Can anyone reccomend s good starting point for learning about how to set up a server? I have this old pc laying around that I want to put to work but I'm not sure how to do that besides just having a normal OS on it
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Id say install ubuntu server on it and watch beginner tutorials about what to do with a raspberry pi since thats similar to having a home server
What id do is learn to ssh to it, install pihole, jellyfin, reiverr, and linkwarden and use it for media streaming/archiving. CasaOS makes it super simple
If you have a target, it really helps to focus your process. Decide on a specific thing you want to be able to do. Start doing research around making that happen. Go from there.
Also don't worry too much about building something the wrong way. As long as you take your time and do things carefully, there's never really a point of no return. I've reorganized my own home server like three times now to make room for new things, and it's always more intimidating than difficult.
A good starting out point is getting networking working with a static ip, either ssh or rdp so you can use it remotely, and maybe a samba share to start storing files over the network. Personally I like Ubuntu for home servers, but any modern OS will work
Ubuntu's a good starting point. You can grab a server ISO from their site and flash it with Rufus. After that, it's best to find fun little projects to work on. Depends on what you want to run, game server, self hosted cloud, etc etc
i see people mentioning static IP, but you probably won't really need to bother, most linux distros have dhcp hostname advertising enabled by default i think
(as in, you can just run "ssh myserver.local" instead of "ssh 192.168.69.420" etc)
yeah the myserver.local is such a nice qol thing. If a server doesn't come with it out of the box it'll be installable with either avahi or avahi-daemon
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What id do is learn to ssh to it, install pihole, jellyfin, reiverr, and linkwarden and use it for media streaming/archiving. CasaOS makes it super simple
Practice installing.
Alma forked from RHEL when CentOS "retired"; also Debian, many others.
Get comfortable with CLI. Learn Vim & SSH. Good luck!
or if you want to play around with virtualization, you could try setting up proxmox or something
(as in, you can just run "ssh myserver.local" instead of "ssh 192.168.69.420" etc)
it's useful when you have lots of little scripts running and you want to notify yourself of something - just send an email directly from the server :3