What’s on my Home Server? MUST HAVE Services!

Hello everybody this is teca in this video what we’re going to be doing is checking out some of the services that i’ve been running on my home lab for about the last year or so first what is a home lab well for me specifically it’s this cabinet thing

Behind me which houses a couple different mini pcs a nas a synology nas and some other little gizmos and gadgets that all work together to give me these services that i have on my home network now for you it can be something as simple as a little raspberry pi or a

Full-fledged rack of servers hosting a ton of different services from home monitoring security systems whatever it may be now for me even though this is a huge cabinet that’s behind me it’s really not that complicated there’s only two systems that synology has in a mini pc that’s running some of these services

That you see on the screen now i do have an empty computer case rack mount computer case that i’m going to be using as a giant proxmox server in the future and at the end of this video i’m going to talk about some of my future plans

Because some of the things i have set up are going to be changing eventually and before we dive too far into this list of the services that i currently run we’re going to have to thank the sponsor of today’s video only office now recently only office has had a major update

Version 7.1 i did a whole video covering all the new features and additions including pdf integrations and better functionality within these sheets and presentation applications now only office is cross platform i have it right here running on fedora the microsoft office compatibility within only office is definitely one of the highlights of

The software and my primary use case for is over here on my next cloud instance and you can actually host only office on your very own home lab or server in the cloud wherever just by going over to their website clicking on a run your own server there are a few different options

For enterprise developers and community if you want to get started for free you could use community get the docker image follow the instructions for ubuntu whatever it may be and try out only office today again big thank you for only office for sponsoring this video so back into the services that i currently

Run on my home lab first things first this dashboard that you’re seeing is heimdall now it is a very simple dashboard there’s not a whole bunch of configuration options but i really like how easy integrates with some of these applications to give you data within your dashboard such as jellyfin here i

Have the amount of movies and episodes i have on my server with the transmission you can see i can see the download speeds leaching seating pi hole i can see the block queries and some other data and depending on the services that you run there will be more options for

Those integrated applications so you get a really good rundown of what is going on on your home network now i’m going to go kind of out of order here the very first thing i’m going to talk about is yacht yacht is a wonderful service to easily go ahead and spin up docker

Images this i have running on the mini pc which runs some of the services such as jellyfin heimdall itself transmission openvpn some of the other things i’m going to be talking about but this is really nice because actually spinning up docker images is as easy as going over to templates going to the

Self-hosted pro template and picking really whatever you want if i wanted something like guacamole or even homer which is a another kind of a static dashboard you just hit deploy run through the configuration options like you normally would with the docker image this just kind of walks you through the

Process and then it will spin it up and if i go over here to dashboard to something that’s pre-existing such as heimdall here you can see all the different links to the dashboards what ports they’re on all the different variables and information as well as our processes here you have access to all

The logs and then specific status for these individual docker containers and then you have the option to start stop them really whatever you want very nice way to manage docker with a gui it’s kind of like something similar to rancher but with a lot less features that works really good in just a

Individual hosted environment so with that for now i’ll be sticking with things that are on this mini pc and the next and probably one of my favorite and must have of these is jellyfin i’ve been using jellyfin for some time to host all my media throughout my home network as

Well as sharing the media for some other people i have this blurred out but i have uh my mom here i have a separate account for children and then we have my niece here so if i just log into mine real quick you could see what’s going on

I got all my movies got latest kids movies latest movies and latest shows that i have on this server and there’s really a lot you can do with this i’ll have a links to my full guides on how to set up jellyfin those are the traditional install this is set up

Through a docker image using yacht with some custom configuration you could probably tell based on the dashboard here we have over 3000 shows 200 movies and the hard drive on my home i mean on my mini pc is just about two maybe 128 gigabytes and what’s really cool is i

Was able to link up my nas as a folder within my home directory so it will act as if the media is on that server when it’s actually on the nas so if i do ls for example and i cd into media you’ll see i have kids and adults if i go into

Adults and then cd into movies you can see all the different movies that i have there and even though it’s showing up in my home directory like i said it’s not actually there if i did a sudo nano etc fs tab right here you can see how i have

That linked up this is the ip address for my nas into the media directory and i have it connected to my home brand and media and my credentials are saved in a specific file to easily and automatically log in you can see where that’s located just in the credentials

And you can see some of the variables i have attached to that to get it to work perfectly the only real con to doing it that way is if my nas powers down i lose access to all my media and if i have everything powered down i

Need to make sure the nas completely boots up first before i turn on the mini pc otherwise it won’t boot because it’s in there in that fs tab and it will just not continue with the booting process if it can’t access all the data and if you

Didn’t know jellyfin is a free and open source fork of envy and personally i like it a lot better than plex because what you get is your media you don’t have a bunch of extra added crap from plex so with that sticking with what is on the mini pc here we have transmission

Transmission is a bittorrent client you can see here i have fedora workstation and neon testing i have both those seating to kind of share some of my bandwidth and the really cool thing about this docker image basically everything here is docker images this docker image also

Ships with openvpn so i was able to log in with some private internet access credentials so this docker image this transmission client independently has its very own vpn which for uh peer-to-peer sharing and downloading these uh linux iso’s is awesome because then other people won’t be able to see

Your ip address and it works pretty good if i just want to add a torrent i usually just paste in a url here and if i run over to yacht real quick this is how i installed this right here is transmission openvpn right now i have the source for the data

In my home directory brandon and downloads and within the docker image it just shows up as data but the torrents we download are kind of mirrored between my home directory and the data directory within the docker image so if i delete a linux iso for example from my home

Directory it will also delete it from the docker image so that is very nice and then the last thing on this mini pc we have uptime kuma this is a really simple application i just got rid of calorie bay calibre web i didn’t really use it that much it’s a way to manage

Your ebooks and things like that it is pretty good but i didn’t use it enough but this will give me information on uptime for various services so synology nas you see it’s at 95 percent i did an update last night so we can uh probably go ahead and

Find where that downtime was if we wanted to so if i go to 24 we see the little red line right there so there it is these are my this is my specific downtime so this is really nice to figure out when that was and to monitor

It and you could see it’s just a tcp ping to the specific port that that nas is on and i actually did a video on uptime kuma for the lenode channel so if you want a lot more details on this you can go ahead and check that out

You can add new monitors real easy and there’s a bunch of different types of monitors that you can add you can really fill this up with whatever you would like so now with that we’re going to talk about what is on the nas and there’s really only two services on the

Nas we have the synology products which is the type and as it is and we have pi hole running on the nas as a docker image first i’m going to jump into just synology real quick sign in and if i didn’t have a synology nas i’d probably

Be using something like true nas but synology is really nice because of some of the like a mobile applications so for example synology photos here is just like google photos except for i own the data on my server so if i go to like mobile backup this is all automatic

Pixel 6 camera 2022 and if we go to five you could see some of the latest pictures i sold the truck so that’s the bulk of the pictures but synology photos is awesome for uh basically hosting your own photo backup solution and of course within synology itself it gives you kind

Of like a mobile not mobile a web based operating system kind of layout up here are the applications so i have synology drive synology photos and i have docker here so if i go into docker you can see right now the only active container that’s running is pi hole gives you some

Information it’s really easy to go and pull if i look at all the different images this is everything that i’ve tested out i did have the jellyfin running on the nas for a while but i ended up moving it to the mini pc just so it performed a little bit better and

That’s the primary con of using like a pre-built nas solution is generally you get really a really nice interface and uh hardware to work with but within the hardware the uh processor ram and all that generally isn’t the best but other than the apps and docker it’s really

Easy to manage if i go into file station for example go into media you kind of see the same layout we saw earlier and if we go to like control panel for example shared folder these are my shared folders and it’s really easy to link up homes for example and share that

With some of the file services such as smb ftp really whatever you need and what’s real nice about this for example my wife has her own account so she has her whole entire separate photo library backed up just as if she were to have her own like google drive or a google

Photos account it’s really handy and if you’d like to see a review on the synology nas i have a video for that as well now last but not least we have a pie hole this doesn’t have very many logs because i actually just moved it

Over to the docker image on the nas but you probably heard a pie hole it is a fantastic application for filtering out trackers ads things like that i don’t feel too bad using it because i have youtube premium and content creators get more money off of that than ads anyways

But you can see down here the various query types all the logs so like this is in the middle of night so there’s really not much going on and then it’s picked up during the day as there’s been more internet usage we have our upstream servers the uh topped block domain so

App measurement dot com we have google ads uh double click some analytics stuff top permitted domains is google one of the reasons i moved it over to this docker image i have all the devices connected to it on a device by device basis because my router is not very good

And it was having some issues with the dhcp server stuff so i had to go ahead and disable that for now but this is the point where i’m going to talk about some of the stuff that we’re going to be doing in the future this right here

This is a zimmer board i’m going to be doing a full dedicated video on this as well as a couple different tutorials what i can say now about this little board is i would highly recommend it this right here you see plugged in has a little pcie connector so it is very

Expandable this is a 250 gig nvme ssd so you just plug that in and before i set it up for what its final use is going to be i’m going to do a couple tutorials on this doing like pie hole setting up a couple services on this but the final

Use for this which if i did my research correctly i can use this as my modem which is going to be fantastic with a pf sense it’s compatible with the um whatever the configuration is that my pisa garbage sentry link modem over there uses so i’m really excited to get

This spun up it has a into intel celeron processor which isn’t like amazing but it’s definitely better than trying to run on some of the stuff on like a raspberry pi and right there you see it has some uh sata ports so you can plug

In some hard drives too i’ll be doing a true nas tutorial uh with all that subscribe like this video if you did everything i mentioned including guides and tutorials and all that will be linked down below uh with all that i do hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and good bye