Hello,
as you may can guess i am here because i need some help because i want to self host some stuff and i am pretty new to this stuff. I did a loto f research and i came up with a lot of stuff. I will present you my thoughts and maybe some people here can tell me if i am good or not.
First the Hardware.
I did a lot of research and came up with a HP Elitedesk 800 G5 Mini as my home server.
It can hold 2x NVME SSD and 1xSata SSD. It has an Intel 5 9500T and is upgradeable to 64gb of Ram.
I can get one from ebay used for maybe 150-170€. Then i need to upgrade the ram because it comes with 8gb only. I thought maybee upgrade it to 32gb for now. And buy 2 nvme ssds both 2tb dont know which brand is cheap and good there. The sata ssd could be my operating system i have 1 with 120 gb at home hope this is enough.
The NVME SSDs are 1 for storage of mainly photos videos and maybe a small audio collection. The other is to make a backup of all this. (Mirrored)
Second Operating System
I know there area lot of things out there and i know people can recommend a lot of stuff but …. I wanna keep it as simple as possible for my first homeserver … also i dont ´have too Much time with an 2 year old child. So my thoughts were using Ubuntu server with docker and portainer. Just that.
Third My apps and Stuff.
So mainly i wanted to run the following Applications on that.
- Immich
- Homeassisstant
- Joplin
- Audiobookshelf
- Calibre Ereader
- CalDav App for a Calender Sync with MY Phone and MY wife
- Pi hole
- Vaultwarden
- And Homarr as a Dashboard for all of this.
Fourth Using all this from my phone
Thats the only part where i didnt have time to do some research how i use all off that safly from my phone.
I guess i need some kind of VPN for a secure use?
I hope that part is easy.
Son ow i shared all off my initial researches and thoughts. I hope i wrote not to much mistakes.
And i hope you guys can help me out a little.
Greetings
I think you’ve put more thought into how to get started than many others would! You have a pretty good plan from what it seems. My thoughts from each section below.
Hardware: I’m partial to Crucial and Kingston for storage that is affordable and dependable
OS: I’d probably spin up a Debian install if I were in your shoes and run my services using docker-compose files. It’s a quick and easy to get up and running, and despite the ease, there is still the option to do a lot of customization when you want to, and that will make it easy to learn more at your own pace and leisure.
Services: For the CalDav portion, I’m really liking Radicale.
Security: PiVPN is what I’m running on my actual RPi along with PiHole, and it was a super simple setup. I connect via Wireguard from any of my other devices.
Debian only with ssh installation or with gnome GUI / Desktop-Environment?
Ultimately up to you, but I’d go with no GUI and just use ssh (and sftp if you need to do file transfers).
When I was using Docker, it was headless because the GUI just ate up space and resources I didn’t need. All your interaction will be in the shell anyway, launching your compose.yml files.
But, if dealing with a headless machine sounds like more trouble than you want to try, install the DE if your choice and breathe easy because it’ll still work perfectly fine.
THX at all for so much nice comments. Got some good inspiration again. Maybe I search a little more for a little more potent mini PC. Buy an external drive as back up and use my koofr account a it more. Think I will go with Debian and a DE. Crucial or Kingston as storage looks nice. And yeah need to look what can I too with wireguard.
Samsung for storage. Crucial if you can’t get Samsung.