Why Run a Linux Server at Home: Cool things you can do with a Linux Server

welcome to Linux fest Northwest 2020 social distancing in addition instead of presenting at Bellingham Technical College I'm joining you today from my home office in Renton Washington my name is Larry Allen and my presentation this year is why I'm running a Linux servic home cool things you can do with the linux server thank you for watching hope you enjoy BC [Music] thank you for watching my presentation on why run a Linux server at home and there are cool things you can do with a Linux server at home you know today it is easy to setup with the cloud service like Netflix Gmail and Dropbox so why should you spend a bunch of time setting up a Linux server at home hey today we will explore different things you can do when you have a mixed server and that flexibility at home so Who am I my name is Larry apolonio I work for Port of Seattle as a Linux server engineer my focus and shrinks are Linux and networking it's a little bit disclaimer you know when running a Linux server at home can be fulfilling but like any other system that you run and connect to the internet make sure you follow our safe practices like keeping your systems up-to-date and use good password policies okay so this is Linux server not a desktop you know that running joke we hear every year at you know this is the year of the Linux desktop no really this is the year I notice presentations about a Linux server some box that you probably shove in the corner or a closet somewhere connected to your network and today's theme or this year's theme is be excellent to each other yep so this video is to my Windows Server admin friends and other folks that are more familiar with the windows I know Linux can seem too different but we do welcome you to try it out so what does the server look like ok so you know it might look like this an actual server class Hardware oh that's in a tower format or you can you know I have our a rack at home with rack mount server in it you know a lot of people think it's cheaper and it sometimes is you might be better off starting off with a consumer desktop though something small I mean like used or you know low powered and then you know there's also single board computers you know popular one is a Raspberry Pi and if you don't even want to buy Hardware you can load virtualization software on your current desktop and run VMware on it you know yes this is ESXi but you'd probably run player for free or workstation Perl which you have to pay for a little a single board computer note you know often said that a Raspberry Pi is just $35 a $34 computer but there are other expenses you know there's the power supply you have to consider SD card network cable you know those add a little bit of cost and then you know if you're not running this as a server you have to add you know keyboard video and mouse of course there is the $10 apply as well but it doesn't have like the USB connections or the Ethernet connectivity that you might want ok so what should you consider when you get a Linux server at home well it depends what you want right everything is seems to be like it depends so you know the initial cost you know the cost of the hardware you know that usually is a big driver but then there's the ongoing maintenance cost both in how much power it draws and you know how you do your backups if you do it to the cloud or to external drives or another computer and good news is you can upgrade your platform and move platforms if your desktop if you grow that desktop it's too small for you then you can upgrade to a tower then upgrade to a rack mount server so one of the things that you can do at home is to set up some infrastructure services this is boring I gotta admit you know but a solid Linux box can provide a pretty stable network infrastructure at home in the first one that you can think of as DHCP you know a lot of people have the router doing DHCP or your firewall during the HTTP and you know DCP is a that service that assigns IP addresses but you know with a proper DHCP server you can register and assign the same IP address to the same devices on your network and you can have registered have it register names into DNS so you're not trying to access a box by an IP address and then you know you can go diskless yes I did say diskless machines on your network where you can boot machines and devices off a network the other service that ties into DHCP is DNS DNS translates names to IP addresses so instead of connecting to one 92168 1.10 you can connect to a name like a server or the fully qualified domain name like the server Hawaii friends not local or something like that and vice versa you know you might have a machine on your network that you're like scratching here today what is this one 92168 1.2 hundred machine on my network you know with proper reverse DNS you can kind of do a look-up on their name and I mean that IP address and see what their name is another thing you can do and popular software packages out there called piehole is you can sinkhole evil domains like if there is a command and control server that in a botnet wants you to connect to you can assign an IP address to that name that will go nowhere you know as a popular tactic to make sure you don't get any get to any website bad websites or even like telemetry or advertisements you can have it sinkhole different domains and then if you want you can actually spoof other domains like if you're testing or just don't want mail to go there so like if you wanted you to intercept all gmail.com records I mean email you can create a gmail.com MX record on your local network and have all gmail.com mail go to your server instead of actual Google and another one in misspell this is DNS over HTTP I said of HTTP here though a it is where when you make a query for a DNS entry onto the Internet it is encrypted by HTTP a popular one is cloud for 1.11 and you know Google Google's 8.8.8.8 is also another one so what's nice is if you have your local DNS Network providing traditional unencrypted port 53 records to your normal devices and then you can have your DNS server make queries up to the Internet using DNS over HTTP so your ISP can't see what you're trying to search up on or on look up on it some other services that are available is you know network attached storage in a file server an internal mail server you know if you want a kickstart or pixie boot or something call that precede it Michael has the other things as well you can set up a TFTP server as well and then you know FDC an FTP server to transfer files and here we go let's let me show you a kickstart example that takes advantage of some of these services you know there's a DHCP giving the IP address here I have different choices to make to build my machine I chose one of the next ones and it here quickly kick starts to build you know that it actually takes like 15 minutes to build of course I don't want you guys waiting that long so I'm speeding this up then after I it's built I you know give it a hostname you know and you know those sort of comments to give it a hostname and I also add it to Active Directory I have a domain controller on this subnet Lords Network and I reboot this box and you can see me login tada it looks like Windows right no it's not it's it's Linux it's not XP ok moving on so number 2 thing that people do like to do when they have a Linux service and when I was researching this was home monitoring it seems to be the second most popular thing that people would like to do with their servers at home or I should have called this home automation but I'm calling at home monitoring so one of the things is Internet of Things I done a couple presentations in the past regarding the IOT home assistant on a hope in a hab or home automation software packages that run on Linux that you can install you can cap can track and keep an eye on things and have things have it take action on things um and here's one here's me getting the mail just to show you what it can do see in the background Thunderbird mail client and then on the right bottom is the door and me walking and then the left is an IOT device based on an esp8266 showing you what's going on as well so you can see me I open the door see the email in the back lights up on the left there's another sensor I place out there here I'm me will quickly walking up to the mailbox and go over here open up that mailbox see it beep again email goes and there's that device a 433 megahertz device I've done presentations I'm a 433 megahertz devices in the past here at Linux press and there you go I'm going back that sensor picks me up again and then of course the door gives the final messages and I don't if you notice there's a attachment to one of those emails it actually takes photos and emails those photos to me as well it's beautiful also you know there's also a video recording a popular open-source package is called zone minder a lot of Windows better than use the something called blue iris this is comparable and the reminder can use a variety of cameras can be a USB webcam you know those old-school BNC you know closed caption TV CCTV cameras and in your those cheap IP cameras you can import internationally from international sources and I want to give a quick note about those IP addresses there's a well documented that those cheap cameras can phone home they'll be rude and open up ports on your firewall using UPnP it's horrible with privacy but with zone minder proxying the camera you can set those cameras up without a default gateway so it does not go onto the Internet at all so yeah you're right that's I did not misspeak you remove the default gateway and in this in this demo network it's one 92168 one not one don't even give them that default gateway don't even give them the I don't DNS or any time services to ton a lot of as well you know and and they'll still work and you can still access them from the internet through zone under another monitoring thing for at home you can do is network monitoring you know I use nad Jos it's a great tool to make sure your network myself it's healthy I use it to make sure the firewall is up services like DNS and web are running and you know like your your servers and desktops are not running out of hard drive space and I take action if you're like Rotter ice P goes down right reboot the router or you know change the routes to connect to another internet connection that you might have and then here's a another monitoring thing yeah I do mother this is more of a curiosity thing and since I work at the airport yeah I use software-defined radios to monitor what planes are flying over me and to record some things over the radio and this was from last year's presentation and here's a clip of last year let me play Here I am at the airport and this does work from home and I can see stuff you know does maybe about 10 mile radius you can see me looking at the airport and seeing the planes flying over and then a number three is entertainment and you know this is the probably the biggest reason I've seen for running a Linux server at home and although there are other servers services out there it seems like Plex Media Server is a leader I admit that this is from my own personal observations these are my biases please chime in if you think I'm wrong I appreciate everyone's input so let's talk about Plex Media Server a little bit it's really easy to install on a Linux box I have a little video later on to show you and once you have it installed you can connect to it and view media like movies musics and pictures there's different type of plex clients that you can use to connect a simple web browser like Chrome or Firefox will easily connect you to a plex server or if you want mobile you know there's the Google Play and Apple App Store they have plex clients on there as well there's also a desktop plex client if you are so interested and devices like a fire stick or Roku will work as well and there's even some smart TVs I don't have one that have them built in order you can add into it hey and here's a little note about plex so the interesting about setting up a plex server at home is you can share content with your friends that have plex accounts not your plex look on their own place ago you're just sharing it to them and they can't change your recordings or add stuff to your your plex server but you can still share your content and this has kind of led to this weird thing and I don't advocate this but some people think they are Netflix and have been charging people to access their plex server so it's you know plex server is awesome but you'll still need to get media somehow one of the ways is over-the-air ODA you know traditional TV I just primarily what I use plex for is to get a Seahawks game I'm a Seahawks fan and record the news sometimes there's something interesting that I want to keep later on and I I I clip out the the news article that they they have you know there's also torrents and then I'll let you guys research this sonar radar and lidar most of 2 hours of in I I mean I have a Spotify icon a Spotify D and YouTube DL is the way I download media from the inner like YouTube and Vimeo and all that okay another thing you can set up at home and it's kind of more old-school minecraft server it's it's relatively easy to set up a personal minecraft server the only reason I mentioned this is back in 2013 a speaker named Brandon did a Linux Chris presentation on minecraft it kind of inspired me to keep doing these these presentations here so you know props to Brandon and getting me back to doing presentations okay number four thing is learning and education so I because you have a Linux server at home you can it can provide a platform that you can learn different disciplines and you know it's not tied to work with rules it's free there's no licensing that you have to deal with you know so you can you can break things and easily rebuild them so you know you can learn programming and web the villain I know Drupal was a big thing here you know JavaScript you can get into all that you know C programming nodejs and whatnot another one is you can learn you know system and server management and like if you get a Raspberry Pi you can learn about electronics like those GPIO ports you know protocols like you know being able to talk to other devices and network mqtt and whatnot or you can get into security and load a distribution like Kali and port scanner Network and see of vulnerabilities and become a security guy and the biggest one to me is to get familiar with Linux just be comfortable with it you know it's you can't do everything all academic you have to like get your hands dirty and with that said you know to my Windows friends you can RDP into a Linux box and here let me show you this video so here here's me we're on Windows 10 box I launch the remote desktop client and in the name of the Linux box and here I log in with my Active Directory credentials it looks like Windows XP but it is not it is a Linux box here I'm going to the Plex website and downloading the bits for it yeah you can see it download ok you see me install it here ok then I enable it and start it up so that you know comes up on reboot why not right the next thing you do is I go to localhost you know and import 3 7 4 0 0 and that URL up there and you know login with your Plex credentials that you created this is just a demo account that I have okay then you know first thing you got to do is uh put a data source on there or a library sorry then the next thing I do is I enable my so that you can connect over the network so you do not have to always RDP into the next box to get access to your plex server here look notice that I'm using a hostname you'll see a cert error and I do sign my boxes but this is beyond the this presentation maybe next year I'll talk about SSL certificates and you're gone you know it's running plex ok and a number 5 thing is self hosting there's a whole ton of services and things you can do at your Linux box at home you know it was just too much to go into this in this presentation so go ahead and um you know look at that link click on that QR code and or take a picture that cure code and then check it out yourself it's kind of interesting a normally I would have a Q&A you know session here at this point but since we're all doing this remotely I'll just give you my contact info Larry apolonio um Larry at Apollonian optic thank you for listening to my presentation [Music]

Channel: linuxfestnorthwest

Views: 163,212

Keywords: linuxfest, northwest, bellingham, linux, LFNW, 2019

Id: ux9bOaInrck

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020