I’m gonna build my first ever server with a old laptop I have. Bought a 240gb ssd to install in it and plan to use manjaro to do it. I’ll add some HDs to it and a total of 4tb, not counting the ssd, I wanna leave that only for the system. I have a jellyfin server kn my desktop and wanna change it to this laptop. Also wanna make a Spotify version of it and a google drive replacement. But since these are my first steps I have little to no idea of what I’m doing or how to do it. Any tips for a first timer? Mistakes to avoid and all that, preferably without buying anything else
You must log in or # to comment.
A tip I have is to move away from manjaro.
When you use a rolling release, you lose one of the main features of stable release distros: Automatic, unattended upgrades. AFAIK, every stable release distro has those, and none of the rolling releases do (except maybe opensuses’s new slowroll and centos rolling, but I wouldn’t recommend or use them).
Manjaro has other issues too, but that’s the big one.
Although I use arch on my laptop, I run debian on my server because I don’t want to have to baby it, especially since I primarily access it remotely. Automatic upgrades are one less complication removed, allowing me to focus on my server itself.
As for application deployment itself, I recommend using application containers, either via docker or podman. There are many premade containers for those platforms, for apps like jellyfin, or the various music streaming apps people use to replace spotify (I can’t remember any of the top of my head, but I know you have lots of options).
However, there are two caveats to docker (not podman) people should know:
- Docker containers don’t auto update. Although you can use something like watchtower to automatically update them. As for podman, podman has an auto update command you can probably configure to run regularly.
- Docker bypasses your firewall. If you forward port 80, docker will go around the firewall and publish it. The reason for this is that most linux firewalls work by using iptables or nftables behind the hood, but docker also edits those directly… this has security implications, I’ve seen many container services people didn’t intend to put on the public internet, on there.
Podman, however, respects your firewall rules. Podman isn’t perfect though, there are some apps that won’t run in podman containers, although my use case is a little more niche (greenbone service and vulnerability scanner).
As for where to start, projects like linuxserver provide podman/docker containers, which you can use to deploy many apps fairly easily, once you learn how to launch apps with the compose file. Check out this nextcloud dockerized, they provide. Nextcloud is a google drive alternative, although sometimes people complain about it being slow… I don’t know about the quality of linuxserver’s nextcloud, so you’d have to do some research for that, and find a good docker container.
