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Home made server

Donal

Philosopher
Donal
Joined
Sep 8, 2006
Messages
8,911
I want to add a server to my home network. I want to to work as a NAS, Plex server, and host Home Assistant. I may also use it for VMs but that is a future discussion. It doesn't have to be super powerful or have a ton of storage yet. I'd like expandable, but I may just focus on affordable for now. I'd like simple to use and maintain.

Would I be better off with just buying something ready like a Synology box, buying an old desktop and replacing the OS with something like Ubuntu Server or Unraid, or building something from scratch and installing Unbuntu/Unraid/etc ?
I have built my own PCs before, including an Ubuntu desktop, so that doesn't really scare me. But, it has to work.
 
It really depends. It’s not do much server vs desktop, or even the OS. The primary difference in purpose-built server hardware is often in redundancy and reliability. Most will come with fault-tolerant hard drive arrangements, multiple power supplies, management ports or software that can allow active monitoring or OS-independent configuration, and similar.

I think the question you should be asking is his critical will thus served be? If it’s not a big deal if it crashes, then just get a cheap desktop and go. However, if you’re going to store the legal and financial documents for your extended clan/company on it, then you might want something more :)

This is basic risk analysis: how bad would it be if something broke down, his much are you willing to pay prevent that, and if it does fail how long can I live without it before repair?

You also get into backup strategies and such here, but backups can be find independent of reliability.


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Honestly, it will be more of a hobby thing. I don't run a business from my home and if I did, I'd invest in dedicated gear. I will probably use it for my blog and YouTube channel, but that is not really a huge deal at the moment.

I do plan on using a backup service.
 
Just to throw in my 2 cents. I agree with hellbound as far as the computer goes because it doesn't really sound like you need to do anything particularly complicated.

As he mentioned, the more you spend the more redundancy you get. Things like Synology NAS's come with multiple hard drives that you can build a RAID on and have that level of redundancy. You can set it to send you emails if something goes wrong and you have plenty of room for expansion.

If you had the room, and wanted another option to a computer, a Dell R810 isn't a bad way to go either. They reliable, are very upgradeable, and you can get them fairly cheap. There's one on ebay for $450 (including shipping) that all you need to do is add an OS to, though I'm a big sucker for ESXi (it's free and a baremetal OS). You just spin up whatever server you want and manage it from the host UI. Now-a-days technology is so cheap that you can do almost anything. Even by the time you're done building a new computer that would be worth running a hosted OS you'd be $400 deep I'd think.
 
How much noise does the R810 make and how much juice does it need? I like the idea of something rack mountable since I also want to run Ethernet through my house.
 
Donal said:
How much noise does the R810 make and how much juice does it need? I like the idea of something rack mountable since I also want to run Ethernet through my house.
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The one I linked to is heavy on the power, as I think it said it runs 2-1100w power supplies. I only have 800s in mine, but server power supplies don't run unless they're needed. If you only wanted to run 1 it does give you an error light if you pull the other power supply but you can just ignore it.

As far as noise, it's not bad unless you're restarting it. Then it sounds like it's about to take off. Mine doesn't make any more noise, on average, than a house fan. I have ESXi version 6.7U3 on it and I run a total of 5 VM's on it. (2 servers (a windows 2012 and a 2019), a windows 10 PC, a pihole, and my pfsense) and it doesn't even put a dent in the resources the server has in total. On a host like that you could run 10 VM's without any problem whatsoever and it would be absolutely baller as a smart home hub.

ETA: Here's a link to my Google Drive with a pic of the setup I have at my house. I'm putting in a 48 port switch as soon as the cage nuts come in today. I didn't want to buy the rails so the server just sits inside the bottom. I can't slide it out anyway even if I had them, and the basement is concrete so I didn't want to drill into it.

ETA ETA: Ignore the MyCloud LoL. I was using it for a data transfer to get rid of an old Buffalo NAS and it was the only shell I had!
 
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On rack mounting, you can buy a rack-mount case for anything...if you’re okay with moving parts around. I moved an old desktop into a rack mount case at home (ATX form). Just make sure of the form factor for the mother board and the height (if there are expansion cards the case needs to be tall/wide enough for them).

Heck, my first job we rack-mounted Mac G5’s :)

Www.iaenclosures.com (formerly rackmount.com) is where I bought the ones I used, but you can find them at other places.

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Well, a while ago I bought a QNAP TS-853A (8 bay) and promptly filled all 8 bays because that is my thing. I still have 38 TBs of free space, even after backing up both PCs and phones. And my GDrive, OneDrive and GMail. Looking back now, maybe I could have gone with a 4 bay system, but where is the fun in that.

I looked and it does support Home Assistant. Wouldn't call it affordable, but it was either a prebuilt solution or me building it. I just didn't feel like learning how to install a server software. It's probably not hard, but I was not feeling it. Plus it had prebuilt apps that let me back up my phone. I'm sure the homebrew folks have a solution for that as well, but sometimes it's nice to have it available on the app store and be done with it.
 
It also depends on how much system maintenance time you're willing to invest and your goals. The dedicated boxes - QNap, Synology - tend to be relatively low maintenance and easy to add features (our Synology, for example, hosts the family photo album, provides VPN access, runs a Tiny Tiny RSS server in a Docker image, and runs surveillance - although only two cameras). We have a two-bay device which is not running RAID.

A home-brew is a bit more work but can be a learning experience as well as a hobby.
 
In that case, you’d likely be fine just putting a server OS on a desktop system :). No need for anything fancy.
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No need to bother with a server OS even, unless it's for the learning experience.
 
I also have a QNAP NAS (a tiny little thing, smaller than a toaster) and it does a lot of 'serving'.

They come out of the box with software to manage security systems, media servers etc.

It's practically silent, very neat, and wakes up on LAN calls, so it doesn't just sit there chewing up power.

(Note: the version I bought didn't come with drives installed, but did include a long list of compatible hardware.)
 
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