WELL, first of all hello everyone! so... yes, i am now in possess of a small Homelab server, first of all tho, what is a homelab? most of you might know since you all scavange on Neocities, so you are kind of interested on technology at least for what i can tell, but to put it really shortly, it's another pc that serves the role of the Server, in my case, local. see it as your own personal cloud storage, but also your personal Neflix if you want to set that up, or as a BIG adblocker for all the tech pieces connected to your wifi, there is a lot that you can do here! and it's not as power demanding as you may expect...

First of all the presentations. here it is. my dear ThinkCentre M75s. it's a small office pc made of 8gb of ram, 500gb of M2 ssd (most likely sata, didn't bother to check for it) and a Ryzen 3400G, pretty normal looking pc overall, but really really good for small homelab servers! i could have gone crazy and use a pc that i got spare that is from the DDR2 era but... that's for another time, i do wanna play with it but i want to first know how some good hardware can go for it first. also ye i am upgrading the ram, i got some plans and things i want to do to this boy here... plus, i need to add more storage, 500gb is literally nothing, i mean... it's BETTER than nothing but i want to have like 4tb of storage for being safe. i do not have that many files, but it's all for future proofing.

But now you may ask why someone should even bother with a homelab... and well, not everyone has! i always suggest it a lot for multiple reasons, even just making a nas for yourself, you can add all sorts of files and have a personal cloud storage in a way, and if you're smart enough with some servers for photo hosting or in general file hosting that are supported you can have a proper cloud storage that works outside of your house, for me... that's not really the case, my first mission is to be indipendent from some companies bullshitting around, i want to have my storage, my streaming services, i will rip my DVDs and Bluerays to have the digital copies accessable, same for the music, i am the owner of the movies i got, i don't rent them, and yes, this is kind of exaggerated a bit, but that's how i do stuff, PLUS i can learn a lot of stuff, from properly understanding what a container is, to what is port forwarding, how you can avoid that and still open some of your services to the public internet with vpns or in other ways too, heck, host a fully online emulator for you to play wherever you want with something like RetroArch, a homelab is what it says. it's a small laboratory you can play with to understand and get to know better computers in a way. doing stuff you would never do to your main pc for obvious reasons...

Back to my small server, what i have on it? well, i did play a bit with TrueNAS because i was mostly interested in file sharing and just trying a Network Attached Storage (that's what NAS means btw, it's storage that is connected with network aka internet) BUT i ditched right after thinking that i did want to try some other stuff, and without digging too much, i had 2 options, ONE Ubuntu server, which i think it's self explanatory, the other one that really intrigued me since i'm a noob... ZimaOS, which is a fork of CasaOS i belive? and i did went with the second option here. i do wanna try Ubuntu server but that's for another time, OR another server... i still got the LGA775 pc (or even older, can't remember the socket tbh) OR a raspberry pi 3b. BUT I DIGRESS, ZimaOS is incredibly easy to set up. it's a full OS installation so it's not like a program you install on top of your Windows or Linux Distro, and with this one at least, you use it MOSTLY with the WebUI you get to it's ip. you can also add an SSH password for root access on the pc itself, which i do recommend. i want to enable NFS (this is the protocol, or however it's called that allows you to have the server as network folders on your file manager for your OS, since usually you have to use their app) and i mean, you can use the termina straight from the server, but SSH is very convenient, so if you end up installing it... DO IT, you may never know when you need it.

With ZimaOS installed i proceeded to install few containers from it's appstore... because yes, it has an "appstore" which is very conveniently a list of docker "apps" (not sure if app is the correct word for this...) that you can install and it's all fully automated, one i instantly got is Jellyfin, which is a media server, meaning that you can add movies to some folders, then with the admin page of Jellyfin add those folders to be scanned, and the program itself will add the movies you had there straight up with also fetching metadata from sources of any kind of your choice (i belive you can customize the websites where they get the metadata or remove them entirely in case) and then connect that form your tv, and bam you got those movies like it was netflix!.. well... mostly. because yes, it's ONLY your movies, it's not as easy as you might expect, not for the setup but for obvious reasons, you have to add the media yourself. same for music, you can host your own music streaming platform too, you can host minecraft servers, or terraria servers too, heck if you feel crazy or want to be hated, host a local AI ! (just so you can hate me, i am planning to do that. i'm honestly curious to play with it. but, fine. i'll make a quick point to what i think about AI because it's such a hot and big topic BUT on the next blog post. why? heck this is getting long already)

In summary... i got it set up very very recently, i installed ZimaOS as my final choice and so far i got up and running jellyfin, tested a photo cloud service and a music streaming service, plus downloaded some AI tools to play around and understand what is that beast. you have to know your enemies after all. right?

with that said, i hope i didn't summon haters already for mentioning that i do want to understand AI better. i belive that a homelab is a really great project to play with if you are geeky enough, it's something that gives some interesting freedom and mostly of all ownership. and yes. privacy. i'll update more on the future for how this small thing is going, and until next blog post, keep down your firetorches to burn me, and choose next time what to do with me about that topic, either way, take care and be safe!

Homelab Journey - first entry