Home Servers Have NEVER Been This Easy: CasaOS + ZimaBoard

Netflix and Google aren’t your friends they just want your money and your data and that goes for just about every other Corporation out there but the good news is that you don’t have to rely on services like Google Drive Netflix or Alexa for everything in a matter of just

Minutes I’m going to show you how to set up a super simple Home Server that you can use to store files stream media automate your home and much more oh and even host your own VPN so that you can securely access all of those services from anywhere in the world let’s get started Trying to sell your products or services online can be tricky and I know this because I recently went through the process of trying to set up an online store for some Hardware Haven merch and it was daunting to say the least fortunately there’s Squarespace the sponsor of today’s video Squarespace

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To get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain so what are you waiting for start selling with Squarespace today so why should you have a server at all well like I mentioned a minute ago it’s a good way to distance yourself from greedy data hungry companies and it can

Even save you money by not paying for some of the services they offer like Google Drive for example there are also a lot of Handy things you can do with a simple server like this such as running home assistant to easily control and automate your smart home devices or

Streaming your personal movie collection to TVs media players and phones using something like jellyfin and if you’re just a nerd like me it can also just be a lot of fun but if you’re new to something like this I’ll admit that it can be a bit intimidating and stressful

Fortunately I found what might literally be the easiest way to self-host your own Services by using something called Casa OS Casa OS simplifies a lot of the more complicated stuff and lets you just focus on getting your apps and services up and running quickly to be fair it’s

Not the best platform for everything there are great Alternatives like open media Vault or unraid for example that offer a lot more features and control but come at the cost of being a bit more complex to set up Casa OS is free to use and Incredibly simple and you can run it

On pretty much any PC or even a Raspberry Pi because it’s not actually an operating system it’s just an application layer that runs on top of something like Debian Linux and a handful of other Linux distros and if all that Linux talk just made you really

Nervous no worries you can just pick up one of these Zima boards which come pre-installed with Debian and Casa OS so it’s literally ready to go out of the box you can just plug it into your network and the server is up and running in seconds pretty cool the zema board is

A bit more expensive than other options like using an old desktop that you stored away in a closet or something but it takes up almost no space and consumes only around 6 Watts or so at idle that’s less than a standard LED light bulb meaning in the long run you might

Actually save money if your electricity is a bit more on the expensive side I’m going to be doing this tutorial with the Zima board but if you want to use a different PC all you need to do is look up how to install Debian 11 or raspberry

Pios if you use a Raspberry Pi and then you’ll need to run a few simple commands but I’ll have some information on that down in the description if you’re interested you’ll also need an ethernet cable and access to your router or switch because you will absolutely want to run this

Wired as running a server over Wi-Fi isn’t nearly as fast or reliable and lastly you might want to have a spare hard drive or two because the zema board only has 32 gigabytes of onboard storage I’m going to use a couple of these two terabyte two and a half inch drives but

You can pretty much use whatever makes sense for you with the zema board you can connect drives via SATA but it can look a little messy so today I’m actually going to be using this dual two and a half inch USB drive enclosure because well it looks better and it’s a

Lot of fun to pop out and pop back in I will have an Amazon affiliate link for this in the description if you’re interested now USB can be a little bit less reliable than SATA but we’re not running anything Mission critical here so I’m just going to roll with it you

Can use any typical external hard drive but you might want to consider having two drives but we can talk about that later with all of the hardware ready to go you can plug this soon to be server into any open Lan port on your router or in my

Case just a network switch and then power it on and that’s it now we can head over to the web browser and start setting things up okay so now that we’ve got it plugged in let’s go ahead and head over to our web browser where we can type in Casa OS dot local

And hit enter and hopefully this should pop up if this doesn’t pop up for you then you’ll need to type in your IP address and that can be a little tricky to get to you can either plug in a keyboard Monitor and mouse and then go to the desktop of

Debian or Casa OS Debian and in the network settings you can find where your IP address is or you can also if you know how to access your router settings you can go into your router settings so for me I use a thing called pfSense and

I can go into my DHCP server settings and see a Client List and so here I can actually see that my IP address is 192.168.10.187 but that’s going to be different depending on your router so you may just have to look up how to see DHCP clients in your router and then

Look for the name Casa OS so I can actually type in this as well into my browser and we can see that we also got to the casa OS web UI like that usually though this Casa os.local works just fine all right so to get started we’ll hit go

And you can create a username this can be whatever you want it to be so I’m going to say haven and then just a password that you can remember and then you can accept this news feed from the casa OS blog which I’m going to

Go ahead and hit accept that way I can see when there’s updates because they seem to be updating the software somewhat consistently okay and now we’re in our casa OS dashboard which is pretty awesome there’s a lot of cool things here let’s just take a quick look around

So we have some time we have a search bar we have a few little update things that pop up here we have our apps which we don’t really have much going on but we’ll add some more in a bit and then we have storage which I don’t have my USB

Drives plugged in just yet but we’ll do that here in a second and then we can see some network settings so I’m using this second interface that’s enp3 so we can see our Network usage and yeah it’s pretty cool up here at the top of the

Left we have an account button so we can see my Haven user I can go in and change my name and my password under settings we have a few things here and you’ll probably if you’re using USB storage want to make sure that this unmount USB drive is checked this is

Where you can also update if there’s new updates to cos OS right now I’m on version 0.4.3 obviously and this last tab here lets us see logs so this don’t let this freak you out this is just maybe if you need to troubleshoot this could be helpful

And then we do have access to the terminal and it gets a little confusing because we we created our Haven user or whatever your username was and that is for the the web UI but for the actual underlying operating system that’s behind all this which is Debian in this case uh there’s

Different users for that and so in this case we’re actually going to type in the username Casa OS and then password same thing and this is the default user on Casa OS especially if you’re using the zema board and so now we’re actually in the command line and trust me we won’t

Have to do a whole lot here but I do want to do at least one thing which is change the password to the cost OS user because if someone gets a hold of the server somehow and they see that everything says Casa OS they’re going to

Know how to sign in as this user and maybe do some nefarious things so we can just type in sudo s-u-d-o and then pass WD and then Casa OS and then we’re going to type in our old password which is just Casa OS and then let’s type in a new password and you

Won’t be able to see this but that’s fine and now it’s updated so remember that password because we’re going to need that in the future for things but that is our Linux user account that costs OS and then our Haven user is a little bit different that’s just for

Getting to this web UI okay how about let’s set up our storage I’m going to plug in my two drives really quick give me just one second okay so USB can be a little bit finicky so be ready for that if you have the option to install via SATA and you don’t

Mind it looking a little weird I would do that but we do see these two drives that just popped up and that is a great sign if this doesn’t happen try restarting your system first and if it still doesn’t work then maybe try plugging those drives into a

Different computer and like you know reformat the drive to a single partition and then try plugging it in again but now we can see we have these two Western Digital drives and if we click this little settings icon here we see that we have these two storage drives and I’m going to hit

Format here and that’s just going to take away this x fat partition that I already had and replace it with ext4 just to make sure everything’s all the same and here this password is going to be the password that we used for our web UI user so that’s Haven in my example

So this drive will get formatted really quick sweet so we have our two terabyte one here and then here I’m going to format this one as well doing the same thing now while this is formatting I do want to talk about raid because that is one huge downside to using something like

Casa OS normally when you’d have like a storage Server Like A Nas or something like that to save all your files over the network you typically want to set it up in a raid array or a redundant array of independent disks basically it usually gives you either a benefit in

Speed by combining multiple disks or usually the main goal is for redundancy so if one drive fails you don’t lose your data unfortunately Casa OS doesn’t currently offer that but it’s supposed to be coming in an update According to some responses on their GitHub but for now we’re just going to run these

Independent disks and I’m going to show you a way that you can do some backups from one to the other one in a kind of weird way but it will work there is this merge storages here but I don’t recommend oh oh I just clicked it okay

Got nervous I don’t recommend doing this a they’re currently testing it at least in the version I’m in and also I don’t entirely know how it’ll work in terms of if you lose one of the drives but you merged all of them into one big virtual disk do you lose everything on

That virtual disk or or not so I would just keep them as separate drives for now but cool so we have our drives mounted we have them formatted if we head over into files we can actually see we do have um this is the root directory on our

Built-in storage on the Zima board and so we have a whole lot of folders here including this data folder that already has some pre-generated folders that we’re not really going to use because there’s not a whole lot of storage on this and then it also has a documents

Downloads Gallery media we’re not really going to use those just because it’s not a whole lot of storage on this we’re going to primarily rely on our external drives so under this two terabyte one they’re kind of out of order which is a little Annoying um but under this one I’m going to

Create a folder and I’m going to call this Casa share and I could hit this shared thing right here but I’m going to hit submit just in case you ever want to share a folder that you’ve already made and so I’m going to go back to this folder and hit

Share and we’re going to set up a network share so that we can save read delete files on this drive from anywhere on our Network which is pretty cool and it’s already set up because it does this really quickly and easily like I said Casa OS takes a lot of the complexity

Out of setting up something like SMB it just sort of does it for you which is good and bad but for someone who’s just wanting to get started it’s great so right here we can see PC Windows Explorer I can copy this or just click this button and then in our file

Explorer I’m just going to paste this really quick and you might get a prompt here to type in a username and password and you can just type in the casa OS username and password not the web UI I think I could be getting that wrong I can’t remember

Because I was doing some testing it automatically is signing me in now that I’m I’m on here I’m realizing that so you may get a prompt for username and password you just may need to authenticate that before you can connect to it but now I’m actually on this Casa

Os.local and let’s say I actually I don’t have to type that in every time what I can do I could go down to this network Tab and you know I have a few other things here I can go to this os.local I can also go to network oh

Sorry nope I go to this PC ignore all of this mess I can go to map network drive and I’m going to call this I don’t know why I’m picking s costs uh I guess and then I’m going to paste that same Casa os.local slash casashare into there and

I’m going to connect using different credentials hit finish and then here I’m going to type in okay so it is the web user password I just typed in the wrong one because I’m silly and now I can basically access this like it’s a drive on my computer

Almost like it’s it’s mounted and I can just go to disk s and now I’m on my casa share folder so anything I put in here will show up in that folder on the web UI but will also show up for any other users that are connected to this network share

So I’m actually going to paste over a video really quick it’s a short video and that took no time at all but I can actually pull this up and this is a YouTube short I made a while back and it’s playing off of our server just fine I can actually minimize this

Go back to the web UI and under Casa share I can see that we have our video right here and I can even play it in the web browser and that’s pretty cool it lets us move files to and from our server or share them with other people and uh you might

Not find this as interesting as I do so let’s maybe move on to something more fun but before we do that if you’re liking this video If you find this helpful maybe give me a like as that helps a lot and also consider subscribing if you want to see some more

But now let’s move into something more fun like home assistant so if we go back to the web UI we can go to the App Store and oh it’s right there right on the front page we can hit oh okay went away oops uh it’s right here as well we can

Just hit install and this is actually using what’s called Docker which is sort of like taking almost an entire operating system of a computer or an application and kind of running in its own little self-contained environment it’s hard to explain I’m not going to go

Way into it but it’s kind of like a little bundled up application that has its own like storage its own files its own everything but is used to usually run like one specific application or service so in this case we’re actually using the Linux server.io image of Home

Assistant which we can actually even go there so on the Linux server.io page which is sort of like a Community Driven collection of Docker containers or Docker images we can find home assistant and click on it and here’s all the information if you were going to set

This up on your own you could look into all this and see all the different parameters but once again Casa OS kind of makes this easy for us we can just go here and it’s already set up and running and we can if we go to settings we can

See that it plugged in a lot of this information for us it went and got the image for the stalker container and you gave it a name set up the port for the web UI and a bunch of other configuration down here so we don’t have

To do that it does it for us which is really cool now you could really quick America Chicago is my time zone but you could change this to America whatever or Europe London or whatever you want to change it to I’m going to leave it as that because it’s actually correct and

Just hit X really quick and if we click on this it’s going to open up a new tab and we’re in home assistant if this doesn’t open up right away just give it a few more minutes it has some setup it has to do but we can set up home

Assistant I’m going to type in a username and a password and I’m not going to get super into detail here about how home assistant works because this isn’t really what this video is there’s a lot of great tutorials that you can find and yeah I’m just going to

Get this set up really quick and kind of show you a little bit of what you can do with it yeah we use home assistant all the time to automate a lot of our smart devices in our house as you can see a lot of them popped up here already that

I might be blurring them out because there’s some confidential stuff and then once we’re in I’m gonna go to settings I’m going to delete a lot of these that it automatically found because I like I said I’m gonna have to blur this out give me just a second

Okay so I ignored a lot of these really quick just so I could get to to here because these are actually the two smart bulbs that are in this studio right now so we can hit configure on for example the studio lamp it’s actually the lamp right over there let’s submit

Uh it’s already labeled in the lifx app so I’ll just hit finish and then same here for the backlight that’s the one behind my desk cool so now if I go to overview I can actually go grab this lamp and change it it’s pretty cool

So I’m not going to go crazy with home assistant you can do a lot of configuring this dashboard here and then get it set up in your phone to use like an app on your phone to control lots of things we control mostly lights but you

Know we have Smart switches for our fans we have our thermostat on here so we can set schedules and automations we can even have motion detection from my cameras to like turn lights on if there’s Motion in certain areas so it’s really really cool and you can really

Dive into it or you can just set up some simple things because you know you don’t want to necessarily have Google or Amazon be in charge of all of your light switches but that’s about it home assistant is super cool we can just exit out of that and we’re back on our

Dashboard okay uh so we have some home automation going on what about streaming some movies and shows and things like that well I’m not going to show you how to get those movies and shows I do have a video you can watch here where I set

Up a server that can rip Blu-rays and DVDs and then transcode those files and stream them but you can also do something very similar to that with make MKV and a Blu-ray disc reader and rip your own Blu-rays or you can find movies and shows in other ways that I’m not

Going to talk about right now but however you get a hold of the files for your shows and movies it’d be cool to have a nice way to stream them and so we’re going to do that with a thing called jellyfin so let’s get into it

Same as before we’re going to go back to the App Store and then find a jelly Fin and hit install we’re going to hit continue in the background really quick and start setting up some files so I’m going to go in here to our casa share folder and create a new

Folder called jelly and then inside that folder I’m going to make two more folders one called movies and one called shows and then under movies I’m actually going to upload a file really quick and now I’m doing this from the web UI but I could also just drag this in Via

Explorer with our SMB share that we set up earlier but I’m going to upload knives out really quick and that is a big upload so we’ll probably have to leave that running for a little bit in the background and then under shows I’m going to upload another file

Actually I’m going to upload a folder I have this folder here the office us that has the first season of the office now while this is uploading we can go back to jelly fan and we see we have this new container here it’s all good to go but we’re going to make some

Tweaks this time so if I go here and go to settings we’re actually going to make a few little changes so the first thing we’re going to do is where it says volumes these are mapped volumes so basically storage on our server like our Zima board for example

Here we can map a destination to a folder within the container that way anything that’s on you know let’s say within that jelly folder on our machine also shows up in a jelly folder inside the jelly fin container it’ll make more sense once we do it let’s just hit add

And then here normally you could click this button and get to folders but with USB mounted drives it doesn’t work that way so we’re going to have to click cancel and I’m actually just going to make a new I’m just going to duplicate this Casa OS tab go to files

Go to our casa share jelly and I’m going to copy the path here and then back here I’m going to paste this path because it’s going to be a pretty big path and in the container we’re just going to do slash jelly and that’ll make sense here in just a little bit

We also want to go down here to devices and click add and then type in slash Dev slash dri and we can copy all of that then paste it to The Container side and what that’s going to do is give the container access to the hardware acceleration on the Intel chip inside

The zema board because that CPU has what’s called quick sync or it’s Hardware that’s dedicated towards transcoding video which okay why would you want to transcode video well let’s say we have a 4K movie or we have a 1080p movie but it’s HDR and that’s not really supported over a certain client

Maybe a media player doesn’t support certain codecs or certain resolutions or maybe it’s just your streaming from a Cellular Connection and you want it to be a much lower bitrate stream well you’re going to have to take that big video file and transcode it into a much smaller video stream and

That can be pretty taxing on the CPU but if we have dedicated Hardware transcoding it can be offloaded to that and it just works a lot better so I’m going to show you that in action here in a second but all we have to do is map

This device this slash Dev dri hit save and let’s see I’m curious how our file uploads are going all right we still got quite a ways so I’m going to take a quick break and I’ll come right back once this is all uploaded so I’ll see in just a little bit

Okay so I actually just found that it was faster to transfer the files directly over the SMB share the network share just using Windows Explorer so I copied it over we can actually see we’re in our casa OS share our casa share and then there’s the folder jelly and under

Shows we have the office season one and then under movies we have knives out so back in Casa OS we can go ahead and head to This jellyfin Server hit next and I’m just going to do a username of Haven and oh gosh Haven and no password

And then now we’re going to add some media libraries and this is where it was helpful that we passed that jelly volume Mount because we can select jelly and then movies and then up here content type movies display name movies hit okay and then we’ll do another one for shows

So content type shows folder jelly shows and now we can hit next next finish and then we’ll sign in as Haven no password and this may take a little bit to scan all of this stuff but we can hopefully go to shows really quick and see the office

And I can just go ahead and play an episode and it’s playing just fine because this is actually a DVD quality video so if I go to playback info we’ll see it’s doing what’s called direct playing which means it’s streaming the full stream the full file

Over the network but what happens if we go back to something like Knives Out which is only 1080p but it’s HDR 10. and that may have some issues depending on the the player you’re watching it back on okay so we can see just starting this it’s pretty choppy

And if I go here to playback info we can see why it’s because it’s transcoding because the video as a range type is not supported which is something you’ll see fairly often and so it’s having to transcode on the CPU and if I actually drag this

Window in here you can see in cos OS the CPU is just getting slammed by jellyfin so how can we fix that well we passed through that slash Dev dri device earlier so we can go to home or actually this little hamburger menu Administration dashboard and then playback

And then here where it says Hardware acceleration we’re going to say Intel quick sync and then we’re going to enable for h.264 and hevc and scroll all the way down to the bottom and hit save now this should work for the zema board depending on the system you’re using if

It’s not a zema board it may be a little bit different so you’ll have to look up the CPU or the graphics card you have in that system and see if it supports hardware transcoding and like what the settings are so now if I go back to movies and I try

Playing Knives Out it still takes a second to load because it’s a really really big file but we see it’s playing back much more smoothly even though we still are transcoding so I can go for example skip ahead it’s going to take a second just because it’s a once again it’s a

Big file but it’s playing back pretty smoothly and if I pull up Casa OS again we see our CPU is down at 17 so the hardware transcoding is working perfectly and that is that is great well what can we do now there’s a lot of things there’s a

In the built-in App Store here there’s not a ton but there’s a good amount of things like Photo prism is sort of like a Google photos ish kind of thing it lets you save photos and organize them by like what they are they can do like facial recognition and stuff

Which is pretty cool um there’s a whole lot of other stuff in here but we’re going to solve two problems that you might already be thinking of which is okay you talked about not having raid earlier how do I make sure I don’t lose my data if a drive fails and

Then also what happens if I want to install something and it’s not in this app store what do I do well let’s tackle the first one and to do that we’re going to use a thing called duplicati but I’m going to hit install while it’s running in the background

We’ll go to files and we’re going to go to our second drive here and I’m going to create a folder and call this casa duplicati and hit submit and then we’ll go back to here and we’ll see it’s installing still so we’ll give it just a second all right

It’s installed but once again we’re going to make some tweaks so let’s go to settings and then down here once again we’re going to change the volume mounts or we’re just going to add one so we’re going to hit add and once again we’re going to need to grab some paths

So let’s go to files and we’re going to copy this Casa duplicate we made paste the path there and we’re going to call this Casa duplicate make a new one and then here we’re going to go grab just our whole Casa share copy the path there paste it and we’ll call this

Casa share and what we’re doing is we’re giving this duplicati image access to those two folders so that we can make backups of this Casa share to Casa duplicate and we can also make backups of cost to share to Google Drive or backblaze B2 storage or something like that in the cloud

So yeah one thing we need to make a few tweaks here I learned this the hard way when I was testing things around by default this Linux server.io image sets the user ID and group ID is 1000 that’s to make sure it’s not root so this thing

Can’t do anything sketchy we’re going to need to set it to root to be able to have the right permissions easily at least to save backups onto our local storage and then I’m going to change my time zone to America Chicago and then that should

Be it we can hit save and it will take a little bit for the container to spin back up so we’ll just give it a minute okay and then we can hit duplicati and we get this first run setup if your machine is in a multi-user environment

You need to set a password to prevent other users from accessing the data we could I’m not going to worry about it because for the most part people aren’t going to access this unless they have the password to our web UI for Casa OS so I’m just going to hit no but if

You’re worried about any of that sort of stuff or if your data’s really confidential you might hit yes and do a password you can always go back in here and add one in settings later too but I’m going to go to add backup and we’re just going to do a local backup

First so I’m going to say configure a new backup and we’ll call this Casa local and I’m not going to encrypt this um it’s really not that big of a deal for local storage anyway if you’re doing this to the cloud you might want to

Encrypt it but I don’t want to have to type in another password so we’ll hit next and now destination is where we want to save these volumes to so I’m just going to hit Casa duplicati it’s a little weird you can hit manually type path

Here just to make sure that it shows up and we shouldn’t have to use a username or password because we already have permissions and everything so we’ll hit test connection connection worked because it’s local storage we’ll hit next and then this is where we’re going to copy everything from and so we’re just

Going to go to computer casashare and then normally I would just select cost to share but this is going to be a really big backup if I do that and it’s going to take a while so for the sake of this video I’m actually going to cheat and I’m just going to

Select this one file here but I would select this whole Casa share then hit next and here you can set up a schedule so you can say I want to run instead of 1pm let’s maybe change it to 1am and then it’s going to start tomorrow

1am and it’s going to run every day and these are the allowed days you can set up a custom schedule because this will take up some CPU because the way duplicate works is it actually takes your files and compresses them almost into like zip files um so you can’t just access the backup

Directly you’d have to recover it using duplicati but that helps save storage and save transfers if you’re doing it over a cloud connection and so it does take some CPU so you may not want to run all of these days or a certain time when you may be you know running this with

Something else that needs a CPU resources so you can think that through on your own I’m just going to hit next and then remote volume size really just don’t set this above one gigabyte um this is a little tricky to explain you can click this link to see some more

Information I’m just going to save this as 500 megabytes and then backup retention we don’t want to keep them all so for me I’m just going to say delete backups that are older than one month and then hit save and then now we have this here and it

Looks like it’s going to go ahead and run it on its own and there it goes it ran a whole backup and if we go to our files we’ll see that we have our casa share but then under Casa duplicati we have these little volumes here and these

Aren’t super helpful on their own but if you go back to duplicati and go to restore you can say restore from backup files or just costs a local actually hit next you can pick which backup you want to use and then you could say you know let’s say I accidentally delete

This file let me go back to my casa share I’m going to delete this short so it’s not in here anymore let’s go back to restore from Casa local okay and I just want to restore this single file because it’s the only file on there and I’m going to say original location

How do you want to handle existing files you could do different versions we don’t have one because I just deleted it and then yeah we’ll do restore read and write permission I’ll just leave that off but we’ll hit restore this will take a second because it does have to

Decompress those volumes that it saved and then now it says successfully restored and if we go back we see haha our file is there so if you save your whole share to this if something happens to drive one that has all of your data

On it but drive 2 is still okay you can pull up duplicate and grab those files and restore them back to a replacement drive if you put another two terabyte drive in there so pretty cool you could also just I don’t want this video to get too long but you could do a

Cloud backup which I highly recommend because yeah having a backup on a drive sitting right next to the other Drive is great but what if that USB enclosure you know wigs out and Fries both of the drives well then you’re in trouble so you could do an off-site backup and you

Could do a lot of different things I’m going to call this cloud or Casa cloud and then I would recommend encrypting this so yeah I might as well just put a quick password on here strength is useless um yeah and then storage type we can click any one of these these things over

Here so you could use like Amazon S3 storage you could do SFTP server or you could go something like Google Drive Dropbox whatever you want I recommend B2 cloud storage it’s a great option because it’s pretty affordable um yeah I you know I said earlier not to

Use Google and stuff like that but it you know if you already have Google drive or you get it with you know a plan you already need anyway you might as well take advantage of that storage and you can make a folder on your Google Drive so if I just do like slash

Um casa uh I’m going to authorize this just don’t look at what’s going on here but it’ll copy and it’ll create these credentials using oauth I can hit test connection and it’ll say the folder Casa does not exist you want to create it I can hit yes

And then I’ll hit next and Source data will do the same thing we’ll say computer we’ll go find our casa share and we’ll just select our little video here next next so I’m just skipping all this right now because it’s it’s fine and we’ll hit save we’ll use weak passphrase

And then we’ll run this Cloud backup and while that’s running I’m going to secretly sign into my Google Drive okay so it’s successful and then if I go into Google drive here you can see that I have all these these volumes in here from duplicate and same thing I could restore

It from the cloud so I’m pretty cool it’s a good way to help to protect your data and it’s really pretty easy to set up but back to the other problem we talked about earlier what do we do if there’s not an app in here that I want

To run you know that’s a bummer well while I want to keep this simple I do want to show that you can do what’s called a custom install and set up your own containers from various images so I’m actually going to set up a Minecraft server with an image that I’ve used in

The past so it’s this Mark TV slash Minecraft Dash papermc server so it’s a Minecraft paper server but it’s in a Docker container and so we’re just going to you could read into some of the settings and things like that I’m actually just going to grab this quick start command here

And then we’re going to go to App Store custom install and then instead of typing all this in manually we can actually go to import Docker CLI and then paste it in and hit submit and we’ll get this notification saying hey we need to do some more stuff

Not everything filled out properly and that is definitely the case because this Docker image is it says run that’s because it didn’t import it perfectly we’re going to have to fix that because the actual Docker image is this Mark TV slash whatever all this stuff is so I

Can paste that get rid of the docker pull command so just this Mark TV slash Minecraft Dash this that’s where the actual Docker image is that it’s going to look for that it’s going to pull and then we can change the name to Minecraft for the logo

We may actually want it to be the Minecraft logo so what we can do is just Google Minecraft logo find a good image and then copy the image address and paste it and then there’s a network we’re going to have this as Bridge ports these ports

Are correct this volume here is not what we want it to be we need to make a new volume so I’m going to once again hop over into our files so I’m going to go back to our casa share here and make a new folder and we’re going to call it

Minecraft config let’s submit and we’ll copy this path and then in here ah config’s fine we could have called it data and that may have made more sense but so it’s whatever’s in this Minecraft Dash config folder is going to line up with whatever’s in the slash data folder

Inside the container and then under memory size I’m going to change this from one gig to three gigs and I’m not going to put those single quotes around it because that can cause it to mess up but everything else should be good okay we’re going to change CPU shares to high

Which should hopefully give it a little bit more CPU Headroom and then restart policy we can set to unless stopped so that means it’s always going to try to restart if it crashes unless we tell it to stop and I think that’s everything at this point usually copying it in using

The import command Works a little better than this it just some of them work really well and some of them don’t work really well but yeah now we can hit install in the meantime I’m going to open up Minecraft cool so Minecraft is up and running you

Can see it’s doing a little bit of work on our CPU and RAM here that’s to be expected I’m actually going to hop into settings and then go to the logs and we’ll see what else going on here because this does take a little while to get started you can see it’s still

Preparing some stuff sweet so now it says done and if we actually just for fun oh gosh get out of here Minecraft actually just for fun if we want to exit out of this and go to files go to our cost to share and go to Minecraft config

We can actually see that Docker container through a whole bunch of stuff in here including this world folder and this is where all of the information for our Minecraft server world is player data and so on and you could also come in here and if you wanted to run some

Plugins this is where you would drag those plugins to and then if you wanted to for example change some settings on the server you could go to This Server properties and it’s going to be hard to edit this here but you could go to something

I can open it with vs code here and we can actually take this file and make some changes to it and then save it back to our share and then restart the container and it would actually pull these new settings for the Minecraft server so pretty cool I’m going to leave

It as is though hop into Minecraft I’m going to say add new server we’ll call this Minecraft server Casa and then it’s probably better to use I’m actually curious if I do Casa os.local will it work I haven’t tried that in testing yeah I didn’t oh I actually did what I

Would recommend though is using your IP address which now that you’ve gotten into the web UI there’s an easy way to grab that and that’s to go to the terminal sign in as the casa OS user and then here we can just type in IP space a and

It’ll print off a whole bunch of stuff here but what we want is probably something enp something or something along those lines but you should most likely see 192.168. something so I can copy that and make the address that hit done okay hey there we go it’s probably going to

Be a little bit of a jittery experience because this isn’t the most incredible Hardware to be running this on unfortunately the paper server does help with some of that you can actually see like it’ll combine these entities to limit the number of blocks that are like spawned in the map

It’ll kind of combine them all into a thing yeah it’s running I’m on my Minecraft server right now and it’s probably like I said it’s probably not gonna be the best especially if you have a lot of players on here all in different areas that it’s trying to render all of those

Areas and simulate everything in those areas but if you just want like a small simple server for you and some friends like hey it’s you know it’s not that bad if we hop over to Casa OS again we can see yeah CPU is pretty high Ram is

Really high but you know it’s not too not too terrible all right so I’m actually going to stop our Minecraft service really quick we can just hit this button and it’s going to stop that Minecraft server so we’re not taking up all of this RAM and CPU and stuff but

Now I want to move on to a VPN like I said we’re going to use a VPN to you know allow us to use that VPN if we’re like at a coffee shop on some sketchy Wi-Fi or something we can use a VPN to Tunnel back into our home network just

To have a little bit more security but the main reason is to be able to access a lot of these services easily and securely from anywhere and we’re going to use a thing called tailscale which is a mesh VPN service that’s really easy to use and I’ve been

Messing around with some recently but there is an issue that we can’t there’s there’s no app in the app store for it and we could use a custom install but we want to use this as what’s called an exit node and it’s really difficult to get an exit node running in a Docker

Container so to keep things simple we’re just going to install tailscale directly onto our Debian install or the underlying operating system on this and that’s going to take a little bit of command line but I promise it’s actually really easy so first thing is I’m going to log into tailscale

Okay so I’m logged into tail skill now and you can see I have a couple of devices here I’m going to have a lot of this blurred out just for some safety reasons but I have my phone and my desktop here and we’re going to add our server so to do that

I’m actually just going to look up tailscale Debian install and we can go to Debian Bullseye which is what we’re on right now and it’s fairly easy we just have a few commands to follow and so I’m going to hop back into cost OS go to our terminal once again

And we’re just going to copy these first two commands paste them straight in you’ll have to type in your password Here we’ll grab the second one same thing paste it and hit enter then we’re going to run sudo app to get update let me copy the next one but it’s just

Sudo have to get install tailscale that’ll take a minute to install okay and we want to do two things with this that won’t just work by default we want this to operate as an exit node meaning all of our traffic can be tunneled through our server but we also want to

Be able to Route traffic to our local network through that server so that we can access you know if I’m on my computer across town I can remote into my Minecraft server for example that’s on my local network that may not necessarily be on that machine if that

Makes sense so what we’re going to do is if you look up tailscale exit node so if we go to this website here talking about exit nodes we can look how to configure that and the first thing you have to do is make sure that it is advertised as an

Exit node and so for Linux when you run it there’s a few things we have to do so first of all before we do any of this we need to run a couple of these commands so what this is going to do right here is copy some stuff into our sys control um

Config I believe I’m probably saying some of this wrong because I’m not a Linux guy but all it’s going to do is the echo basically just means like hey take this right here and then we’re going to pipe it into this config and same thing with the second one we

Don’t really probably need IPv6 but we’re going to do it anyway paste enter and then we just have to basically make those changes take effect that’s going to allow ipv forwarding which we need for passing traffic through our server don’t worry about the Nitty Gritty it’s fine and then we don’t

Have to do any of this firewall CMD stuff it should work just fine as is but we’re going to need to remember this advertise exit node command because when we run if we go back to the original instructions here it says sudo tail scale up but we need

To run a few extra commands with it so we’ll have to remember this advertise exit node but then we also want to set this up as a subnet router and if we go to the subnet router instructions here it says the exact same thing we need to set up this ipv

Forwarding but then we also need to use this advertise routes command so this is where you would type in what’s called your subnet which most likely if your IP address is 192.168.1.something or zero dot something you would type in you know if it was 192.168.0.1 was like the address of your

Router and all of your IP addresses were 192.168.0.something you would type in 192.168.0.0 24. we’ll do that in just a second so I actually have this command kind of ready to go here just for the sake of the video so I’m going to copy that but back in

Our terminal we’re just going to paste this command so it’s sudo tail scale up and then we have this dash dash reset um don’t worry too much about that you may get an error if you don’t have that dash dash reset there but then we have dash dash advertise routes and then I

Put in my Subnet which is 192.168.10.0 24. like I said if you if your IP address for your server says like 192.168.1 dot something you’ll do this as 192.168.1.024 and then dash dash advertise exit node is our last argument there so we should be able to hit enter

And it’s going to give us this address to go to so I’m going to copy it oh I’m gonna copy and paste and I’m going to sign in but I’m going to blur it it’s going to say do you want to connect the device Casa OS to blah

Blah blah all blurred out and I’m going to hit connect and then now we can go back to our admin panel and we’ll see that we have this Casa OS here I need to do a lot of blurring on this all right so we have a casa OS here

That’s great and we can click these three dots and go to edit route settings and we’re going to set this up as an exit node we also have key expiry is enabled if we didn’t want that to be the case we could fix it we’ll fix it in a second and then

Subnet routes we want to be able to allow people onto my local or allow my connections onto my local network which will be really helpful and then last we’re going to go to disable key expiry you could enable that you just have to every now and then

Rerun this command to make sure whatever but this is just going to be running at my house all the time so we can leave it disabled and now I’m actually going to record my phone really quick okay so now I’m in my phone here and I’m in the tailscale app

And I’m going to enable this and I can also go up here and hit use exit node and I’m going to select Casa OS and now I’m on cellular you can see at the top right I’m on cellular so I’m actually I’m actually going to disable this really quick

I’m actually going to go to nordvpn.com just to see their IP address here so one of those you know I’m not going to show the whole thing here but you can see part of the IP address here now if I go back and I enable this

You can see it says using exit node Casa OS and then if I reload this what’s my IP address I’m not going to show the whole thing but you can see that it changed it is not the same as it used to be before and I can actually if I go to

192.168.10.41 that’s the location of my truenow server which is on my local network and I can I can see that which is really cool I can actually even go to 192.168.10.187 which is my casa OS server you can see I can get to my casa OS there is this cool

Thing called Magic DNS that I should be able to just type in cos OS here maybe a slash after yeah so I can type in Casa OS and just put a slash after just to make sure it’s not thinking I’m trying to Google search and it’ll actually take me straight to that and

That’s a feature of tailscale it’s pretty cool cool so we have a Home Server running quite a few different things and hopefully at this point you may feel comfortable enough to start adding some other services that are either on the app store or maybe not and if you’re

Interested in this sort of stuff and you want to learn more maybe check out a few of my other videos like this one where I converted an old desktop PC into an unread server or this video where I set up a Nas using open media vault

Once again if you like this video make sure and give it a like as that really goes a long way and maybe consider subscribing if you’re interested in watching more that’s about it for this one though so as always thank you so much for watching stay curious and I

Can’t wait to see you in the next one