I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend
I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend
You may be way ahead of me on this, but I highly recommend using docker for this endeavor(or podman), as it really allows you to try a lot out without making a mess of your system.
I run pihole, syncthing, and gitea locally(among less interesting things.)
Can you share with me what OS you are running? At the moment I am using MX Linux because it is familiar to me, but is likely suboptimal for running a server.
I think docker is really cool, but felt like a lot of work compared to using flatpaks or a package manager, but I am really limiting myself and it is probably not that hard to learn.
Oh, as for os, i’d recommend dietpi on a SBC that uses a memory card, because it logs to RAM so you don’t wear the card as much, and Debian for everything else. You don’t run Into problems with Debian. Unless you like snaps, then go with Ubuntu. As much as I hate snaps, they are good for some services that tend to break on upgrades, like has been my experience with nextcloud.
Ooh. I have a RPI 3 that I never use. Maybe I am overcomplicating this. I tried to use it for managing my 3D printers but it was just a hassle. I think it is actually cheaper to get one of those Creality boxes at this point instead of rolling my own.
Plus SBCs are quiet. Okay, I will try it.
Octoprint on a pi is great for 3d printers. You can even use a pi zero of you disable Bluetooth (it uses the better serial chip otherwise). I’ve never seen the creality boxes. I’ll have to look into it.
Yeah, I was using octoprint. I think I just do not understand networking enough to get over random problems I have.
Actually, I got it working. It was fine for one printer, the set the z offset into the bed so that was a no go. Never got the webcam to work, which is most of the reason I wanted it in the first place.
The webcam is… not easy. Or anyway, it worked when I used a raspberry pI with a raspberry pi camera. Now I use some orange pi zeros with USB cameras, and the setup was tricky. Even worse, it seems to change the camera device every few reboots, so it’s basically useless. My printer is by my desk though, so it’s not a priority for me. If I really wanted a camera i’d probably set up a cheap WiFi camera that exposed a stream and just set octoprint to point to that stream instead of serving a local one itself. I also use a relay to power my printer on and off, and I think if I was going to set it up again i’d just use a smart plug and one of the plugins to turn it on and off.
Strange, Lemmy didn’t tell me you replied. Well, I run mostly Ubuntu Server OSs for Linux for work, but at home I am cheating and using a Synology NAS as my home server with docker installed on it. CentOS used to be a good go-to for servers, but I think Redhat made some changes to the way it releases and I think a lot of the CentOS users moved to other distros.
CentOS still works great for servers. The problem with classic CentOS and other RHEL clones is that they can’t fix bugs or accept contributions that change the OS. CentOS finally fixed these problems by moving upstream of RHEL (but still downstream of Fedora). It is now the major version that RHEL minor versions branch off from, so it’s still very stable and highly compatible with RHEL. I’ve got a thread with diagrams that may help.
https://fosstodon.org/@carlwgeorge/109985597904896856
Interesting. I never used CentOS, but I think it makes sense to run an OS designed to be used in servers. That would probably make my life a hell of a lot easier than setting up everything on my own.
Good call.
Honestly, with Linux, the biggest difference between server distros and desktop distros is if a GUI is installed by default. But one advantage of using a well known server distro like Ubuntu Server is that most articles on the Internet assume you are running it.
True. I think the software I would download anyways is installes by default, which makes it easier.
I don’t need a server to have a gui since most of the interfaces for services are browser based anyways.
I am in no rush! It would do me well to explore and become more familiar with the networking side of linux.
No doubt, there is an endless amount to learn with Linux. I’ve been using it for servers since the early '00s, and have been using it as my main OS on my personal devices since probably 2016, and I still regularly learn new things. If you are trying server stuff out on PC hardware, I suggest looking into virtualization. Proxmox is a great OS to start with for a virtual host. Then you can try out as many OSs as you want as virtual machines. You may be way ahead of me on that, but back when I was first learning what it meant to run a server it was of great help to me. That was before the days of docker and most containers(although I did use BSD Jails a little).
I only recentlg learned about Proxmox through Lemmy, so I will definitely give it a go… I keep saying that about all this new software I am exposed to. Hah.
I have always been fascinated by virtualization, but was concerened with resource management and nerfing my computing experience.
Which is silly since concurrent computing has existed since nearly the inception, and with a few exceptions, CPUs spend most of their lifetimes idling without ever approaching the limit of resource usage.
Yeah, I need to experiment.
I just started using podman yesterday, and only used docker for about a week before that, im excited for the learning to be had in this area. A couple days ago i tried pihole, for some reason it didnt serve the web interface, but i will definitely kepp on trying.
Yacht is a great UI for starting a container, especially for self hosting, there are a good amount of tutorial online.
I personally also host
Some other things you can try: