Laptops make GREAT Linux Servers

this first little device I've actually featured this on the channel before this is arguably the very worst laptop in the entire world this is one of the very first HP minis it was a netbook at the time of release features an Intel Atom Processor with two cores and it shipped with Windows 7 starter Edition and to say that this is a piece of E-Waste is an understatement additionally we have here something that isn't E-Waste this is a good old trusty ThinkPad t450 these things are awesome because they're moderately powerful and you could get them on the used market for anywhere between two or three hundred dollars depending on where you are and what we're going to be doing in this video is talking about turning old Tech like this into a usable Home Server and particularly these laptops because laptops actually have a a little advantage over other things you may want to use as a server such as an old desktop a little mini PC like I used to use or trying to actually buy an old used server First Advantage is the built-in screen and keyboard obvious nicely it makes maintenance and setup and all that on these things incredibly easy and people in actual server rack spend a good chunk of change in order to add like a rack mounted keyboard monitor setup second thing is most laptops have a Wi-Fi card that works so if super high bandwidth rates aren't that important you could actually have this set up anywhere in your house with basically one cord and probably one of the most important things with laptops like this is this right here the batteries of a laptop acts as a UPS as if the power goes out the laptop battery will keep it running at least for a couple hours or so and that's awesome because people spend hundreds of dollars on these types of systems and of course form factor isn't always the most ideal for having a server setup but in this video there will be some additional tips and tricks that we will be getting into right after I tell you about the sponsor of today's video protoark and their ekm01 ergonomic keyboard and mouse combo and after a few weeks I do notice that I'm typing a little bit more efficiently and have less strain on my wrists the mouse and keyboard here both are Wireless it does ship with a USB dongle but there are three channels so you can either use the USB dongle or two different Bluetooth devices the keyboard has some scissor switches sounds feels good it's super clicky while the mouse on the other hand has more of a gentle soft click it fits very well in the hand you got your side buttons here this button in the middle is a DPI switch that you could switch between 800 to 2000 I've been using this one off and on to be quite honest with you I've been using their uh trackball Mouse here which is a different product active battery life of both of these guys is 90 days with up to six months of standby time overall modern Sleek very comfortable to use and I would recommend them and of course if you're interested in either of these products or this trackball mouse and many of the other things that they have use the code Tech Hut to go ahead and save an additional 10 now I tried to use this as a server but it just is not performant enough to do some of the things that I would want to do with it the only server distribution that would work on it was Ubuntu 20.04 I did manage to get Jelly fins spun up but it would not read data there was incredible lag within the terminal but using it for a base service like hosting an internal website or using it just as a Bare Bones basic FTP server for moving files around within your home network this thing could work remarkable but doing things like hosting an xcloud instance I tried installing the snap package of that incredibly slow I mean just download speeds were limited to like two megabytes per second in my local network because of the processing power of the actual atom CPU but nonetheless it is low power and you can use something this bad as a server if you really wanted to stepping up the ladder a bit we have this old well it's not old it's like 2014. ThinkPad laptop that I actually started this Channel with this was the laptop that I was using to do all my first like little Windows videos and stuff I was making okay so to do this you are obviously going to need that laptop we talked about and you can follow this guide if you're using a desktop or whatever I just think laptops are cool to do this with power source obviously you need an internet connection Additionally you will need a USB because we are going to be putting a distro on this and then booting it on to our laptop and when I comes to actually picking your distribution it really doesn't matter there's a whole bunch of options you have Ubuntu which is what I usually use for a server distro great for a server not so good desktop but Aura is really good if you want more frequent releases and of course you can go with something incredibly stable like a Debian you could go with a red hat Enterprise Linux clone like Alma Linux sentos stream there's a whole bunch of options and I'm going to be linking down below to an article with all the options but generally for my use case I usually go with Ubuntu or Fedora which Fedora is what we're going to be playing around with in this video with that Fedora server the official Edition we're going to go ahead and give that a quick download in order to actually flash it to our USB there's a variety of tools that you could go ahead and use there's actually Fedora media writer if you want to use that additionally there's tools like Rufus there's been toy I have a whole separate video on that if you want to be able to put multiple things on a single USB if you're on a Linux system you could use a gnome disks which is generally what I use but since I'm over here on Mac OS I'm going to go ahead ahead and fire up etcher and then once we have our USB burned you're going to want to plug it into that computer that you're going to be installing it on shut down the we'll make sure it's completely shut down turn on the computer and then you're going to want to go into your boot menu or your bios now depending on the computer it could be Escape delete it could be one of the function buttons it will probably flash what it is really quick with the motherboard boot screen for the ThinkPad in particular it is enter so I press that go into my boot menu and select this USB the Kingston data traveler for you it's probably going to be something different now when it comes to that laptop I couldn't get my capture card working because it doesn't have a proper HDMI but right here the installation process is going to be the same this is a quick little virtual machine we're going to go ahead and install Fedora 36 of course you could go ahead and test the media but for me I'm just going to go ahead and jump right into the installation process and here we go this is the installation it will look basically the exact same for you might be the resolution might be a little bit better but what you're going to do is go ahead and pick your link language I'm English United States so we're going to go ahead and continue from there and now here this is where it's going to look a little bit different than a normal Fedora install as we're going to have some more options available to US keyboard us good English good I am in the Los Angeles time zone good thankfully nowhere near there installation source is going to be local media now we will have some software selection I'm usually not going to want anything in here but you have options for a container management tools guest agents and a couple other things you can look into these tools specifically but for just basic personal server use that we're going to do today the regular Fedora server edition with no additional software for now is going to be completely fine now system right here under installation destination this is your where you're going to want to pick your hard drive now generally if you're just going to use the default hard drive on there you could go ahead and select it hit done and for me it didn't ask to reclaim but you may get a little dialogue that comes up if you already have something installed on your hard drive asking you to reclaim the space just go click delete we all reclaim space done and then you're good to go will automatically partition it and life is wonderful and obviously we are going to be wiping this drive so if you have anything on it currently you're going to want to go ahead and back that up Network on hostname I already have a wired connected if you do need to connect to Wi-Fi this is the place that you're going to do it and make sure you can do it now because you're going to want to make sure that you're not going to run into any issues once you do have it installed right here you have root to count in user creation Now root account you can go ahead and enable this if you want to but generally I just go in and keep it disabled because it's not really good to do things as root anyway and under user creation we have this check right here add administrative privileges to this user account which is what we're going to want to do so in this case I'm going to go type in my name change this to just Brandon give yourself a strong complicated and secure password and of course you're going to want to go ahead and require a password for this if it's a admin this is a server server it's going to be connected to your home network and you don't want people getting into it so I'm gonna hit done and I'm going to hit done again because the password wasn't actually that secure and then from there we just go ahead and begin the installation and of course depending on the actual USB your hardware and all that it may take anywhere from a couple minutes to 10 20 minutes and then when the installation is complete it'll look just like this so we'll go ahead and reboot our system here at this point once it's uh at the post screen you can go ahead and remove that USB and here we are this is how you know that everything was successful we have Fedora Linux here that we could go ahead and boot into and there we go so here is our web console this is actually going to be a much easier way to go ahead and manage this but if you do want to log in and manage it through the actual computer you could do so of course but going forward let's go ahead and connect to this local IP address right here all right so we got Fedor installed and I went to this URL right here this local IP address of the port 1990 on my local browser here and we are greeted with this now one of the reasons why I really like Fedora is actually include a little GUI like this out of the box so here I'm gonna go and type in that name for the user I created as well as the password save that and here we are in our dashboard this is real nice because here we can go ahead and see our CPU our memory usage so you can see I'm using about 25 24 my CPU just that idle it's probably going to drop down a little bit this was the very first login it's doing some things as you can see and then over here we have our memory usage our host name and some more information here including the Machine model uptime if I view the hardware details specifically you can see I can see all that here including the bio versions the specific fifth generation Intel CPU I have and you could actually get a lot more stuff so if you go to logs we can see what's going on there a couple error messages but nothing that seems very important storage here this is nice gives us a good rundown of how much of our storage we're actually using and our read write speeds and all that and then of course we have NFS mounts that you could set up here if you have a separate like Synology Nas or something that you want to connect this to even though that kind of uh the purpose of that wouldn't make sense unless if you're installing this on like a much more powerful machine than what your Nas can provide networking information here typical stuff you'd expect including enabling disaber disabling firewalls you have rules to edit here so a lot of basic administrative stuff that you need to do over there on the command line or in the terminal can actually be done here on the little Fedora default dashboard you can see right here this is all the services running and then you have tools so we have applications here cell Linux software updates no authentication so right here I have limited access this is probably a pseudo command so I'm going to authenticate that it's going to then check for updates and you can see we could do all that through here as well so real quick I'm just going to go ahead and install all of the updates to get that out of the way and there it goes and if I go here to the update log you can see everything that it's doing just a really nice interface that is a lot more friendly to somebody who's doing this for the first time and the server has closed the connection so it probably needed to do a quicker restart if I do try to reconnect I could go ahead and log on in again and there we go so now this should say that we are completely up to date unless if it's still processing step there you go system up to date now really cool thing under software updates here we have terminal so you have full access as if I was over there typing on that computer right now for example it probably doesn't have the package of course with the Fedora the default package manager is dnf so we're gonna go sudo dnf install and we're going to go ahead and grab a neofetch h-top just in case if it's not already in there and here you could adjust your font size and then you could change this to like a slightly Lighter dark white really whatever you want white actually looks kind of good and there we go we have everything it's going to need I'm going to say yes and continue and that's basically how you install packages but we're going to be doing now after after all this is done is actually setting up Docker now if you don't know what Docker is it's in the simplest terms it's a way to kind of containerize and separate packages and services so if you have a media server and maybe like a torrent client running everything will be kind of separate they won't rely on the same dependencies there's a lot less opportunities for them to break and it's really easy to stop and start them individually it just makes it life so now that's complete before we do that I can type Neo Fetch and we can see see some more specific information about what's going on which will match up basically with this overview I was just showing you the general package setup and also before we do this I might as well show you that you don't actually need to use this dashboard necessarily I'm going to go ahead and exit out of that SSH session start a new terminal and if we just do SSH your username at that local IP address so in this case it's 192.168.0.81 into her yes this is my server I do trust it type in your password and we're in and if I do the same neofetch command it's going to be exactly the same additionally one thing you may want to do is easily move files on your server so the way I would recommend it doing this is opening up the filezilla application It's a Wonderful FTP client or file transfer protocol and to connect to this what you're going to want to do is under host you just do SFTP so that's a secure file connection I'm going to do this just like it was a website and then that local IP address so 192 680.81 and then same situation under username and password and then it's going to ask that the same thing that we uh or that it asks us when we connect it through the terminal do we trust this connection we do indeed and then here we can see that we're connected if I go ahead and drag this down a little bit you could see more specifically what's going on there and just as an example let's say we want to jump over here to the terminal on the web dashboard mkdir to make a directory and let's say I'm eventually going to set up a media server so I want to make the media directory and if I go over here refresh this we can see that the media directory is there so that's just one way to easily connect and manipulate files as well as permissions if I actually right click on this I could see the file permissions and 755 is looking good so everybody has a read and execute privileges but only the owner can actually write files to that directory beautiful now one more thing before we actually get into installing Docker this is on a laptop now you're not going to want the lid open and the screen on all the time because that's just not good on power silly and to actually disable the computer suspending when you close it what we're going to want to do is edit a quick file now it's just going to be a sudo Nano Etsy system D and log in D dot comp just like that hit enter type in your password and of course we want to make sure we have a Nano Nano is a text editing application that works within term channels like this so again just like we installed neofedge sudo dnf install Nano and continue with the installation and then let's jump into that folder here we are and now in here we're going to have some things commented out now if there's a little kind of hashtag before a uh a configuration option that just means that that is going to be being ignored completely and it's going to go with the default now what we want to uncheck is this one right here handles suspend key handle lid switch as well as handle lid switch docked and then out of these configuration options the handle lid switch here we're going to want to switch this to match the docked one which is going to be ignore as well as the handle suspend key I'm going to go ahead and ignore that because we just don't want our system suspending at all if we want it to suspend you might as well turn off and give it a break so once these three options here say ignore what we can do is go control o to save that and Ctrl X to get out of there so now what we're going to do is actually restart our systemd login so it will actually do that and to do that what we need to do sudo system CTL and then we're gonna go ahead and restart our system D Dash login D and of course hit enter and we you can close your laptop now or check to make sure that it uh everything works fine now at that point let's actually go ahead and set up some services in here and we are going to be doing that with the wonderful world of Docker here I'll link to this down below this is the official Docker setup for Fedora and here it's going to go over all the basically everything you need to do there's various installation methods so you could install using the repository you can install it from a package and you can install using the convenience script which I think is what we will probably do in this case so to grab the script we can just go ahead and copy this curl command here give that a copy paste it on in there okay so Mac OS problems we're going to go ahead and switch to terminal because apparently I can't paste in this window so new terminal let's go ahead and log in 90 one just like I showed you guys earlier there we go and now paste so we're grabbing that little script there and now if i l s we can see we have git Docker sh so now if I do sudo sh and then the get Docker script just like that type in our password it is going to do everything that it needs to do since we already just updated our system it shouldn't take too long at all and while that does that one thing I'm going to grab that just makes things a little bit easier is a application called yacht I did cover this on the channel previously it's a newer kind of uh dashboard to manage and install your Docker containers you don't need this but it it really makes it easy getting things set up initially so I'm going to copy that and over here we can see we have a Docker installed and everything else that we will need to get that up and going so we should be able to paste this on in and it says here that to uh make it so you can run Docker with non-privileged user you might want to set that up might be a good idea so not good to run Docker as pseudo generally but I'm just going to go ahead and do it anyway make sure that this is actually running sudo service Docker status which it is not running and let's check that again there we go so I just needed to start the service and now I should be able to get out of there and then create that yacht volume there we go and now we could grab this and this is going to be on the port 8000 to actually connect to it so give that a copy let's paste her on in enter and run this as sudo enter and then it's going to go and actually pull and download everything it needs and then set up that container now while it does that I'm going to go ahead and grab our IP address open this up in a new tab and then go to the port 8000 make sure that it's going to be finished up by the time I do this and there we go so it should be launching should be able to go to that we'll go to the non-secure port or a non-secure location and here's our yacht login now if we go now back here we can see the default stuff and you could obviously change this if you'd like to this is your default email and the password is pass so let's go over here paste that on in and then type in pass and then you can see we are logged in and the only container we have for running at the moment is yacht and it's from here you could go ahead and set up whatever Services you want on your home network to do that if we go under templates here we can add a new template and you can see they have some of their own so I recommend just grabbing this real quick I'm going to paste that on in and then I'm going to grab this name because that's going to be the title and paste that on in because that's going to be the title of that template submit now under here we have a full list of all the applications that we can go ahead and grab I'm going to be doing a quick example with jellyfin so if I search that up jelly we have jelly fin here hit deploy over here is the official jelly Finn Docker instructions so you get a lot of stuff here as well as docker compo those files and all that to actually get this spun up without using yacht but within yacht we have our basic settings here we can continue under networking we're going to want to go ahead and Bridge this and you can see it already has all the ports and everything set up for this 80 90s this the standard non-secure Port right here I'm going to do some changes I'm actually going to direct this under my host is going to be home Brandon and that media folder that we created and then this in the container can just be as simple as media and then continue on from there time zone value we're going to want to set that so if we actually head on over here I'm going to grab the proper I just want to make sure that that's what it was and deploy that instance of jelly Fin and there we go jelly fin is spun up so if we headed over to the web UI which should take us right to our jelly fin install it will then run us through the setup process of this now I do have separate videos on different ways to install this I don't have a separate Docker video I might make that in the future but that's basically how you set it up through Docker media so we just click this let's do a movie Library folders we should be able to see forward slash media right there hit okay okay and then next and actually just to make sure we did this properly let's go back into here so let's go to filezilla and a beautiful thing about this we just go ahead and connect to our last connection there we go under media I'm actually going to make a separate folder for movies and then for example a separate folder for shows which is generally a good way to go about it now if I edit this actually just remove that library and then recreate it so let's go movies folders media and there they are so I was just making sure that I got the directories properly set up so okay okay and then of course you could add another one content type shows and then this will be the media shows folder done done next next allow remapping is important next finish sign in and there we go this is our jelly Finance since you saw easy that was to spin up and this is all running off that old laptop granted now let's see if I can actually get this to work we got some cat dog who doesn't like cat dog let's go ahead and drag oop drag and drop that right into shows and then let's go ahead and grab a movie so under adults no not that kind of adults movies as evident there we go let's grab the Great Gatsby that's a good movie so drag and drop that in there and you can see all that was added to the queue we got files moving I'm gonna not do all of these because this is more of just a an example so let's just do season two shall we so remove from q and then while it does that first we'll kind of see if it's already recognizing it it's not so we could go to dashboard under Administration scan all libraries and we can see that's doing a quick little Library scan and once it's done we can go back to here you got next up cat dog it already pulled everything for us under shows not all of them have transferred yet but we can see you what we do got in there yeah two of them beautiful and within the yacht dashboard too if you actually uh wanted to use this we can see what each uh yeah or not yeah each Docker container specifically is using when it comes to your CPU and overall memory consumption based on the CPU usage and all that that we just talked about we can afford to put a lot more services on this little laptop here so for example templates if we go to a self-hosted pro there's a lot of things on here and of course you don't have to just limit yourself to Docker but you have file browser guacamole for having a clientless remote desktop Gateway Homer for static home pages and really a lot more such as if we keep going down we can set up a pie hole instance I have a whole separate video on how to do that we have Plex in here if you prefer that over jellyfin or MB TeamSpeak transmission a way to store all your books you can do your uh bolt warden so store all your bit Ward and passwords encrypted on there and this right here transmission open VPN this is really cool because then you could actually use openvpn within this Docker container specifically for a transmission client perfect an example of one that's uh pretty easy to spin up for example's sake would be something like a code server right here Microsoft vs code so here all the settings look good continue of course we want this to be bridged continue and the config looks fine continue you could add actually other volumes if you wanted to actually let's go ahead and do it container we'll just do uh Brandon because I know that will link to my home directory so we could do home Brandon just like that continue from there and now time zone I could paste in what I pasted earlier and then give ourselves a password for this since it's going to show I'm going to go password one and password one and proxy domain I'm just going to ignore that for now hit deploy and then it's going to go ahead and pull the image and install everything for us and there we go so we can go to the web UI here and then type in the password we just created that super strong and secure one and here we are so I'm going to go ahead and trust and understand that and this is your very own Microsoft code server and we have our workspace here if I go ahead and add a folder let's go ahead and open a folder and let's go to Brandon and then you can see there since I linked up the volumes properly I can actually access my home direct home directory from this code server here so for example if I wanted to edit my bash RC I could go ahead and do that so here is my bashrc that I'm editing from that server with a Microsoft code something you might be interested in doing and of course I'm going to have a bunch of links in the description showing you how to set up Docker the commands I use to go ahead and do the little laptop Lids suspend trick and some other resources and things that you might be interested in with all that I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned a thing or two and this has helped you out in some sort of way and if it did and make sure you like this video subscribe and ring that Bell so you do not miss any future uploads with all that have a beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 227,430

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, fedora, homelab, server

Id: HxvFuGnjoJo

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2022