I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend

  • GreyBeard
    2·
    2 years ago

    Strange, Lemmy didn’t tell me you replied. Well, I run mostly Ubuntu Server OSs for Linux for work, but at home I am cheating and using a Synology NAS as my home server with docker installed on it. CentOS used to be a good go-to for servers, but I think Redhat made some changes to the way it releases and I think a lot of the CentOS users moved to other distros.

    • DidacticDumbass
      1·
      2 years ago

      Interesting. I never used CentOS, but I think it makes sense to run an OS designed to be used in servers. That would probably make my life a hell of a lot easier than setting up everything on my own.

      Good call.

      • GreyBeard
        2·
        2 years ago

        Honestly, with Linux, the biggest difference between server distros and desktop distros is if a GUI is installed by default. But one advantage of using a well known server distro like Ubuntu Server is that most articles on the Internet assume you are running it.

        • DidacticDumbass
          1·
          2 years ago

          True. I think the software I would download anyways is installes by default, which makes it easier.

          I don’t need a server to have a gui since most of the interfaces for services are browser based anyways.

          I am in no rush! It would do me well to explore and become more familiar with the networking side of linux.

          • GreyBeard
            2·
            2 years ago

            No doubt, there is an endless amount to learn with Linux. I’ve been using it for servers since the early '00s, and have been using it as my main OS on my personal devices since probably 2016, and I still regularly learn new things. If you are trying server stuff out on PC hardware, I suggest looking into virtualization. Proxmox is a great OS to start with for a virtual host. Then you can try out as many OSs as you want as virtual machines. You may be way ahead of me on that, but back when I was first learning what it meant to run a server it was of great help to me. That was before the days of docker and most containers(although I did use BSD Jails a little).

            • DidacticDumbass
              1·
              2 years ago

              I only recentlg learned about Proxmox through Lemmy, so I will definitely give it a go… I keep saying that about all this new software I am exposed to. Hah.

              I have always been fascinated by virtualization, but was concerened with resource management and nerfing my computing experience.

              Which is silly since concurrent computing has existed since nearly the inception, and with a few exceptions, CPUs spend most of their lifetimes idling without ever approaching the limit of resource usage.

              Yeah, I need to experiment.

    • Carl George@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      CentOS still works great for servers. The problem with classic CentOS and other RHEL clones is that they can’t fix bugs or accept contributions that change the OS. CentOS finally fixed these problems by moving upstream of RHEL (but still downstream of Fedora). It is now the major version that RHEL minor versions branch off from, so it’s still very stable and highly compatible. I’ve got a thread with diagrams that may help.

      https://fosstodon.org/@carlwgeorge/109985597904896856