Hello preppers! As I prepare further and further for the digital and traditional collapse of society (/s), I finally got to the point of building my selfhosted server.

At the moment I have a single bay Synology nas but it will soon find a new home (🗑️). I was thinking that instead of buying new tech I can be a conscious human being and recycle my old laptop.

My old MSI PE60 2QD with i7 5th Gen, its a very capable machine and having the battery, I think, is better for a sudden loss of power. I replaced it because the hinge and screen broke but I never thrown it away.

I wanted to wipe it and install some linux distro for selfhosting with, I think, Tailscale for access it remotely. I use it to store file, photos, music …normal cloud stuff.

Before wasting hours troubleshooting, I’m sure there are brilliant people here that can give me tips or a link to a simple guide to follow. (Please don’t make me ask the bots).

I’m sure this thread is already open somewhere and I’ll be happy to follow that and delete this, if so.

Thank you lemmings.

  • Frank Heijkamp@mastodontech.de
    2·
    1 day ago

    @dan00 The specifications of the hardware seems enough to run a couple of VM’s and / or containers. Given you have a reasonable amount of RAM installed.

    The choice of OS and packages depends somewhat on what it is you want to do with it. A headless Debian or Ubuntu install would be an obvious choice. I have Proxmox VE on a little Intel NUC that has some stuff running on it. Other people might choose things like OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS or Unraid.

    Do you already have an idea what you like to do?

    • dan00@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Yes I was thinking something like TrueNas or OMV would do the trick. I feel that a general headless distro could be harder to set up.

      But what about the raid copies for example? Because i need to attach some external storage, is usb okay for this?

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        2·
        23 hours ago

        USB isn’t good for RAID, it’s unstable.

        Do you currently have more than 8 or 12TB of data? Because you can buy drives that size today, no need for RAID under those capacities.

        I recently purchased an 8TB drive for ~$100 on Amazon. Yes, it’s used, but comes with a 3 year warranty. I’m fine with that warranty length, as drives don’t last forever, and I’ll be replacing drives due to growth anyway.

        Don’t overlook RAID 1 - mirroring. With large enough drives this is a viable first step to some redundancy (though it’s really intended more for failover). Simply replicating your data locally to multiple drives, and backing it up offsite should give a lot of redundancy.

        The big challenge with local redundancy is that it’s not backup, so replicated bad changes can wreck all local copies. Backup, however, gives you multiple copies of data and incremental changes (if configured that way).