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.
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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.
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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!
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If you can boot an os from usb (basically the same for all distros) you can try proxmox.
There are these incredibly useful helper scripts that setup entire services in 1-2 copy pasted commands.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/
To explain what proxmox is its basicly virtualisation software, it can run vms but also lxc (light linux containers) and share resources very efficiently between all of them
Jellyfin, radarr, sonar. They are all included in the helper scripts, each will be a dedicated lxc.
Its also very easy to setup raid and there own storage format is very efficient.
Its well documented to the point that any decent llm can help you learn whatever you need. In fact its claude that helped me setup my own proper raid on proxmox, also tought me about datasets and how i can make those available to different lxc
Personally i am very hands off with my server, the hardest part is often choosing what ip i want to give a service, i rarely update or mess with it if not strictly necessary.
For hardware i recommend plenty of ram (can Be bought and installed seperatly), more cores is usually better and internal graphics can save you some hassle depending on what you are doing (also allows you to dedicate a Big gpu to some services).
A warning on second hand corporate machines, the performance is often good But quite fans are often an afterthought. I onxe got a beast of machine for free but you could hear it spin from anywhere in my house.
A good practical case is always a blessing when you need to check the insides.
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.
Thanks so much! I expected it to be more complicated for some reason.
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!!
Some of the HP DeskMini machines might be a good one. There’s a model that has 2 x m.2 for a little high speed network storage or as a HTPC.
Great recommendation - I’ll keep my eye out for one!
I’m not sure if they all do, but some models also support a daughter board for additional IO. Often it’s DisplayPort but I’ve seen ones with Ethernet and DB9/RS232 on AliExpress/ebay
