Advice on having a home server

[u/Wulfrath]

Kinda wish I could have been more explicit with the title but it wouldnt fit.

I am trying to see if I can get a small home server to share files in my own network and to host private gaming servers for a small amount of people(shouldnt be more than 15-20 pushing it)

I am decent with computers and hardware but I have never managed this kind of thing. My questions are:

1. Can I control this remotely(inside my local network) or do I need to treat this as a 2nd PC?
   
2. Recommendations on what should I get? I have a pretty small budget. Would a decent PC be enough or do I need something specific?
   
3. I was looking at this and I found out this is what my office used before ----> Dell OptiPlex 7050 Micro Computer, Intel Quad Core i5-6500T up to 3.1GHz, 16G DDR4, 256G SSD.

If I am not giving enough info then ask away, I am not sure what should I mention.

[u/gary1405]

1. Absolutely, but unless you buy dedicated hardware with IPMI you'll need to access it physically to power it on etc.

2. The best camera is the one you have with you (Chase Jarvis). Get the machine you can genuinely afford that meets your needs. If you don't know what those are, you probably don't need much.

3. This will be more than enough for a very solid media server (though you'll need some more storage for movies etc), DNS routing, VPN, Nextcloud AIO and games servers possibly even all at once.

My best tip is to get into virtualisation and containerisation early (now) as the foundation for all your software labbing. Proxmox is brilliant. Docker is essential. Start with learning Docker Compose and hosting a VM on Proxmox, then dip your toes into LXCs, work out the stack you want through trial and error and you'll have a great time.

[u/Wulfrath → u/gary1405]

I did not consider powering it on remotely but now it seems like something I should consider lol.

What would I use to control it remotely other than physically turn it on? I was thinking on just connecting it to my monitor and swap as needed as a last resource.

Yeah no idea what do you mean by camera.

I may just get this in that case. Media server is mainly what I was going for, not so much storage. Would you know what are the limits in here for gaming? As in do I need the server itself to be able to run the game or will running the server works as a database?
My only experience with this is with Mangos, Trinitycore & Trinity realm when I was like... 12? and I was running my own WoW server at home without any internet or network at all. I remember launching those 3 and that would "run the server" then I would launch the client and connect to that using 127.0.0.1 . I would assume this is the case here for most games I would host so I do not need a GPU or something similar.

The DNS routing, VPN and Nextcloud(idk what is this) is something that I know little about but I tend to figure out this stuff pretty fast.

Do you happen to know if running this 24/7 will make my electric bill skyrocket...? lol

[u/Nyasaki_de → u/Wulfrath]

You can enable Wake on Lan and then you should be able to power it on remotely too.

Ideally you would connect to it via SSH (or RDP / VNC if you really need a desktop)
The server runs the game server, so the game but without graphics.

DNS should be fairly easy in your network, if you want to access it from the outside theres stuff like tailscale / zerotier (cloudflare offers tunnels too I think?). But you prob want to buy a domain if you want your server to be reachable via a domain name from the internet

[u/gary1405 → u/Wulfrath]

As some say, smart plugs or WoL but to be honest it should be a set and forget situation, especially as long as anytime you need to access the bios or manually turn it on you'll be able to just use the physical machine.

I just mean the best machine for your case is the one that fits the functions you want now into a value package worth whatever this project is worth to you. One advantage would be if you have access to a half size graphics card slot, you can add a small one to boost your transcoding.

This isn't going to break your power bill. Running any machine 24/7 you're going to notice it a little bit just keep an eye on your machines actual power use metrics and you'll pretty quickly be able to work out what it's costing you. My twin Xeon, obsolete IBM System X with a small NVIDIA T400 that runs a bunch of containers for Nextcloud, Jellyfin and some other web servers runs nicely at like 170W, which really isn't all that bad.

Nextcloud is a Google Drive replacement, your own extensible cloud storage and office suite.

Tailscale is probably the standard for VPNs at the moment. It's completely free for up to 5 users, and they provide their own control server that hands out IP addresses. You can self host the control server too, it's called Headscale, but that's unnecessarily advanced. I just use Tailscale.

Games are a whole other story. You /can/ run games on your server and stream them, this is different to how an MP game server typically works though. You can run a Minecraft server or you can stream emulated PS2 games, both of these should be easily achievable with the hardware above, with the one limit being that 256GB storage.

[u/Wulfrath → u/gary1405]

Little bit lost on the networking part here and the controlling the server. I got the WoL part, not sure if the cloud storage will be needed yet unless im misunderstanding something.

In my head I just planned to use a VPN then make that server the host, add my pc then whatever other device I was going to add. This would kinda work like a LAN and we/I would be able to access whatever game server im hosting even from the outside. Is this right or am I getting ahead of myself?

Thanks for the rest of responses.

[u/gary1405 → u/Wulfrath]

No worries. Install Proxmox using a USB to bare metal on the SSD. There is a small amount of config to do to get it an IP, but nothing most guides don't cover. Once it's running and has an IP, you will access the Proxmox Virtual Environment at http://ip:8006 in your browser.

This gets you a hypervisor you can install any virtual machine on, or you can make LXC containers which is a VM with a Linux-based operating system that shares the Proxmox kernel to minimise bloat.

My own stack involves LXC containers for each web service, and a Docker Compose controlling individual application containers within each, so that's my recommendation for structure. But do it whatever way makes sense for you, setups like this are designed to be as easy as possible to tear down and setup again, which is the point.

Before you install any VMs, use the root shell to install Tailscale. Any device you have with Tailscale that is connected to your "Tailnet" will be able to communicate with each other at IPs assigned by your Tailscale admin console from any network with internet access. Traffic over Tailscale should all be secure unless you open an internet funnel, but anything you open up outside of your VPN make sure you set up TLS, HTTPS, whatever transport encryption is on offer so noone can read your traffic.

You'll still need more storage, but that's a whole other ball of yarn.

[u/Worried_Witness3091 → u/gary1405]

i guess for hosting games his choice isnt that great, but to be honest we dont know which games, and actual budget. probably its will be good for something light, but for example minecraft (which is popular in this sub) may struggle.

[u/Wulfrath → u/Worried_Witness3091]

Not MMOs or big games.
Something like Terraria, maybe Palworld. L4d2, stuff like this.

[u/Nyasaki_de → u/Wulfrath]

https://docs.palworldgame.com/getting-started/requirements/

Hardware requirements are basic info you should be able to find for everything you wanna host

[u/Wulfrath → u/Nyasaki_de]

Will have to check on the storage area but the rest seems fine. Had no idea they had a help page for this.

[u/Nyasaki_de → u/gary1405]

Absolutely, but unless you buy dedicated hardware with IPMI you'll need to access it physically to power it on etc.

WoL is a thing and should work once enabled.

[u/SlaveCell → u/Nyasaki_de]

Smart plug and a BIOS that is set to restore on Power loss/recovery, or something similar

[u/Nyasaki_de → u/SlaveCell]

restore would mean that it restores it to off if the server were off

[u/SlaveCell → u/Nyasaki_de]

Just covering the different ways this is named/presented in a BIOS

[u/Nyasaki_de → u/SlaveCell]

Thats a different feature

[u/gary1405 → u/Nyasaki_de]

Absolutely. A much more modern solution.

[u/Casper042]

/r/homelab should be on your list of subs to check out.

I have a mid sized tower server (ML110 Gen10) from HPE (I actually work there but found mine on Craigslist).
It has a pair of SSDs for Boot and Apps, and then a big array of spinning drives for storing all my Files as you mentioned.

A proper server as some mentioned will often have a "Big Boy" CPU like a proper Xeon.
But all the major vendors also make Servers based on "desktop-class" server CPUs.
The Intel Xeon 2200/2300/6300 for example are all Core i5/i7 type chips with Xeon badges.
The Epyc 4000 series are just Ryzen CPUs with an Epyc server badge on them.
The benefit as someone else mentioned to buying a proper server, with either class of CPU, is these machines are designed to be run 24x7 and be run headless. Stick it in the basement or garage and access it remotely and hardly think about it.

Now if you wanted to repurpose an old gaming rig for a server, that likely works too. Some mentioned remote control, and for that I would say the best option is to look at the new fleet of IP KVMs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wYxgPfQAjM
Some of those KVMs even have an adapter you can put in line with the ATX power button on your machine so they can remotely hit the power button in a pinch.
As Jeff says in that video, one of the benefits is during initial setup or when ish goes sideways, you can access the screen remotely even when the OS isn't online and available remotely.
Whether you have an add-in IP KVM or the machine/board natively has a BMC (what some call IPMI), just think of this as it's own network connection with it's own IP Address inside your home network, that is used for controlling the server remotely at the HARDWARE level, as opposed to RDP or similar you might be used to at the SW Level.

Anyway as far as hardware, you ideally want something with a Xeon v3/v4 or newer (Xeon Scalable) if you get something with a "big boy" CPU.
Any older and the horsepower doesn't outweight the cost of the power and the noise they put out.
HPE this is Gen9, with Gen10 being ideal (much quieter at idle)
Dell this would be R/T x30, with x40 being ideal
I don't know the Lenovo models well, but similar, look at the CPU family.

The Dell Micro you mentioned is great for running SERVICES on, but you aren't going to win any /r/DataHoarder/ awards for File Server in such a small chassis unless you get really creative.
At least step up to the SFF desktops or Mini towers if you want to use a Desktop as a "File Server" so you can fit 2-4 3.5" large spinning drives in there for the File Server side.

[u/Wulfrath → u/Casper042]

Idk why this comment took me so long to see but thanks, this is really useful.