My Home Server

Hi! This is my first ever post on my website. In fact, it might even be the first properly written article/blog post I have written if we exclude my ramblings about cricket on Reddit. Anyway, what I hope to achieve in this write-up is to give a framework to build upon and share what I have learned over a couple of months working on my server. Ok then, let's do a brief dive into the server.

I used an old Dell Inspiron laptop lying around my house as the server. A 10-year-old Inspiron 5558 with an i7-5500U, 8GB DDR3 RAM, a Seagate 2TB hard disk and an Intel Wi-Fi chipset, to be specific. Unfortunately, the ethernet port is a measly 100Mbps which is quite frankly a bit slow by today's standards but it is manageable. My software build has Ubuntu 24.04 as the primary OS. It is not the best choice; an LTS(long-term support) version would be much better suited for the purposes of a server. If comfortable enough, I recommend going vanilla Debian(what Ubuntu is built upon) without GUI for that last drop of performance. Over that, I am running something called CasaOS, which is like a pretty frontend for docker(I will explain what it is) with a decent enough file browser. One big drawback would be the absence of an option to set up a raid array(diving your total storage space into fractions for backups so that your data is safe even if a few drives fail). Setting up a backup is still possible, but I haven't tried it because I only have a single drive. Remember, this is just a gateway into self-hosting. I highly recommend Proxmox for people who want to dip more than their toes into this and are willing to spend a bit more time.