Linux Home Server & Networking Lab
Built and maintained a Linux-based home server to explore networking, containerisation, and secure remote access.
In August 2024, I decided to embark on an opportunity to build my own home server. For £160, I bought a refurbished Dell OptiPlex 3070 SFF Desktop PC from eBay. I installed a headless version of Debian Linux to maximise the efficiency of the hardware used, which was an i5-9500 paired with 8GB DDR4 memory and 256GB SSD storage. On top of this, I installed CasaOS which is a Docker-based software interface that runs on the browser to manage containers.
This project allowed me to explore various things, including:
- New distributions of Linux I had never used before
- Exploring the creation of shared network drives and mapping onto other machines
- Hosting of a Minecraft server
- Exploring network tunnelling for remote access using Tailscale to create a network between my devices, each device being assigned an IP address. If I wanted to access my server remotely, I simply would just need the IP address of the machine hosting my server.
Over time I would upgrade the RAM to 16GB and add a spare 1TB HDD for my network shares, I decided to install a desktop environment and chose Xfce to maintain efficiency so the server can also be used as a media centre.