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!
be prepared to knock it all over and start again.
Definitely used to this already just messing around with my few Pis lol.
Proxmox might be what you’re looking for, it’s very popular among homelab users and allows you to run VMs and Containers natively so you have the best of both worlds.
As to which you should use (Docker or VMs), neither is a silver bullet. I’m going to oversimplify it a bit, but in a nutshell:
Containers lend very well to microservices like web apps and processes you want to run isolated but don’t need a whole VM for. I can go into this in more depth if it helps you.
VMs are better suited when you have a disproportionately more resource hungry service (like database servers). They also allow easier deployment of things alongside the application, for example if you have monitoring agents. The downside is VMs add a maintenance overhead for the underlying OS (this is true of containers too but less so as you’ll often run many containers on one host).
In my environment I use VMware ESX for the hypervisors, manage it with vCenter and run mostly Linux machines with a mix of traditionally installed services and Docker standalone. There are some highly resource intensive services that even get their own physical host, like my NVR (for CCTV cameras) and backup server.
Hope I’ve answered more questions than I’ve created!
I was on the same boat few months ago. Went for Debian OS and then docker containers for almost all services. Portainer is awesome web UI to manage all containers so thats what I install first. Starting up new services is about copy paste docker-compose with slight modifications for your needs. My server is accessible through wireguard connection and that should be one of the most secure ways and probably the easiest to setup afaik (downside of wireguard is that you have to setup each device to allow connection - AKA scanning qr code)
Just saying what I did, most people here are more experienced and Im still learning.
GL and HF
I feel you. I was where you are 2 years ago and it was really hard to start off.
I’d suggest starting installing Debian as an OS. Then, go for Docker.
If you feel lost, you can take a look at some videos from DBTech on YouTube. Look at his playlists to sort what you need.
Remember to document everything you do, because you’ll forget what you did to make things work your way.
Have fun !
