Kevin Thomas Development

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Home server setup

July 18, 2020

For the past few months, I’ve been interested in switching from a lot of the proprietary cloud services I use to self hosted free and open source alternatives. Back in late June, after a lot of research, I finally bought my first home server to accomplish this. I ended up getting a Dell Poweredge R220 server with the following specs:

  • Intel Xeon E3-1240 V3 8M Cache 3.40 GHz Quad Core (8 Threads)
  • 4x 4gb 10600E DDR3 Memory
  • H310 Raid Controller
  • 2x Brand New 1TB SAS Hard Drives
I bought this server used from Ebay, and got the new hard drives from Newegg (I didn’t know how old the drives that came with the server were, so I wanted to get new ones). I configured the server with:
  • Debian GNU/Linux 10 (Buster)
  • Raid 1 Configuration using the H310 Raid Controller
  • Docker
Here are some of the services I'm currently hosting:
  • Airsonic - music streaming
  • Droppy - file sharing
  • LinuxServer Swag - nginx webserver and reverse proxy
  • Minecraft Server - game server
  • Mumble Server - voice over IP server
  • Nextcloud - file hosting
  • Taskcafe - kanban board
  • Watchtower - automatic docker image updates
  • Wireguard - VPN
Overall this has been a very fun experience. It took a lot of setup, research, trial and error, and troubleshooting, but I’m now at a point where all of these services are working great for me. My skills in server management, Docker, routing, Debian, and security have all increased a huge amount in the last month, so that has been very rewarding. I’m always looking for new useful services to self host, so I’m sure this list will grow over time.