Hello selfhosters! I read here a lot, longing for the day to get back into it. I have a little plan to do so I have access to some thin clients with decent enough hardware to run a small file server. I’d like to set one up for myself and as a gift to my partner
I keep getting lost in the jungle of options and incompatibilities so I was hoping to enlist some help in selecting a stack
I’m looking for open source software in the base, maybe truenas but I prefer debian and my partner uses LMDE already.
- On top of that should be a simple file server for backups/network storage. Some interface for managing storeage would be huge too
- Wireguard with an interface
- Having a simple container interface for future features like homeassistant and jellyfin et al is great too.
Open source and free is a must and I want to avoid risk for future lockins and freemium/ripe for enshitification-software as far as possible. And no or at least responsible llm use if that even exists anymore. Happy to shed featues to acheive that in combination with longevity. Is plain debian or even ubuntu the way to go or are there more optimised distros? Or am i just describing fedora with cockpit? Im not lost in linux itself, just overwhelmed with the endless options hoping someone can help me make a plan!
Would you make someone you love a home server?
Yes, but the gift isn’t the hardware. It’s that it keeps working when you’re not around to fix it. So I’d go boring: plain Debian, Cockpit for storage and containers, and a WireGuard web UI. Before you hand it over, unplug the internet for a day and see what breaks. DNS usually goes first. I’m building an open-source home box around the same idea (GPLv3 once it ships), and your question is the one I keep chewing on: what makes a partner actually use it instead of just tolerating it?
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You could do them a solid and set them up with an ad blocker on a cheap SDC, but if you really want a loved one to manage proxmox and learn how to yaml and manage containers, all while learning everything you never wanted to know about networking, IP addresses ports and Linux all at the same time… The best thing you can do is get them interested in figuring it out for themselves. Give them the bug, spread the addiction, don’t give them hardware/responsibility
I put openwrt on their router and an adblock dns already but a dns sink would be cool too
Neither of us want to learn proxmox, but I am still convinced there are simple and feature rich solutions that don’t require that.
Well for me, my wife had a ton of pictures laying around, and some scattered on google drive etc…
I basically did a huge scanning project in secret, set up an immich server and surprised her with it. That absolutely is one of her favorite gifts of all time.
Now as far as doing that with someone that didn’t stay in the same house, on an OS I wasn’t already managing… no probably wouldn’t imagine doing that unless the person was already showing signs of interest in managing something like that… in which case it should be done as a “lets build this together” project.