I know literally nothing about home servers/NAS, but with all of the cheap non-Win-11 PCs that should be hitting the curb soon, I think now’s the perfect time to try to grab one on the cheap and give the whole thing a try.

  1. What should I be looking for in a used PC for this sort of use case? Specs, etc.? I think I’d like to do at least 3 hard drives in some sort of RAID config (whatever that is), but room for more would be welcome.

  2. Does anyone know where I would be finding these PCs? How would I know what a good price is? Are there centralized websites that sell this sort of used tech, or should I mostly be scouring Facebook Marketplace for local businesses getting rid of stuff on the cheap (in which case I’ll need to know what specs I’m looking for and how to price them reliably)?

(3.) My tech knowledge is at the level of running Linux Mint exclusively for the past year or so, but not even being able to get my Mint computers visible to each other over my local network after a few days of trying. With that said, can anyone point me to a super basic tutorial (like, idiot-level) for how to set up a NAS/home server, how to set up containers on it (whatever those are), how to set up a RAID array on it, how to get Jellyfin/Radarr/Sonarr, etc. working on it, and how to make sure that it’s visible on my network? I realize that this is a huge question that’s somewhat orthogonal to my main point for this post, and that there may not be exactly the resource I’m looking for, but I thought I’d ask anyway.

Thanks!

  • kokomo@lemmy.kokomo.cloudEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/quick-start/ Here’s a quick start for Jellyfin, depending on which OS you wish to install, there’s also one line scripts that can set it up in LXCs (linux containers) that share the linux kernel with the host operating system, such as Proxmox… https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/ (always make sure before setting up you read before executing and understand what the script is about to do, just to reiterate safety) As far as *arrs, https://wiki.servarr.com/ here are some setup guides for the most common. Podman and Docker are the most common container software, depends on what you need from both of em, podman is by default rootless, while docker is set up as privileged by default, while you need to execute a small command to get it to run rootless, which is in their docs respectively.

    • hakase@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Thanks so much! I expected it to be more complicated for some reason.

      • kokomo@lemmy.kokomo.cloudEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        you are very welcome :) yeah it can be tricky at first but I’ve gotten used to seeking out docs haha. I hope you have fun!!