OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers signs off with a real labour of love. This project is based on five years’ personal experience running his own self-built servers. Current Podman container count: 16 (and rising).
OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers signs off with a real labour of love. This project is based on five years’ personal experience running his own self-built servers. Current Podman container count: 16 (and rising).
Dare we suggest that everyone needs their own home server? In these febrile times when privacy is under threat and the rentier economy keeps finding excuses to ramp up the cost of online subscriptions, taking back control of your data and services is a no-brainer. And what better way to do so than set up your own basic home server?
There’s a free open-source equivalent for just about any online service you can think of, and you don’t need fancy hardware to get started – you can press an old PC or laptop into service if you wish. However, servers are designed to be run 24-7, so unless you want to run up a huge electricity bill, you might want to explore a dedicated low-power option, such as a Raspberry Pi 5 or mini PC based around Intel’s powerful – but energy efficient – 12th generation Alder Lake N100 chip. One such example is Beelink’s MINI-S12 Pro range – aim for 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD, which would cost you around £220. If you have large amounts of data to store, hanging multiple USB drives off this might not be practical, in which case, check out the box (below) for a fully specced N100-based self-build with plenty of room for internal storage.
Off with its head!
You’ll be running this server headless, which means that once it’s up and running, you won’t need a monitor, keyboard or mouse to access it on a day-to-day basis. Instead, you’ll log on remotely through any browser to administer all aspects of your server using the Cockpit web-based front-end (https://cockpit-project.org).
But first, we need to install our underlying operating system, and we’ve chosen the latest stable release of Debian (12.10 at time of writing) for the job. Head to www.debian.org and click Download to save netinst.iso (a mere 648MB) to your hard drive. You need to create USB bootable media from this – most distros provide a tool for writing ISO files to disk, such as Startup Disk Creator in Ubuntu or USB Image Writer in Mint.
Once created, insert the USB drive into a spare USB port on your server PC, which should also be temporarily connected to a keyboard, mouse and
BUILD YOUR OWN SERVER
If you’re looking to build your own NAS replacement – something to rival a QNAP or Synology drive – why not follow our own example? Here are the components we used (and how much they currently cost – from www.scan. co.uk unless stated) to build our own N100-based server.
The N100 chipset draws very little power, but its quad-core CPU can run over a dozen containers with ease.
BUILD YOUR OWN SERVER
If you’re looking to build your own NAS replacement – something to rival a QNAP or Synology drive – why not follow our own example? Here are the components we used (and how much they currently cost – from www.scan. co.uk unless stated) to build our own N100-based server.
monitor for the setup process. Boot from the drive, which should detect the Debian boot media and take you to its UEFI Installer menu. Leave Graphical Installer selected and press Enter. This works in a similar way to most distro installers, so work your way through it.
Debian’s graphical installer makes getting up and running a breeze – just make sure you remove the desktop environment option as shown.
Home addresses
Certain parts of the process require careful consideration: the first is when Debian detects your network interfaces – if you have more than one network interface installed, you need to select which one to configure (preferably the wired one for a faster, more stable connection). It is automatically configured using DHCP – we’ll switch it to a static IP address post-install. For now, give your server a suitably identifiable hostname (such as server-pc or home-server) to make it easy to identify from other network devices before continuing. Skip the domain name prompt.