What are /r/HomeServer's favorite Products & Services?

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Not sure if you have access to his computer, but it might be worth to check if he setup some ssh keys for remote access (ssh (user@)server_ip)...

from windows if he was using winscp, he might have saved the password, if it's the case you can activate logging and "sensitive" data that will store the password in plain: https://winscp.net/eng/docs/faq_password
good luck and sorry for your loss

I use HDMI over ethernet. Run unbroken ethernet (or at least don't go through any infra) from your office to a TV. Add a transmitter and receiver at each end. Bam - low/no latency uncompressed video and audio. I Fu the same with USB 2.1 (because I can't find a good 3.1 over ethernet option).

I've bought a few of these adapters and this is by far the best one.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019MADOS8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_RSmaEbPQA294P

The USB adapter is from the same brand, but those are less finicky in terms of finding the perfect one. Any 2.1 should do.

Rare that I can chime in on such an esteemed community, and to reinforce what other users have said: YES you can use it. The bad news? You will need a Z-wave controller to use it. There are 'hubs' that come basically ready to use, or a more DIY approach you can buy a Z-Wave USB controller that works with Windows, Linux, Rasp Pi, etc.

I use a Z-wave controller with a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant (for reference this is the one I have). I have a few Z-wave receptacles that I can control with Home Assistant on my phone or computer.

But bottom line you will need a Z-wave controller/hub to use this device.

I checked online, and this is apparently the manual for your device. It shows how it connects to Z-Wave. Happy automating!

http://z-wave-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/docs/388/ZDS-200NA_Documentation.pdf?1494454857

Everyone's talking about cost savings, or system wear.... I'll attack it from a different angle....

• Figure out your desktop's power usage. A Kill-A-Watt is <em>great</em> for this.
• Switch it into Kilowatts, if it isn't already....
• Multiply it by your $/Kwh value...
• Ponder the worth of your annoyance when realize that you have to get up to push a button, and wait for the stupid thing to boot up.

Could I lower my bill by powering down some servers? Certainly. However, they serve a purpose, and they can't serve that purpose if they're offline.

I'd suggest a used computer off of ebay. You can get a slim form factor 2nd Gen i3 Dell Optiplex w/ 4GB of RAM for $55. It will perform significantly better than an RPi for Plex and for not much more either. All you'd need is a boot drive for whatever OS you choose or a flash drive w/ FreeNAS. As for not having a monitor, you'd need one to set it up initially, but that's it. Once you get the OS loaded and SSH server installed, you can manage it remotely.

If you really need as small of form factor as possible, I'd suggest an Intel NUC, but it's a big jump in price.

Host a Linux Repo and Torrents for some of the not-quite-popular distros you like.

Host a game server and play with friends, make new friends and lose false ones.

Host a Jabber/XMPP server and help freeing the Internet.

Don't use that stuff all for yourself, do good in the world. Learn something. Share joy.

They're called mini-sas cables, I believe sf-8087 are what you need. I used these with an h200 in a 720XD and they work great:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07CKXFKHT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_2K970GEHD7V3TYCRAJ4D?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

Check out Apache Guacamole https://guacamole.apache.org/ it's the closest thing I'm aware of to running Windows in a browser. It is a browser based rdp /vnc/ssh gateway. I use it daily and it's pretty slick.

I'm building one that you're welcome to try: https://PhotoStructure.com

I wrote it to be simple enough for my not-so-tech-saavy parents to install and run, (via a "desktop" edition that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux), but also runs on docker and NAS. Libraries are portable across machines and OSes.

If you're migrating off of Google Photos, I'd try v1.0 (currently in beta): it'll import the JSON sidecars from a Google Takeout which include album and face metadata. Make sure you extract all the archives into a single folder, though: each .zip/.tgz file contains a random subset of albums and sidecars.

I have an old skull canyon nuc with 32GB memory that I run VMWare esx on.

Currently it's running a pfsense firewall, VMs for nextcloud, pihole, gitlab server, portainer docker server, Ubiquiti controller, windows 10 desktop and windows server 2019. Oh, and a minio server for backups via duplicacy. And a wireguard server running on the nextcloud VM.

Sits on a shelf in my basement and just keeps humming along.

Caddy uses Let's Encrypt, which is just one of the CAs it supports. (Caddy supports any ACME-compatible CA.)

I'd recommend:

• https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
• https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/

I personally run a raspberry pi that I use as my internal gateway for these services. I have nginx installed as a reverse proxy and I use letsencrypt.org to get my certs with certbot-auto as the client.

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This solution can be used to front many services as a passthrough which offloads SSL.

Virtualization means using your hardware as a host for virtual computers (allowing you to run multiple operating systems as virtual machines). So, think of it as your computer becomes a big foundation that you put tiny houses on -- and you can configure and customize those houses to your liking. You can turn them on when you want, shut them down, wreck them, rebuild them... all while the foundation (and other virtual machines) are safe and secure.

And I'd agree that once you add some more memory (I'd also toss a =<250, you'll probably have a blast getting into it.

ESXi and Hyper-V are good choices, but I'll throw my vote for Proxmox. It won't cost you a dime, it's a solid hypervisor with a pretty solid community and is based on Debian so if you need to drop down to the command line, you'll have a plethora of resources at your disposal.

Also, take a look into LinuxGSM. If the games you want to serve are on the list, it'll help you keep the resources down vs. running a top heavy Windows server.

Have fun, mate. =)

I would recommend trying the pterodactyl.io panel which runs on GNU/Linux. For beginners I recommend a GNU/Linux distro called Debian. You’ll need the panel itself (hosted on a web server, nginx is recommended) and the pterodactyl wings daemon(a standalone executable written in Go)

Edit: for a second I thought this was on r/admincraft 😂

Wordpress.org is pretty much the self-hosted version of Wordpress

PeerTube is a federated video hoster, pretty much a YouTube alternative where you host the videos yourself.

As /u/snuzet says, this is not for the feint of heart. At bare minimum you would want to firewall your hosting machine off from the rest of your network just in case.

Typically the shorter depth racks are meant for network/telecom and occasionally AV gear.

Wall mounting a rack with any legit server is going to be tough (weight and leverage).

The route I went was I have a similar rack I use for my network gear and then I have a vertical wall mount 4U rack that lets me mount my 3U server flat against the wall.

Here's an example. Relatively inexpensive and gets the job done https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001YHYVEY/

Install Home Assistant in a VM and start down the path of home automation. Get some z-wave lights, switches, and motion sensors and start living the Star Trek life.

https://home-assistant.io/

And since you're running a seedbox, how about Plex, PlexPy, Sonarr, Radarr (or CouchPotato), Mylar, NZB Hydra, and SABnzbd?

Maybe I'm thinking too simple but here is my aproach. I use the Linux subsystem for Windows with a Debian install. You can then use Debians ssh to ssh into your Linux machines.

If you install it on your desktop you can setup something like Guacamole and connect to it to work on from the laptop. If you plan on doing it while you are at home on the same network you can rdp to it. If you want to set it up on a vm on your desktop you can setup Hyper-v and setup gpu pass through so it runs in the background and you can rdp into that.

Humble Bundle allows torrenting of your purchase from them to you.

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Anyway there's plenty of premade VMs for experimenting. One can even give old OS a try where original hardware is unavailable (Amiga, BeOS, OS/2, Nextstep, etc). Never mind the wealth of older software attached to that.

This is a medium/hard task to build from scratch. I'd suggest try finding something that fits before building it.

https://alternativeto.net/software/appointment-booking-calendar/?platform=self-hosted

Also... I made, what seems, the opposite some time ago: https://github.com/impshum/checkin-thing

One of the Jellyfin folks here.

Jellyfin is 100% free and is dedicated to staying that way. We accept donations at https://opencollective.com/jellyfin, but these only go to necessary costs (domain registration, hosting costs, development licenses, etc). It's entirely volunteer run.

Official clients so far:

• Built in web UI
• AndroidTV/FireTV
• Android
• iOS
• Kodi addon
• Roku (on the official store as of yesterday)

In addition, we have several third party clients that provide some different functionality

• Infuse (AppleTV)
• MrMc (AppleTV)
• Mopidy extension (Audio client)
• MPV-Shim (Use Jellyfin as a backend for MPV)
• Gelli (Android based music only client)

There's apps in progress for smart TVs, but they're not polished enough to be submitted to the stores for review yet

Probably a few others that I'm forgetting right now and somebody will remind me of, as well as support for DLNA targets if we don't have a dedicated client yet

Lynis, formerly cisofy, is a good tool to ensure you are applying security best practices. There are lots of plugins, so look for one for each service you run on a server.

https://cisofy.com/lynis/

It won’t make changes itself, but it gives you direction on ways to harden the system.

Ah, this is a great idea -- thank you! I've never used Docker, so please forgive my ignorance. Just to clarify, could I simply create a container for NordVPN/OpenVPN and then a separate container for qbittorrent, tell qbittorrent to use the VPN container's network, and then set up everything else "normally" to run on my network without a VPN?

What a nice compromise between a VM and regularly running applications! I don't see much benefit for using it for all my services, but it does seem ideal for something like this.

I recommend checking out this tutorial, very handy in terms on how to set everything up - Then it's just a matter of setting up NordVPN via OpenVPN, but as far as I know, they have a tutorial for that, moreover, it's pretty easy to follow and should work.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-nginx-as-a-web-server-and-reverse-proxy-for-apache-on-one-ubuntu-16-04-server

You can ignore the Apache part if you already have a web server created

TOR is an internet-anonymizer. It works by bouncing your traffic through a bunch of relays before ultimately coming out an exit node.

It's not for the faint-of-heart and inexperienced though, as some questionable internet traffic sometimes goes through TOR. You shouldnt be able to get in trouble operating a relay or an exit node, but you may get questioned by the FBI/CIA etc.

There's an FAQ on the tor project site: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en

I implore you to build your own server. synology is the apple of the NAS world, crap components and a severe price premium. That $170 NAS might serve 1 computer at 35MB/s at 95% CPU usage. You can buy a brand new dell T20 that will run marathons around any comparably priced synology product for $450, used can be had for -100. A comparably priced synology product is the DS416play, sporting a Intel Celeron N3060 and 1GB of ram (lel that CPU is worth the silicon)

Check out this muo article on the subject http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-reasons-server/

I myself host a Plex server (streaming video and audio), a monitoring server, owncloud service and a VPN. I'm using about 180w for that, so not too bad. Cost effective and I'm in control ;-)

There's Jellyfin (an Emby fork), which you could use with Kodi as the clients on your Pi. It's not as polished as Plex, and overall less fancy/stable (in my experience -- it's hard to compete with a codebase that has dedicated, paid developers working on it), but you gain independence from a hosted service (plex.tv for authentication), and it's fully open source.

Can't really comment on the other options, but in general I'd say Plex is the most polished and stable self-hosted service out there (with the disadvantages I mentioned and the issues you have with PMP), and Jellyfin the most promising open alternative (esp. in combination with Kodi as a client). I'm still using Plex personally, because it's much easier to share my library with others (native apps in TVs, etc), but hope I'll be able to migrate at some stage.

That's not exactly true, as far as ad-blocking goes. Ad-blocking works by using a DNS filter to either drop or redirect website requests to ad-hosting sites.

What you want to do is set your DHCP / network addressing to point to a server address that does this filtering for you. You can look for DNS settings under DHCP settings in your router to find it.

In my configuration at home, I use a Ubiquiti Edgerouter-x as my router (192.168.1.1/24). Then, on my home server I have a virtual machine instance running Ubuntu desktop, which I then added a free service called Pi-hole. (https://pi-hole.net) The instructions are super simple to set up. I have this as a dedicated IP address on the network (192.168.1.12/24) and then updated my network DHCP settings to make this the DNS server address that is distributed to clients when they connect to the network.

The only problem with this is that if I take the physical server down for updates or anything else, the virtual machine also gets shut down and will need to be restarted. Also, if the DNS server is down, most internet traffic will probably stop working on your network until it comes back online.

Sorry, long winded. Let me know if I can help or feel ask more questions if you like.

Happy to jump in here as well.

First, learn about what OS you want to use. I run six game servers and a TS3 server off a single HP DL360 Gen 8 that I got second hand for about $375. It's running headless Ubuntu and all the game servers are virtual machines (LIBVIRT/VIRSH). Virtual machines are a STRONG recommendation because:

1. Different game servers share the same resources and can start to be a pain in the ass for each other (shared dependencies especially.)
2. You will absolutely screw up the first few (dozen) game servers you set up or need to restart several times to get settings right. You don't want to offline all your other servers every time you do this.

Now, most CPUs support virtualization these days so you'll want something with a relatively high core/threat count and a solid amount of RAM to spread around. I'm running 24 threads (dual Xeon CPUs) and 32GB RAM. That's why I went with a old decommissioned enterprise machine. CPUs and RAM are cheap for previous generation systems. But, energy costs go way up.

Second, Linux Game Server Manager is your absolute BEST friend. https://linuxgsm.com/It could not possibly be easier to set up a dedicated game server than using LGSM. Plus, they have a really good support discord.

Also, downstream bandwidth isn't super valuable to you. Your upstream is what's most important.

Feel free to reach out if you need any more guidance. I like setting up my dedicated servers more than I enjoy playing on them so it's fun for me.

in general, I always recommend disabling all outside access and running an openVPN server. That way you first connect via VPN and then connect to any service you want.

Once you know what you are doing, you have to check each service individually to make sure there are no major weaknesses. Make sure the docker containers only have access to files they need. This is hard because for example the transmission docker needs access to all you drives in order to write but who knows how much security they have? Same for sonarr and plex.

My preferred setup is this:

1. get a VPS like digital ocean for $5/mo and install a reverse proxy on it.
2. Lots of good info here. Setus a domain with DNSsec. Point IP of domain to vps
3. vps redirects everything to your local server. So, the vpn.domain.com is the address you use to connect to your home network.
4. setup dynDNS on your router so that the VPS always redirects to your your home address, ie: domain.com->VPS->home.dyndns.com->home IP.

This setup will protect all your services behind a VPN, protects your home IP and you don't need to worry about old/bad services not keeping up with their security.

Openvpn has clients for win, mac, linux, android. All work with certificates if you want extra security.

I also recommend getting a decent router if you want to do that. At the very least, get a $40 linksys and install DD-wrt.

For a dedicated server a graphic card shouldn't matter. Your other specs are fine, obviously depending on how many servers you are going to host in the end. As I never hosted a gaming server before, I can't point to much out for you. I would use pterodactyl for the simplicity and as it splits the servers into several containers.

Is there a question in your post? If you're asking whether you can install FreeNAS on a Mac Pro 4,1 then I can say yes you can. That's what I have running now.

I'm on FreeNAS 9.10.1. I haven't tried any newer versions although I have a spare MP 3,1 that I'm hoping to test on. It can run ESXi 6.5 with no issues so I think it will probably handle FreeNAS fine.

Mine has:

• 1xW3520 @ 2.67GHz
• 32GB RAM
• 4x3TB WD Reds
• 1x120 GB SSD

I left the optical drive in there but I suppose I can take it out and install one more hard drive. I don't think you're going to be able to fit 7 hard drives in there. You're going to want to run the OS off an internal drive (small SSD) instead of trying to get it to run from a thumb drive.

You may have to use rEFInd for a boot manager. I don't remember at the moment what I did.

I might be mistaken, but I think the USB and ethernet share bandwidth on the rpi. An SSH session can sometimes feel laggy regardless though. One thing you can try is Mosh (https://mosh.org/). It makes terminal sessions feel more responsive, especially if you're out and about.

Not quite clear from your question though; is file access itself slow?

Don't rely on your own network to host potential clients. Set them up with a dedicated host.

Learn cluster computing in your own spare time, away from your business. You shouldn't start a business on hardware you are wanting to learn on.

Add to the list of others mentioned:

https://www.linode.com/

https://www.digitalocean.com/

1) With 16 GB of ram, I would definitely install ESXi to give you flexibility. You may have some issues with part comparability but you might be okay. Check their HCL for what you bought. If you haven't bought ti yet, checking first would definitely be advisable. A CPU with hyperthreading would have been good though.

2) Honestly, you are best to just stick with debian/ubuntu. You want to stick with one of the LTS releases. This needs to be stable and relatively unchanging. If you are virtual you can split each function out to its own server; which would allow you to choose something different for each application.

3) I know less about the security. It sounds like you have a pretty good plan though. Keeping updated with patches is another key thing. Something that a LTS version of an OS will help you with. With ESXi and two nics you could create a virtual switch inside and put a firewall appliance (install something like pfsense) and bridge internal and external networks? I do something like this to keep my "lab" isolated from my home network. Remote access is done with an SSH server on a non-standard port.

Actually, after looking your server over again... you don't have ECC memory? Not requirement but usually you'd want that in a server.

Also, look into Webmin.

XCP-NG

This may not be a common recommendation, but I actually really like it...

I'm not using it at home, because I won a VMUG Advantage subscription, and need to keep up to date with vmware tech. I've used XCP-NG in the past, and like it for the most part. It's constantly getting better. It's basically a XenServer fork, with some open-source stuff for a html front-end (Xen Orchestra). You can compile that front-end in a minute or two to get ALL of the features with no nagging ^((To be clear, it's free, I hesitate to call it 'nagging')). They also have a "Thick" client that's just a fork of the old XenServer thick client.

It may not be the answer to all of your problems, but it sure is at LEAST an interesting thing to look into.

Softether. You have client applications (for configuration) on windows and macos. The server itself can be on linux (VM). You have plenty of videos on youtube how to set it up.

https://www.softether.org

I would suggest XigmaNas (formerly NAS4Free). The software runs great, and the support forum is actually very supportive. I am computer savvy but a networking noob, and the people there have helped me out more than once.

See the homepage for more details

For a bare bones web interface to git, I quite like cgit:

https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/

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However, I'm using Gitea myself these days. It hits a good balance between lightness and features, especially when compared to Gitlab and Bitbucket server.

I'm sure the pros around here will have a better answer, but I have a cheap DAS with RAID made by ORICO that I am happy with. You could plug that into one of your Pi 4s and turn it into a NAS on the cheap.

Otherwise the standard answer I see is to buy a Synology NAS.

I use a line tester something like this. It tells you if you put the plug on the ends of the cable correctly. Plug one end into the jack and the other end onto the other side of the cable. See if the numbers line up.

Pull/unplug everything except the most minimum amount of hardware needed to run the machine. That means extra PSUs, secondary CPU, all but 1-2 DIMMs, etc.

The goal is to try and get the system to boot with only what's necessary, then add components back until one causes it to fail to boot.

If it fails to boot with just one proc and minimal RAM, swap them with the other CPU and different DIMMs.

If it's still dead, then off to amazon you go!

Or even better, one of these

https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Passthrough-Installation-Speaker-Coaxial/dp/B07RRNPB94/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&amp;keywords=double+brush+plate&amp;qid=1600273945&amp;s=hi&amp;sr=1-2

brush plate.

If you're using Apache: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-14-04-lts

Nginx (I recommend): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-nginx-virtual-hosts-server-blocks-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts--3

Here's a nice guide to starting to harden your server too. They have some other useful guides too.

Bonus: Linode are also cheap provider of VSIs too.

https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/securing-your-server/

Have a look at pterodactyl to run your servers. Very easy set up for lots of different games. Runs each in its own docker container so keeps isolation between them. You can also set limits per server etc. I'm running it on an ubuntu server VM on proxmox. Had started installing some games individually and then came across this. https://pterodactyl.io/

Haha, now we're getting into the fun details. So the docker management platform I chose to use is called Rancher. Its fairly light weight, has a beautiful UI, has lots of powerful features and runs in its own container.

Rancher has includes a built-in load balancer, but its not quite smart enough yet to support dynamic L7 routing, so I created docker-rancher-events that listens to events via the Rancher API and configures the Load balancer automatically. It does this using tags defined in the service definition (docker-compose.yml file) and some metadata configured during the chef-run (like the base domain: *.depot.local)

So when I spin up a service named "plex", the event hander registers the new service with the load balancer using "plex.depot.local".

All that works great for local requests on the server itself, but the cookbook also configures a DNS server so that any local network computers can request *.depot.local and all traffic will be routed to the server and its load balancer will handle the routing to the correct application.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I'm pretty proud of getting that all working :)

Yes. Download YUMI if you want to create a USB boot disk, then select Clonezilla from the Tools section and it will allow you to download the ISO, then "burn" it to USB.

I use Handbrake for all dvd ripping. I use Makemkv to rip bluray disc's into an mkv then handbrake on those to make them into an m4v file.

Edit: Link for Handbrake.

Instructions on setting up handbrake to decode retail disc's

City: Halifax, NS

ISP: Bell

Service: Residential Dynamic IP

Speed: 500 down , 500 up

Ports Blocked: None

Proof since I'm always asked for it. haha

You want it to be encrypted in transit or encrypted sitting on the drive?

• SyncThing - open source p2p file sync that encrypts data in transit. This may be your best option if I understand you correctly. Basically drop any files you want to share into the folder that you have synced to both or however many machines.
• NextCloud - basically a self-hosted Google Drive. You can run it on a pi if you want, but users can upload files, share files or folders with other users. This can also encrypt files. Bottom line though, instead of sending files back and forth, everything now lives on your own self hosted "cloud"/server.
• Filerun - another option like NextCloud, although not open source
  

Question is really the architecture you want here. You could also go with a Linux storage server with a samba path you and her have access to (you could also theoretically access over SSH/SSHFS with MountainDuck on the mac). Filestash (https://www.filestash.app/) is a nice project as well for web access to a plethora of storage backends.

for steaming it will depend on a couple of things #1 what media you have and if the client can direct play and not transcode it. If your client needs to transcode it then you will need CPU Power. Memory 4GB is enough. If all your media is in a format where your clients can play directly then CPU Power isnt a issue. I have plex and have RP3 and everything is direct play while family use my plex server outside my house, so i tell plex to optimize files for them so it will direct play on there systems. The less transcoding the better. Next i would recommend virtual machines, have one for plex and another for your downloads, have your downloads vm with your vpn connection running. VMWare ESXi is free, and if you want to upgrade your hardware it easier to move vms around. Dont recommend you use external drives, the bottleneck will be the speed of USB. Recommend you keep Google Photos, main reason for this is cause unless you can make sure that all your data is backed up on multiple drives and also one of those backups are outside you house then can you be ok losing those photos. I pay 3NZD a month of 100GB of space. Create a family account, add it onto both your and wife device and backup images onto google photos. There is https://nextcloud.com/ which could do want you want but once again, i would recommend 3 lots of backups and offsite backups.

Gotcha, I personally would finger tighten it and move on with my day. If you really want it to be exact there are in-lb drivers but they’re pricey.

Real Avid Gunsmithing Torque Wrench Kit | All in One Torq Driver Tool with Screwdriver Bit Set & Accurate 1 Inch/Pound Setting for Precision Scope Mounting. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FDYXV41/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_MDNWHRXQ20H2Q9K2PSF3?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

You could get a blank keystone patch panel and a set of keystone couplers. The keystone panel gives you flexibility to use either couplers or regular terminated keystone jacks or even other modules like HDMI or F-style coax connector for cable TV.

Hi. I doubt your standard Vodafone router would let you use it as VPN server. I personally use NordVPN with Netgear router from them (). Maybe you need something like this :)

One thing that jumps out at me is that the case you have chosen can only use mITX motherboards and the motherboard you have chosen is uATX.

The other thing that raises an eyebrow is the following-

> I'll be running Raidz1 most likely due to drive constraints. Currently, most of my media is on a 4 TB drive, and while it all could be reacquired, that's a huge pain in the ass.

RAIDz1, which essentially is a RAID5, is considered by many to be &quot;dead&quot; for multi-terabyte HDDs. I'd strongly suggest that you reconsider the number/capacity of drives you choose. You may or may not be storing precious data but RAIDz2 could potentially save you a "huge pain in the ass" when trying to reacquire your lost data.

Another thing you should know is that the PSU you have chosen (which should be powerful enough) is an "Active PFC" type PSU. The UPS you have chosen is a non-true sine wave type UPS. Active PFC PSU's and UPS that use anything other than a real sine wave can have issues when used together. When there's a power outage and the UPS takes over power delivery, the PSU can interpret the steps in the simulated sine wave as losses of power. This can cause the PSU to shut itself off or draw extra power from the UPS. When the UPS detects this increased power draw, it (the UPS) can also shut itself off. I recommend that you read this .pdf on the matter. It was written by APC but the information it contains applies to all other UPS manufacturers - http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/RMUZ-7DTKRC/RMUZ-7DTKRC_R1_EN.pdf?sdirect=true

Do you have an old PC case with a normal PC power supply? Put your new drives in that and get an LSI SAS "8e" or "16e" card and SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cables. You need a power supply jumper like this.

https://www.amazon.com/SDTC-Tech-Starter-Without-Motherboard/dp/B07X9SVB5K

https://www.amazon.com/COMeap-Switch-Adapter-Braided-21-5-inch/dp/B07LGRFMDP/

Most of the anti-RAID5 movement stems from this article, which basically says that based on manufacturer-provider unrecoverable error rates, you are almost certain to encounter a UER while rebuilding a 12TB array (and the odds aren't great for any multi-TB array). UREs are reported by drives and may cause your RAID controller to cease rebuilding and drop the whole array.

Combine this with correlated failures, lack of parity checking on reads, silent corruption due to non-reported errors, hard drives lying about flushing their caches, memory corruption... and you've arrived at the reason so many people are excited about ZFS / RAIDZ.

The really important thing to keep in mind is that no type of RAID is a replacement for backups.

If I am not mistaken, the CPU you're looking at is this one:

64-bit Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.00E GHz, 2M Cache, 800 MHz FSB [Ark],[PassMark]

You're going to be in a world of pain trying to do anything serious with it. You'll probably be better off with a Raspberry Pi 3.

This seemed to be a good ratio price/power. It's also on the current cheapest end. And consumption was a criteria for me. But really, maybe there are better alternative!

One site I've found very useful is cpubenchmark.net. So for example, here is the page for the Celeron G3920 and the one for my amd. So the Celeron is nearly 2 times more powerful, but the amd needs less watt.

To elaborate a little, I don't want to go over 35W for my CPU. Very honestly, I expect this CPU to be more than enough for what I need. Hell my owncloud is still running on a raspberry pi currently!

I've seen your thread. For your need, if I exclude the minecraft server (I have no idea what it needs) and the Jenkins CI (it really depends on what you build with it), either the AMD or the Intel will be more than enough, I think. If Jenkins is gonna do expensive compilation, then the worst would be that the job will take longer time to complete (providing you set it up correctly so that the rest of your system still has enough resources to function correctly). It's up to you to see if this is acceptable I guess :-)

Concerning the mb, its the cheapest while being of good quality than can host my cpu.

EDIT: for the torrent thing, both would be more than enough.

RE-EDIT: erratum, my 5350 TDP is 25W, not 35W. So 2 times less than your CPU.

Those are fairly old CPUs. I wouldn't be surprised if a single, modern 4-core Xeon could keep up with your current dual 4-core Xeons. And at a TDP of 120W (x2!!), pretty much anything you pick will be less power hungry.

Over the past decade Intel has really concentrated on efficiency over clock speed. So a current Xeon with 4 cores and ~3Ghz will easily outperform the CPUs you have now despite the similar specs. Here's a quick benchmark that I got from Googling, I really have NOT looked at it in depth.

You're going to have a very very difficult time re-encoding video files with any pre-built home NAS, I think. The QNAP 451+ has an Intel Celeron J1900 CPU. Here's a benchmark for it : http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J1900+%40+1.99GHz&amp;id=2131

Here's a site that shows transcoding benchmarks for the QNAP. A ~100MB file took 12 minutes to re-encode. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/QNAP/TS-451/13.html

Even a desktop PC with a relatively powerful CPU takes some time to encode files that large.

You're going to need an exceptionally powerful network connection and a serious server to handle this kind of work.

S'all good! Luckily, the definition of NAS is "Network-Attached Storage", and (just like workstations) this can be as low-tech or high-tech as you want.

• External USB drive connected to my router? Network-Attached Storage.
• Old laptop set up with a share on its primary HDD? Network-Attached Storage.
• Rackmount server with 13 HDDs, parity, and striping? Network-Attached Storage.

In your case, you just need something that you can put on the network with shares. (In Windows, this is as easy as right-clicking on a folder and selecting "Share", then going to another computer on the same network, opening a new Explorer window, and typing \\{first.machine.IP.address}\sharename )

As far as ECC RAM goes, you don't really only need it, but it's definitely useful as long as your processor and motherboard supports it! ECC stands for Error Correcting Code, and ECC RAM contains basic support for fixing glitches caused by electromagnetic interference and cosmic rays. You have to make sure everything supports it, though; otherwise things get hairy.

I second this - I'm using a Pi 1 Model B to host my Pi-hole and it doesn't have any problems running this, and the benefit is huge. See Here for more info - https://pi-hole.net/

Another option (maybe if you aren't familiar with Docker) is using https://linuxgsm.com/lgsm/vhserver/

As for hardware requirements, I've had no cpu trouble (2x i5-4590S cores) you'll mostly just want 4gb of ram.

Agree. On top of that, isn't jellyfin a FOSS version of Emby? Which is a paid product. Both Jellyfin and emby have the same interface and I can't imagine paying for it. I do personally run jellyfin for family videos, and havedonated to them in the past, but that's only because I don't want to install another instance of plex. I guess if you're happy with it, then what the hell, just don't worry about the alternatives.

AsRock is not unique in it's reliability. All the motherboard manufacturers have their lemons, the rate of which will vary over time. AsRocks boards have been increasing in quality, closing the gap. We're talking about a difference of singular percentages in terms of overall failure rate between the companies. I've had bad MSI boards, I've had bad Gigabyte boards, I've had bad Asus boards.

These organizations are dynamic and constantly balancing the necessary economies of being in the consumer space against reliability. You can play the odds or you can design for failure. Backup regardless of what it's running on.

Be objective and rational. And build a Ceph.

:B It's really nice (lets you do declarative config management for everything, even for multiple servers), but the downside is that you have to create new "Nix modules" for everything that isn't packaged.

On the bright side, it's really simple once set up. This is my current LizardFS config:

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:

{ services.lizardfs.enable = true; services.lizardfs.chunkservers.masterHost = "192.168.1.5"; services.lizardfs.chunkservers.servers = [ { name = "localdisk"; port = 9422; storageDirectories = ["/var/lib/lizardfs-data"]; config = '' HDD_LEAVE_SPACE_DEFAULT = 50GiB ''; } ]; networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 9422 ]; }

networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 9422 ]; }

https://cockpit-project.org/

Its basically a little GUI for linux that are CLI systems. I do not use it much but it is a nice snapshot if I do not feel like opening a CMD to check.

EDIT: A cli overview would be something like glances: https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/

Emby:

https://emby.media/

The server is open source and you can access it on practically any device. (Web, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Android, iPhone, etc) Most of the apps are free, but some cost money. A ~$100 "donation" for a license key for the server makes it free to stream on the paid platforms. Otherwise, anything with a web browser can play for free.

In your case, I would get something like Linux Mint XFCE or Peppermint and use resources like alternativeto.net to see what you can easily install and maintain via GUI.

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If you get really stuck, there's no shame in getting a Windows 8.1+ machine online and using stuff like Google Drive/FileZilla Server, OpenVPN, Chrome Remote Desktop, etc. Windows 8 and above can run on much leaner hardware than 7 and the like.

The R510 and R710 are always my go-to recommendation for homeservers right now.

Very cheap to own, and performance has been tops for me and a few other users to run our VM's on.

Our Total power draw seems to be around 200 Watts when under load, so its only costing about 3 bucks a month in electricity too!

OP, I'd Also recommend looking into one of these servers. You don't even need to fully spec it out. With the applications you are looking for you could do a single CPU and a few gigs of RAM.

One thing is that these servers are decently large, so you will need to find a place to set it if you do not own a rack. Mine sits next to my desk though, and has been working fine there.

As far as tools to manage it, SSH will be a great way to manage the thing, and can be setup so you can access it securely from elsewhere.

If you do not have a Static IP (ie: residential internet service connection) you can register for free at https://freedns.afraid.org. They are a great Dynamic DNS service so that you can get a domain name that always points to your server IP, even if the IP changes. I prefer to run with FreeDNS instad of No-IP because they tend to be more vocally supportive of linux and free software, Especially in BSD groups. Just a personal preference really.

If you have more in depth questions, send me a PM or reply here!

Right, you should've specified you needed a router in your original post.

You could use lxc containers or virtual machines on (for example) an ubuntu host https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/getting-started/

You would need to create a container or vm for pfsense , but you should run nextcloud on the host, since you don't have much compute resources.

> I feel like I am using it more than it can really handle

what makes you think this? Check your RAM usage, CPU load, and what your 4 cores are doing. Always measure before making changes. Check out something like Netdata. When you find your server is feeling slow, go to Netdata and see what was going on.

If you're doing multiple software transcodes then that's probably your problem right there. It appears you can hardware transcode with Ryzen APU. See if that's an option. Otherwise, consider whether you can transcode ahead of time instead of on the fly.

> I know most like to use Intel, but I've always liked AMD.

Ryzen is more than fine. It's a great alternative to the used Xeon gear people are buying, and easily runs circles around most of it. Xeon has the benefit of being widely used in the enterprise, which means you get a constant supply of cheap used gear on eBay. Which also means you can get into motherboards with IPMI, or a dozen SATA/SAS ports, or whatever. Ryzen is pretty limited in the respect, outside of Asrock Rack and I think one or two ASUS WS motherboards which are more expensive.

My guess is you'd probably benefit from stepping up to a Ryzen 7. It's a simple upgrade if you find you're running out of cores. But AM4 has a ton of upgrade options. You can switch to a Ryzen 7 2700, or switch to Ryzen 5 3600x. Or go totally insane and get a Ryzen 9. It's a wonderful platform.

KVM is great. If you want web management, Proxmox is king and free for home use; very powerful and you can cluster if you end up with a couple more servers :). My casual observation - Proxmox is overtaking ESX in the homelab type environment. There are other KVM web management projects that might suit your needs although don't appear to be actively maintained (Kimchi and Archipel). Cockpit Project is maintained and offers rudimentary VM management from a web GUI. You can also run virtual machine manager, a GUI application for KVM management. If you go the cluster route, oVirt is a Red Hat project. Lots of options under KVM.

Now I'm guessing you know this, but there is a community fork of XenServer: https://xcp-ng.org/

I'm with /u/clickwir, I wouldn't put my network in a container or VM either (even with a dedicated NIC). Especially if you plan to fiddle around with other containers or VMs on that host.

You should start by looking at pfSense's requirements when deciding where to put it. Keep in mind those are for basic routing. If you plan to add squid and other services to pfsense you'll need more horsepower.

I'm currently in exactly the same situation. Check also out ZeroTier. It's free to use for 100 devices. I'm also unaware how I do this with my internal dns names. I have now a traefik instance running and get valid certificate names for my duckdns domain. But internally I'm not able to use them because I havent solved the DNS issue yet. Maybe you have more experience in this topic?

There's plenty you can do to secure stuff, but you're going to need to do a lot of research. First thing to consider is your router - that sits between your server & the internet. Don't put your server into the DMZ, and don't enable UPNP on the router. Learn how to port forward. Only forward those ports you need. For example, there's no good reason for home use to forward SSH (port 22) out to the internet.

Try and secure everything with SSL - https://letsencrypt.org/ is a good starting point for this.

Always read the documentation with each service. Consider best practices, and discover what ports need to be exposed.

If you are comfortable with SSH, I would stick with that. It's much simpler than setting up a VPN, and more secure (less services exposed to the internet, especially if you keep your SSH server too).

If you have a Linux server and a rooted Android client, you could look into WireGuard. It's much simpler than any existing VPN, and has a much simpler-to-understand security model. It can also deal with mobile clients that change IPs. The one big downside: It's kinda new, so not supported everywhere yet.

Your choices are pretty much Lidarr or Headphones. There are plenty of guides around that should help you get up an running too. Happy hunting.

I assume you are using Windows as your host operating system.

• For backup i would recommend CrashPlan and set it up as a client that can receive backups - quite straightforward when you got it downloaded and installed. This is completely free.

• I don't think you are able to host a minecraft server without problems when the server is doing something else CPU intensive at the same time.

• I guess you're talking about /r/Piracy, therefore i link you there and to https://couchpota.to and https://plex.tv.

I recommend BackupPC. Ignore the horrible name, the software's really solid.

It uses SSH and rsync to poll and start backups, and doesn't require an agent or service be installed. (on *NIX machines, at least. Windows needs cygwin-rsyncd installed)

BackupPC (https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/) is badass, GPL, and free. You should be able to pick folders for backup, but I don't think you can pick individual files. Compresses and deduplicates. Admin or user can restore individual files from backup or restore everything.

>BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, Windows and macOS PCs and laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.

I can highly recommend restic. Single binary, content-addressable storage (=> deduplication & incremental), very fast.

In addition, it can also easily do offsite backup to various object store services such as Google Drive, S3, ... and BackBlaze B2 (which I'm using).

Seems like what you want is PXE boot. Most Linux distros have a similar guide as well.

Alternatively, instead of making the whole thing boot from network, I think simply mounting /home from NFS could be a much simpler solution to implement.

Personally, since I have a desktop and a laptop, I use Syncthing to keep most of my home directory in sync whenever both are on the same network, but keep the ability to work offline and have some machine-specific stuff. I'm planning on involving my NAS and VPS as well somewhat soon.

On the Windows side, I heard ActiveDirectory can do pretty crazy stuff as well.

Yes, Paperless seems to fit the bill for you. The original developer moving on and there being 20 open pull requests makes me worry about it's future though. Openpaper.work might be another option but i haven't really looked at it much.

Those lenovo towers are the perfect machines to kickstart a home server. My first home server was built on a TS140, and its still running (transplanted into a new case) as my NAS ~6 years later.

The CPU will probably be fine for most games, though if you need to upgrade you will find lots of cheap options on ebay. I would definitely see about maxing out the RAM though. 32gb at the absolute minimum. 64 if possible with that motherboard.

The only little niggle is if you want to re-case them at some point you'll need to replace the PSU because they use a non standard size, and also buy a PSU cable adapter because they also use proprietary cables. (Dell does this also. Not sure about HP). No big deal though bc the adapter is like $15.

I went with one of these Beelink GK55 units because it was 10W power draw AND Win10 Pro. Not super capable, but still runs RDP like a top. 2 ethernet ports means you can airgap. I use mine as a very capable 10w firewall and NAS

That NAS is limited to 6Gbps SATA even for SSDs, so you'll need two of them in RAID 0 or 1 to saturate a 10GbE connection.

A TS-473A is not rackmount but gives your four HDD bays and two NVMe slots, although the NVMe slots are not much faster than SATA and not actually capable of saturating a 10GbE connection alone. You can get faster caching that will easily saturate your 10GbE connection with a cheap add-in card. Not sure how much the 473A sells for in the UK though. You'd also need a separate 10GbE NIC.

There's also the TS-932PX, which is all SATA but offers a lot of bays and is only 515 quid. You could do two SSDs for your cache. https://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-TS-932PX-4G-Bay-Desktop-Enclosure/dp/B08FTMWVLQ/

I have a 6-disk RAID 6 setup with EXOS drives on a TS-673A and get speeds of 800-900 MB/s without caching.

There's a couple of Pi cases that use the entire case as a heatsink, might be something to try out. I was getting ~61°C peak temps at a 23°C ambient indoor temperature, not sure how that will translate to your hot tropical location.

I also have one of my drives in an aluminum case (it was a generic external case), right now the drive reads 25 C internal at idle at 22°C ambient

Flirc is the most well known aluminum RPi case but there are plenty of others, https://www.amazon.com/Flirc-Raspberry-Pi-Case-Silver/dp/B07WG4DW52/

Not sure where to find more aluminum drive cases though, I got mine at Microcenter last year but I don't know if that's an option for you.

Not sure about the server racks...

As far as disk, the basic info I can quickly find is

> Maximum Storage Capacity (with MSA50, SAS HDD)

> Internal - 4.0TB (8 x 500GB SATA SFF)

> External - 5.0TB (20 x 250GB SATA SFF)

> Total 9.0TB

Or

> Maximum Storage Capacity (with MSA50, SATA HDD)

> Internal - 960GB (8 x 120GB SATA SFF)

> External - 2.40TB (20 x 120GB SATA SFF)

> Total - 3.360TB

Source

So depending on your raid settings or what you want; you can either max out for disk space, redundancy, or speed. (note the SAS vs the SATA HDD).

You say you have 3x 146gb sas, I can find this drive for $54.

If you fill up the rest of the internal slots with these, that would only give you a total of 1168 GB and cost $270. If you can get an USB 3.0 or better PCIE that is compatible, I would say that is better for just disk space alone. Maybe not speed. But that is going to be determined on what you need...

You could also find 500 gb SAS hhd, but I am sure that will be more expensive that what I calculated above. The big question is if you can use a PCIE to external drive idea and even then how many at once.

FYI take this with a grain of salt, I am not the expert, just my quick research. Maybe someone else can chime in and correct if i am wrong. But if it were me, I would explore your PCIE idea more as that seems to be more suited to home server with giving more to disk space over speed.

I hope this helps!

I'm running unRAID with essentially your exact setup. I have 6 SSDs for cache and 14 14TB Seagate drives and have no issues with a Corsair RM750. I use these SATA splitters on the stock cables from the Corsair to power all the drives. The server also has a 3060 with two PCIe connections on it so 750w should be more than sufficient if you don't have a GPU or something else chewing up a lot of power.

I made a NordVPN LXC in proxmox. Did pretty much this, with some minor changes:

The reason it's working great for me is because I can use that as my gateway IP on whatever and traffic goes through NordVPN and there is no internet connectivity until that connection is started.

I'm using this one and it works great. You'll want a USB 2.0 drive since they don't get as hot and thus tend to be more reliable and live longer. The speed doesn't matter for Unraid. You don't need 32 GB though so if you can find a smaller one for cheaper, go for it.

Does it have to be ExpressVPN? I've recently come across Tailscale, and think it's mint. It's just Wireguard with an easy cloud-based admin overlay. Can use Google SSO single user for free. Apps for iOS, Androd, MacOS, Windows, Linux.

You could just run a lightweight Linux VM as the 'exit node' and expose your LAN subnet(s).

Advertise 0.0.0.0/0 as well to proxy your internet via your home network, from a remote device.

>APC 1500 pro

About $200 and $200. Catch both on sale.

I used this for my most recent case. Works like a charm.

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