That too, yes. General game server for a few games I play with friends, plus some datacrunching from time to time.

Free except from the drive to get there. But the drive is a lot cheaper than those racks would cost.

Vent fans at the top and the bottom. But it can be next to my work desk without the hardware getting annoying.

Not working on anything particular, but I’m going on a road trip on Tuesday to this regional airport that is giving away two racks perfect for my use case. Deep enough for my larger machines, sound proofed and 42U tall.

Finally my hardware can have a proper rack instead of being in a stack/pile in this harrypotteresque locker under my stairs.

Not much these days. While it used to be “everything”, now it’s:

• Http/https
• dns
• Wireguard
• Minecraft
• beegfs

My home servers have generally a lot smaller attack surface, as only a few ports are actually routed to them, so in theoey I could get away with a more relaxed approach. But I’m also a big believer in defense-in-depth, so I follow the same rules of thumb:

• iptables (or equivalent) that drops anything incoming that isn’t wanted. It also rejects anything going out that isn’t planned for.
• any public facing service (except ssh) gets its own user
• disable root login via ssh
• ssh login with key only on any user in sudoers

If I was on my laptop and not my phone I would post a screenshot with a P just for you

Well, there’s a footnote on my end: Me taking the drives home is a bit of a grey area, as the procedures say that the drives are to be mechanically destroyed when no longer needed. It doesn’t specify needed by whom. And I do attack them with my angle grinder, so it’s in accordance with company policy.

And yes, my employer knows and is OK with it. We go through a ridiculous amount of drives due to large storage needs, so pragmatism tends to trump bureaucracy.

I usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they’re a bit smaller than I’d like them to be, but on the other hand they’re free except from the minor work and documentation involved in ensuring that no company related data remain.

Yup, there’s no kinkshaming here

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Depends if you’re hosting something public, or something private.

For public, a webserver is a simple start. Can be anything you want it to be, but as complexity increases, so does the amount of potential attack vectors, so keep that in mind of you’re considering adding things like WordPress and the like.

For private, a NAS and/or a simple game server is a simple and useful start.

As for how, there’s a million ways to do it, and I’m an old stubborn BOFH that still cling to the old ways of doing it (as in, no VMs, no containers), so I’ll defer to others for that.

While purpose built server hardware is always nice since it comes with some useful additions, the truth is that “any” machine will do. Old discarded PC will do just fine.

This mostly comes down to your preferences, but my rule of thumb is that everything should be on mgmt vlan for mgmt, and then you choose which of those to expose to other VLANs via secondary interfaces. This has the benefit of allowing configuration when you’re on the management vlan only, and limiting access to the service itself.

Hetzner is pretty cheap, and have datacenters all over (I mainly use the one in finland). For your usecase, a very cheap VPS shoyld do. If you want a physical machine I can recommend their server auction.

Used it in the past, and it’sa pretty alright desktop OS. It would work as a server OS, but that’s not really its main focus.

It’s debian based, so might as well go for actual debian.

It’s been a while since I selfhosted my email, but I found it pretty efficient to set up a spam filter that periodically logged into my Gmail address and used its spam folder to train a bayes classifier.

Been a hetzner customer for around 20 years. No regrets.

It said 1~2 originally

Still more plausible than 1W

Yeah, it sounds more plausible like it’s amperes