Maybe small NAS with NextCloud and Docker/Portainer installed
Running my own Minecraft server that uses Curseforge mods that my friends can join
Running my own Starbound server that my friends can join
A Plex/Jellyfin server that I can stream media from when I am not utilizing it for gaming
Questions
What OS should I run?
I am familiar with both Linux and Windows based systems, however, it seems like most of the information I find online for troubleshooting deals with Windows based machines
Should I just scratch the idea?
Just maybe even get a small HP ProDesk for the server hosting and/or Intel NUC instead in order to get an efficient Plex server going.
Are there any areas online I can find really good information regarding the troubleshooting and implementation of all these items I am trying to run?
Please let me know what your thoughts are and any tips are very very much appreciated!
I’m a bit worried about that Barracuda drive, I doubt it would be able to handle more than one task at a time, and be a bottleneck. And it’s probably SMR desktop drive, so not great for NAS use.
If you only have one, that could be a problem when it dies, no redundancy.
As for the CPU if energy cost is of any importance, latest Intel N100 will be about the same performance but at 6W instead of 84W, and integrated GPU will do H264, H265 encode/decode and AV1 decode eliminating the need for power hungry GTX1060.
Anyway, you can always give it a go and see if it works for you, but I would definitely look into hard drive situation first - get at least a pair of CMR drives first, like WD Red Pro, Seagate IronWolf PRO and such…
Okay, very interesting didn’t even think about that hard drive situation in the first place. I can definitely look into those options listed, now would RAID need to be implemented or do you think I could do without it ? Also any opinion on what OS I should get started with ? Thanks!
Well, RAID will help if one of the drives breaks, you can rebuild with no down time, BUT RAID IS NOT BACKUP! The second drive can die during rebuild.
As for the OS, you should be able to run TrueNAS, not very well but you will learn a lot about how to do things, how storage works, how RAID and RAID-Z works…
Another option is some sort of hypervisor, like Proxmox or even just good ol’ Linux and go from there.
HAVE A BACKUP at all times, you will screw up from time to time.
Since you’re at the beginning of your journey and I don’t think this is the machine you’re gonna keep forever, I suggest you to start with a Debian base. DietPi is pretty light and offers many apps to easly install and experiment with through their installed. It also doesn’t come with a GUI so it pushes you to work with the shell and troubleshoot/experiment. Supports also a txt to set up the basic settings on boot and backups to an NFS share.
To experiment with and find how you like to work with things, no. To permanently deploy, yes.
You’re not gonna find one be all and end all guide on how to setup those softwares. Start with detailed guides and troubleshoot if needed, if there’s no video or article that helps you solve the issue. Also make sure to take notes on what worked for you so that you create your own knowledge base.
Depending on the amount of people that are gonna access the server at one time you might need to scale up or down your configuration, in a computational power sense. Though Vivante has suggested you a good option, the Intel N100. I have a full SSD NAS based on it and it’s plenty powerful to do all the things you listed. But it can’t do everything, all at once, with tens of users.
Generally speaking, if you go with linux, almost anything can be turned into a home server and can probably make due with less resources imho. The specs you list seem fine (although I have never heard of Starbound and don’t know the requirements for it).
I have similar services running (+Wireguard VPN, dnsmasq, nginx, etc.) on my own slightly beefier home server (with a Ryzen 5700G, 64GB, btrfs raid 0 with WD Red Pro 2x16TB in a Fractal Node 804). While it might not be the most popular choice, I am happy with Arch linux. The issue most have with Arch as server distro, is that it’s rolling release and as such might cause problems when updating. I have never had a problem in the 2.5 years the server has been up. What I like about Arch is the AUR, making many packages easily installable, including jellyfin and nextcloud. However, a more popular choice would probably be Debian or Ubuntu server.
So, I don’t see a reason to scratch the idea (but keep the yearly cost for electricity in mind, depending on your location that could easily be a few 100$/year; for comparison a RaspberryPi 4 comes at slightly less than 100$/year in most countries).
While directly installed my services, containers are probably the more prudent approach…
No matter what distro you go for, https://wiki.archlinux.org/ has great guides for most things linux, and often also lists solutions for the most common problems that arise with these services.
I know the Intel N100 was mentioned, however, is there any feasible way to maintain the hardware I have now and not completely break the bank? Or are there good options with the N100 processor that would make my idea of basically repurposing my old desktop computer redundant. I have looked and not too knowledgeable on the companies providing this hardware. Thanks again for the reply!
Thanks for the reply! I will definitely take this into consideration as well, I see the main point that you all are basically trying to get across is that there is no true singular route that one can take, there are just recommendations on what could be done to make life easier haha. Didn’t even know Arch Linux had all those helpful features. Thanks for that.
My previous system was i7-4770. If you want to do anything about vfio, or sr-iov networking, the platform is just too old to support that.
For a simple server, it will work.
Rip out the 1060 card, it’s roughly going to be as good as the CPU for transcoding (neither is great by todays standards but you’re going to transcode already compressed media anyway so I doubt pq is a priority anyway).
As others have pointed out you probably want to for a SSD (get one with some kind of cache).
It’s likely going to be a few years before you’re going to break even between your current server and a dinky N100 box factoring in costs of purchasing needed hardware (which people seem to forget).
Be sure to update to latest bios and apply microcode patches via OS for your hardware though.
Yes, just keep the hardware you have until it’s not good enough for your needs. If I were you I wouldn’t rush to buy anything new.
Maybe transcoding is gonna be a bit hard on the system. Everything else will run pretty well.
You’d need to chuck CPU, motherboard and RAM into the bin and spend 130$ for an AsRock N100M while reusing all the other hardware you have. But it’s kind of a side grade not worth spending for.