Hi there! This is a video that I made that I’m hoping can act as a beginner friendly entry level point to the world of self hosting and running a homelab. Just thought I’d share in case anyone is interested, and I hope it can be a resource to share with noobies. I don’t claim to be an expert at all so I’d also love some feedback. Thanks!
I just have my old PC’s running Linux connected directly to the tv or projector.
I use a super basic webdav server or free arr matey streaming sites.
I sometimes sftp into devices.
That’s my setup.
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I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.
Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.
I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.
Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.
Currently about 70TB capacity.
My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.
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My entire life is Linux and self hosted, aside from Email. I may get to that one day too. Love my Plex server, even with the more recent baloney the company’s apparently been up to.
I should be using Jellyfin but once I get home from work I don’t want to tinker any more, I just wanna play a game or dick around.
Agree with the message in the video, these companies should be told to pound sand the minute they do a single anti-consumer thing.
I have my own server and it’s great, but the real product these streaming services sell isn’t access to content—it’s discoverability and recommendations. We need a better solution for that!
Yeah I use jellyseerr with jellyfin and they work great together
I need to learn more about the *arr stack.
I want a future where communities self host their media and circumvent media companies like Netflix and Disney. Local film clubs, TV clubs, hobbyists, etc. can come together and host as a collective bringing down costs and making this more accessible.
Like ham radio ppl
We can do this, once we transition to socialism, and cut out the corporations. Run nodes on the community-owned fiber for free access to the citizens.
What media do you think you’ll be getting under socialism with no corporations? Lol
I don’t even consider the Soviet Union to be very successful socialism, but here you go.
Here’s a 1970s sci-fi noir movie from Soviet-occupied Estonia that I would recommend. It’s honestly a pretty cool movie, even if janky. But it’s not like 1970s western movies feel much less janky nowadays.
And inb4 “you only get the state approved media” - well right now you only get the capitalists approved media (so same-same) and also in a functioning socialist society, for bigger art projects like film and TV show, projects get funding from government without being government-initiated. I mean it was the same in the soviet union, but since it was a dictatorship, the government was picky in what was approved.
In fact, best thing about government funding is that there’s a lot less pressure to be commercially successful than with corporate funding. Commercial flops can still have cultural value and the fun thing is, a socialist government as the source of your funding can see that as a value unto itself, whereas a corporation has no value for culture other than the money it can bring in.
You must be joking. The people who make any money producing online content are a very, very small minority.
And if people didn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to barely make enough to survive, we’d get a lot more creative content. All that would change is there wouldn’t be some talentless suit exploiting it.
You wouldn’t be getting any tv shows or movies. You’d be getting YouTube style stuff……like you do now.
People put shows and movies on YouTube already. You’re just not getting corporate backed media on there.
I’m not sure what role you believe capitalists have in creating media, but it’s clearly disproportionate.
Who’s making the media?
Okay, so you don’t even need a socialist system for this, just a moderately sane government. Even here in Estonia, the government hands out funding for cultural projects. Now this is still a capitalist society, so you likely can’t get full funding for a big project.
In an actual socialist economy, the government will give you full funding for projects. The actors and everyone else working on a movie or TV show have guaranteed income that’s enough to live their lives, guaranteed living accommodations, etc, so they’re more likely to do it as a passion project, but they could still be paid as extra motivation. Funding is still required for equipment, etc. Unless you go fully money free as a society, in which case you ask the government to assign equipment to you.
The same people who already make the media. Just cut out the corporate middle-men & shareholders, who soak up all the profit and contribute nothing to the content.
I just imagine a federated, YouTube-like platform. Except better in literally every single way. You are a member of your local community instance, and thereby connected with every other federated instance throughout the world.
As an in-between measure, may I suggest Nebula? Creators get 50% of the earnings, it’s assigned by view time. Price is significantly cheaper than Netflix or YouTube Premium. Yes, most of the creators are on YouTube too, but a lot of them do bonus content on Nebula + there’s no ads + they get more money. If you use an ad blocker on YouTube, the creator gets nothing.
You can get a discount for your first year by using your favourite small-medium size creator’s marketing link (which gives them a bit of money). If you don’t have one, may I suggest Patrick H Willems? He has cool video essays on cinema. You could of course use a bigger creator’s link too, but I figure I’d rather pump some smaller creator’s numbers.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a reality outside our own.
imagine it for us then. what would this model look like and be sustainable?
Sure.
The premise is to bring down costs, and not be free. This is a reality where we can share media we buy, because we own them again.
So you can kind of imagine the world 20-30 years back with VHS and DVDs. Just in the digital world.
Fewer people would buy the content, and less shareholders will be rich. Actors will also not go for multi million dollar salaries. But actors would still exist.
You can argue that this will bring down the number of movies, but most likely there will just be alot of small studios making movies instead of Netflix and Disney controlling the market from start to end.
There will be a much larger varaity in movies, and not that many reboots of past succes from the VHS/DVD age.
A tax on corporate use of AI to fund an artist stipend, to provide a living wage for artists.
There are a lot of independent creators out there too.
Pffft, I don’t trust meself with me own dater. Gon’ lose it all in a jiffy, fr fr
Pretty understandable fear tbh I’m not quite sure I trust myself with mine yet
but why tho?
If everyone had a friend that had a server we coulddp some fun stuff with federation and decentralization. Decentralized federated social networks without spam and without much need for moderation. Backup (I’ve always wanted to offer friends a family a backup service. I’d like to have a friend with a server so that I can backup my backups on their sever and in exchange they can do the same on mine). Almost free hosting (if I have my own home server I could provide friends with the option to host their static site for free which could be acceded by any server on the federated network
that makes sense
Started my own home server about a year or so ago. Currently hosting Immich for me and my gf. Jellyfin for archiving movies shows and downloaded YT videos. Forgejo for local git where I backup my work. Homeassistant to manage lights in the appartment and some other small stuff. Linkwarden to archive important websites and links I might need in the future (docs for work, how-tos for the server itself so I dont loose all that setup kbowledge). Syncthing to sync files between multiple devices - which is awesome, easy to setup and pair folders. Seafile to share files.
It has been great, it draws around 20-30W idle.
I am currently in search for Obsidian and Bitwarden self hosted alternative that can be run in docker container - if anyone has some ideas I am all ears.
I often see LogSeq, and to a lesser extent Silver Bullet, mentioned as self-hostable alternatives to Obsidian that people actually appreciate using.
Obsidian and Bitwarden self hosted alternative that can be run in docker container.
Well not 100% sure about Docker but Tiddlywiki is pretty easily hosted! It’s got some quirks, but in the end it’s just an HTML file (or slightly more complex if hosted as a website), so it should stay relevant for a long time. I enioy making notebooks with it for various things!
Nextcloud has a pretty decent passwords manager and I think firefox plugins for it. I personally use SyncThing to sync KeePass databases and use the nextcloud passwords app for low-risk things we share, like streaming service passwords. :)
You can selfhist bitwarden. Or use vaultwarden.
I’m syncing the files from Obsidian using Syncthing as well, works fine.
That’s the primary draw for plain text files for me!
Joplin is a good Obsidian alternative.
I use Bitwardens self hosted option, VaultWarden, that I run in a docker. works fine. I use it with the bitwarden CLI since I’m using QuteBrowser on all my machines. I then run a weekly backup of my vaultwarden to an external ssd.
Beauty of it is that it will also work with Bitwardens extension on chrome or firefox. So if I’m on another machine and I need access to my PW’s I can just install the extension, add my self-hosted vaultwarden, then remove it when i’m done.
Vaultwarden is what you’re looking for.
Instead of Bitearden you can use Keepass and share db file with syncthing
Trilium is nice as an obsidian alternative
I have tried trillium, it looks good but mi y main issue is that the notes are not plain text markdown. It using its internat l database that makes syncing to other devices with syncthing harder. But yeah, otherwise great alternative.
Not sure if you already knew but Bitwarden does have a self hosted option, the docker-compose stack runs great and they have been working on a singular image that just needs a DB. It all runs great depending on what you need and supports the actual bitwarden team.
That’s a welcomed thing, often it’s daunting to do it from scratch when all guides assume you’re a masters student in computer science lol
I’ve been using Yunohost for a while, it makes all the stuff soooo much easier. Especially reverse-proxying.
Yeah as someone that was just getting into it not that long ago I definitely kinda struggled through it even though I’d feel pretty confident saying I’m a bit more technically literate than most. Figured I’d try to help others with the process as much as I can! I appreciate the validation lol
Thanks! I’ve been wanting to set up something like this
You’re so welcome friend I wish you the best of luck :)
This is a 32 minute video that starts with a text card and robo voice. Is there any kind of summary? I don’t have a home server and don’t know what I’d do with one if I had it tbf. I have several vps and other hosted servers and find them much less hassle than a home server. But, maybe I’m missing out on something.
Honestly I was in the same boat. I ended up just buying a raspberry pi and following the dead simple tutorials on this site and now I can stream my audiobooks or TV wherever the hell I want
Again though, why a server? I don’t understand the concept of streaming really (I mean why I would want it, not how it works). I have some music files but they are on my laptop’s internal SSD (plus a few on my phone). No need for streaming. The idea of a server is generally to run some network services 24/7, or serve multiple clients, or have more hardware resources than would normally be found on a client PC. I don’t see a raspberry pi at home helping with much of that.
I guess I could imagine wanting some kind of centralized media server at home if there were multiple people using it, but it’s just me, and I’m generally not into video so I don’t have a huge video library or anything like that.
You don’t understand the concept of not having to carry your laptop everywhere with you to listen to your music? What?
I mostly listen at home, but I do have some music files on my phone. I could put them all there in principle. The phone has 256GB of local storage and an SD slot that can take a 2TB card. It’s a cheap phone too (Moto G series). I have a few GB of music that I listen to plus some archived.
If I’m going to stream to my phone away from home though, that means the streaming server has to be on the internet, and wasn’t one idea of a home server to be off the internet? I do have a bunch of such files on a bare metal dedicated server at OVH. They have better things to do than examine my files and delete stuff with the wrong kind of lyrics. I do understand not wanting to use stuff like Google Drive where they do mess with the files.
Even if I wanted to totally control the hardware I’d probably look into colo. But dedicated servers always end up being cheaper.
No, home servers aren’t made to be off the internet.
Well that was one idea mentioned by one of the other posters: better security by having the server off the network.
I think my luddite tastes in software are part of it, but if I have a server on the network, it might as well be in a data center where I don’t have to worry about space, power, noise, ICE raids (my servers are in several countries so they’d at least have more work to do), etc. I can add or delete new hardware with a few clicks. I actually do have an old Supermicro 1U server in my kitchen but it’s just sitting there unpowered. I had intended to colo it but it’s just not worth doing that. I had forgotten about it.
Even if I have a server at home, I probably want to back it up over the network, so then what? There are remote copies of the files then either way.
For me personally, I share this with several other people. So my wife can stream movies or TV that we own from anywhere. We can share the same audiobooks like as if it were audible but I only need to own one copy. Things like that it’s really a convenience thing. That and digital backups of my failing DVDs is a bit of comfort
Aha, yeah, sharing with people at home is an attraction and it’s good to not have to rely on your home internet being up for that. DVD backups though (unless they’re being shared too) seems like they can be handled either with client storage or remote servers. You want off-premises copies of your backups anyway.
Ai will summarise it if you watch in edge.
Persist with the video! The text-to-speech is only for a couple of quick screens - the rest is very personal, and they cover a bunch of use cases.
If you really don’t want to, the server OS they recommend around two-thirds of the way through is YunoHost, a beginner-friendly way to run services as containers on any capable spare computer. The YunoHost website has a bunch of use cases that are also covered in the video.
I’m pretty comfortable running Debian on servers. I just don’t understand why I’d want the hardware at home instead of remote. I don’t have much space at ome, and my home internet is crappy.
Also addressed in the video! Neither I nor the video creator has any stake in what you choose to do, and I’d prefer not to rehash the whole video for you since it’s right there for you to watch if you’re interested in this topic, but the main points were generally about reducing subscription costs and gaining better control of content (e.g. no surprise removals of music, videos, and ebooks).
I’m not into video, I didn’t want a rehash, I was hoping for a 1 sentence summary or the like. I don’t have any subscriptions and my music and ebooks are on the client and I don’t understand the attraction of putting them on a server. I guess the thought is that many people use their phones for media consumption, with limited local storage particularly on old iphones, but I’m not set up that way. I like having the files local instead of streaming them.
It’s not about me personally but rather (regarding media) about how a streaming setup is better than local file storage for stuff like ebooks. Even for a phone user, phone storage is cheap now, especially if your phone has an SD slot. One big attraction of servers for me is fast internet, but that means hosted servers rather than home since my home internet is slow.
I’m something of a a luddite but I’ve generally tried to stay away from “smart home” stuff, streaming subscriptions, etc. So I’m trying to figure out if home servers are more of the same.
I just don’t understand why I’d want the hardware at home instead of remote. I don’t have much space at ome, and my home internet is crappy.
Because plenty of us do have space and have good internet. You don’t have to, and that’s totally fine.
The main difference is that having a home server means You are in complete control over Your data. You can run home server and isolate it from the internet, running only on local network. Great for privacy and You are not relying on some external provider being reliable and available.
It also has it’s downsides. You have to maintain the server, keeping it up-to-date. Checking if some components need upgrading or replacing - which is mainly about having healthy drives so You do not loose all Your data.
loose all your data
yeah i hate when my data gets loose and out of the specific drives i put it on
The main difference is that having a home server means You are in complete control over Your data. You can run home server and isolate it from the internet, running only on local network. Great for privacy and You are not relying on some external provider being reliable and available.
I my a laptop for that, no remote access, I mean what services would I want to run and what would the clients be?
Having my own server is sooooo cool. There are so many services I’m running for my friends and family that are just incredible. That includes this piefed instance! Which is public if anyone wants to register here
That’s a pretty vague title. What kind of server? I run emby. I also run a ton of other servers.
did you try clicking the link? titles aren’t meant to convey all relevant info.
A 30 minute be video is a big ask when I don’t know what it’s going to be about
Hey @[email protected], your yawning emojis aren’t very convincing when I see that you are still actively following my account.
ok, did you read the body of the post?
Yes, did you try just telling people what kind of server instead of leaving passive aggressive replies?
A home server with digital services (from mail to cloud) as we got wired phones back in our timeline, most of the time up, possible terminal of our own and able to unplug at will
