Good day people!
(This paragraph is fluff, feel free to skip) First I’d like to thanks everyone who has answered my questions thus far. A of now I’m daily driving CachyOS on my “laptop” and Bazzite on my gaming PC. I’ve settled on Hyprland after running with sway for a few days and have been forcing myself to solve problems and do file management using the CLI exclusively (excluding firefox for duckduckgoosing help). I’ve gotten semi-comfortable manipulating files, but haven’t had to do anything too skill intensive yet.
On to the question! I am currently looking to set up a home server. My use case is for storing media, specifically videos (for watching) and game Roms (for playing older games on emulator). With this use case in mind, what’s a good resource to learn how to get started? For those who have home servers set up with similar purposes, how did you arrive at your current set-up? What considerations should i take before, during, and after set-up?
Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Thank in advance! Hope to hear from you all soon!
The safe way would be to buy an existing NAS solution, such as a Synology DS423+, don’t forget that you want to buy at least one USB Drive that the NAS can put backups on if the data is valuable and/or unique to you (can’t redownload the photos from Vacation Summer 2024) and you want to run your NAS disks redundantly (mirrored in some way, f.e. RAID10).
If you want to expand your home lab services and the NAS can’t handle the cpu/ram requirements you can still often use the NAS as a bind mount and keep it as your storage location even when you add a second computer that runs the actual services. This is the way many traditional data centres work, with Compute and Storage separated into different hardware.
Personally I run everything virtualized in a Debian kvm/qemu server, including my gaming fedora vm with vfio gpu passthrough. For me it was a lot of fun learning to setup vfio passthrough and the like but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you do it because you’re curious and doing it that way has a value in itself.
There’s a lot of packaged hypervisor solutions, such as Proxmox, that makes it easier to get started with virtualization right away and already have builtin backup solutions and so on.