Huge thanks to ISL Online for sponsoring this video! Try ISL Light now and get 15 days free!
www.islonline.com/
You know that old laptop you have lying around that you don’t know what to do with, but nobody would buy it if you tried to sell it, but you don’t wanna throw it away at the same time? What if I told you that you could not only find a new use for it, but that you’ll be using it for all sorts of tasks, no matter how weak it is. Want a personal media server to host movies and shows? You got it. Want network storage for your whole house? That too. Want a VPN to your home network? You’re not gonna believe this… I’m Chris Kalos, I like computers, and today I’ll be showing you how to set up The $0 Home Server, a home server with the ESSENTIALS for the average user. (Jellyfin Media Server, Samba network storage, Wireguard VPN, Wake-on-LAN)
====Alternative titles====
EASY Home Server from E-Waste!
The ESSENTIAL Home Server Setup
Turn Any Old Computer into a Useful Home Server
The $0 Home Server
Easy home server for the average user
====Links====
GUIDE:
chriskalos.notion.site/The-0-...
We finally have a Discord server:
/ discord
Keep your laptop lid closing from putting your computer to sleep:
www.notion.so/chriskalos/The-...
LVM clarification:
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/how-is...
Port forward:
portforward.com/router.htm
/ a_guide_to_port_forwar...
Ubuntu Server LTS:
ubuntu.com/download/server
Samba:
www.samba.org/
Jellyfin:
jellyfin.org/
Wireguard:
www.wireguard.com/
Etherwake:
www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1...
====Credits====
"Lenovo Thinkpad L410 (Open)" (skfb.ly/oGJRP) by AquaEquinox is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (creativecommons.org/licenses/b....
"INTEL CPU" (skfb.ly/o7NoN) by Kuat-Entralla 3D Engineering is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (creativecommons.org/licenses/b....
Song: VOLT VISION, Beneath My Shade - Dangerous [NCS Release] Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds Free Download/Stream: ncs.io/VV_Dangerous Watch: ncs.lnk.to/VV_DangerousAT/youtube
====Timestamps====
0:00 - Introduction
0:34 - ISL Online Sponsor
1:24 - The Basics
3:26 - Utilities & Use Cases
3:50 - Reserving Your Local IP Address
4:17 - ssh
4:44 - Network Storage (Samba)
7:04 - Media Server (Jellyfin)
8:28 - VPN (Wireguard & DuckDNS using PiVPN)
13:12 - Wake-on-LAN (etherwake)
15:57 - Recap
This is a SCAM because if you start your cheap homelab, you'll be hooked and find yourself with a rack full of gear right next to your couch in the living room. You'll go quickly from an old laptop, to a desktop, and then then just one server, but before you know it, you'll be planning network upgrades, buying SSDs for your storage, and debating the merits of different operating systems over dinner with your wife that doesn't care about it at all (only cares about the electricity bill). Your living room might start looking more like a mini data center, and you'll be the proud admin of your very own homelab empire. Consider yourself warned: there's no turning back.
LMAO
I agree. DON'T DO THIS! It's endless pit.. 🙃
I have since years one server and not more. If you size it from start with space for future things your statement is usesless :D
@@mutosanrc1933 Hey, you completely forgot the video title there :D
LMFAOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally a youtuber that doesn't blur private addresses.
I was going to but then the other Chris from the channel told me it was stupid. This is why you need people to review your edits 💀💀💀
@@KalosLikesComputers But also, people are gonna give up on doing it because of what to put on it.
From someone that has been been building home servers for over 20 years I gotta say this is well put together, informative, and concise while not being too dry. Good video.
where should i start for homeservers and what are they most useful for ? storage ?
@@shellohd8421it depends on what you need, but yes storage is a good place to start because a lot of other things depend on it. Samba configuration allows many shares and many users. For example, I have several personal shares that only I have access to, I have a share for my wife and I for documents we both need to access, and I have device specific shares such as for media and for our home office printer/scanner. A good next step might be setting up backup software for your computers/phones. For example I use an app to run a regular backup (at least once a day) for my phone's photos/videos/voice memos/notes. This allows me to save a local copy before it gets backed up to my cloud storage at the end of the day.
I have to say, I can only agree, this is the best bang for buck budget homeserver. Also well documented and explained for new comers, not my cup of tea since I like making my systems a bit more trim, but generally good advice.
I’m surprised Paul Dano was able to take a break from his stellar career to teach us about home servers
Jerry O'Connell
Jerry O'Donnell
- How did you ended up with a closet full of old laptops? - Kalos said "Dale" y yo le dí 🤷🏼♂️
"Honey, would it be okay if I got this component that I think will really help us out?" :D
Why did you switch language?
@@user-nw6xh7mn3h If you've got a closet full of old laptops, they're bound to be your friends, or your enemies. One of them likely spoke in other languages, so he was talking to a long lost friend/ememy :-)
Le daste bien?
Two weeks after watching this I've been pretty deep into making a home server. Thank you for making such an easy to follow start guide
Very glad I could help get you started!
I hope, for your sake that you did not follow the drive partitioning recommendations. Kalos is obviously a unix noob who is unfamiliar with all of the ways a linux server may be crashed. It is a strong recommendation that you partition off the /var or /var/log directories. This way if the log files fill up the filesystem, you can still recover without too much hassle.
@@mrquickyhow would you recommend doing that?
@@swiftsushi create two partitions, one for /var or /var/log & the second one for the root filesystem /.
Yeah, it’s really rare to see such a celebrity into computers. Thank you Paul Dano!
This! This is the type of stuff most normal people even with some basic IT knowledge can easily follow and get an actual usable home server out of! Amazing stuff!
I remember when I was 10 my dad gave me an HP laptop motherboard from which I hosted Minecraft servers. We even upgraded the CPU from a low end c2d to a higher end c2d. Good times!
@@repairwins Nice!
When was that
Hello 2001-2006
I have no intention of creating a home server and yet, I loved watching this.
Same but I do have an intention of doing it
Something that wasn't mentioned here is about direct costs of a home server, as of electric bill, if you run it 24/7. The laptop is the best choice here since you get lower consumption CPUs by design and an integrated UPS! As a final tip, if you need extra storage and your laptop had a CD reader, you can find hdd/ssd caddy for the CD tray! If you need to backup stuff, also syncthing is a must have!
To be fair, unless you're doing something insane then the power consumption of a small home lab is going to be negligible compared to a fridge, HVAC, stove, microwave, etc. I run a cluster of 8 raspberry pis nearly 24/7 and I have a plug in power meter between the cluster, network equipment, and the wall. As a point of comparison, my microwave uses 27x more power than the max draw of my raspberry pi cluster (about the same power that your average old laptop/desktop would use at max draw) and 100x more than the average draw of the cluster. Electric in my region costs $0.36/kwh which means running my pi cluster all day for an entire month costs $2 to $3. I'm not trying to gatekeep having a homelab or anything but if $3/month is a problem then you should probably not go into homelab as a hobby.
@@user-jm8sy5ox2j I'm on average around the same consumption, but I do not see the point of having way too much stuff running all time when I do not need it. I had two laptops and I compared their power draw at idle. One was 7W around , the other one was 45W (it has a dedicated old GPU which I wanted to use). With the 7W I had around 2$/mo, with the 45W one I would have easily gone into 12$/mo. Probably you find cheaper and more reliable options with cloud servers around that price.
@@user-jm8sy5ox2jbut you are running a cluster of low power devices, maybe he is referring to use a server PC like a hp Proliant 24/7
outta no where I just got a random side quest
This guy is a nerd. The great one. I hope your channel grow big and you countinue to share your computer knowledge
Wow, what a brilliant video! Easy to follow, content was well organised and your presentation was consistent and spot on… especially the jokes. You even reminded me that I have an old laptop doing nothing so that’s a prime candidate for becoming useful again. Well done, Chris! Looking forward to watching more 😊
Finally found a channel that explains things correctly and easy to follow- Ive been using an ssd attached to my home router and it always takes 3 or 4 attempts just to load a movie !new sub from the UK
Everyone benefits from learning to self-host their stuff. People must be educated to own their services and devices. I thank you a lot for this, really, you make the world a better place.
Nice to see some people making the path easier for beginners, Keep it up
This is so beautiful because I just ordered a raspberry pi 4 to use as a server but it felt like an overkill and now I get to use my old laptop for the server and still have a fresh raspberry pi for loads of experimentation. God bless Kalos.
Update bro : drop the ultimate - your provider have port forwarding I got you guide. That’s all I need now. Iocal network nuts with tools and all network provider is an ass. Tried telebit - will try ngrok but that would be a decent follow up video for some people already down the rabbit holes
The benefit of a laptop is probably it's a lot more powerful, downside is power draw and laptops aren't really made for acting as a server cause of their airflow
The Raspberry Pi 4 is not worth the trouble, IMO. I really wanted one, but kept holding off from buying one because of the cost. Christmas 2022 my husband got me one, and I maybe used it a week.
@@atlantic_love that's not a point again a pi4 but that you just don't use it. I bought a blender and use it maybe once a month but I don't recommend people against using a blender
@@atlantic_love how often you use it is not an argument to not buy one
Dude, this is a killer, practical video on getting into home servers. Awesome work! Just gained a new sub.
A man after my own heart. I used to recycle old desktops as a home server but now we are using a Thinkpad T420. Nice having much lower power consumption. Replaced the main HDD with an SSD and stuck in a 2TB HDD in the DVD-drive bay. I'm just using Win 10 Pro not a real server OS. We use it as destination for automatic backup of my and my wife's desktop. It is running an NTP server to keep all the non-mobile devices on the LAN in sync. This is nice because some of our IoT devices revert to hardcoded time/date after a power failure so this way even without internet they get a reasonable time/date. It is also running a web server that displays a bunch of static links including our DIY IoT devices.
I've watched so many home server videos. This is by far the best one. The others made me not want to touch it. This made me want to finally set one up.
This is probably my fav. Video on the platform, so useful and well made! With some trials and errors i turned a shitty laptop from 2010 (1gb of ram, couldnt handle it's own os / ram upgrades) into a "free" cloud, then spent a day automating remote on/off with my phone to save on the electricity bill. Now i plan to add bitwarden, an image viewer and other cool stuff, cant wait for a part 2!
I'm so glad we helped!!
Subbed because you actually explain this in an easy to follow fashion.
My friend and I just followed this guide and now have our own home servers with our old laptops, so cool! Thanks a ton!
How I havent found your channel yet is baffling. Your content is very easy to follow and engaging, this has got me interested, thanks
Wish I had a video like this like a couple years ago when I randomly decided that I wanted exactly this, it would've been an amazing start. Great vid! Now I'm deep in it with two desktops permanently next to my router running Jellyfin, Nextcloud, personal sites, etc.
What's the point of having a home server? U can view your media files on all devices that's it?
thanks to you i finally can acces my home network from outside, completely changed the game, thank you so much kalos
great tutorial, really wanted to get into jellyfin but i couldn't find any good tutorials for it. This came at the perfect time, thank you!!
Holy moley! always wondered how I could utilise my old machine and access my home network form the internet. Got the perfect solution here! Subscribed 👍🙌👌Thank you, Kalos.
Thank you, for all the detailed steps, helped me put it all together. I used it to be able have my sever with my videos and file system to be able to access from any computer. and YESS I am trying not to get carried away LOL
This video had so much information that I didn't understood anything completely. Thanks a lot because now I have so many new cool things to research.
Phenomenal video! Hands down the best basic guide I've seen in a long time! Way to go!
That part in the intro of you spinning around smiling at the laptop made me so happy, thank you
🥰🤝💻
thank you, Jim Morrison from The Doors, for teaching me about servers
Come on baby boot my server
Your videos are genuinely good and on point. You are gaining global audience by the way. I am from India.
True. Hello from Puerto Rico.
I genuinely loved how simple and amazing the explanation is, especially the part about Jellyfin being Mum approved. Truly great work!
I found that running a NAS OS and installing docker is much more easy then running ubuntu. I tried both and I went with OMV and using docker compose for containers and a raspberry pi 3b for wireguard and adguard.
I found OMV was too cumbersome to use and instead went to just a bare ubuntu install with docker.. lol
This vid is very well made and presented. I've done these and more plenty of times already, yet I still enjoy and was able to learn from it. Thank you :)
I've read many many stories about users acquiring used hardware for homelabs. $15,000 servers for $200 that are years old yet still do what you need them to do. All those < $500 components can and do add up to a wonderful setup you've been wanting to build/expand. Yes it's worth it but as said in other comments, it's addictive!!
Is there a subreddit to follow this kind of stuff?
@@lorenzogiovannone5036r/homelab
This video made my college laptop from 2011 go from e-waste to one of the most valuable devices I have in my house. Thank you for making this guide super easy to follow. You should probably make a followup video for automounting the UUID of external USB drives in fstab since I had to do a bit of additional research for that.
Been using a linux booted 2 core 4gb ram chromebook with an upgraded ssd as a server for the past couple of months and its held up doing plex and mc servers surprisingly well.
Would love love love to see another video about using your server for backups from mobile devices and other desktops/laptops! This video was an awesome starting point for me, thank you so much.
We may visit this topic soon! The other Chris on this channel really wants to do a backup solutions video.
This ist amazingly useful and very well explained. Thank you!
Wow! Thank you for that great piece of information how to make my life more comfortable while learning new ways hot to improve myself. Well done! Keep going! Such a great and really educating channel!
This is amazing. Great job! A bit fast for my level of knowledge but with 0.5x speed and a dozen replays i manage to complete this successfully. Many many many thanks!
Cool. I am having to buy a new laptop for crappy reasons, but i was just thinking of setting up a server with my current one. It's a pretty powerful machine for it's time, 5 years ago. I think i should be able to do this.
I used an old laptop with a mostly broken keyboard as a plex server. Used the built in Ethernet port onto my home lab network, and the wireless link of the laptop to the 'house' cable-wireless router. It functions as a cheap bridge to protect 'public access' from my lab net and does good enough, especially since the keyboard was missing several keys.
I believe this is the best ever video about home labs.
That honor definitely does not go to me, you should check out what Wolfgang's Channel is doing with his home server videos. He was a big inspiration for this one! Thank you so much for your kind words.
I appreciate this video bc I have a languishing side project to essentially make exactly this. Now that I know I can just do this, I've done this, and I'm very happy.
Thanks for this video! Got me started to turn a macbook that still has plenty of life to it into a home media server. It was just gathering dust and I had no use for it as a desktop. It's been a few weeks and I've already bought external storage, put some more services on it and planning to add more
This is great! I was considering setting up home server for some time but I didn't want spend much on it alas I have unused 2009 HP notebook.
it should be noted that to install wireguard and create a vpn with no-ip or any dynamic dns service this process does not always apply, not all providers give dynamic or public ip. many are under CGNAT means Carrier Grade Network Address Translation, it is a technique that allows the use of the same public IPv4 in which private IPv4 addresses will be associated simultaneously. so you must use NGROK or zero tier for the process to be functional remotely.
ngrok allows only 2 hours of connection tho
Tailscale is another option for this as well
@@Nathan_Woodruff been using tailscale to workaround that, works like a charm.
Cloudflare tunnels too
I have the very same acer laptop model collecting dust in my drawer. I always wanted to make a home server, but was to lazy to mess with it. Thx for the video
I've been looking for something to do with a bunch of old laptops I've got, thanks so much.
Really really great video, thanks the yt algorithm for this discovery. I knew I would do something like a home server when I'll have the time and even if I'm kinda experimented, this video is well explained ! Keep up the good work ! :D
You've given me the clearest, simplest plan yet for this type of project among all the videos I've watched...subbed. And by the way, your name qualifies as an excellent villain character on Star Trek TOS! "Captain Kirk! Kalos is hailing us from the Klingon cruiser!" I know, it's pretty close to Kahless, so sue me lol.
Oh man this is so easy to do and so cool! Truly incredible stuff I didn't really know I could do with my rpi this easily. Absolutely great video to get you into this stuff!
Thanks for yet another great video! Χαίρομαι που συνεχώς βελτιώνεσαι :)
This is what I've done. It is simple and gives my laptop with a broken screen another purpose.
Cool but now i need to find a home
damn watching this video made me want to find an old laptop just to try it! Well done Kalos!
gr8 tutorial very detailed and well presented!
'roflcopter' This is Awesome. As a Student I don't have much resources for a fully - decked home lab but I also want to tinker around things for Sys Admin point of view / skills!
Tip: press alt + / to reach the EOF when in nano
the BEST tutorial for home server! Thanks!
This was an awesome video, thank you for making it!!
This was really helpful! I have one question: I'm using the WireGuard portion of this tutorial to set up a home file server that I can access remotely, however I don't know how to get my desktop to connect remotely to the WireGuard server. Like, on iPhone it seems pretty straightforward, what with the app scanning and enabling VPN configuration and whatnot. But what about on a laptop, where I don't have that QR-scanning functionality? How do I connect to my VPN like that? I assume it has something to do with the DDNS set up previously, but beyond that I'm kinda lost.
There's Wireguard apps for Windows, Linux, and Mac too, and you can import the configurations manually by importing the .conf file that is created on your server when you run `pivpn add`. Copy that .conf file to your samba shared storage so you can access it, and import it into the Wireguard app of your choice.
You can use an old 32bit system like intel's socket 478 platform, but I do recommend upgrading to atleast a core 2 duo. Power efficiency matters in this situation. Don't pitch that old system though! A lot of fun can still be had with it!
You can use the old electrical tape trick to essentially overclock a Core 2 Duo
So far I've had a few hangups I have a bunk router I can't configure on a desktop so I had to figure out how to configure a static IP using YAML, thankfully after a day of troubleshooting and learning YAML for the first time I got it to work. Right now my big hang up is copying from my clipboard from the web browser into vim, all of the solutions I've tried to find don't seem to be working. I'm anticipating having to do some over complicated work around for the port configuration but its been a fun challenge so far! I can say I have a home server at this point all that I need to do is configure a VPN and wake on LAN. This video was so helpful in all of its steps.
It is really well thought... Except for one thing: old laptops don't have a ton of storage space, which you're gonna want for a data server, specially if you store movies there. Okay, this comes from a guy who has four drives inside his computer (me), I got here just trying to figure out what to do with my old laptops. I don't find it that convenient, while I know how to set all of this up it's still faster and a lot less messing around to use my internal storage, whether directly or though a Plex media server kind of thing, which also allows me to access it remotely. I don't use that either, but it is a lot of hussling around compared to other solutions. Still, like I said, well thought and well explained. Regards. Left a thumbs up.
Great guide but after years of doing this a few points to add if you use a laptop you are going to kill the battery fast by charging it 24/7, 365 so see if you can run the laptop with the battery removed also 2.5 inch hard drives die fast if subjected to constant access you need a ssd or external 3.5 inch spinners, also with a laptop you have to consider cooling, stick something under one side of the lappy to increase airflow and if you stick it in a cubbard(closet) you need to wedge the door open an inch or two consider underclocking the cpu to help with cooling, laptops aren't designed to take this abuse but are capable, been running an acer for 5years this way never a problem except boiling it's battery
You're right, I've removed the battery from the laptop I'm using as a server for exactly this reason!
First! Sick bro! 🤘
This is great video! Now I can put all my outdated laptops to use. Thank you for sharing it Kalos.
The best Home Server video on KZhead😍😍
6:21 keep in mind, that the user should be the same as your actual linux user otherwise this won't work. You can't just create a random new user and name whatever you want. The user should be the output of echo $USER
"Debian's defaults are completely insane" 🤩 well said. It's the God's honest truth. My little crappy Chromebook OpenVPN server uses Debian, headless. Ubuntu Server was better and will be my go-to moving forward, but I had to try a few different ones.
I'm so happy daring to try a BSD. I randomly landed on OpenBSD for an old laptop after years of curiosity and haven't looked back! Must be around 4 years now. I use it on all my laptops and my moms desktop 🤭 KDE Plasma or the native CWM - fantastic! My point was INSANELY SANE DEFAULTS on OpenBSD. And "all" is in the base! Or a pkg away. ~~~😈🐡💻🐡😈~~~ And I haven't even gotten to try it as servers, which is where it really shines, they say... But nobody asked me 🫢
I been looking for a simple way to have my own server at home thanks a lot its simple and clear to an extent that I am going to buy old laptops and make them servers
I literally loved this 10/10 It was a fun journey to set up.
The fact you are replying to all the comments are amazing !! I’ve never seen something like that- Quick (maybe stupid) question though. How do I let my parents access jellyfin on their android tv ? (They are not in the same house as me )
It's not a stupid question! You can set up Wireguard on their Android TV, so that it connects to your home server no matter where it is. I don't know the exact process for Android TV, but it should be possible. Thank you for your kind words!
Learn how to download apps
Also apps that officially do not support Android tv can work in it. You have to install the app in phone. Take a backup of the app. Now you get the apk in the backup folder. Now you side load it in android tv 😊
For wireguard I rather using Tailscale (it does not need port forwarding in the router)
Same here
Thanks for this video, it helped me build my first home server.
I have a Toshiba laptop that is like from 1857. Now it will become my private server. Thank you!
What a revolutionary™ machine
how
Hey Kalos, you made a wonderful tutorial! However, as a Linux and programming novice, I am having trouble with the Wireguard setup. Specifically, (11:51) I am not receiving any data despite successfully sending it. I have spent over three hours trying to troubleshoot the issue, including reinstalling Wireguard multiple times, but to no avail. Could you please provide some guidance on where I might be going wrong?
I am facing the same issue. Please let me know once you get to know how to resolve it.
up this comment
This is a networking issue. Please use a service that checks for open ports on your network, it seems that the port forwarding did not work. Perhaps you have CGNAT, which doesn't allow port forwarding?
Also, if you have two routers, you have a double NAT. Please make sure you are port forwarding the correct router.
This is EXACTLY the type of video I've been looking for! Thanks for the simple step by step explanations for noobs like me.
I see you with the altstore installed😏😏 great video brother, keep it up!
Perfectly legal 😎
Hi kalos, thank you for this amazing tutorial, as I person who is new to linux I was able to follow each every step. But I'm facing an issue at 11:15 the data is being sent but I'm not receiving any data (the duckdns.log output was OK). Could you please help me on this?
upvoting
Hi! Sorry for taking so long to respond. Please join our Discord server so we can troubleshoot together!
If you ever make a followup video, I'd like to see Tailscale (which uses WireGuard) instead of bare WireGuard itself. I think a lot of people would prefer the added features of TailScale.
I totally agree. I use Tailscale and I LOVE it! My network is behind two NAT enabled routers so port forwarding is a pain not to mention the potential security problems of having open ports. I'm pretty sure Tailscale is easier to setup than Wireguard too.
This is pretty cool! I'm testing this out on a vm first, but I'll probably end up doing more.
Finally, a nerd of the same flavor as me. Love it!
greek man talks about servers for 12 minutes
16, actually.
still worth it
She is cute as hell
bro?!
thank you my man, been wanting to do this with my old thinkpad x260.
I like how you're funny, AND knowledgeable.
I had to stop and comment after the pitbull reference 😂 hilarious man. Awesome video. I love learning stuff like this and you explained everything very clearly
This might be the best video I’ve ever watched. Thanks for holding my hand!
🤝
Wow! A truly engaged creator, one question please! How am I meant to access the server? Through the duckdns url? Mine only works through “[my ip addr]:8092” . I must have done something wrong with duck dns. Also what is the purpose of WireGuard? When I have the Ubuntu tunnel on everything is super slow and idk how the local only works. Also what in the world is the port forwarding do? PLEASE HELP and god bless you if you actually reply. 🙏 thank you.
Hi, it seems my reply to your comment didn't show up because of KZhead not liking "links". You access your server with its local IP, not the duckdns address. So [ip]:8082 in the browser. When you're connected to the VPN you've made, that IP (any IP call that starts with the local IP string) will be redirected to your home router, so that you can access your home network from anywhere. DuckDNS only points to the network, aka the router, not your server itself. Hope this helps!!
Yo dude! Thanks for making this video, I have a 2019 dell computer that was given to me and I was looking for a good idea for my laptop
This was super useful! Thank you for the video.
Its amazing dude, me too love this crazy home setups
This is amazing. Thank you so much for this.
Good content! You can feel the years of knowledge.
thanks, great video. much appreciated. Found this very enjoyable, useful and easy👍
wtf a good tutorial about self-hosting, it's very nice to see!