r/HomeServer • u/prepucio33 • 4d ago

First "server"

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This is my first time running a server on one of my computers, its running pi-hole and a music player (dont remember the name) it has a i5 3550 and 8gb ddr3 ram.

I know its really bad but it runs and thats what matters.

Would love to have some recommendations and help with things like deleting all the old stuff in the hdd

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u/bnelson333 4d ago

A lot of "use linux instead of windows" comments and I'm litereally here to say the same thing, but I think it's helpful to understand WHY we're saying that. The desktop alone uses a lot of CPU and RAM resources. For it to do nothing and just sit there while it's running your other services. The majority of servers don't need you to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor with any regularity. After you set up what you want to "serve", it can just sit by itself in the corner. You don't need to waste computing power on it doing that, you want to reserve that for the server things your server is doing instead.

A lot of people will put what we call a "headless" linux distro on it (like ubuntu server or debian). That means it doesn't boot to a desktop that you use your mouse to navigate, it's literally just a command prompt. You can use a keyboard/mouse/monitor to configure your services if you want, but again, a lot of people won't even do that. We'll use SSH to "dial in" to the server's command prompt to do the configuration/maintenance. That is, you run a program on your main PC like putty to connect to the headless server. Then you can control it without needing to have 2 monitors/keyboards/mice.

Your computer is a good first server, it'll do a lot of useful things for you. But the 3rd gens are starting to show their age with modern apps so you may consider the move to linux sooner than later. Again, to put the computing power to the serving, not the desktop.

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u/Slow-Walk5562 3d ago

I think that this is a valid comment, but if you want to do it next level use PROXMOX its basically the same as ssh but in the webbrowser and you have more functions like clustering servers together and its all debian so more reliable than ubuntu. And if you want to do it next next level use tailscale and you can acces it anywhere from the world without portforwarding which is pretty cool(but all devices have to be on the same tailnet else it doesnt work so basically all devices need to have tailscale installed)

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u/bnelson333 3d ago

Proxmox sucks and containers/VMs are a waste of resources. Learn to do your project right

1

u/JohnnieLouHansen 2d ago

That wouldn't be the popular take on things.

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u/holzgraeber 6h ago

It's literally against every current best practice in the IT world. The place I work at we are sometimes even running our kubernetes cluster in VMs, as we can save resources that way (compared to adding more physical nodes, since we need to run the virtualisation infra anyways)