First Home Server Setup Has No Clear Starting Point
Individuals are eager to self-host various services (media, storage, utilities) but lack the technical expertise and experience to do so reliably. They're exploring platforms like Proxmox and Docker, seeking guidance on setup, maintenance, and security, often starting with limited hardware resources.
SOURCES (60)
“oh no. although the first thing I install in VM is the cockpit, but as a hypervisor web interface, I was afraid to ruin it”
“Hello All! I'm finally getting back to this, many more months later than I planned. Had to do stuff for the house and hardware problems with the TrueNAS box that was supposed to be temporary. I also could not for the life of me find a proper cpu platform to utilize this 128GB of ECC DDR4 I had from a few years ago before I decided the two R730 SFF chassis I have laying around just would not do what I wanted. This is a sort of continuation of my last post. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/”
“I recently built a home server using an HP ProDesk 400 G5 (exact specs below). I had previously run the mini PC as a home server using Debian 12 and CasaOS, but rather sporadically with a small Pi-hole container and occasionally Crafty for the classic 2-week Minecraft phase. Recently, however, I got hooked and wanted to set up a proper home server with Proxmox. Everything went smoothly with a home server VM, a game server VM, and an LXC Pi-hole. On the home server VM, I installed 2FAuth, netboot”
“I'm keeping an eye on this to see how it progresses. Great idea and seems useful! Good luck!”
“If you have Proxmox VE, and you have configured a ZFS pool on top of some redundancy scheme (RAID-1 at least), and you have a Debian LXC where Samba (and/or NFS) is installed and configured, you can create one or more ZFS datasets for your data and pass them to the LXC. It may be too minimal, but it's more than enough to provide good CIFS/NFS shares, and you have the advantage you can take snapshots of your datasets in a snap (directly in Proxmox VE), which you can then send to a backup site”
“Currently, I have a single Ryzen-based Mini PC with 32 GB of RAM. I’m looking to host my Jellyfin media and store my files/photos locally, so I can eventually ditch Google Drive. My initial thought was to buy a NAS, but my Mini PC still has plenty of compute power available. So I was wondering if it would make more sense to get a DAS or a multi-HDD enclosure (e.g. 4 × 4 TB) and manage the storage through a Proxmox VM using USB 3. Would RAID be a viable option in this setup? I’ve also come across”
“https://preview.redd.it/5oy9optvp9nh1.jpeg?width=5056&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=76127804070e177704d348f62932952dc79d1899 This was my first NAS, a raspberry pi 4b running PiOS(I think it’s called), a 64gb sd card, and as storage an 1tb hdd, softwarewise, syncthings, photprism and other stuff that I don’t recall right now. It was a junky setup, but it worked, for cooling it had a motherboard heat sink which was just laying on some thermal paste, with a laptop fan hooked to the 5v rail bl”
“Early 2000s when I heard of OpenWRT then found out my Asus router supported it AND had a USB port. Slapped an external HDD on it and ran a FTP server for myself and friends.”
“If you've got an old phone lying around, yo can host anything on it till resources permit https://github.com/imxade/nixship-android”
“A few years ago, we had a external hard drive plugged into a Android TV box, watching through Kodi, and we were starting to run out of space. We couldn't get more drives in, so we used my husband's old laptop and ran Jellyfin from there. And then we upgraded to internal HDDs on a proper Xeon computer (we got lucky, we bought the drives about a month before storage prices went off to insane land). I've been sneaking in more and more docker containers on it ever since - got Immich afte”
“6 years ago, 2:30 am on a pandemic Wednesday, looking for a way to send the Roomba using a Hue remote. Found out about homeassistant. Then homebridge. Thrifted an ancient mac mini for 100€, so I can close my laptop. Oh maybe I can run plex on it! Ad blocker? Why not? And then I found the community. 6 years later, same machine now hosting a ton of useful, fun or experimental tools on obsessively organised docker containers running on Ubuntu Server thrifted drives connected running through a also”
“I think all prox needs now is something like DRS and vMotion and it will be ready for prime-time”
My old Proliant dl380 gen9 went out with a fight.. i decided to go with a more "pc like" server that is less noisy. i'm trying to bring my Smart Array P840…
“You may use Restic it's simple, fast, and open source. Also if you need dashboard for it you may make own custom one for it easily. If you want ready-made dashboard then ping me. https://github.com/restic/restic”
“Awesome! I will look into Authentik. Prometheus+Grafana+Loki would be too much for me. I would use Beszel and Uptime. Appreciate it, bro.”
“Thanks soo much. I really appreciate it. I will explore these. Thanks again. And yea I won't destroy my life doing this sh!t. I promise.”
“Surprisingly modest actually 😄 The main host is an HP Elite Mini 600 G9 with an i5-12500T running Proxmox. Most of the services run as VMs/LXCs on that box, with a 10TB ZFS media/storage pool and separate backup drives. Networking is UniFi-based with a UDR7 and a couple of switches/APs. It’s definitely more “small homelab that got slightly out of hand” than a datacenter 😂”
“As i mention i wanna learn Kubernetes by hosting real apps with their configuration needs. Also, there might be useful apps that can ease my life that I don't know about.”
“The question is in the title, not really more submitted by /u/Pseudo_Studios [link] [comments]”
“XCP-NG has some hold, XEN however has it's quirks. If you want the long route, look at FreeBSD + bhyve + vm-bhyve/sylve.”
“Use sysprep a lot to build images. Take a snapshot, ideally with the VM powered off. Disjoin the VM from AD. Great way to FUBAR the OS if you don't do this. Power on, run the commands as listed, but swap out /shutdown for /reboot. Use /shutdown to then capture an image, not for this. Do watch for any agent like software that has its own version of a SID. Antivirus is the most common example.”
“I have a Universal Devices EISYHome (~ISY 994i) using ZWave, a few Insteon, and Hue devices as well a few WiFi devices and connections. I wanted something that could be setup and run on its own without the need to live on a host machine... i.e. I wanted it to be mostly invisible and low maintenance. The system has done that and been very reliable with 65+ devices being controlled/monitored running 115+ automations. Been very happy with it. It's integrated with Alexa and a couple of other clo”
“Hey guys, I need suggestions on what cool things I can host in my potato mini pc (Dell Optiplex 3020m, 4th-gen Core i3, 16 GB RAM) I will be hosting stuff in Kubernetes because I wanna learn it. I know it's overkill for a homelab. I have spun up a Jellyfin Media server already with Cockpit and Uptime Kuma. TIA submitted by /u/homelabber3000 [link] [comments]”
“I inherited server management duties from a coworker who left, and honestly it was held together with cron jobs and good intentions, now I'm trynna get backups, firewall rules, and basic user hygiene acc consistent across our boxes instead of tribal data. What's on your baseline checklist? submitted by /u/trueharshit [link] [comments]”
“How did you spin up the self-hosted instance?Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#".It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system.https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation”
“Hi so been wanting to make a self hosted media server for my family and ive been looking online and what I see used the most is jellyfin? Is that the most easy to set up? Cause I do like it a lot cause its opensource and free but it still feels like im relying on another corporation. But if this is an easier and cheaper way I will just start out with this. I also would love to know where you guys are getting your movies and series from? My collection of actual physical media with dvds is not tha”
“There are a few such as accessing the hardware decoder of the NAS vendor (but that can be enabled via docker too, just more work), limiting space/memory usage, ... I personally like having a single binary, but that's because I handle permissions and linux namespaces myself. Mostly a matter of taste (I would always provide both Docker+1 other alternative anyway)”
Interesting. Thought DV support was limited to amlogic boxes.
“Hi guys, i'm a newbee in selfhost and one of my colleages hands me old server from corp guys. what i should try first and any recommends at it? at the moment i already install a proxmox and server specs is: https://preview.redd.it/x4ql12p91qmh1.png?width=802&format=png&auto=webp&s=8d4653e3cfab757e173dd119a6dc391bdfe9c442 i wondering if torrents autodownload and photo/notes sync fits in it. submitted by /u/Square-Excuse-6939 [link] [comments]”
“Hi, Can this run on a laptop to gain experience or any other option's? Can we convert Windows 2003 or XP to run on a Containers? How MS Sql run on this? submitted by /u/EducationAlert5209 [link] [comments]”
“I am looking hardware to host my first selfhosted system. My use planning is to host data like a NAS, my own password vault, an adblock like pi hole, vpn, and maybe explore with some project to host some automate, and data monitoring apps. In a medium future I want acquire a better independient device to set up a self hosted IA server with some harness, but I said I want to have them sepparated. My maths to hardware request are enough with 2tb of storage, 16gb RAM, and a N150 cpu. I saw in this”
“I would say learn containers as a starting point. Paradoxically that will save you a lot of linux pain with repos and dependencies etc. For real if you asked me how to get up and running and have a machine thats easy to manage, I would put this at the top of the list. rustdesk or similar so you can run it remotely (dont have to physically go to the machine to work on it) gsmartcontrol and gparted htop or similar and honestly, some kind of CLI-AI. Its super cool if you want to do forum posting an”
“No, not VMware specifically. We are ditching it, so is everyone else. You want a good skill? Install VMware, setups some VM’s and then convert it to proxmox or hyperv.”
“Azulle Acess Plus on a remote server running Klipper. 👍 submitted by /u/Ok_Establishment2857 [link] [comments]”
“For some general help you might want r/linuxhelp . The fastest way to get going with selfhosted stuff is docker (or podman which for intents and purposes should be near 100% compatible alternative), so setting that up is probably your next step. There will be tons of guides for it, Google away.”
“A NAS would typically run something like NFS so other devices can share its storage. It typically wouldn't need alot of horsepower (no high-end cpu or gpu necessary), but would have a large spinning hard drive physically attached (no SSD necessary) to store files from other computers. You would then install and configure NFS on Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmDIfJtCKCk That would share it as a target that other devices can mount as a volume and save files to.”
“Built a PC with spare parts from updating my gaming rig. I am looking to build a self hosting NAS/cloud storage. I put Ubuntu on it and am following guides to set it up properly with the right programs. I am more or less putzing around just to learn and get away from windows, google and the such. I know enough to set things up but not how to be sure things are secure and safe. If ya'll have any suggestions as to what programs work best for certain tasks or video guides that explain things we”
“since you mentioned prices you pay now, I have to tell you that you definitely won't save money yearly by selfhosting 8000 songs. with electricity for (in my case) minipc and HDD is gonna equal to what you pay for Spotify if not more. however I did selfhost my music for one reason. lyrics 🤣 this might sound stupid but a lot of underground-ish (some are at 1M monthly listeners so not really) just don't put time synced lyrics on Musixmatch. So I basically make my own time synced lyrics wh”
“It’ll give you the container setup (compose or whatever), the config based upon your homelab stack, etc.”
“I myself host a basic ubuntu based setup running on a very old piece of hardware (core2duo) as a homelab for storage, streaming mostly. And the story starts from here only. My external and internal drive was a mess. I couldn't find anything, and whenever I tried cleaning it up, disk tools gave me a colored map of the mess. Useful, sure. But a certain giant blob of rectangle doesn't tell me what it actually is, or whether deleting it is going to ruin my day. That idea and some extra high”
“Hi, I'm new to self-hosting and I want to expose a service for a static website from my laptop, which is running Proxmox. The thing is that I want to do it securely, and I've seen multiple posts debating the use of VLANs isolated from the local network, but my router doesn't support it. So, I've thought about getting a cheap VPS and reverse proxying from the VPS (using Nginx). Then, I would connect the VM inside Proxmox running the service to the VPS with WireGuard. Could I remov”
“Please educate me. I have multiple optiplex machines of varying capabilities and a silverstone PC with 8 drives for my main NAS. Every PC has Proxmox running. I have recently detached them from a cluster and use datacenter manager instead. How would I use this for kubernetes instead? Install ubuntu server as the base OS instead of Proxmox? I have been wanting to try K8s properly for a while now, I just don't really know how it would fit in with my distributed homelab.”
“Proxmox and community scripts? Don’t think it can get much easier than copy pasting a one-liner lol”
no AI use. I am asking a general question from community.
“you’re not tripping, you’re just trying to turn a homelab into an appliance, so keep Proxmox, run one Debian VM with Docker Compose for the apps, and make backups of the configs before the next”
“I asked before what i should try and what is good. Now i played a little bit around and have now this: true nas installed on a ssd and then immich on 4tb hdd that is mirrod on antother 4tb and the postgres from immich is on a sata ssd, also i have an external drive were i make backups about every month. So my question is, is there anything i could change or improve? submitted by /u/Tybiest [link] [comments]”
“hi all, I already have RomM for my retro games but how easy and useful it has been has made me start looking for similar solution for my regular PC games. some way to store and then serve installs to remote computers from my server, ideally also holding retro games (though I’m fine keeping RomM). it would be ideal if there was a big picture mode so I could launch it directly to UI on my tv console minipc. anyone know the options? edit: to clarify, I already have Steam set up in big picture to pl”
“I used to run NixOS on VMs and LXCs on top of Proxmox and a TrueNAS on the side for storage. I recently moved everything to bare metal NixOS, even the NAS (and a small backup NAS box) and it works like a charm. It's definitely a learning curve and a different approach but it can be done and has a lot of benefits.”
“Got a desktop and notebook running NixOS. Now I want to get a beefy NAS and run immich, jellyfin, home assistant, some file shares, vaultwarden and papra on it. My plan is to run NixOS on it because i know it and can restore a PC in a few minutes. The named services do exist on NixOS and that’s how I plan to use them. No docker, no Proxmox. Anyone tried it? Anything I need to know? Objections? submitted by /u/phischer_h [link] [comments]”
“Been a selfhoster for a while. I recently decided to get a dedicated box that I can expose to the internet. Completely delinked with my lab. I decided to host a simple news service like miniflux on there. The goal was to have my RSS feeds and news on the go at all time without needing to have tailscale or a VPN of sorts. I did it. Have a hardened server, SSL etc all working. But I was hoping I can read my news at work as well. And oh boy was i wrong. My company has zscaler and the domain I use i”
“I am posing this question out of a need for helping older non technical people in their houses. I get asked if I could set up a HA system / instance in their house like mine. This question always daunts me be because I…”
“I'm not long in. I started last year with a zimablade, got a r640 fro $450 off ebay. hell I had a lot on zima blade. Dedicated as in those servers, I'm not running nextcloud as docker, it's it's on vm on Ubuntu snap”