Homelabbing: The Beginning

My Google Drive bill, £25 per year or so, was due on 1 July 2023. It was still February so I had some time. The idea of paying a subscription for Google Drive - which was both simple in its functionality and yet incredibly frustrating to use - just rubbed me the wrong way.

And as if that Youtube algorithm was reading my mind, I started getting recommended videos that purport to make it super easy to replace Google Drive with your own hardware. I got a tech-y nerdiness in me, so I clicked on that video… I was hooked from the get-go.

What follows in this, and follow-up posts, will be a story of my personal journey in this new hobby of mine - homelabbing. It will contain evolutions of my homelab setup, all-night debugging sessions, silly mistakes and powerful new abilities.

I will share a world in which I am a Mr Been character, wielding Excalibur - a confused nonchalant guy attempting to tame the same tools - from software to hardware - that give rise to the Internet.

It all started with the idea that I could simply use an open-source version of a file-sharing service (open-source basically means that the code is available and so anyone can use it). That service was Nextcloud and I found countless guides online on how to install it on your own computer (i.e. server) so that you are the owner of your files - and no more annual subscriptions!!! That was attractive to me, and so I dove deep.

I quickly found out that installing it on my existing hardware is quite tricky as I might override existing data and all the guides recommended using an old PC. I had two very, very, very old ones. They were not turning on. I tried swapping parts and whatnot but turned out that the power supply just wasn't working on either of them. I also found out that you need a bit more resources so I ditched that plan.

In April 2023 I went to my local second-hand PC shop and bought a PC for BGN300 (~£130). It was an old HP PC (pictured on the left) with 8GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel I5-6500 3.20GHz -- it was slow but was supposed to be enough to get the job done. I installed a special operating system that allowed me to do server stuff - TrueNAS Core 13. I also had to get some hard drives, and so I got 2x500GB ones - this was just for me to figure things out and then I would buy better ones (hard drives can get pricey - and you need to get proper ones usually). I started setting things up and everything was going okay - still had to spend many hours. I was basically just clicking stuff while hoping the tutorial will get me where I need to go. I had no idea what those IP things were, what a gateway is, what FreeBSD, hypervisor or ZFS are. In any case, the local setup was working fine - I managed to install Nextcloud and it worked just like Google Drive (even better so).

But now I wanted to expose it to the internet as I was wanted to access it from outside of my local network. And boy was that a ride. Took a full week or so. My biggest blunder was when I figured out what a MAC address is. Basically, in order to expose your local network to the outside world, you need a static IP address (which I got from my ISP, or internet service provider, for a small monthly subscription -- thank god I will be avoiding the Google Drive subscription...). Then, you have to enter the MAC address of the device, which will be receiving the outside (or WAN, wide area network) traffic. And so, I reasoned, I had to enter the MAC address of my new server PC (it had a sticker with that MAC thing). The moment I did that, my entire internet crashed. No wifi, no cable internet - nothing. Pitch out black. Phoned the ISP up and they sent a team the next day. When I told them what I had done, they were in awe - and not in the good way. I had to enter the MAC address of the router, the one the ISP gives you, as this is where the internet first terminates before being passed down the 'line'. Thankfully, the MAC address on the ISP router sticker was printed incorrectly so that would have happened anyways and I needed intervention but still - what a start.

Anyhow, the router was all fixed now and so I asked for credentials to get into the router root settings as I had to changed stuff to the ports and whatnot. Followed a guide or two and it kinda sort of worked (I mean a lot of trial an error but we got there in the end).

I already had purchased a domain name so just created a subdomain and made it point to my own public IP address given to me by my ISP.

More problems emerged after that. Just plugging in the Nextcloud software from the open-sourced code was not the plug-and-play option it initially seemed. I still had to configure other settings. The default limits are to be able to upload a file size of up to 1MB. I wanted more, obviously, so I increased that value in some config.php file. Easy enough, right? Wrong. I had to update some other php.ini file as well as an nginx.conf file on the same container. I also had to update yet another nginx.conf file on the other container that was hosting an nginx reverse proxy service (that was necessry, the tutorial said, to maximise security).

And so quite a few weeks later I had the whole setup up and running. My RAM was running low, though, all those files and stuff were quite demanding.

And so, where does this leave me? I managed to save £25 per year on Google Drive after I had spent some £500 and hundreds of hours. Just for the money alone, that would have been the cost of the Google Drive subscription for 20 years.

But I discovered the fascinating world of homelabbing. An amazing new hobby of mine that allow me to learn so, so, so much about computers and the internet. Now - two and a half years later - I am reaping a ton of benefits: stable, fast services, including my own cloud, movie streaming, VPN, photo management, self-hosted software, containers, services and a lot, lot more. And all of those files live on my own hard disks at home, not in some datacenter under the control of morally ambiguous companies! Not your hard drives, not your data!