Turn Your Old PC Into a Home Server FOR FREE! - Jellyfin, PLEX, Home Assistant, Pi-hole and more!

if you clicked on this video you probably have some old PC Hardware laying around and you're trying to find the use for it it could be an old PC an old laptop or some old Parts tucked away and collecting dust well you've come to the right place because in this video I'll show you how to set up your first Home Server you can use your Home Server to create your own media server to stream your favorite shows and movies to other devices you can use it as a home surveillance system or as an S you can even host your own VPN from it or automate your home by using home assistant the possibilities are practically endless and it can run almost everything you tried running on your Raspberry Pi it's 10 times cheaper than a pi and about 100 to 1,000 times more powerful the only drawback is that it takes a bit more space and it draws a bit more power I for example run my 3D print farm from a such server there are more than 10 3D printers and it's all handled by this old xon CPU which was released back in 2007 I did some tests and with all 3D printers running with input shaping the CPU usage never went above 5% I have three servers running at my office at the moment and I'd like to start making videos about them before I can do that I have to show you the basics so settle in and let's get started before starting with the server let's quickly go over some things you'll need so you can prepare them before we begin you will need your computer and an internet connection I'll be installing yuntu server in this video and to do so you will need the USB stick with a capacity of 8 GB or more when the server is set up we will access it remotely via SSH so it doesn't need to be connected to a keyboard mouse and a monitor while it's running for the first time setup though these things will be needed so we can change bio settings and get the operating system installed I'll use a wireless keyboard and mouse combo with a capture card instead of a monitor so I can record what's going on since all of my old computers are already running something I didn't want to mess around with them so I gave Facebook Marketplace a quick search and found this awesome system for only €20 it came with a gigaby GH g41 motherboard which supports gigabit L outof of the Box a zon e5430 CPU 8 gigs of RAM and a radon hd6570 graphics card it came with a hard dve drive and a DVD reader as well and all of these components will be powerful enough to run all of the things I mentioned earlier but there is one thing I would suggest you to upgrade and SD hard disk I would swap it with an SSD because the performance difference is huge and the prices of ssds have well dropped I can get a 256 GB SSD for around €25 and yes I know that's more expensive than the whole system in my case but again the performance difference is huge I'll be installing IUN server on this machine but before I get to the software let's make sure this computer is set up and ready so we don't have to open it again later I'll take most of the things out and give everything a good clean first thing the hard drive goes out and I won't be connecting the DVD reader back I gave everything a good vacuum and I replace the thermal Pace on the CPU the ram goes back in and since I won't be using this server for tasks which depend on the GPU I'll swap it with a gt220 which would be less powerful than the one that came with the system I did try running it without the GPU but since this Zeon doesn't have an integrated one the PC didn't boot I swwa the hard disk with an SSD and the CD reader will remain disconnected since I'm not going going to use it this part is not needed at all but since I'll be using a lot of USB devices from this machine I got a PCI USB controller card with which I add another USB controller to this machine giving me more USB band withd and the last thing I'll be adding is a single 120 mm Fen to the side of the case since I already had it on hand I'll do some cable management close the case give it a wipe and the computer is finally ready it our computer ready the next thing to do is to install the operating system as I mentioned earlier I'll be installing IUN to server on this machine and to do that you will need to create an installation media in form of a USB stick or a CD since I don't live in a cave and my house is connected to electricity I'll be using a USB stick go to ubuntu.com serverd download and download the Ubuntu Server image while it's downloading you'll need to install a utility that's going to format our USB stick and turn it into a bootable USB drive there are many options but the easiest one is called Belina etcher so go to the link below the video and download it if you don't want to install it on your system you can download the portable version which will be able to run run without you installing it on your computer get your USB stick and connect it to your computer open Belina etcher and hopefully your Ubunto server image has been downloaded by now if it was click on the flash from file button and select your ISO file then select your USB stick and please be careful to select the right one and last thing click Flash and wait the flashing process will start and now you'll have to wait a few minutes I would suggest you to not touch anything until it's done after it is finished you can remove the USB stick from the computer and congratulations because your bootable USB stick with youb to server image is now ready to be inserted to your soon to become server and after doing all of this we are finally ready to make this machine an actual server plug in your keyboard mouse and monitor along with the bootable USB stick I'll be using a capture card instead of a monitor so I can record what's going on plug in the power make sure the L cable is connected and flip the power switch to the own position before starting let's briefly cover some of the things you'll need to know first we'll be entering the bios so please find out which key on your keyboard is used to do that when you you turn the computer on and when the post screen shows up your bios key should be displayed somewhere on the screen one more thing that may be useful is if your motherboard has a boot menu to quickly select the drive you want to boot from so after you found out which key gets you to the BIOS start spamming it as soon as you turn the PC on when you enter the BIOS try to look for a power loss recovery option or something similar what I'm trying to do here is to make the PC turn on automatically after a power loss so if you ever lose electricity the PC will turn on automatically when the electricity comes back next thing let's go to the boot order settings and select your USB drive as the first boot option now you can save changes and exit the BIOS the computer will reboot and show you the Ubuntu Server grab menu select the try or install iuna server option and wait for the installer to start up on the first page you can select your language and I'll select English I'll check continue without update and now we have to select our keyboard layout since I'm using a creation keyboard some letters are reversed compared to the standard one so this step is very important for me luckily there is an awesome tool that helps you do this select identify keyboard option and press the switch as it asks you for the base for the installation I'll choose you buun to server and here in the network connection section just make sure an IP address has been assigned to your computer I'll skip proxy and mirror address and now we have to select how to install our system on our drive I'll be using the whole SSD drive so I'll select use an entire dis and click done now it shows the system partitions and asks us to confirm and I'll select done once again all of the data on this drive will be deleted are you sure click continue and now we can set up our Pro profile you can enter your name and the name of the server since this computer is the only one running a Zeon CPU I'll name it Zeon so I know which one it is set your username and password and I don't want you Bo Pro so I'll skip for now open SSH server will allow us to connect to this server from another device remotely and that will be the main way of accessing our server so make sure this is selected now the installer will ask us if we want to install some other services as well if this wasn't your first installation this would be very useful but for the first time let's leave it as is and click done and we are at the end of the installation now you'll need to wait for a few minutes for it to install everything and when it starts the updates I like to cancel them and do them manually later this cancelling update procedure always takes about 10 minutes so be patient and when it's done the PC will reboot after it does you will need to enter the BIOS once again you can unplug your bootable USB drive from the computer and inside the BIOS you can select your HDD as the first boot option save changes exit and wait for the to server to boot if everything went right you should be as for your loging credentials if you are then everything is right and you can continue with the rest of the video if this is your first time running something like this you're probably wondering what to do now the best way to start doing things is to start watching videos that show you how to install services like motion eye jellin home assistant and others while playing around with your server CAD GPT will be your best friend since whenever you need to do something simple like copying some files from one place to another C GPT will give you the commands you need and it will help you figure it out quickly we are going to start doing some pretty cool stuff soon but just a quick reminder if you enjoyed watching this video until this point make sure to subscribe since I'll be doing a lot more videos about this server in the future and I'm sure you'd like to check them out the keyboard mouse which I haven't touched since I plugged it in and the monitor are kind of getting in a way so let's get remote access working as shown earlier we installed open SSH server and that's going to be used to remote access into this computer first let's check if our server is connected to the internet let's log in and type pink google.com you can see that I'm receiving packets so my internet connection works now let's do a quick update of our repositories to make sure we are running the latest ones it's always a good practice to do this before you make any changes to your system so let's do it by typing Soo upt update it may ask you for your password and after it's done you will see the number of packets that can be upgraded now run the op upgrade to install them all while installing the OS in the network section we saw that this PC got a local IP address and this address will be needed to remote access into the server currently this IP address may change when the PC or router reboots if that does happen you won't know your IP address and you'll have to log into the router to check it again so what we need to do is to set a static IP we will have to edit some config files and it would be useful if we could copy some things over from our main PC so I'll SSH into the server right now so I can use my clipboard I'll log in into my router and it looks like the IP address of my new server is 192.168.0.1 16 now we'll try to SSH into it you can use a utility like PTY or simply do it from the command line by typing SSH your username at the IP address type yes and then type your password and you can do the exact same thing from a Mac terminal as well as you can see everything works and we've logged into our server from another device on the network now let's install party since it's my preferred way of doing it let's open it up and type our IP address once again click accept and type in your username and the password to set up a static IP address we'll have to modify our netl configuration file we have to find out what's our network controller called and we need to decide which IP address we want to use it has to be an available one and what I mean by that is that no other device is already using it to find out what's your network interface called we can use the if config command but before we can do that we have to install net tools type Soo opt install net tools and after it's done we can try running the if command once again and you can see that my interface is called emp3s 0 next thing let's modify the net plan config file you can use LS command to show what's inside the current directory and you can use the CD command to change directory use CD space dot to go back or CD followed by a f to which you want to go to move there and you can use the clear command to clear everything that's currently on the screen our config file is located inside Etsy SL netlamp and it will be a yaml file we can edit it by using the sudo Nano command sudon Nano and then type the file name you can use tpe to aut to fill it to the end this is the sudo Nano editor and we are inside the config file but the thing I'd rather do is to back up this file before we make any changes press crl X to exit and let's rename it to yam bck as backup we can use the MV command to achieve this and you can see that I got an error since my user doesn't have permission to rename root files give yourself root permission I can type pseudo I and after doing so you can see that the file name has been changed successfully now let's create a new file which will be our actual config file you can use the touch command to create a new file and I'll name mine static. AML now let's go inside it by again typing sodon Nano and then static. yl you can see that this file is currently blank and I'll make sure to leave this commands somewhere in the description so you can copy and paste it I have to change the interface name and set the IP address to the one I want now I can copy it all and paste it into the config file by pressing the right Mouse click press crl X to exit y to save and enter to confirm now we can type Pudo net plan apply to play the config and I lost the connection to the server so something did happen which is a good sign I'll go back to the server and type SoDo reboot to reboot the machine once it's back up I'll go inside the router one more time and if I did everything right the IP should be static this time which is it is now you can power off your machine by entering sudo power off disconnect the keyboard and everything else move it to its destination and power it back on while editing this config file you've learned how to change directories how to list files create files rename them edit them and much more if there's something similar you need to do but you don't know which command to use ask CH GPT I found it to be the fastest option when I'm trying to troubleshoot something if you ever built a computer you probably Ed hardware monitor to check the components temperatures Etc in yourto you can install something called neofetch type suro up install neofetch and after it's done you can run it by typing neofetch you can see the OS version the motherboard kernel up time and much more one more useful thing is htop htop will allow you to check the current load of your CPU and memory install it the same way by typing sudo op install htop in my case it was already installed so I just had to run it by typing the htop command in the command L here you can see your CPU course the memory and the services that are currently running use control C to exit out of it and the last thing before I go I'll show you how to access the files in your server from other devices on the network I'll use an application called VP and sadly I couldn't find a good alternative on Mac go to the vinp website and download the installer open the application and again enter the IP username and password click yes and you'll be inside your OS file system I'll go inside home/ Bruno which is my username and I'll create a text file now I'll SSH into the server and try to find the file as you can see that's the file I just created and in some cases it may be easier to use a client such as vinp to quickly edit or transfer a larger amount of files I really hope I explained everything well and I can't wait to start doing more videos about home servers and services you can run on them please don't forget to subscribe if that's something you are interested in and if you have any questions or ideas don't forget to leave a comment down below thank you so much for watching till the end and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Djambo

Views: 10,970

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Id: TPtgeFzQTrk

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024