First, a hardware question. I’m looking for a computer to use as a… router? Louis calls it a router but it’s a computer that is upstream of my whole network and has two ethernet ports. And suggestions on this? Ideal amount or RAM? Ideal processor/speed? I have fiber internet, 10 gbps up and 10 gbps down, so I’m willing to spend a little more on higher bandwidth components. I’m assuming I won’t need a GPU.

Anyways, has anyone had a chance to look at his guide? It’s accompanied by two youtube videos that are about 7 hours each.

I don’t expect to do everything in his guide. I’d like to be able to VPN into my home network and SSH into some of my projects, use Immich, check out Plex or similar, and set up a NAS. Maybe other stuff after that but those are my main interests.

Any advice/links for a beginner are more than welcome.

Edit: thanks for all the info, lots of good stuff here. OpenWRT seems to be the most frequently recommended thing here so I’m looking into that now. Unfortunately my current router/AP (Asus AX6600) is not supported. I was hoping to not have to replace it, it was kinda pricey, I got it when I upgraded to fiber since it can do 6.6gbps. I’m currently looking into devices I can put upstream of my current hardware but I might have to bite the bullet and replace it.

Edit 2: This is looking pretty good right now.

      • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I don’t recommend it unless you just want it for storage or whatever else it does out of the box. It’s basically impossible to tinker with it because it has so many layers of abstraction. At least that was my impression when I tried to edit their nginx config. It had like 2000 lines so I just gave up.

        If you want a server that runs services that you download from the internet, don’t buy it. Look at it as a box that does the thing that it promises to do, not as a computer. If you want it to do a different thing, buy a different box that does that. Kinda like a TV. It’s technically a computer that runs some kind of linux but to the user it’s a monitor that also shows videos from the internet.

        Also it’s perfectly fine to buy a “NAS black box” but maybe not something I’d buy if I wanted to get into selfhosting. I’d buy it if I wanted to have a NAS running at home with the least amount of “self” in “selfhosting” that’s feasable.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    3 months ago

    Just kinda flipped through his guide. It’s a bit dated on knowledge and techniques, even for beginners.

    You don’t need a computer for a router. Get a router that ships with OpenWRT and start there. GL.iNet makes good and affordable stuff. Use that for your ad blocking, VPN, and so on to get started.

    I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

    If you want to run other heavier services, start out with a low-power minipc until you’re settled on what your needs or limitations are. You can get a very capable AMD minipc for $250-300, or an n100 low-power for a bit cheaper. Check out Minisforum units for this. Reliable, good price, and solid warranty.

    If you deal in heavy storage, maybe consider adding a NAS to the mix, but maybe that’s a further steps. OpenWRT is a good starting point just to get your basic network services and remote access up, then just move on from there.

    A good and fun starting point for some people is setting up Home Assistant on a minipc or Raspberry Pi (honestly, the costs of Pi boards now is insane. Might be good just to get the minipc).

    • dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.winEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

      This one was huge for me. OpenVPN is pretty heavy with CPU overhead, where as wireguard is almost free. I was getting throttled due to the overhead of OpenVPN and roasting the CPU on my Netgear R6350 (it’s what I had lying around). With wireguard I get nearly the same speeds as without a VPN and my loads are very reasonable.

      Also with weaker routers like mine, be wary of trying to use QoS, this will probably not help network congestion and instead become a bottleneck (like it did for me). This is where a beefy dedicated router really shines.

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      First, thanks everyone for all the info, glad I posted. It’s a lot to go through.

      OpenWRT is the most frequently recommended thing here, and my router is not supported. I somewhat recently purchased my router (Asus AX6600) when I switched to fiber due to its high bandwidth and I’d prefer to not replace it. I’ll look around and see what options I have for putting a separate device upstream of my current hardware and if that doesn’t work out then maybe I’ll replace my current router.

      I see that you can install openwrt on a switch. Would it make sense to put a switch with openwrt upstream of my current router/AP?

      Edit: dang there’s only 1 switch supported by openwrt that has 10 gbps ports (ZyXEL XGS1250-12)

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      To add to this, don’t buy a server at all, upgrade your desktop! Then use the desktop as a server. Then recycle every desktop for the rest of your life into the new server. Been working for me for decades.

  • mneasi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    This guide seems pretty dated in terms of technologies and approaches used so I wouldn’t follow it 100%.

  • bigDottee@geekroom.techEnglish
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    28 days ago

    I’m not sure if you ever made your way to following through with this… But the three node system isn’t a bad starting point. However, here’s how I would approach it (similar to how I actually got my start in homelabs and how I do things now)

    1 system for your router (looks like you picked a Qotom unit, those are decent), 8-16 gb ram

    1 system for proxmox virtualization… run all your services in LXC’s or Virtual machines, as much ram as you can get a get for your system

    And 1 system dedicated to storage (truenas or unraid), 32gb ECC ram (personal preference but not necessarily needed even with zfs for home use)

    I’d start at https://reddit.com/r/homelab … but since we’re on Lemmy, I’d rather suggest posting on !homelab@geekroom.tech (new, but looking to gain traction)

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Just glancing through that guide:

    OPNsense instead of Pfsense, because pfsense is going to rugpull, it’s just a matter of time. I wouldn’t trust the twats that run it farther than I could throw them because they’re pretty silly people. Rossman suggests exactly this in the intro to the router section, he would change if he hadn’t been using it for a decade already. Unfortunately, a lot of this guide is focussed on how to do it via pfsense and if you’re brand new, you’re going to have to figure out how to do it in OPNsense yourself.

    Wireguard/Tailscale instead of openvpn. Faster and way easier to set up. Don’t even try to set up a full LAN routed VPN, just use Tailscale for the services you want. And use it for everything and everyone instead of punching holes in the firewall.

    He’s definitely right about mailcow; if you’re reading that guide for information, you are not a person that should be self-hosting email.

  • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I would not look at his guide. If you’ve watched any of Louis’ videos, you already know this guy is a ranting machine. He can go on and on for hours about things. I watched about 15 minutes of his rambling and realized he had gotten basically nowhere. It’s also one of the more complex ways of doing things. Use ZimaOS to get started with the easy button.

    Stick with whatever router you have, for starters. You can upgrade later. You don’t necessarily need that at all.

    For the actual server I highly recommend this guy. N100 is very common due to being very inexpensive and efficient. You’ll have to add RAM and an SSDs but you probably want to choose exactly how large that is anyway. It has 4xNVMe and 2xSATA, if you decide you want to expand later.

  • net00@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    There’s a million ways to do anything when self hosting, so I’ll just talk about what I have and if you interested just reply.

    I only host a few services for now: Invidious, CloudTube, Redlib, FreshRSS. All of them as docker containers, this helps in quickly updating them and isolating their configurations. I have a few TB of disk space on the server itself that I can access through SMB3 shares, so I don’t have a proper NAS yet. Probably will do so at some point when I need it.

    As for hardware, I’m using an HP mini-pc with

    • Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE
    • 16GB DDR4
    • 256GB boot drive (NVME), 2TB storage drive (HDD)

    This mini-pc can literally be opened by removing 1 screw, so hardware changes/cleaning can’t get easier. I installed Debian on it

    As for remote access, I use twingate instead of self-hosted wireguard. Mostly because I’m using my ISPs router and they like to reset it whenever they want. I’m also not confortable opening ports on the router. Twingate covers my use case completely so I never went back to this. I can map a custom domain to the server’s IP and this meant I just switch on twingate when I’m out and can access it seamlessly.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I wouldn’t trust his guides personally. He has some hot takes and more importantly he isn’t someone who really knows the Homelab/self hosting landscape.

    If you are looking for guides I would find channels that have done series on whatever you are interested in there is plenty of quality material.

    To start off here is what I would do.

    First, get a wireless router that is capable of running OpenWRT and then get a switch to accompany it.

    Next go to eBay and buy 3 used workstations. They don’t need to be fancy and you can always upgrade them later. You need 3 for later.

    Next find some storage. You can find decent Sata SSDs for pretty cheap. If you are looking to store something bigger like a movie collection also pickup some larger drives. With the extra drives make sure you buy a sata or SAS pcie card. This is because you need a dedicated controller to passthough to a VM.

    Once you have all that you can start installing Proxmox. You probably want a raid 1 configuration so that you can replace a disk without downtime. The reason I say three devices is because you need 3 machines to get consensus in the cluster. When consensus is lost affected devices go into what is called fencing which is where it freezes all VMs and operations to prevent split brain from happening.

    Technically this is probably a bit overkill but I like having a solid base for experimentation and flexibility. Doing it right from the get go will mean that you have more power down the road.

    For actually hosting stuff I would use docker compose inside a VM.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        Proxmox is a great starting point for self hosting. You don’t need advanced features to start, and you can easily create VMs and containers.

      • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Proxmox is nice for beginners. This is a nice tutorial: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo

        Proxmox has nice UI for managing Linux Containers (LXC). They act like a computer inside a computer with the advantage that you can clone them. So you can basically save and load them whenever you succeed or fail at something. Proxmox also allows you to install Turnkey Linux containers which have the software you want to run preconfigured in them so that’s also good for beginners.

        Only downside is that this is not declarative so it won’t be as scalable as docker or nix. It might be more worth it to learn docker from the beginning but that would also be less friendly for a beginner.