Linux Questions

I am currently looking to set up a home server. My use case is for storing media, specifically videos (for watching) and game Roms (for playing older games on emulator).

Ok, a lot of open questions still:

• Are you looking for hardware recommendations, or software, or both?
• What is your budget range? Tens, hundreds, thousands of dollars?
• Do you want a straightforward solution that will just do what you want right now, or do you want a long-term platform that can grow and adapt with you?
• How much space do you have - does the server need to be compact?
• Will it be in your bedroom - does it need to be quiet?
• Are you just looking to store the files, or also stream them from the server to endpoints?

If all you need is a place off of your computer to act as a file server, you can get there very easily by plugging a USB drive into a capable consumer-grade router and configuring it to provide NAS service. This cheapass WAVLINK can do that.

For those who have home servers set up with similar purposes, how did you arrive at your current set-up?

It started with networking. When you start trying to expand your home computing capabilities, at some point you will find that a basic consumer wifi router is too limiting. When that happens, I recommend looking at Ubiquiti Edge networking devices.

What considerations should i take before, during, and after set-up?

If you're ready to build a proper server, then first start with a change of perspective. Stop thinking of your personal computer as your main computer, and start thinking of it as a peripheral end-user device on your home network. Treat its local data storage as unreliable, temporary, disposable. Its computing power is important for usability, but its storage drives are expected to fail.

The server is your data's true home now. It's not just a place that you save files, it's a data tank. Anything important on your end-user systems should be automatically synced to it. The server should be up all the time, reliable, stable, and built for redundancy. The drives in the server are consumables. Every drive must have at least one backup. The power supply should have a backup too.

To accomplish this you get used enterprise hardware, something like this Dell PowerEdge T410. This has 6 3.5" HDD bays on a backplane with a hardware RAID controller. It has two CPU sockets, so you can add a second processor when your workload increases or if you get into running VMs. It has lots of space to expand the RAM as needed (up to 128GB). It has redundant PSUs. It has a dual NIC (trust me this will be useful later).

Install either TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox VE - either is a good base for home server applications, either can be used for NAS and VM host purposes. Some people like Proxmox as the primary OS with TrueNAS as a hosted VM to manage the data storage.

This platform will be long-term stable, and expandable. There are a lot more considerations, but you won't really know what you want or need until you start building something. It's best to buy something that can grow with you.

Also consider getting a basic UPS - this particular one can be connected to TrueNAS so that if the UPS detects a power outage, it will tell the server to gracefully shutdown.

Backups, and backups for the backups. Redundancy is reliability. Build for reliability before you think you need it.

Resources for learning & support:

• Professor Messer's Network+ training (start with the OSI model)
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