51 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Building a home-server"
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date: 2020-06-17
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draft: false
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summary: "Building a personal home server ..."
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images: [/static/img/server.jpg]
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---
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In my ongoing effort to decrease my dependence on other people’s computers,
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I finally pulled the trigger and build myself a home-server.
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That way I can move all my personal data from the so-called cloud to my home.
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The server is build out of my old desktop computer,
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which saw little to no usage after I bought myself a new notebook to be more portable for uni.
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All hardware but the case and power supply is repurposed from my old computer.
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I also could have used the case but since the server would be placed in my bedroom[^1] I wanted something silent without fans,
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so I opted for something passively cooled like the FC-10 Alpha case plus matching power supply from Streacom.
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It’s not cheap but seeing the end result it’s probably worth it, as the case keeps it’s promise of making the PC fully silent.
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The maximum power the i5-6600K processor from Intel dissipates as heat is roughly 100 watts so lightly higher
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than the Case specified but I have not encountered any cooling-problems after the month of home-server-usage.
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The whole build draws about 30 watts of power which equates to about 0,72 kWh per day.
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Living in germany this equals about 18 cents per day or 5.60 EUR per month of Power used.
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This is similar to most small cloud storage offerings with the benefit of actually owning your personal data
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yourself and being able to just add storage with the one-time cost of a new drive.
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When reading up on home-servers and how to build them one topic always has to come up: backups.
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Backups prevent otherwise inevitable data loss.
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So what is my backup-strategy? I use btrfs-Raid1 on my drives,
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which means having two hard drives mirrored[^2].
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This covers hardware failures… but not software failures which would could just write bad data twice to the drives.
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That’s why there is a third backup on an external hard drive which is not plugged in all the time so
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when there is software failure or something that kills the drives in the server
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there is a backup from the past that still contains the intact data.
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There is potential to upgrade this to a backup-server at another place but that’s something I’ll leave for future me to try out.
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For the operating system I opted for Archlinux as I’m most familiar with this Linux-distribution.
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The actual applications are all run in containers and are started by multiple docker-compose files.
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There is a nextcloud instance and a gitea one. In the future i'll maybe look into synapse/matrix and set up some notification channel
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This was the first time messing with software-containerization and docker in particular.
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It turned out to be way easier than I imagined.
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The compose files are organized in a git repo,
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as its not ready for general usage I didn’t put it online yet[^3],
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but when i got the time and motivation to finish it I will upload it and post a link to my (selfhosted) repo.
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[^1]: One room apartments <3
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[^2]: which means storing everything twice on physically different drives and cutting the total capacity in half sadly
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[^3]: the passwords are all over the docker-compose files. I'll have to look into docker secrets or .env files so im able to delete them from the yaml's.
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