Setting up a CHEAP and EASY Homelab Linux Server

there is a huge misconception out there when it comes to how much it actually costs to build out your very own home lab in this video not only am I going to show you that it is very affordable but it is actually very easy to spin up just a little Linux server install a really nice dashboard to manage various applications and really give yourself the opportunity to dive into the potential of what just having a little home lab server can do for you now actually setting up a home lab and running multiple Services you really don't need that powerful of a machine at all I have videos using old laptops as home labs and those have their own really great use cases considered the built-in UPC keyboard screen and all that you could use a single board computer like a Zima board or even a Raspberry Pi or my personal favorite mini PCS now the misconception may be partially my fault because a lot of the mini PCS that I've been covering as of recent have been rather expensive I've looked at some of the Intel Nooks which have a hefty price tag and even some of the higher end AMD machines now that's where this video is going to be a little different here we have the geekom mini air 11. this is an incredibly affordable mini PC this right here is the geekom website this is the Mini PC that we're going to be taking a look at and you can see it is a hundred and twenty dollars an incredible value they did sponsor this video and send this over to kind of do this demo and show you how affordable this can be of course you don't need to use their specific mini PCS and there are other affordable options this is a Intel Celeron based system the zimba board like I mentioned earlier is another Intel Celeron base but one of the reasons why I really like these mini PCS is because one the ram is upgradable and in many cases the SSD is upgradable which is something I've already done this is the little nvme SSD that came with this device it is a 256 gig for me I need a little bit more in my home lab I would say the minimum you're going to want is probably a terabyte if not two now this does not have the option for a 2.5 inch hard drive which then that can really increase your storage potential for that we'd want to go with something a little thicker like this it12 here but for Budget systems and just getting started this right here will work awesome and if you're going something budget like this these little Intel machines are awesome because the hardware transcoding on Intel CPUs generally is a pretty good deal if you don't know Hardware transcoding is actually like converting media on the Fly such as down scaling something from 4K to 1080P and Plex or jellyfin while you're on like your mobile phone for example now just a quick Hardware overview here this specifically is an Intel Celeron and 5095 featuring four core four threads this thing is really light comes in just over a pound it does have Windows 11 pre-installed on the SSD that I've taken out of it I put a terabyte in here that we're going to be installing Ubuntu Server onto this does have dual Channel ddr4 memory it ships with one stick one 8GB by stick so if you do want that dual channel Speed you may need to pick up another stick this thing is listed to support up to the one terabyte that I put in here looking at some of the i o here we do have a USBC these are data only so they cannot use or you cannot use these for display on the front here we have a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 we have our auxiliary our power button we have some airflow on the sides a Kingston lock on this side we have an SD card slot on the back we have our 19 volt power and a mini display port we have a gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.2 gen 1 Port another USBC for data transfer and then an HDMI this is kind of the minimum setup you're going to want you don't really need the mini display as long as you have one HDMI you're going to be good to go and of course breaking into these little mini PCS and actually upgrading them is really easy you just unscrew these three screws here which also double as the kind of a feet pads unscrew those pop it off you have access to everything you're going to want access to so that is the device again they did sponsor this video so if you're interested in picking it up there will be a link down below so what we need to do now is install Ubuntu Server onto it now for this it's a pretty simple process so I'm not going to do a full step-by-step guide on the Ubuntu Server installation it's really easy you get a USB stick similar to this one you're going to want to plug it into your machine I will note it's going to wipe everything on it so do make sure you actually back up that USB if you would like to this is the official kind of Wiki for Casa OS which we're going to be using a little bit later they support deviant and Ubuntu Server as well as Raspberry Pi OS if that's something you're going to want to be using so from there you're going to want to use a tool such as etcher to actually Flash the ISO file that you're going to download to the USB you're going to want to plug it in go into your bios or your boot menu I believe on this one it's either delete or Escape it will vary depending on the device you want to use and actually boot to the USB that you just flash you may need to disable secure boot depending if you get a weird like ufi error that's something you're going to want to do and then once you're in it's as simple as kind of following the prompts you select your keyboard your language all that kind of stuff make sure you select the proper hard drive you're going to want to search for third-party drivers just in case I'll leave a link down below to a full kind of walkthrough of the Ubuntu server setup but it's pretty straightforward the one thing you are going to want to do for sure is one make sure that if you are installing this you back up anything that's on your hard drive because we are going to wipe it select the appropriate disk within the installation it's going to give you what your IP address is going to be I highly recommend actually plugging this into ethernet because using Wi-Fi and trying to set that up as one an absolute pain and two ethernet is just going to be much more reliable so do take note of that IP address it's going to kind of spit up at you you're going to be using that later to connect in the terminal and actually install Casa OS do make sure you select to install the open SSH server you're going to want that you don't need to install install any of these snap packages that kind of pop up we could do all that kind of stuff later and run the install let it update reboot and if all is well you should get a login prompt if you did forget to that IP address you could obviously do IPA so from there let's go into uh screen recording and do the actual installation of Casa OS it's made by the same people who make the zimbab board which is a wonderful little single board computer I generally kind of prefer the little mini PCS that we're working with here because we have options to upgrade the storage Ram things like that the zimmerboard doesn't have that granted it does have that mini pcie functionality which is super cool and just cast OS has a lot of options to make everything really easy to set up down here we can see some of the apps or Docker containers have available a good amount to start out with and what we are going to do is simply scroll all the way back up here and we're going to copy this scroll command so let's give that a copy there we go this is going to install both Casa OS and all the various prerequisites but now we're going to do since we installed openssh when we installed Ubuntu Server we are going to connect to it so for this we are going to open up a terminal here and we're going to SSH into it so SSH your username at the IP address I think it's 152. I'll be back there we go it was five three I didn't properly uh restart it after the initial installation so now we are in the geekum 11 air now we do have some updates here so generally before anything it's always good to update our Ubuntu Server so we're going to do a sudo apt update type in our password let it refresh those repositories and pull the potential updates there we go now we'll do a sudo apt upgrade let's go ahead and restart all the services and okay there we go so now we're up to date so all we need to do to install this is paste in that curl command that we copied earlier hit enter and now we have cast OS made by Ice whale so they're installing all the necessary dependencies and we can kind of Monitor and see exactly what is going on here so we have net tools being installed called and there's a big list of everything that it's grabbing so we have a various python packages just a whole bunch of dependencies overall you can see it unpacking it grabbing all of those it even says please please ignore the following error installed all the necessary dependencies you can see it's grabbing SMB clients so we can log into it really easily installing various dependencies it has unzipped Docker so all the applications and everything that we're about to dive into are all Docker based and you could probably even install something like protainer with this and have it kind of work together in that regard so this is installing the iso Casa OS releases and we just keep scrolling down and here's where we are so it's successfully installed it's starting all the services right now and boom there we go so easy as that our Cas OS is 0.4 so on and it's running right here so if I go ahead and copy this open up our web browser paste it in hit enter you get to see it's going to take us to the cast OS page so I'm going to go ahead and full screen listen real quick let's zoom in and then we just need to click on go it's going to ask us to set up our account I'm just going to kind of match it with our server there we go great and here we go I'm going to accept the news feed from the blog and here's our server and this is a really beautiful dashboard we have our system statistics it's only using one percent of the CPU we have our power usage our Rams we only have eight gigs in but it's really not using that much here we have our storage which it looks like it's not using the full terabyte so if I go over here oh they have a merge storages they have a couple different new things here that I didn't notice last time here's the full storage right there so I probably need a little bit of a tweaking to get that to work properly there's our full drive and we can see statistics such as our temperature and all that if I go back over to storage you can create storage here so if you want to plug in external drives you can mount that through here got some Network statistics not really doing too much at the moment we have the option to sync our data smarten up our home we can add things here and we have our applications and we can and drag these icons around the default application installed is files so if I were to open this it gives us a really nice overview of our various system files and let's just say I go to Media for example I wanted to create a new folder I could call this something like Tech Hut and let's say I want to mark this as shared submit that go in here there's not really much going on then let's go down here to shared for example and go to techa click on the little menu get network path you can see the options here if I want to give this a copy for example go in here it's not showing up by default in my shared network but if I did paste this in hit enter there we go and I should be able to go and grab something here like a past project copy that paste it in and there we go now the network transfer speed here is kind of slow that's because I'm on the Wi-Fi network on this computer from further away but if I jump back in here we can see that it's actually working so if I go back over to me media going to Tech Cut You Could See this is a micro Weber one-click video and we have something in there already so just a really cool default application there now if you're going to be setting up a home lab you're going to want more services than a simple kind of file sharing thing so that's where their App Store comes in and again these are just various Docker containers that are kind of pre-configured to be able to easily install through this system jelly fin right here is really good if you want to spin up your own media server I'm not going to talk about the r applications too much I have to kind of tiptoe around that but I do love them let's say theoretically one of my favorite use cases for actually having a home lab server is something like photo backup your very own self-hosted kind of Google photos alternative so if I go ahead and grab this so if I install photo prism here default account is admin Casa OS and obviously we could change these let's go next steps and it's going to go ahead and start that installation for us now while it does that I'm on my phone here I opened up an application called photo sync I'm going to go ahead and continue it allows us to select send receive continue this is the application that photo prism recommends for backup so I'm just going to go ahead and get out of here we're going to go to settings and go under configure and we can see photo prism right there we'll do the trial I'm just trying to show a demo here photo prism one edit account I'm connected to my local network so I'm just going to do it that way so 168.1.153 admin password is Casa OS and all looks good so I'm going to connect that see if it works and there we go perfect so now I'm going to just go done and I'm going to click this little sync button and I'm just going to go send let's send them all and send it through photo prism let's just send it into the root and there we go so now if I go over here to photo prism we can see here it's going to open up in the proper port in its own application own little website kind of deal here photo prism is loading we're gonna login with that default information it gave us name the admin in Casa OS we can see there's nothing found yet but if we go over to library we are going to do a rescan so let's start that it's going to go check all of our files and see if we have anything in there but you can see it's indexing Google pixel 6 camera so it's uploading in the same kind of directories that I'm using on my phone and we can see numbers start filling out here so we have videos places labels and a lot more if I just go back to the home page for now we can see some things starting to show up for example this picture right here I just recently took and posted it's a little uh yellow box right there but that's just one quick example real rough install I'd want to go through and actually configure it set up SSL certificates and all that but this is just one example of something that you can do with having your own little cheap home lab so now if we go back to AppStar you could do things like home assistant app guard Calibre web we do truly have a bunch of different stuff here ready to go for us to install and play around with including torrent clients protainer which I talked about earlier this is honestly is kind of my preferred way to work with Docker and just if we click install it will allow us to jump into an instance and this is a pretty lightweight application so it should be pretty quick and it's done so if we click on protainer here we are we have our new user set up and you'd want to go through set up a strong complicated and secure password create user from home we have our local environment so I'm going to live connect to it real fast there we go and if we go over to Containers we can see we have photo prism and protainer so if you're on a more nitty-gritty kind of Hands-On approach to actually managing Docker this is one of the applications easily built into that kind of like I said earlier how you could have them kind of work together considering the fact it's actually in here it's very very possible if I click the little plus here we can install a customized app or external link here so in a way it kind of can act as your dashboard something like homar or heiml it can act as that so like a customized app for example if you did install something through protainer and it's not showing up here this is where you'd want to go ahead and add that you can add icons the actual UI ports volumes variables Etc really cool stuff and of course if we dive over here we could jump into a terminal so for that we're going to copy this connect and then here we are in our Ubuntu terminal so you don't even really need to SSH into it like we did to install it you can access the terminal directly through the casa OS dashboard so now it's really at this point you have the framework and Foundation to begin playing around testing out Docker containers really start experimenting with what home Labs can do for you and you it's super cheap the device that we're demoing this on comes in under two hundred dollars you get a Zuma board which Casa OS ships on for stock for about the same price but again for getting started the mini PCS are awesome because you can actually upgrade the RAM you can throw in like a two terabyte SSD without having to have a thing stuck to the side of it really cool stuff so with all that big thank you again for geekum for sending over that little mini air 11 for us to check out if you are interested in purchasing it there'll be a link down below they of course have other models so you could get something a little bit more beefier if you want some stronger like hardware transcoding for media they have AMD machines I'll leave some links down below and with all that I do hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 206,235

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment, server, homelab, ubuntu, casaos, docker

Id: _qNWpdFqLIU

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023