Over the past 5 years, I have inherited my father’s philosophy of self-hosting. It all started with my brand-new Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted to create a Minecraft Server for me and my friends to play on. Unfortunately, due to my lack of skill, I have had to offload the responsibility onto my father’s server (which was really weak! an intel celeron j1800 was barely cutting it for versions newer than 1.12.2!). Eventually, during quarantine, my father had moved his entire suite of servers (mainly SBCs) to the j1800 and it was beginning to get quite horrible. We were lucky to even get 18 TPS when more than 2 people were on.
Eventually, I’ve decided that the j1800 wasn’t good enough anymore, so I’ve decided to get an old laptop motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo. Due to me barely knowing shit, I was quite frankly hooking that poor laptop motherboard to a monitor and starting the Minecraft server in a new window, which wasn’t and still isn’t a good thing, as it required me to be at home, it wasn’t an issue for spring 2020 though.. After 3 months of doing it this crappy way, my father spent an afternoon teaching me how to enable the sshd daemon and figuring out how to make the Minecraft server autostart. Eventually he convinced me to just use Docker, and I have to say, I really enjoyed it, so much so that until recently I only (with a few exceptions like nginx) used docker.
Nowadays, the only component that remained the same through all of these 3 years worth of administration was Docker. I have learnt a lot just during this year alone and my system adminsitration knowledge doubled compared to last year. The motive for this blog post is to reflect on my progress this year and what I have learnt.
The components
My suite of servers is comprised of the following few lads:
- Frantech/BuyVM VPS: I use this as a VPN in order for me to be able to expose my services to the internet without needing to port forward on my home IP address.
- HP t620 Thin Client This is the brains of the whole operation and I find it hilarious how last year I thought I’d be using a more beefy server, but this lad, which cost me 5 dollars by the way, went above and beyond for me. I strongly reccomend the HP t620 for hosting basic websites, fediverse instances and Minecraft servers (though you should use purpur or you will experience a lot of lag!).
- Raspberry Pi 4 I still use this guy for stuff that must only be accessed on my home network. Stuff like Bitwarden, althrough I also run a Jellyfin server meant for public use, by my friends of course.
- Wyse 3040 This lad is a new addition to my homelab. I run an experimental Terraria server on it.
The stack
For all critical services, I prefer to run them on bare metal, as to not depend on one too many daemons. As I was saying earlier in this blog post, I still use Docker after 3 years of non-stop use. Recently however, I have dabbled into some Proxmox shenanigans and for a while I was reconsidering my faith… until I saw how badly virtual machines performed on the t620. Arguably it isn’t really a wise choice to run Proxmox on it and I’ve ultimately decided that I was better off with just Docker.
My regrets
I should have gotten more ram and I should’ve not had to rely on Wireless internet, which is a node which can fail within my setup. I should’ve used ethernet. Unfortunately, I cannot convince my father to help me extend an ethernet cable to my room.
Conclusion
I strongly enocourage self-hosting everything you can, as it helps fight decentralization and you can often times find it better to use free and open source alternatives to things such as Google Calendar or Gmail.