My First Home Server Build
I built my first home server using spare parts from Mercari!
I was really bored one weekend and while doom scrolling, I suddenly had the urge to open the Mercari app. I was first looking for a laptop upgrade but then I saw really cheap old computers for sale. I had the idea of putting up my server for a while but in the country where I am from, even cheap parts aren't that worth it to buy for its price. Here, I was shocked at how low the prices were. I saw an i7-3770K old NEC Mate for just JPY 4,000. Even without storage, I think that its really good for the price so I bought it immediately.
The problem is that I don't have any monitor that supports VGA anymore so I tried to look for one. I was sure I would be buying really old tech like the old square LCD monitors but I saw a 1080p Dell office monitor for just the same price. Instead of buying older stuff, I made a decision to just buy this and then include it on my main setup after.
After waiting for 3 days, it arrived. I tried one of my spare 240 GB SSD on it, boot and checked if all the hardware attached is working—and it does.
This is the first time in years that I have seen a desktop PC with an optical drive.
then flashed a 16 GB USB drive with an Ubuntu installer and began the installation process.
The setup is very simple. After install there won't be any use of external displays, just SSH. First thing I did is disable passwords and to just use identity keys. So I created keys on all my computers and added it to the server's authorized_keys. Next is to install Docker and manage it using Portainer since I will be putting up several services.
After Portainer was setup, it's just a matter of selecting which services I want to put up first. Here are the several stuff I have on my server:
CasaOS - I just installed this so I can manage my server files easily and have a dashboard at the same time. But I never installed apps using it.
Hosting a Bitwarden server using Vaultwarden.
Jellyfin for you know what
For now this would be enough but I am sure this would grow more in the future. I am a JavaScript developer so I there would be some self hosted projects, experiments, and other fun stuff running here in the future.
It's just sitting under my desk running 24/7 and after checking my electricity bills for the past 3 days, it doesn't even consume a lot, somewhere around 20 JPY per day.
