Your Old PC is Your New Server

[Sir Asvald]

1 hour ago, poochyena said:

Seems unlikely a scenario where your entire PC dies, but your home server, likely located nearby, doesn't also die.

Everything is likely. As for a server, you use a UPS and like I said before, you should have more than 2 backups in one location. The 3-2-1 backup strategy

 

 

[poochyena]

1 minute ago, Sir Asvald said:

Everything is likely. As for a server, you use a UPS and like I said before, you should have more than 2 backups in one location. The 3-2-1 backup strategy

How is that likely? Only way I could see that happening is a PSU failure, and even then that is unlikely to damage EVERYTHING. Why not just use a UPS on my computer? I'm not not seeing the advantage a server provides. Its most likely the drive will just die randomly, so you can just back up from the 2nd drive in the computer. If your house catches fire, you can just download the data from an online backup. Only benefit I can think of is if you get a virus that steals your information and locks you out of all your drives on your PC and your online backups, so then that separate server data could come in use, but that seems very unlikely unless it was a very targeted attack.

[MrCyrious]

On 1/4/2022 at 3:18 PM, finest feck fips said:

Huh. You've never used a networked file share at school or work? Or just didn't make the connection that that feature was available to you on Windows at home?

....

There was so much interesting info in that reply, so thanks for that! I actually will do some digging, and that's a great tip about finding a linux magazine at the store! I am indeed just looking for things to do that get me screwing around and learning a new skillset and all that kinda thing!

 

And to answer that question at the beginning: I did use some basic networking stuff early on in highschool I suppose... that was a few years ago now, and I didn't have much interest in networking or software at the time. I just knew that things worked and didn't bother to figure out why. As an adult through the years I've never worked at a place that made use of a local network aside from basic wifi access, so never had any reason to look in to it. At my current job, I literally am the "systems administrator". If it's not obvious, our networking/computing needs have been fairly simple over the years.

 

I am a bit of a video geek though, and have years of old raw footage scattered between a bunch of usb drives. Seeing this youtube video kinda got me on that journey of finding a central, reliable, fast-ish cloud storage; and having a laptop and a couple of 2tb external hdds laying about at least gives me my proof of concept and a way to learn how to make it work. At least now I have my crappy old DVDs all loaded up onto a Plex server, and everything works, so I'm a happy boy. Now that I've had time to bask in the glow of things working, you're absolutely right that I should take another crack at TrueNAS to see if I can figure out the issues I had (namely: external hdds wouldn't sleep), and get more comfy with a more capable OS for that time when I'm ready to build myself a proper server, or I have some more appropriate hardware free up in my fleet.

 

But yeah, seeing as I've got another laptop and external hdd kickin' around, it'd probably be a good idea to do all my experimentation on that "offline" so to speak, and then apply what I learn to my actual server machine. Time to get crackin'!

[nostalgiacafe]

I enjoyed this video. I have been waiting to build a home server for a long time. I had a Windows Home Server 2011 before that was shutdown. The ideal of using existing hardware I have is always appealing. 

 

But at the of the day I just find all the choices and debates crippling. Unraid, Windows, Freenas etc etc. Even Raid set up choices seem impossible to find the correct choice.

 

There are just to many choices can the debates are endless.

 

All I want is a place to store all my home files and be able to access them on any of my devices. And of course create a media server for my music and DVDs.

 

The idea of using windows 10 which I already own as the core, including built in storage spaces was appealing. What to do, what to do......

 

Overchoice

nostalgiacafe

 

 

[nostalgiacafe]

On 12/13/2021 at 3:38 PM, TheGingerSnapKid said:

I just turned my old fx 8350 computer into a home server with unraid which Linus seems to shill (I get why, I was skeptical at first and tried proxmox but moved to unRAID and love it) for all but his most recent NAS setup with the high speed SSDs.

 

I guess I understand why they chose windows, especially given pulseway sponsoring, but man, unraid is perfect for a home setup like this. The expandability is what sold me. I'm just dipping my toes in so I only have 2 NAS drives, single parity, but when one fills up, I can just pop in another and keep on chuggin along. Plus the simplicity yet robustness of the docker integration is great. I've set up plex, a pihole, and makeMKV and handbrake containers on it for ripping old DVD's (ouch anthony, hating on that old physical media). I was super happy with the simplicity of the workflow for different things.

This sounds exactly what I am looking for. I'd love to see a video on what your suggesting. Particularly, intricating the makeMKV, handbrake, pinhole etc 

 

Could you suggest the steps you took or the linkts to these parts?

[TechSupportsWorstNightmare]

What should I do if i have a Windows XP computer that i'd like to use for this?

[googleuser3212]

I have been thinking about setting up an asterisk server on an old pc that isn’t supported by windows 11

[arifroni]

is pulseway free to use? I cant seem to create an account without any work email!

[overstitch]

6 hours ago, arifroni said:

is pulseway free to use? I cant seem to create an account without any work email!

Pulseway is no longer offering the free plan-so the recommendation is unfortunately mistaken.

[tkitch]

20 hours ago, TechSupportsWorstNightmare said:

What should I do if i have a Windows XP computer that i'd like to use for this?

upgrade to something newer.  XP is a security nightmare.  

[tkitch]

On 1/30/2022 at 10:09 PM, nostalgiacafe said:

This sounds exactly what I am looking for. I'd love to see a video on what your suggesting. Particularly, intricating the makeMKV, handbrake, pinhole etc 

 

Could you suggest the steps you took or the linkts to these parts?

Youtube.

 

Pihole has a million instruction videos for setup.

Same for the other apps.  

[Eammon_Wright]

ok, im confused on the video does this computer have 3 SATA cables? one for SSD and 2 for Mechanical? or are they just using two mechanical? complete noob here no idea what im doing but i think this would be a nice thing to have.

[steelo]

If you don't require anything overly demanding (such as transcoding), rpi's work great as samba servers and use next to no electricity. I use a humble rpi zero w (connected to a cheap usb drive) as a torrentbox/NAS for backups and it just works. Torrent downloads aren't particularly quick (my pi averages around 1 MB/s download speeds and the single core arm cpu is maxed out during downloads) but I'm rarely in a hurry.

[Eammon_Wright]

2 hours ago, Eammon_Wright said:

ok, im confused on the video does this computer have 3 SATA cables? one for SSD and 2 for Mechanical? or are they just using two mechanical? complete noob here no idea what im doing but i think this would be a nice thing to have.

nevermind i figured it out

 

[Arcluna]

On 2/18/2022 at 12:06 AM, Eammon_Wright said:

nevermind i figured it out

 

I have the same question. Do you need 3 hard drives? One for the OS and 2 for the RAID storage? 

[sonickboom]

Ran into an issue with this and I'm looking for some insight.

If I connect my new "server" through Wifi, it shows up on my network using other devices but when I connect with a wired connection nothing shows up. I've done a reset of the OS and of the firewall and still getting the same issue. All my other devices are connected via Wifi.  Any help would be great, thanks.

[PapelSchaap]

On 12/13/2021 at 7:00 PM, CPotter said:

 

Hello guys, im triying to make a home file server... So can it also work without pulseway? Because i dont have a business email.. And it dont works without it. So what do i need to do?

[Needfuldoer]

27 minutes ago, PapelSchaap said:

Hello guys, im triying to make a home file server... So can it also work without pulseway? Because i dont have a business email.. And it dont works without it. So what do i need to do?

You do not need Pulseway, they just sponsored that video.

 

You can connect to your server PC remotely with tools like Windows Remote Desktop, VNC, and TeamViewer. None of those need a business email to work.

[ENTON]

Anyone knows how to turn my old pc into a running Minecraft Server for friends? Me Router seems to be the problem. I tried to activate IPv6 Host Exposure to my friend to join the minecraft server through my routers firewall

 

I use this website (https://mcsrvstat.us) to check if the server can be reached from outside, but it is not the case. What could I have potentially done wrong? I have set inbound and outbound rules for port 25565 (where the server is running) in the "windows defender firewall with advanced security". I added protocol TCP/UDP and set port 25565 on the router via Ipv6 host exposure. Then I entered "ncpa.cpl" via Windows key + R to see the network connections, selected my --> Properties and there Internet protocol version 4 TCP/Ipv4. There I changed the settings from Obtain automatically to Use the following IP address.

 

Can anyone here explain in detail to me what i did wrong? Im using Windows. And have a Vodafone station

[evileromega]

I followed this video and have a network shared folder for my household. Now, I am trying to give everyone their own folder without others being able to add/change/delete things in others' folders. I tried setting up a local account with the information from one of the intended users, but when I set permissions to that local account (and removed "everyone"), they couldn't even see the folder.

 

The server is running standard windows 10 home and the thing I like about how it is set up now is that everyone can treat the shared drive like a folder on their device (just a simple drag and drop). If I can do that with linux without having to download additional software on the client side and get the exclusive folders for them, I will do that, but I haven't seen any sort of home linux server that can do that with windows users. 

 

Any help is appreciated.