The first question that maybe comes to
your mind might be – do I need a home lab server ? And what could I use it for ?
I recently bought this little PC here second hand on e-Bay for roughly 200 bucks. It’s got
an intel i5 core 6th generation processor, I upgraded the RAM to 16 Gbytes and I added a
Terrabyte SSD drive. That’s plenty for what I want to do. I want to run a file server, so that
I can share my files with everybody in the house without having to upload them to a cloud service.
I want to run my home automation software on it and maybe install additional software either in
a docker container or in a virtual machine for testing and learning purposes. Furthermore
we will install graphical User Interfaces so that you don’t have to fiddle with the
command line or linux shell. Stay tuned. (intro) Guys, please use the chapter markers and the time
line if you want to skip parts of the videos. You can see the sections here on the timeline
? Those are the chapters. I have also put them into the description. We don’t want to get
a huge electricity bill at the end of each month because we run that loud 500 Watts engine.
The one I bought should not consume more than 50 Watts on average, so the cost of running it
will be around 5 to 10 Dollars per month. Much less than my subscription to the gym
which I don’t use any more but still pay for. Enough talking, let’s get this thing installed. We will first need to chose an operating system
(OS) to run it on, then install the OS and then install a graphical user interface, a GUI, where
we will do all the remaining tasks from. I have chosen Ubuntu Server version 20 because it’s quite
up to date with all the components and it is a widely spread distribution. In order to install it
I use a USB stick with VENTOY on it – if you want to know how to build this then please watch this
short episode from my tool box series – I have put a card up here on that little info icon or you
can access it from the description of the video. Installing Ubuntu Server is pretty straight
forward. It is mainly questions and answers, that means the installation program
asks you all kind of questions such as the region or country you live in,
the keyboard layout which you want to use, the network configuration etc. Where this is
different from a Desktop installation is the fact that everything is text-oriented rather
than graphical interfaces that use the mouse. The only thing which I really want to pay
attention to is to tick the box to have openssh installed because otherwise I will have
no way to interact with the server later. Once I have answered all questions of the installer it
will start to copy files and set up everything. I can lean back and relax. Once it’s finished, I reboot the system and I
can then access it over the network using ssh. Cool, Now we have a PC with
Ubuntu Server 20 installed. The next thing we want to do is install
a graphical user interface to linux so that in the future we don’t have to fiddle
with the command line any more if we want to manage things on that server. The GUI that we will
use is called Webmin. This is around for I’d say 20 years now – and it has constantly evolved. So
let’s get this installed. This is the first and the last time that we need to use the
shell. You can do the following steps directly on the PC if you have a screen and a
keyboard attached or you can do it over ssh. I will install webmin over ssh because my pc
is already in the network rack in the basement. Webmin provides a debian installer package, a .deb
file which can be downloaded from sourceforge. I have put all links into the description of the
video. Using wget or curl I can download it to the server. Takes just a couple of seconds
really, depending on the available bandwidth. Once the package is downloaded I need to become
root in order to install it. Installing a debian package can be done with the dpkg command
then dash i plus the filename to install. Takes a couple of seconds as well. Most probably
the install will fail and tell you there are a lot of packages that are missing, but there is
an easy way to correct this. All we need to do is call apt with the dash f option and the
install command and that will automatically install all missing packages and configure
webmin for us. Here we go, all done. While I am still logged in as root I might as well
change the root password using the passwd command so that’s another box ticked on the list
to make the server a bit more secure. That’s it. Perfect – we have just installed the Operating
System and Webmin as a GUI to linux on top of it. Now we can disconnect the keyboard and the screen
and move the little PC to the basement or into our rack or somewhere where it’s not in our way as
long as it has a power and network connection. In IT terms this is called headless, that means
the server runs somewhere and does not have human interfaces such as a screen, mouse or keyboard.
We will access it over the network. Now let’s do all the subsequent actions using the webmin GUI.
First, we want to install Virtualbox and Docker. If the Webmin Installation went well then
our system will be reachable browsing to port 10000. Be aware that by default Webmin uses ssl
so https. That means you will get this security warning because the underlying certificate is not
known to our browser. I will do a separate episode on TLS and SSL certificates in the future. For the
time being just confirm the exception. I can now log in as root with the new root password which I
had changed in the previous step. And here comes my webmin interface. From here I can do most if
not all tasks that need to be done on my system such as in our case install a software package. I
just type in Virtualbox and then click on install. That will resolve the dependencies and give me
a list of al the packages it wants to install. It gives me that huge list of components to
install which I just confirm by clicking on Install now. Webmin calls apt behind the
scenes and pulls the packages from the debian repository in the internet and
installs and configures them for me. Next let’s do the same thing with Docker.
The package we want is called docker.io and that’s pretty much the same procedure. I hope this already showed how easy it is to
do tasks on the server using the Webmin GUI. Before we move on let’s just check if
all software packages are up to date and if not quickly update
them and reboot the machine. In the software package updates section
I can see that there is a little reminder telling me that a lot of packages
are outdated and need upgrading. Again this is just a matter of two clicks really
to get everything up to date. I click on “Update Selected Packages” and after clicking again on
Install now the system does everything for me. Once it is finished I will see if a reboot is
required. If a newer Kernel is installed then I will get this Reboot now button at the bottom
of the screen so klicking on it will reboot my server. The same warning will be shown on
the dashboard if ever a reboot is required. Awesome. All software packages are installed, we have a GUI and now we want the same
for Docker of course. As a GUI for Docker, let’s install portainer. This is just a
one-liner and we can also do this from Webmin Under Tools – Command Shell we have the
possibility to execute a command on the server. You might remember the command from my
portainer episode. All we do here really is issue the docker run command directly with the
right parameters. All details are of course in the description of the video. So let me just
copy paste the command into that input line. Once we click on execute command then Webmin will
launch the docker pull in a shell and show us the output. Here’s the full command line. Takes
a while… here we go … If everything went well then we should be able to connect to portainer
by browsing to our server on port 9000. So let me just open a new tab and
put that URL in the address line. Here we go, portainer shows up and
asks us to create an admin user. I leave the admin name and just type
in a new password for portainer. Once I click on create user then portainer asks me
where I want to connect to. Here I select Docker so that’s the outmost left option and then I click
on connect. The portainer interface shows up and asks me which Docker instance I want to connect
to. I only have one which is my lab server itself, so I click on the local bar and once I
click on container I can see that there is of course only one container so far which
is portainer itself. Up and running. All good. Perfect. We now have a GUI to Linux
and a GUI to Docker which is Portainer. Before we can use virtualbox,
we need to do a bit of tweaking. The reason is that we want to
use the Virtualbox Web Services or API in order to connect to the server as we
can not access the GUI directly on the machine. Also we want to make sure that Virtual Box does
run as an unprivileged user for security reasons. First we need to create a user for the
Virtualbox Web services. Under System- User and Groups I have already created that user.
It’s called virtual. Let’s check the options. Username and UID don’t matter really. I set home
directory to automatic and very important set the shell to /bin/false because no one should
use this account to log into the system. Therefore we check the radio button No login
allowed. Now the group settings are crucial and need to be followed exactly in order to have a
working instance of the virtualbox web interface. The primary group needs to be vboxusers. That
will enable a lot of features around virtual box. In order to enable the Virtual box web
services to verify login information it needs to be a member of the shadow group.
This group has access to the /etc/shadow file and can therefore authenticate users with PAM
which is the integrated Linux security authority. That actually cost me a day to figure out. So
let’s look for shadow in the secondary group and add it to the user. All other parameters can stay
as they are. The next step is to tell the virtual box web interface to actually run under the
context of that user. And if you google for this then you will find a lot of outdated information
such as changing the default config file etc. That is really outdated since linux doesn’t use
initd any more. So what we need to do is go to System-Bootup and Shutdown, then find the
vboxweb.service and click on that link. This shows the Systemd Unit file which
will need to be adapted as shown on the screen. Here we specify the user and Group, the
executable which we bind to the right interfaces plus we move the PID file to the user’s home
directory. Once we have made and saved all the changes then we can restart that service.
Again, disregard all the info you find in the internet – this is the way to go – things have
changed a lot in the last 2 years here. That’s it. Now we have the Virtualbox Web interface
up and running and we can now use a client to connect to it. For this exercise we
will use a software called remotebox. There are other alternatives such as phpVirtualbox
but they need additional configuration on the server. I might show that in a separate
video. Let me know if you are interested. Please do leave me a comment. Let’s download
and use Remotebox. I will use this from a linux machine. If you want to do this from Windows
then you need to do a couple more things. The documentation is on their website. Again, if
you want me to coever this in a video let me know. So let me google for remotebox. That’s the link we
are after. Sourceforge or Knobgoblin. Again please check the documentation on Ian’s Website on how to
do this under Windows. UnderLinux I just download the bzip file to my workstation using wget or
curl , I then unzip the file, change into that directory and call the remotebox binary. Now let
me try and connect to my lab server. By default, the virtualbox web services listen on port 18083.
If you have not changed this then it is sufficient to just type in the server name. I specify my
user name and password and click on connect. Great, I am connected to the server and can
now add media and virtual machines to it. Cool, so Remotebox gives us the possibility
to access Virtualbox on the server very much as if we were sitting in
front of it. Before we can install our first virtual machine we need an
installation CD. Hey, let’s actually use a Windows ISO file and install Windows 10
in our first machine. But how are we going to copy the ISO image over to the server ? You
may have guessed, we use Webmin to do this. Under Tools-File Manager we have direct
access to the server’s file system. I want to create a new directory in marc’s
home directory which I call ISO images. This is where I will put all
of marc’s installation DVDs. Now I select Upload File and I can either browse
for a file or drag and drop it in that area. Let me pick that Windows 10 ISO file and upload it to
the server. Good. The file is uploaded and I can now go back to Remotebox and tell Virtualbox about
the new ISO file. Under File-Virtual Media Manager I can add an optical Disc. I browse to the file
which I have just uploaded and confirm my choice. Now I can create a new virtual
machine by clicking on the new icon. I give it a name, 2 GB of memory and a 50 GB
Harddisk which I want to be dynamically allocated. So here we go, here is my new virtual machine. Next I need to go to the settings and here
I can change all the parameters very much like directly in the virtual box Gui such as the
processor, the RAM etc. Here I add the iso file. Please be aware that you would need to add it to
an IDE controller because presumably if you just added it to the SATA controller like I did in my
first attempt then the VM would probably not boot. Cool, let me start that virtual
machine and launch the remote display. The windows installation launches and I can now go ahead and install a windows 10 into
that virtual machine on my home server. OK, let’s stop this here – I am quite
sure you know how to install Windows. Awesome. We have a convenient small form factor
PC running as an always on home lab server with graphical User interfaces for all tasks, for
Virtualbox and for Docker. Guys, I hope you liked this episode. If so, please do leave me a thumbs
up. Next Episode we will install another virtual environment which is a bit more enterprise
or professional grade called Proxmox. If you subscribe and check the Bell or reminder button
then you won’t miss that episode. Until then, many many thanks for watching. Stay
safe, stay healthy, bye for now.
