thousends of pageviews?
Do you want to serve static pages with nginx, or dynamic content with apache? If you want to run a mastodon instance, then you would need to run nginx+postgres+mastodon-server+mastodon-background-processing and you can add elastic search and libre translate: that would be 4 to 6 different server processes - and it would need significantly more ram than other setups.

neocat_shy_flower

@lexi I'd recommend you look up how container technology (such as docker) works, it's really the best way of installing any services

keywords you might want are "docker", "docker compose", "container images"

avoid podman (alternative to docker) until you become more comfortable with relentless workarounds and debugging

I have over 25 services running entirely in containers on my personal setup, i can bring everything up or update in seconds, and transferring EVERYTHING between OSes or machines takes a literal 15 minutes of work (mostly spend waiting for file transfers)

feel free to DM me for questions

Skyler Jun 18, 2024

@lexi contrary to others here: it *is* possible to host a mailserver, if (and normally only if) you do something called "smtp relaying" which is where you send outgoing mail via a 3rd party.

I do so, and am happy to give tips.

n.b. It is still complex to set up from scratch, and there is a nonzero amount of caution you should take, as misconfigurations could lead to stuff like you becoming an "open relay" (accepting mail from everyone and forwarding it, making it really easy to spam from your addresses and probably getting you banned from your smtp relay provider).

Skyler Jun 18, 2024

@lexi that's not to say you have to set it up from scratch, though. There are packages like mailinabox, mailcow or stalwart which can make this easier.

Lexi 🌸Jun 18, 2024

@minion3665 that's pretty neat, i'll look into it :3

Jana Jun 18, 2024

@lexi There are many ways to get started, depending on how much you want to spend, how much storage you want, etc.

I‘ll just throw in what I and a lot of other people use. That’s common mini PCs from the likes of HP, Lenovo and Dell. Used ones with CPUs like i5-6500T up to i5-9500T are very cheap on the used market and have enough power for common home uses. I run a few of them by now.

Here’s an overview: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/

Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution

STH Project TinyMiniMicro is set to revolutionize the home lab segment with clusters of high-quality, quiet, low power, and inexpensive nodes

ServeTheHome

Jana Jun 18, 2024

@lexi The nice thing is that all of those have an Intel iGPU that can be used for transcoding in Jellyfin or Plex. I host my Plex server on my i5-9500T and yeah, never had an issue :)

Marika Jun 18, 2024

@lexi you should checkout Wolfgang's Channel on YouTube www.youtube.com/channel/UCsnGwSIHyoYN0kiINAGUKxg

Bevor Sie zu YouTube weitergehen

@lexi
I bought some hardware to get rid of my ML350G9 I had from work because of the huge electricity bill it is creating.

I bought for around 800€ of hardware for that and I'll be running proxmox with a few lxc containers to handle everything I have at home.
It's an aliexpress motherboard with an i7 11th gen cpu 4 cores / 8 cores ht,64g ram, 1 nvme ssd and a jonsbo nas case to stick everyone together.
I don't have the PSU yet and I'm reencoding all my library first before moving all the nas disks on it. I can't talk too much about how reliable it is because it still very fresh but I find it very unexpensive and the nas case makes it so pretty

proxmox is an hypervisor allowing you to create virtual machines or LXC containers (something between a VM and a docker container, with little ressource usage)

Alex Bissessur Jun 18, 2024

@lexi
As was said, you're toast with a mail server in your homelab.

I run a cluster, but even solo, micro PCs (dell optiplex, lenovo thinkcentre) are great for starting a lab. They're cheap second hand, upgradeable (unlike pis) and are low power. Can get them on ebay or other second hand markets.
If you're really going in deep, a Ryzen CPU is good for the extra performance (read: less future upgrades)

Alex Bissessur Jun 18, 2024

The advantage of going with a desktop build is that it's a lot easier to expand and upgrade through the PCIE slot(s) and SATA ports for storage for your legally procured content.

I run OpenSuse on mine because I'm slightly biased towards SUSE but you can use most OSes such as Ubuntu or Debian. I think OpenSUSE is fairly underrated but you're of course free to distro hop :P

sophia disorder Jun 18, 2024

@lexi personally, the easiest distro i've found easiest to run on my homeservers is arch specifically endeavor os

fully customizable, i'm very comfortable w arch anyway, no pesky selinux, you get all the software in the aur, and always the most up to date software!

you can even set it up to automatically update (which isn't recommended, you can even get months of uptime like this which is really not recommended) (both of which is what i do :3)

Bob Jonkman Jun 18, 2024

My advice is: Buy as much computer as you can afford. Nobody ever complained about having too much RAM, disk space, or CPU power.

And you *can* run your own mail server, and probably receive e-mail at your home IP. But you may have to sent outbound e-mail through your ISP's mail server (called a "smart host" in some mail software) so your server doesn't get silently blocked by the e-mail cartel (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com)

furicle Jun 18, 2024

@lexi whatever is cheap and handy - if and only if you have a performance problem later, you can transfer things to something better

A ten year old whatever with a couple of big hard drives and 8 gig of ram.

Steve's Place Jun 19, 2024

@lexi I'm serving a mastodon instance & occasional chat server on an old 4-core Intel i5-4690 w/ 16GB of RAM. A 1GB line. If you don't have a static IP, you can script it to correct your registrar when it changes. For torrents, you'll want a GB connection in both directions. If your IP is not static, and it changes, it will glitch them. Infrequent. Linux. Apache or nginx for https. Install fail2ban. Turn off ssh password logins.

You'll be a sysadmin, lol.

Lexi 🌸Jun 19, 2024

@steter i already use a static ip for self hosting and use ssh with keys only for authentication.
i'm already doing very well with torrenting, all i'd have to do is copy over my docker config for it.

Steve's Place Jun 19, 2024

@lexi 👍