server Multi-purpose home server

[Rafaldrafas]

Hello,

 

I was looking on the forum (and other forums) for a similar post, but didn't find anything similar to my case. I will start with the context, then my idea and then my question.

 

Currently I have around 30 smart devices working in my flat (lights, stores, temperature sensors, etc) most of them are a mish-mash of Zigbee devices that I centralize on a single hub and then control through Tuya's Smart Life app. Plus a handful of wifi devices (humidifier, nest speakers, vacuum cleaner, etc). I centralize everything via Google Home. I'm often adding new stuff to make the house smarter, but I'm limited Smart Life's and Google Home's automations, and well, I'm not too comfortable about talking to a Chinese/Google server every time I want to turn my lights on.

 

Also, I automatically backup my family's phones with Resilio Sync on an old laptop with windows 10 which stays on all the time. The computer also stores our old pictures (even some scans from before the digital era), and has a physical copy of our Dropbox and Google Drives (a few dozen gb) with important document scans. All these are important and are stored on the internal HDD, which is backed up by windows every night into one external HDDs (poor man's Raid xD). There's another external HDD with a collection of movies and music that I acquired before 2010 by less than legal means (the video quality is poor, and most of it is on streaming now), so I don't really mind losing them beyond some nostalgia from my broke student years. To access the media on our phones and TV, the computer also runs a local Jellyfin server. The HDD's are currently at about half capacity, but since I'm just storing new pictures and short videos, I don't think I need much more for now.

 

As you may have understood by now, I would like to transition from Smart Life into Home Assistant (to have more powerful automations plus having everything local...). Also, I'd like to turn my hacky Resilio+Windows backup solution into a proper NAS server. Finally, we don't use Jellyfin much, but it wouldn't hurt to digitize all the physical media I currently (and legally) own and have access to it whenever and wherever I want. 

 

I know that you can have all that in a single machine, using the magic of Linux and dockers and such, and I've been checking online for how-to's. The problem is that basically every forum says something different, crapping on whatever solution is proposed elsewhere and saying that you'll lose your precious memories or that the proposed hardware is either not good enough, or too good for whatever anything somebody wants to do (my conclusion this far is that  I either need a raspberry-pi, or a $2k investment on second hand server hardware...).

 

So I would like to know if people here have something similar at their place and if they have recommendations for somebody trying to follow those steps. Which OS you decided to use and why? Is there's a newby-friendly solution you'd recommend? Do you have everything tucked in one machine or you have dedicated machines for everything? Or I'm good for now and I should just get a home Assistant Green?

 

I think my old pile of junk (AKA, the laptop) is handling its two current tasks like a champ, and I'm sure it'll handle Home Assistant well, so I would like to use it as the guinea pig for this experiment. I could spend a few dozen bucks on hardware or software licences, but I would like to learn before investing on a permanent solution... Also, I'm all for giving old machines as much life as possible, so if I can keep using the laptop for something, I will.

 

The specs of the laptop are: an i7 2630 (quad core/2GHz), 16gb of ddr3 memory, 512gb internal SSD, 1tb internal HDD + 2x 1tb external HDDs (USB 3), a Nvidia GT555M with a 1gbps ethernet connection.

My specs are: intermediate coding skills (mostly python), a beginner's knowledge of Linux and CLI (I've been using it at work for about a month now) and almost zero knowledge about networking. I'm not afraid of learning new stuff, but I can't currently devote hundreds of hours of my life to learn a new skill.

 

Thank you so much for reading this far and thank you for your recommendations as well :) 

[igormp]

1 hour ago, Rafaldrafas said:

The specs of the laptop are: an i7 2630 (quad core/2GHz), 16gb of ddr3 memory, 512gb internal SSD, 1tb internal HDD + 2x 1tb external HDDs (USB 3), a Nvidia GT555M with a 1gbps ethernet connection.

My specs are: intermediate coding skills (mostly python), a beginner's knowledge of Linux and CLI (I've been using it at work for about a month now) and almost zero knowledge about networking. I'm not afraid of learning new stuff, but I can't currently devote hundreds of hours of my life to learn a new skill.

you're good to go. Install openmediavault or truenas if you want something a bit more off-the-shelf, or just go with your favorite distro and build everything on top of if, the results will be really similar no matter which way you go.

[BootlessBuck]

That's always the issue with asking online, everyone has an option.

 

Your old laptop should do just fine. There is no such thing as hardware being "too good". You might leave some performance on the table, but if it's an old piece of junk to you, that would be sitting around doing nothing anyway, then who cares? I once built a really nice gaming rig, then decided I would rather use a console, so my gaming rig turned into a file server. Oh well, just because it had the ability to do more than server files didn't make it a bad file server.

 

If you run into the limits of your hardware, then you can explore the idea of an upgrade, but without going through it, it's a shot in the dark, as everyone's usage is going to be a bit different.

 

As far as losing memories go, just make sure you have a backup. I'm running my file and media server off a Synology NAS with Docker and have a nightly backup to the cloud each night. I wanted something that I could setup and basically forget about. If a tornado comes through and takes out entire setup, I should be able to buy a new NAS and pull all my data back down. Short of that, the drives are mirrored, so if I just lose one, I can rebuild locally.

 

I can't suggest much on the home automation side of things. I've been holding off on all of that until Matter gets more popular, as I don't want to juggle all the various ecosystems.