I am interested in tech and would say I have more knowledge about networking than the average person, but there’s still a lot that’s way above my head. I’ve played around with Pis a little and have set up things like home assistant and foundry VTT before.
I got my hands on an old machine from work and want to upgrade it with some of my spare hardware, and ideally have it set up as my single home server. I would like to host plex, a few foundry servers, home assistant, and use it as a NAS. Basically combine everything I have right now into one more powerful machine.
Thing is… It feels really overwhelming to try and start. I’m not sure really sure how to go about the whole endeavor. What OS do I use? Do I use VMs, docker containers, is there pro or cons one way or the other? How can I make sure they’re all accessible from the web securely?
Is there anything you guys can tell me to get me started? Some resources to walk me along setting a multipurpose home server?
Oh and by the way, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed starting out in this. My advice is to set yourself small, achievable goals to help break it up. Start by doing your hardware upgrade, then work out what your host OS will be and install it. Then work out how you want to use it, what you want to containerise, what you want to run in VMs.
be prepared to knock it all over and start again. Everyone rebuilds their environment, usually after learning how they could do it better. And most of all, have fun!
Definitely used to this already just messing around with my few Pis lol.