This is a SCAM because if you start your cheap homelab, you'll be hooked and find yourself with a rack full of gear right next to your couch in the living room. You'll go quickly from an old laptop, to a desktop, and then then just one server, but before you know it, you'll be planning network upgrades, buying SSDs for your storage, and debating the merits of different operating systems over dinner with your wife that doesn't care about it at all (only cares about the electricity bill). Your living room might start looking more like a mini data center, and you'll be the proud admin of your very own homelab empire. Consider yourself warned: there's no turning back.
I hope, for your sake that you did not follow the drive partitioning recommendations. Kalos is obviously a unix noob who is unfamiliar with all of the ways a linux server may be crashed. It is a strong recommendation that you partition off the /var or /var/log directories. This way if the log files fill up the filesystem, you can still recover without too much hassle.
From someone that has been been building home servers for over 20 years I gotta say this is well put together, informative, and concise while not being too dry. Good video.
@@shellohd8421it depends on what you need, but yes storage is a good place to start because a lot of other things depend on it. Samba configuration allows many shares and many users. For example, I have several personal shares that only I have access to, I have a share for my wife and I for documents we both need to access, and I have device specific shares such as for media and for our home office printer/scanner. A good next step might be setting up backup software for your computers/phones. For example I use an app to run a regular backup (at least once a day) for my phone's photos/videos/voice memos/notes. This allows me to save a local copy before it gets backed up to my cloud storage at the end of the day.
I have to say, I can only agree, this is the best bang for buck budget homeserver. Also well documented and explained for new comers, not my cup of tea since I like making my systems a bit more trim, but generally good advice.
This! This is the type of stuff most normal people even with some basic IT knowledge can easily follow and get an actual usable home server out of! Amazing stuff!
@@CallumAnthony-r9o If you've got a closet full of old laptops, they're bound to be your friends, or your enemies. One of them likely spoke in other languages, so he was talking to a long lost friend/ememy :-)
Something that wasn't mentioned here is about direct costs of a home server, as of electric bill, if you run it 24/7. The laptop is the best choice here since you get lower consumption CPUs by design and an integrated UPS! As a final tip, if you need extra storage and your laptop had a CD reader, you can find hdd/ssd caddy for the CD tray! If you need to backup stuff, also syncthing is a must have!
To be fair, unless you're doing something insane then the power consumption of a small home lab is going to be negligible compared to a fridge, HVAC, stove, microwave, etc. I run a cluster of 8 raspberry pis nearly 24/7 and I have a plug in power meter between the cluster, network equipment, and the wall. As a point of comparison, my microwave uses 27x more power than the max draw of my raspberry pi cluster (about the same power that your average old laptop/desktop would use at max draw) and 100x more than the average draw of the cluster. Electric in my region costs $0.36/kwh which means running my pi cluster all day for an entire month costs $2 to $3. I'm not trying to gatekeep having a homelab or anything but if $3/month is a problem then you should probably not go into homelab as a hobby.
@@user-jm8sy5ox2j I'm on average around the same consumption, but I do not see the point of having way too much stuff running all time when I do not need it. I had two laptops and I compared their power draw at idle. One was 7W around , the other one was 45W (it has a dedicated old GPU which I wanted to use). With the 7W I had around 2$/mo, with the 45W one I would have easily gone into 12$/mo. Probably you find cheaper and more reliable options with cloud servers around that price.
@@user-jm8sy5ox2jyeah cute in theory but I have an old proliand dl380 g5. Bitch costs like $2-3 per day of uptime. Cost like $50 but its just too much to have up unless I'm actively using it. Wish I knew how much it used in standby, though I do know its warm around its psu, on standby.
Hello, I don't have access to old laptops or Raspberry Pis, but I do have an extremely cheap mini PC/thin client from the lockdown days. I believe it has an AMD GX-217GA CPU. How would power consumption compare to an old laptop like the one shown in the video?
Everyone benefits from learning to self-host their stuff. People must be educated to own their services and devices. I thank you a lot for this, really, you make the world a better place.
A man after my own heart. I used to recycle old desktops as a home server but now we are using a Thinkpad T420. Nice having much lower power consumption. Replaced the main HDD with an SSD and stuck in a 2TB HDD in the DVD-drive bay. I'm just using Win 10 Pro not a real server OS. We use it as destination for automatic backup of my and my wife's desktop. It is running an NTP server to keep all the non-mobile devices on the LAN in sync. This is nice because some of our IoT devices revert to hardcoded time/date after a power failure so this way even without internet they get a reasonable time/date. It is also running a web server that displays a bunch of static links including our DIY IoT devices.
Finally found a channel that explains things correctly and easy to follow- Ive been using an ssd attached to my home router and it always takes 3 or 4 attempts just to load a movie !new sub from the UK
This is probably my fav. Video on the platform, so useful and well made! With some trials and errors i turned a shitty laptop from 2010 (1gb of ram, couldnt handle it's own os / ram upgrades) into a "free" cloud, then spent a day automating remote on/off with my phone to save on the electricity bill. Now i plan to add bitwarden, an image viewer and other cool stuff, cant wait for a part 2!
I've watched so many home server videos. This is by far the best one. The others made me not want to touch it. This made me want to finally set one up.
I've read many many stories about users acquiring used hardware for homelabs. $15,000 servers for $200 that are years old yet still do what you need them to do. All those < $500 components can and do add up to a wonderful setup you've been wanting to build/expand. Yes it's worth it but as said in other comments, it's addictive!!
Wow, what a brilliant video! Easy to follow, content was well organised and your presentation was consistent and spot on… especially the jokes. You even reminded me that I have an old laptop doing nothing so that’s a prime candidate for becoming useful again. Well done, Chris! Looking forward to watching more 😊
Wish I had a video like this like a couple years ago when I randomly decided that I wanted exactly this, it would've been an amazing start. Great vid! Now I'm deep in it with two desktops permanently next to my router running Jellyfin, Nextcloud, personal sites, etc.
Cool. I am having to buy a new laptop for crappy reasons, but i was just thinking of setting up a server with my current one. It's a pretty powerful machine for it's time, 5 years ago. I think i should be able to do this.
I used an old laptop with a mostly broken keyboard as a plex server. Used the built in Ethernet port onto my home lab network, and the wireless link of the laptop to the 'house' cable-wireless router. It functions as a cheap bridge to protect 'public access' from my lab net and does good enough, especially since the keyboard was missing several keys.
I found that running a NAS OS and installing docker is much more easy then running ubuntu. I tried both and I went with OMV and using docker compose for containers and a raspberry pi 3b for wireguard and adguard.
'roflcopter' This is Awesome. As a Student I don't have much resources for a fully - decked home lab but I also want to tinker around things for Sys Admin point of view / skills!
it should be noted that to install wireguard and create a vpn with no-ip or any dynamic dns service this process does not always apply, not all providers give dynamic or public ip. many are under CGNAT means Carrier Grade Network Address Translation, it is a technique that allows the use of the same public IPv4 in which private IPv4 addresses will be associated simultaneously. so you must use NGROK or zero tier for the process to be functional remotely.
Holy moley! always wondered how I could utilise my old machine and access my home network form the internet. Got the perfect solution here! Subscribed 👍🙌👌Thank you, Kalos.
Thank you, for all the detailed steps, helped me put it all together. I used it to be able have my sever with my videos and file system to be able to access from any computer. and YESS I am trying not to get carried away LOL
Good starting point, but be sure to back up whatever automation scripts and software you end up needing. Laptops aren’t exactly made to have reads/writes occurring 24/7 due to (and depending on) hardware, so you’ll be looking at a ticking clock. I ran through two within 2 years before deciding to just get an actual rig.
Would love love love to see another video about using your server for backups from mobile devices and other desktops/laptops! This video was an awesome starting point for me, thank you so much.
Wow! A truly engaged creator, one question please! How am I meant to access the server? Through the duckdns url? Mine only works through “[my ip addr]:8092” . I must have done something wrong with duck dns. Also what is the purpose of WireGuard? When I have the Ubuntu tunnel on everything is super slow and idk how the local only works. Also what in the world is the port forwarding do? PLEASE HELP and god bless you if you actually reply. 🙏 thank you.
Hi, it seems my reply to your comment didn't show up because of RU-vid not liking "links". You access your server with its local IP, not the duckdns address. So [ip]:8082 in the browser. When you're connected to the VPN you've made, that IP (any IP call that starts with the local IP string) will be redirected to your home router, so that you can access your home network from anywhere. DuckDNS only points to the network, aka the router, not your server itself. Hope this helps!!
You've given me the clearest, simplest plan yet for this type of project among all the videos I've watched...subbed. And by the way, your name qualifies as an excellent villain character on Star Trek TOS! "Captain Kirk! Kalos is hailing us from the Klingon cruiser!" I know, it's pretty close to Kahless, so sue me lol.
It is really well thought... Except for one thing: old laptops don't have a ton of storage space, which you're gonna want for a data server, specially if you store movies there. Okay, this comes from a guy who has four drives inside his computer (me), I got here just trying to figure out what to do with my old laptops. I don't find it that convenient, while I know how to set all of this up it's still faster and a lot less messing around to use my internal storage, whether directly or though a Plex media server kind of thing, which also allows me to access it remotely. I don't use that either, but it is a lot of hussling around compared to other solutions. Still, like I said, well thought and well explained. Regards. Left a thumbs up.
Great guide but after years of doing this a few points to add if you use a laptop you are going to kill the battery fast by charging it 24/7, 365 so see if you can run the laptop with the battery removed also 2.5 inch hard drives die fast if subjected to constant access you need a ssd or external 3.5 inch spinners, also with a laptop you have to consider cooling, stick something under one side of the lappy to increase airflow and if you stick it in a cubbard(closet) you need to wedge the door open an inch or two consider underclocking the cpu to help with cooling, laptops aren't designed to take this abuse but are capable, been running an acer for 5years this way never a problem except boiling it's battery
"Debian's defaults are completely insane" 🤩 well said. It's the God's honest truth. My little crappy Chromebook OpenVPN server uses Debian, headless. Ubuntu Server was better and will be my go-to moving forward, but I had to try a few different ones.
I'm so happy daring to try a BSD. I randomly landed on OpenBSD for an old laptop after years of curiosity and haven't looked back! Must be around 4 years now. I use it on all my laptops and my moms desktop 🤭 KDE Plasma or the native CWM - fantastic! My point was INSANELY SANE DEFAULTS on OpenBSD. And "all" is in the base! Or a pkg away. ~~~😈🐡💻🐡😈~~~ And I haven't even gotten to try it as servers, which is where it really shines, they say... But nobody asked me 🫢
Lmao; I just spent hours getting neck deep in this to find out my ISP has completely removed the ability to forward ports on provided gateways. Amazing.
6:21 keep in mind, that the user should be the same as your actual linux user otherwise this won't work. You can't just create a random new user and name whatever you want. The user should be the output of echo $USER
I LOVE taking old laptops and giving them new life using Linux! It is so much fun for me, and there's the added benefit of recycling the old gear. If it powers on and has a proccessor, it still servers a purpose!
Awesome video. I just realized that my internet provider has very strict policies about their own routers, so I might buy one myself if I really want to enjoy such thing. Sadly, but I watched the whole thing twice and enjoyed a lot.
I appreciate this video bc I have a languishing side project to essentially make exactly this. Now that I know I can just do this, I've done this, and I'm very happy.
Thank you for this video, it made me confirm I was not losing my mind. To my knowledge a server is a device reachable thru a network that offers any kind of service. Yet everyone I speak about the subject automatically defer to the thousands of dollars, power-guzzling, datacenter-rack. It's impossible to do server-tasks (services) with any other kind of pc according to them, with all their reasons basically boiling down to the device not having the name server. 🙄
Really really great video, thanks the yt algorithm for this discovery. I knew I would do something like a home server when I'll have the time and even if I'm kinda experimented, this video is well explained ! Keep up the good work ! :D
This vid is very well made and presented. I've done these and more plenty of times already, yet I still enjoy and was able to learn from it. Thank you :)
I use a $0 backup server since June 2019. It runs on the remains of a 2003 HP d530 SFF, it has a Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz); 1GB DDR (400MHz) and 1.21TB of storage in 2x IDE 3.5" and 2x SATA 2.5". The cabinet is a Compaq Evo Tower with a Win98SE activation sticker. It now runs 32-bits FreeBSD 14.0, released Nov 2023, on the OpenZFS 2.2.0 filesystem. The server supports Samba too for restoring e.g a single file, but normally the backup works with OpenZFS replication, sending the difference between 2 snapshots with "send snap1 snap2 | ssh receive".
Hey Kalos, you made a wonderful tutorial! However, as a Linux and programming novice, I am having trouble with the Wireguard setup. Specifically, (11:51) I am not receiving any data despite successfully sending it. I have spent over three hours trying to troubleshoot the issue, including reinstalling Wireguard multiple times, but to no avail. Could you please provide some guidance on where I might be going wrong?
This is a networking issue. Please use a service that checks for open ports on your network, it seems that the port forwarding did not work. Perhaps you have CGNAT, which doesn't allow port forwarding?
If you ever make a followup video, I'd like to see Tailscale (which uses WireGuard) instead of bare WireGuard itself. I think a lot of people would prefer the added features of TailScale.
I totally agree. I use Tailscale and I LOVE it! My network is behind two NAT enabled routers so port forwarding is a pain not to mention the potential security problems of having open ports. I'm pretty sure Tailscale is easier to setup than Wireguard too.
I want to use an old laptop for my first homelab and this tutorial is amazing! Thing is, I'm a bit of a data hoarder, and I don't know what to do about storage, because if I'm limited to a nvme m.2 and a sata ssd I'm gonna run out of storage soon, and any other solution through USB seems like it's gonna be hella slow...
So far I've had a few hangups I have a bunk router I can't configure on a desktop so I had to figure out how to configure a static IP using YAML, thankfully after a day of troubleshooting and learning YAML for the first time I got it to work. Right now my big hang up is copying from my clipboard from the web browser into vim, all of the solutions I've tried to find don't seem to be working. I'm anticipating having to do some over complicated work around for the port configuration but its been a fun challenge so far! I can say I have a home server at this point all that I need to do is configure a VPN and wake on LAN. This video was so helpful in all of its steps.
I have a 5TB external hard drive that I have movies & TV Shows on. I also have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop, so I'm going to set up a media plex server on it
Hi kalos, thank you for this amazing tutorial, as I person who is new to linux I was able to follow each every step. But I'm facing an issue at 11:15 the data is being sent but I'm not receiving any data (the duckdns.log output was OK). Could you please help me on this?
My router actually keeps the same IP reserved for I think three months even when the device doesn't enter the network for this time, pretty handy, saves me from all that manual configuration. I just plug in a new device, nmap, and make a mental note. My PC is on 100, laptop 149, rack server 155, NAS 209.
I spent 100 euros on an old Lenovo laptop. It has scratches all over it, even broken plastic at some places. But it has 8th gen Intel CPU and 16gb of RAM so I installed Windows 11 on it. Then I used vmware player to create my nodes and now I'm running Kubernetes cluster on it with NFS server for dynamic storage provisioning on another machine :D I also did the same thing with Linux before I decided to use Windows instead. But because I also run my own WOW server on this laptop and couple other things, I needed Windows machine. This was the best idea I had in a long time :D I have so much fun with this old laptop.
so here is my side of the story after trying this on my absolute sh*t of a laptop with no battery since the battery decided to get pregnant and get kids? and an another problem in this pc is that if it overheats too much it decides to... die? so the graphics card on this thing (integrated graphics) decides to shut down the pc and make the screen look like i hit it with a sledgehammer. anyways here: so after "successfully" installing linux (ubuntu server) i ran into the first problem which is the pc not recognizing the linux installation/not finding it i have tried tons of stuff like checking the bios changing settings bla bla bla etc for like 5 hours now and it seems it doesnt want to work so i think ik what to do now im gonna install windows 7 on this sh*tbox and try to update the bios and see if that unlocks a setting that can maybe help me? i'll keep u guys updated if this comment gets 10 likes :) also for those wondering its an hp probook 5330m and its sh*t 👍 also im putting these symbols (*) so that yt doesnt delete my comment like they always do to comments that have swearing in them. anyways please like this comment and i will keep u guys updated ;) Update 1: so i installed windows 7 HARDLY bc of how weird the uefi boot mode was on this pc then i updated the bios so the first update went smoothely but didnt add any of the features i was looking for (but it actually let me run ubuntu server? i will speak abt this later) and then i tried to install the second bios update which... failed at first failed again then i had to create a fat32 partition so it could put its data there then it finished and i thought the update finished but it didnt restart which wwas confusing then i found .efi files in the partition that i created so i tried to boot it in the boot manager in UEFI mode and it failed the update 💀HORRIBLY. then after some digging i foudn that there is a bios update mode in the bios so i turned it on and then i got so confused imma update yall again in a few minutes or hours it depends. also linux ran after the first bios update but i didnt realize until i booted in UEFI mode and then i found out that i f*cked up and forgot the credentials and the linux installation also deleted the bios update partition that lets the bios update mode do its sh*t so now i have to redo all that sh*t again YAY! updating in a few hours pls like :) MIGHT BE LAST UPDATE!!!: so after some time and more gibberish and jank I actually ended up FINALLY reinstalling ubuntu server bc I didn't realize that it would keep failing if I connected it to the ethernet or wifi so I had to do the installation with no wifi but then it finished and I realized I couldn't SSH into the laptop if it wasn't connected into the internet or wifi and the only ethernet cable I had was being used in my working desktop and connecting wifi to linux using the terminal is SOOO COMPLICATED FOR NO F*CKING REASON!...that was.. until I discovered nmcli which was so easy to to help me connectto the internet. now I have internet and I can ssh into my laptop I can finally download samba and finish my home server also one thing that's pretty weird abt this laptop is the that the file that chooses what to tell the PC when the lid is closed I made it so that the laptop ignores the input and doesn't go to sleep mode but it still goes to sleep mode? its pretty confusing but I decided to just keep the lid a little open so it wouldn't sleep. anyways last update is in a few minutes/hours and thanks for 2 likes guys :) LAST UPDATE!: so I installed samba and I'm proud to say that this laptop actually has a new use which is storing my extra files and its really good also when I tried to connect to it my dumbass forgot a number in the IP address and I was wondering why it wasn't working 😭💀 anyways bye guys :)
Oh man this is so easy to do and so cool! Truly incredible stuff I didn't really know I could do with my rpi this easily. Absolutely great video to get you into this stuff!
Literally the best explanation and step by step process I have ever found. One question though, what all, if anything, changes if i use a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi instead of the laptop?
i recently decided to repurpose a miniPC I had laying around into my home seedbox. I set up Parsec on it and it gives me all the features I need to basically set up my torrent clients and the needed open ports. previously, I would seed all of my torrents on my laptop, but that would end up tethering it to my home connection and not being able to take it with me to uni or on trips. I was genuinely considering getting a seedbox, but remembered the miniPC at the last minute.
Don't knock that laptop, son. Had one of those and it was an excellent work laptop and a decent mid-range gaming laptop too boot at the time. That Radeon 3650 GPU allowed me to play Crysis at 30 FPS average at medium resolution--without blowing my computer gear budget.
Thanks for this video! Got me started to turn a macbook that still has plenty of life to it into a home media server. It was just gathering dust and I had no use for it as a desktop. It's been a few weeks and I've already bought external storage, put some more services on it and planning to add more
You can do this on any old spare hardware, but if you want a setup that takes a lot less power while being probably about as fast(due to newer CPUs) you should get an old thin client. Just don't get the dual-core AMD GC2-whatever ones, unless you like really slow harware, You should be able to get at least an AMD quadcore for about the same price(~20€ where I'm from), or get a slightly more modern Intel-based thin client(for about ~50€) that can also do video transcoding etc., and is an overall newer platform. These devices take almost no power(typically less than 10w under load), are made to be online 24/7(I've done the various notebook servers before. They can die pretty quickly, especially the PSU!), and often have features like power on AC powerloss etc. that make them way more convenient for this sort of thing. Plus, they are smaller and often come with absolutely noise(no old HDD, no old fans, etc.). My Dell Wyse 5070 has 12 TB of old USB HDDs attached to it, and can saturate the single GbE port using CIFS("Samba", "Windows File sharing") as long as the HDDs are not the bottleneck. Eventually I want to get a cheap switch and use it as my router/firewall as well.
I run win 10 desktop debloated for my jellyfin/fileshare/game server machine. I have a second old machine that is slightly newer and had to run win 10 as well. The games that I am hosting have better tools or outright don't work on linux. It's kind of easy with RDP and chrome remote desktop for when I am away. I run them headless and they are happy enough. Jellyfin/fileshare/minecraft bedrock server is Phenom II x6 1090T and palworld server is i7 2600. Both with 16GB ram +SSD's. For now I stay on windows.
I been looking for a simple way to have my own server at home thanks a lot its simple and clear to an extent that I am going to buy old laptops and make them servers
You missed a trick in not suggesting Promox or Proxmox cluster, that way you can designate the laptop resource as DNS and everything else separated into different VMs. Utilising the resources more efficiently
I haven't experimented with stuff like Proxmox yet, I'll document it when I get to it! I wanted to make an old-school bare metal sort of server to start with.
I have the very same acer laptop model collecting dust in my drawer. I always wanted to make a home server, but was to lazy to mess with it. Thx for the video
Also, I know Debian defaults seem "unreasonable" but I made my own Ansible script to solve this as soon as the system is up. Also Debian allows pre-seeded auto installs
Wow! Thank you for that great piece of information how to make my life more comfortable while learning new ways hot to improve myself. Well done! Keep going! Such a great and really educating channel!
@@KalosLikesComputers i know right? though makes sense if they already bought the lifetime plex pass. also god damn i never thought about making a wake on lan shortcut on my phone, thanks for the idea :D
Thank you! I was looking at buying a Mac mini to use as a media server for my house, but I have an old MacBook that it looks like I can use instead without buying something new 🎉
