A variety of beginner home server questions
I will soon have a home and figured now's the time to do a proper home server, especially since it's going to come with cat 6 run from the main panel to just about every room. I code for a living, but at the same time network is a massive gap in my knowledge, as are servers, and I was hoping to use this as a learning moment as well as just a way to optimize things. I've been doing research for a few weeks now on and off and feel like I've got more questions than I started with, so I'll just vomit them out and if anyone has some guidance I'd really appreciate it.
Some information:
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I'm willing/able to spend to get quality/simplicity. Time is the much bigger crunch for me right now, and I'd much rather buy something that works even if it costs more than cobbling together some deals.
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Related to 1, I'd like this to not become my fulltime second job/hobby. I will at some point try to expand to a full home lab, and do want to use this to learn about things I feel I should understand better for general knowledge and my career, but i'd love for core functionality to mostly "just work" after configuring so when I don't have time to do that I'm not stuck telling everyone "oh yeah it'll be broken until I find time to fix it".
Things I know I want-
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Some sort of NAS. From my research Synology comes up a lot as the "it's expensive but it'll just work" option, and I probably want something like a 4 bay of NAS specific several TB HDD's in something like raid 5/6/10. Pricey as hell but I'm most willing to spend on this as the cost might very well be split by the family members who want me to guinea pig all this.
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I will have a camera system and would prefer to not have it sending data outside my network. This is the area i've looked at the least, as it's a little farther down the road, but I know others who have things like Arlo and lets just say i'm not super impressed. Obviously this brings up question like remote access to said camera's and where I'm storing the data (nas? Somewhere else?)
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I'd like to mess with a media server. Plex/Jellyfin constantly come up in my research, so I'll be looking into those, but I've also got a bunch of audiobooks that I'd love to be able to easily share, and I think there's software for that stuff as well.
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Pihole strikes me as the other "well if you're going to do this, you might as well" option that i'm aware of. Realllly need to better understand networking in general, but I hear these days it can kinda be installed and quickly configured and then left to do its job.
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Related to all of this, Casa OS keeps coming up as a very good tool for a beginner like me, since it streamlines the handling of docker containers and also file sharing. However it's not really an OS, since it must actually run on Debian (i think?) for now (zima OS still in testing?).
Stuff I'd like to mess with but doesn't have to happen right away.
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Eventually the aforementioned NAS would be backed up offsite to another NAS at another family members house, once I know what the hell I'm doing.
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Proxmox constantly comes up as THE tool to use, but it leaves a lot of questions for me. Obviously if I start trying to do lab environments and screw with VM's it's going to be great, but my understanding is that I probably don't, as a beginner, want to say load up a device with proxmox and then have it host debian which installs CasaOS as it'll get a little more tricky to have everything talk right? Unsure on this part.
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Anything else I'm forgetting. One issue I keep having with this is a LOT of the information out there is either too complex for me to really grok or just says "well yeah you could do ANYTHING with this" and it just sorta assumes I know what the options are. If there's anything else worth checking out I'd love to know.
Hardware I've come across-
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Synology - Already mentioned but seems like they're a common go to for a "more money than skill/time" situation like mine.
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Zimaboard - My understanding is it's underpowered for its price, but the main draws are that it's VERY low power, small, and quiet. What it could actually do from my list above is where i'm unsure. I see people are supposedly using it for Plex servers and what not, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to make any kick ass lab environments, but being quiet, small, and maybe a bit closer to plug and play seems tempting (I know they make the blade and a few other products but it all seems greek to me).
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Various mini computers - I've got a minisforum machine from several years ago that I currently use as a living room computer for light gaming and mostly playing movies and the like. Not sure if i could just wipe it and convert it to be the starting point (more on that later). I know used 1 liter mini pc's from companies like HP are also popular.
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The MS-01 - Similar pile as the last one but my understanding is this is the kind of thing that's probably really cool if you actually know what the hell you're doing. I'm 99% positive it is vast overkill for my purposes, but I'd like to eventually get to the point where I could understand why I might want something like this. My understanding is if I knew what I was doing I could probably drop proxmox on this and do everything I could ever want and more, but I feel quite far from that.
Some general questions I have -
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The thing that kicked this all off is my new place likely having fiber, and cat 6 drops throughout the building. Architecture is something I'm still a little shaky on. I assume i'm going to need my own modem/router (just because the cox routers are meh and not really configurable from last I checked), and then that routes to the server first???...or something(seems like a must if you want the pihole to do anything)? I've seen lots of niffty network diagrams at this point but they're all from people WAAAAAAAAY beyond my skill level doing much more ambitious stuff, so it gets hard to understand. If anyone has a simple home network diagram/guide to look at I'd really appreciate it.
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I'm just in general going to need to learn more about networking, especially in a home environment. Should I eventually get those camera's set up, I want to understand how to let them talk to internal storage and what not ,but not get out to the web...or..something (again remote access seems nice, but also like a massive security concern). I know speed is also a big factor i'm going to need to better understand. Having a fiber connection in only to be bottle necked by a crappy router or a 1gigabit port is just a waste of money, so that's something else I'd like to better understand.
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I'm a little unclear on how to deliver the media in a media server to the various screens throughout the building. I've got cat 6 to all of them, but I suspect i'm still going to need, at the very least, a cheap computer to hook up to it and then display the image to the monitor/TV? This is why I assume I can't just wipe my current mini PC and reuse it as a server, because I still need it to receive the data from the home server (or at least a web browser?). A part of me feels like if I got a powerful enough server it should be able to server the media direction to the screen, but then you'd need some sort of HDMI/DP drops as well from the server to all your screens?...or something?
Sorry for all the rambling but I've got an odd mix of knowledge and ignorance so it's been a little difficult to research when half the video is stuff I already get, and the other half blows past me or just assumes I know about the parts i'm trying desperately to learn about.
I would start with your ISP -- do you need to buy a modem from them, or can you provide your own? I know with Verizon FIOS, I was able to to use the ONT (the box outside) and run ethernet directly to my own router. No further Verizon equipment needed. If you have to have an ISP-provided modem, it will probably have a router with it. I usually turn the wifi off on it, configure it for passthrough, then set up my own router anyway (especially since Xfinity "shares" your bandwidth with other people).
I've only used consumer-grade routers, so I don't know what's best at that point. If it were me, I'd probably be looking at a consumer grade router and a switch with enough ports to fan out for all the home run rooms. My default starting points would be Asus for routing and Netgear for switches, but I'm no expert. I'm sure there are bigger SOHO switch router combos you could get all in one, but sometimes all-in one is not better.
You also don't have to everything at once. Almost everybody I know just has a wireless router and is "fine", so if you start there, you can always add stuff later.
On the NAS side, I have an older Synology NAS and it has been great. One nice thing is that they have apps for backup and remote file access. They also have a service that connects you to your NAS remotely without you having to have an open port to it. All stuff you'd have to figure out for yourself if you were rolling your own.
Just make sure you enable the drive status notifications. I didn't have this turned on for a previous set, and both drives were eventually failing (after years of use). Fortunately, I was able to copy everything off, then replace them and rebuild, but it was touch and go. Now I get an email every month that tells me the drives are okay.
Hello, not OP but since you seem to be knowledgeable about this topic I hope you don’t mind me piggybacking with a tangential question:
So my ISP indeed provided me with a router / modem combo in one device. What is a passthrough and how do you set it up? And what are the benefits of using your own router?
A router is simply a device that moves packets from one network to another. The routers that ISPs provide are usually locked down and don't provide many advanced features.
Some of those features would include things like setting up multiple accounts so you could give other people in the household access to do things in the router without providing them with everything, a dynamic DNS client that will update an external domain name with the current IP address of your house, multiple network interfaces, in case you wanted to do something like segment your IoT network from the rest of your network for security reasons and so on. There are tons of things that routers can potentially do, and the basic ones that ISPs give you can't do most of those things.
The problem is that many ISPs REQUIRE you to use their router. They do this mainly to cut down on the support calls they'd get when consumers use their own devices and break something, or open up a security hole in their network. It also makes it easier when technicians come onsite. Everyone uses the same model of router, so just swap it out if there's an issue. No need to troubleshoot it.
The way they enforce this is by using a technology called 802.1x. The router authenticates with the next router along the network chain to make sure it's allowed on the network, and if so, the port it's connected to is allowed to communicate. If not, then the port stays down. This makes it impossible to replace the ISPs router with your own.
Some ISPs allow you to enable passthrough mode though. This makes their router forward packets from the providers network to your home network as normal, but make it look like you're directly connected in to the providers network from the standpoint of your home. The packets are just forwarded as-is, without any address translation or anything. This allows you to plug your own router into their router, and from your routers POV, nothing is amiss, it's just routing packets from your network to the providers network (and then to the internet) and vice versa.
This allows you to get the features you want, and allows the ISP to get most of the benefit of controlling the in home edge devices. The only real downsides are an additional box you need space and power for, one more thing ther can go wrong with your Internet access, and a (very negligible) amount of added latency because of the additional hop.
Pass through mode is also called bridge mode. If anyone is searching for more information on this, consider searching for both.
I’ve never thought of double NAT issues as potentially nefarious, but I’ve never had - or been made aware of - an ISP that doesn’t allow BYO modems or bridge mode on ISP supplied modems.
Some ISPs require their equipment be used for unlimited data, some charge more for unlimited with customer supplied equipment.
I think @papasquat has covered most of the bases, I will just add that another benefit is improved security. The ISP routers may or may not be getting security updates, and since they are white labeled, you may not know if they have some kind of critical vulnerability. No router is guaranteed to be perfectly secure, but by putting your stuff behind your own router, you can choose one with a good reputation, regularly apply updates, and monitor the news or other channels to find out about unmatched vulnerabilities.
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I know cox will let you use your own router (or at least they did a year ago), but I've never done much more than buy my own so I don't have to rent their overpriced device.
And good to know about drive status notifications. Sorta surprised that's not something it has you configured by default when you first setup, because yeah what's the point of some RAID style array if you're not going to know when the drives are failing.
I'm not a programmer (I can hack stuff together), nor is my profession networking/server administration. I'm in Finance... but this is my hobby. I don't spend a lot of time maintaining it, but the initial setup and different iterations have required a decent amount of research and upfront effort.
Networking - Definitely provide your own router. I used the edgerouter x for a year or 2. Updates bricked it and eventually I replaced with a PC dedicated to it running Opnsense. I liked this aspect, but if I were you. I'd start with something that is likely simplier to setup such as the Ubiquity ecosystem or even TP Link small business stuff. I personally have 3 APs EAP 225 and they have been rock solid in keeping connectivity and ensuring the signal propagates through my home. VLANS are great to separate network traffic especially if you're going to expose any services to the web. I have a gameserver, home assistant and some others that I do expose through NGINX Proxy Manager. Although I'm contemplating on switching this to tailscale access only. I think this part is key to ensuring you have fun running a server. You'll need a switch and this is likely where you'll spend a decent amount of money if you're not getting second hand used parts and are willing to get them all working together (like I did). I have a cisco switch that I got for $40, the EAPs (were new) and the opnsense router. It would have been easier to do this with a single ecosystem, but would have cost me 3-5x.
Server: I built mine. It runs an intel 8300 which I use for transcoding plex/jellyfin. I ended up running a hypervisor (Proxmox) to have separate VMs, LXC containers etc. This was just for fun. You can get all this running on a single machine running debian/ubuntu, just takes more work. Proxmox took a bit for me to get used to, but definitely prefer using a hypervisor to separate stuff out, run VMs for specific tasks etc. You'll definitely want one with an Intel CPU to utilize QuickSync for transcoding.
Services:
I like my solution, its super flexible and allows me to do what I need to do on the "cheaper" side of things. I learned a ton.
In the NAS world I have a Truenas SCALE OS installed. What I like about it was a simple system for deploying helm charts / Kubernetes solutions easily. Think of docker compose on steroids on my home network.
+1 for Truenas SCALE.
Makes it very easy to convert an old pc into a NAS. Everything is available through the web interface so there is pretty much never a need to open a terminal.
Regarding a NAS system, I wouldn't recommend rolling your own software stack like OpenMediaVault on a mini PC or anything like that if time is the limiting factor. Stick to commercially available solutions like Synology.
A 4-bay NAS is the smallest I would go. Be mindful of the CPU and RAM it comes with, since media decoding is quite intensive, and doing it for multiple videos at once can be problematic if your system is weak.
On the media side, I'd recommend Plex. There's a good community of Synology Plex users with plenty of guides to follow.
Synology also has an IP camera storage app, and a 1st party backup system for your other devices. If you plan to send IP camera stuff to the synology, I might even suggest a 5 bay NAS, with the additional slot dedicated to CCTV footage, as hard drives really chug if you're writing (CCTV) and reading (media decoding) at the same time.
Regarding basic networking, you essentially want the jack from the wall to go straight to your firewall/router (all home routers have built-in firewalls), then out to a switch (or daisy-chained switches if your stuff is in different locations) with all your other devices attached to the switches (including the Pihole). That will be enough to get you running internally.
If you do go down the road of rolling your own firewall/modem/router solution, I'd recommend OPNsense. It does everything you need with built-in DNS filtering (what a pihole does), and VPN support so you can securely access your junk from outside the house.
Hit me up when you've done some reading on networking, I'm a cybersecurity engineer and I'd be happy to help with some dos and don'ts.
Finally, why you can't just display stuff from a NAS on a screen - it's Network Attached Storage, it doesn't have the graphics processing power needed to run anything more than a debug/setup screen. So you need something at the other end to take the data output and turn it into instructions for the display.
Once you've got plex running and you have a smart TV or computer, your plex library will be available internally by installing the plex app on that device. Dumb displays will need a miniPC or something.
Any reason for Plex over Jellyfin on Synology?
I've had no issues with Jellyfin running on anything from a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to a Alder Lake i7, either installed or in docker. But I've never run it on a Synology NAS.
Plex is slightly easier, I think. If you want to access it outside of your LAN and time is worth more than money, but it's not that much easier. Is it?
Note: I know preferences are a thing and have no issue with people on Team Emby or Team Plex, even if I'm on Team Jellyfin.
It's not entirely clear to me but from those remarks, I get the impression that OP might be sharing media with family members, but not sure if only immediate household members or beyond that. In any case, once you start sharing with other users, there might be a case to be made for Plex if only for the simplicity of the clients existing on nearly every platform with little to no issues.
I've not used Jellyfin myself even though I actually would like to get around to that sometime, but from what I have read, apart from a few of the more popular clients like Android or web based, it sounds a little rougher for clients on less popular platforms. If you're only working with your own hardware, you can more easily control the experience, but if you're inviting family members especially ones outside the household, I could anticipate that being potentially more problematic in some cases. Since I haven't used Jellyfin personally I'm also not 100% on this, but since Jellyfin doesn't have a centralized server like Plex does for coordinating connections, I'd assume you also need to give other users some kind of connection information to put into the configuration of their client in order to make that work, which is just another step for people to potentially trip on if you're going to invite grandparents or less tech inclined people.
Granted, Plex has its own issues in making complexity of setup/onboarding worse for less tech inclined people, partly due to their shift to FAST for revenue so they've further pushed those things into the interface and made it harder for users to tell what content they're accessing, along with the most common complaints from server owners over the years of stupid default settings that force unnecessary transcodes which can be a different onboarding headache for server owners.
So I can see either one having its challenges when you invite other people to share the media with, though traditionally I think Plex has been considered a little bit easier at least. I think the clients being available on nearly all hardware is the biggest selling point in this regard. I think no matter what one you go with, you'll likely end up doing some undesired tech support for people if you're sharing the server out. Conversely, a benefit to Jellyfin over Plex is that you're not doing tech support for Plex's authentication/coordination server outages, because in those scenarios your equipment and services are working fine and it's their fault your users cannot access your server.
I don't have experience with Jellyfin or other alternatives, I've only ever used Plex, so I can't compare them. Bearing in mind OP doesn't have much spare time, and Plex is probably the most popular solution (though I might be wrong about that), I think it'll be easier to find solutions to any problems they have.
Easy with custom hardware: TrueNas, probably.
Less easy but flexible with custom hardware: ProxMox, perhaps with VM of TrueNas/OMV/etc.
If I were you, I’d go with something like CasaOS as you mentioned or what I use and actually prefer which is CosmosOS, on top of Ubuntu Server. Both CasaOS and CosmosOS use their own configurations of Docker/Docker-Compose to present selfhosted apps in a very beginner-friendly way. There are others too like UmbrelOS but I’d avoid anything associated with crypto to be honest. The major benefit of CosmosOS is that it does a good job of automatically configuring security features if you want to expose your server to the internet at some point.
Edit: Sorry! It’s actually called Cosmos Cloud https://cosmos-cloud.io/ not CosmosOS which is something different.
Good to know. I assumed Casa couldn't be the only thing simplifying the process, and security is one of those area's I'm woefully blind on. I'll check out CosmosOS.
In case you missed the dit.
If you're trading money for time, you probably want to go the NAS route but just FYI if you're already comfortable with linux, it's not too hard to repurpose an old box with a bunch of disks and setup your own NFS or SMB drives.
My issue is that while I'm sure I can get it working, I'm not sure I want to spend the time at the moment as this year is going to be brutally busy.
That and I honestly just don't have any old devices to repurpose. I always gave them away to friends or used them until maaaajor failures. I've got maybe an older HP laptop I could do something with, but even then i'd have to get it working first.
To address your questions:
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Apple TV 4K Wifi + Internet is really great. Even if you aren't in the Apple ecosystem, I'd still think it's a great client. Infuse will stream from Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. And Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, etc.
Raspberry Pi's can make for an ok client, but I think only one model will handle HEVC / h.265 so all media will need to be h.264 or transcoded. If time is worth more than money, I wouldn't consider them (or similar). And Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby should all have clients for Android TV, Roku, and WebOS. Other devices might need a Kodi + Jellycon (for example) solution.
I've been running a NAS Raid off of a WD device for years (they suck, don't do it) and as of last year, have been wishing that it and my Blue Iris security camera PC were combined.
Since it sounds like you're looking for a camera solution, I'd recommend Blue Iris software running on windows alongside a Power over Ethernet camera network connected via PoE switches.
The computer sits below my living room entertainment centre and serves as a torrent and Kodi machine, a Blue Iris camera server and hopefully one day soon, my media server as well.
The benefits here are that you're using windows and all of the plusses that come from having a flexible machine to launch the network from.
Glad to hear this as Blue Iris was something i've come across a few times in my research but wasn't sure if it fit the bill. I'll have to look into PoE options.
Happy to answer any questions you might have about it
If I had a house, I would just get myself a small rack with some cheap 1U switches and a 2U/3U second hand SuperMicro chassis with an Asrock AM4/AM5 socket server board equipped with a Ryzen and ECC DIMMs. With up to 12 drive bays and two network interfaces my storage and networking needs would be fully covered. Might need to add a PCIe SATA card, though.
I would install two 1TB NVMe sticks on the board and then use them in RAID1 for system and as cache for LVM of the VMs that would normally use RAID5 of the SATA drives.
For WiFi, I would probably go with MikroTik and install bunch of APs. Those can be configured to manage clients intelligently, which helps moving them from AP to AP as they move through the house.