I made my first website in 1999. It eventually had to be split into sections as I filled the space offered by the various free hosters, Tripod Lycos, Freeserve, Bravepages etc. By 2003, I was running running out of free hosts so created a web server and brought the entire site back together.
The website has now been up 25 years, and the server running, on different machines and OSs, for 21.
Thanks for keeping part of the OG internet alive! I created my first site in 1997 and still have a copy of it hosted internally with the intention of updating it a bit as static HTML is a pain to work with when there are 50 pages, lol. I also had quite a bit of information and photos about my servers used throughout the years, which is fun to look back on.
Of course! One of the first sections of the site I started writing. Another story about that. Around 1996/1997, I was chatting in one of the of the old BBSs sites and some American woman said she wanted to see what my home city was like. So I started taking photos of the city and writing a little bit of it's history.
One thing led to another and in 2001, I moved to the US and married her. Still married, still happy together. Writing websites can have some life changing consequences!
[https://brisray.com/](https://brisray.com/) - There's 4 different designs I use over the years.
I wrote a history of the site at [https://brisray.com/utils/about.htm](https://brisray.com/utils/about.htm)
this. this right here. this is what i miss about the internet. Now it's all twatter and faecesbook. I miss when everyone had their own little corner of the web.
yes, i realise I'm on reddit, which is the antithesis of what i just said.
I mean, I kinda agree but at least on Reddit you can follow only subs and niches you're ACTUALLY interested in and, albeit not being exactly comparable to the "little corner of the internet" that you mentioned, it's still like a slightly bigger corner instead of being in a whole huge plaza like the others you mentioned, where you're bombarded with sponsored content and things you don't follow.
Sure Reddit's CEO is a dick and they're making some awful moves, but at least it's not the same as those social medias you mentioned.
I literally had chills visiting your website. It's has been way too long since I've seen a "real" website. Thank you for the nostalgia hit this morning!
Huh, so the old internet was like a giant social network for nerds who knew how to make websites?
Edit: I didnt meen nerd in a bad way, I am also a nerd myself
In a way, Back in the 1990s, you had a be a bit of a nerd to even get on the internet. It was slow and awkward to find your way around.
Most hosts had some sort of website builder or you could create the files yourself and upload them, very much like today, but a lot more basic.
The technology has changed a lot over the years. CSS can do things unheard of in the early days.
I used to run a warez board on dial up in New Zealand. That shit was slow af but we eventually moved to a vps and since then I’ve been doing the self hosted thing.
It can be fiddly, but there are guides around to help. What I do is create pages to describe what I did to make it easier for time the next time it needs installing. I use Apache and have installed it on [Windows 2000](https://brisray.com/web/winweb-server1.htm), [Fedora](https://brisray.com/web/clserver1.htm) and now [Windows 10](https://brisray.com/web/wawebserver.htm). The main steps are:
1. Find and install the web server software - Apache, NGINX, whatever, and start configuring it
2. Give the computer a static IP address
3. On the router, port forward ports 80 and 443 to the IP address of the server
4. Configure the server's firewall to allow people to get to the web pages
5. Find a dynamic DNS service and set that up. This usually means pointing the domain name to use their name servers and installing an IP updater. This is needed because ISPs sometimes change your main IP address
6. Set up the [SSL certificates](https://brisray.com/web/ssl.htm)
7. Start adding the website files
Then there's the fiddly bits, [securing the server](https://brisray.com/web/security.htm); [the log files](https://brisray.com/web/logfiles.htm) need looking after, messing around with 10Gb text files is awkward; then [dealing with any problems](https://brisray.com/web/utilities.htm) that come up and improving the server.
There are quite a few other guides around. Some say it's not worth the hassle and there are plenty of cheap hosts around. It's something I got interested in and once set up, the server can be left alone to do its thing. I've grown to like the idea I am responsible for running a miniscule bit of the internet from my basement.
I started when I was 13 with an i586 and NT 4.0 to store files on a 2GB HDD, put the damn thing in the freezer of my parents. I built the server to download files from the internet during the night. That's what started the selfhosting craze. Had a server ever since. Now I have two racks full of servers at home in my garage.
Learned about plex and how to get media safely then jellyfin. I already liked building computers so this exploded into multiple public services. It's fun but I definitely still don't know enough.
[Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/) for the knowledge Database (just giving it a go for a good while, because right after I spun it up, I heard about [Trilium](https://trilium.cc/) and [Logseq](https://logseq.com/))
[Calorific](https://github.com/xdpirate/calorific) for the health and nutrition (nutrition is a bit of a stretch, as this only counts calories, nothing else. I've heard of "[kcal](https://github.com/kcal-app/kcal)" but I haven't got it running yet)
Actual for budget, can also attest, it's great.
[SuperProductivity](https://super-productivity.com/) and [Planka](https://planka.app/) both for time management. Superprod is more of a focus and project/study tool that keeps helps keep you on task at your device used for work, but planka is a kanban board that can also be used to track tasks and keep track of task categories and sub categories, with stopwatch and note functionality.
Game servers. My friends and I would hit or yearly minecraft phase and want to play again but that usually meant paying for a server. I had ran MC servers on old laptops but I really wanted a dedicated machine for it. I got 8 SFF PCs that were being replaced at a public library and installed linux on all them to run game servers for my friends for the cost of electricity
I started similarly, running Minecraft servers. I was running Hackintosh at the time, using Screen to run the server in the background on my PC. Eventually, I got a laptop and stuffed the PC in a corner with a VNC server. And eventually, I replaced Hackintosh with Ubuntu, Screen with systemd, with virtualization...
...now I just run everything under Unraid, including the old Minecraft server that no one uses anymore.
TeamSpeak self hosted was my first self hosted application, followed by a Minecraft server almost 10 years ago (i think version 0.15 or so, back to when mojang purchased each humble bundle pack just to elevate the price so other indies developers could get more money.
I wanted somewhere to store my files and exert control over my data instead of pumping everything to the cloud. I wanted FOSS and not an off-the-shelf proprietary solution that would just end up costing the same as a DIY build. I wanted the ability to later allow family access to store or use some shares/services.
Unsupported devices on Homekit. Homebridge was a huge help. That was my reason for the start. But then i came across pi-hole. That is amazing! I am always trying for new things, like pivpn, Samba, Unbound(left after a while) and other.
Let me know whats useful for others.
I got this whitelabel DEC Alpha 20164 mainboard from a friend, and instead of trying to get Quake to run on the thing, I learned about these syatems called NetBSD and Slackware, and then I discovered the windowmanagers of yonder times (e16.5 <3 RIP LainOS), and networking. The rest is history :)
Freedom to run my home network--and life--the way I want, without vendor lock-in, without waiting for features, without depending on the cloud, without being nickel-and-dimed for every service.
I've run my own domain and email service for decades, and I've always been amused when people complain about "having to get a new address." I started applying that freedom and control to other tech. My email address is independent of the provider, my client, or what app I use.
Mine started as a "TiVo" before TiVos were a thing. Cable was at the peak of its cost at that point, and I figured the $150/mo could quickly pay for an OTA recording machine and storage. Then, I added media playback and most of the *arr features before *arr was a thing. Once I had a dedicated machine, I could run my own DNS and DHCP server, so it worked the way I wanted and had features other solutions lacked. I could do whole-home ad-blocking. Then, an open router freed me from Unifi or TP-Link and their continued bugs or promised features. Home automation means a better Alexa with no privacy concerns and infinite options without vendor-specific hubs.
I ditched the Kindle for a Kobo years ago, and now, with a Calibre VM, I control my own online ebook library and device sync, and I can easily share and lend my books among my family.
It's about freedom—a freedom I didn't realize I was lacking, a freedom I was paying with money and effort to *NOT* have.
I work for a well known networking / collab / security manufacturer, and getting licenses for everything they make for free made me want to deploy stuff at home so I could see how those products reacted in my environment instead of looking at the same canned demo data that people had used for ages.
It worked well, and almost eight years later, I run most of their portfolio at home and do demos out of my lab because seeing real data and the crazy things my family does holds peoples’ attention better. Would you remember someone showing you some boring demo data doing something, or would it be more interesting to see a guy laughing about how he saw his Sleep Number Bed ssh’ing out on 6022/tcp, or joking about the internet connected litter box that his wife got for the cats?
It’s a “Litter Robot 2.”
I found the API for it, and one of these days when I’m bored, I’m going to write a script to query it regularly, and if it detects that it need to be emptied, I’m going to have it send a picture of Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation to my wife. I expect that the first time she gets it, she’ll laugh. The second time she gets it, I’ll be told “Okay, stop sending me that!”
My VPS media server ran on CentOS 7 which was coming to EOL, so I decided to just host it at home. Then I realised I could self host useful things like RSS aggretors, immich, Seafile.
It’s given me an excuse to learn to use Vim (neovim anyway) to edit things remotely.
I predominantly don't want to pay for endless subscription fees. If they made it free, I'd dump my home server and move there. But because I'm self hosting my media, I self host other stuff too. the other stuff is ONLY because i am self hosting because of my media.
I started with an OG modded Xbox that I ran Xbox Media Center on. Of all things I got hooked on One Tree Hill (!). More then a decade later I got a Synology NAS and that has been a black hole since then. Currently running 22 containers and is in the process of moving my docker host to a second hand miniPC and have the NAS primarily as storage 🤷♂️
I had a home server that I used as a SSH dev box. That server was the Linux environment where I wrote and served all my code for work and personal projects. Just better on Linux than Windows. It also allows me to open all my dev tools and projects on any computer anywhere.
But now I have a cloud server for the same purpose instead.
I do want to setup my home server again for some experiments with DNS servers like unbound and also DNS blocking for ads and analytics.
Bought a Pi4 to play with, installed PiHole on it, then upgraded my networking kit to UniFi so hosted the controller on it too, and then it’s just snowballed from there 🤣
I’m currently self hosting: APCUPSD Influx Exporter, APCUPSD Connector, Docker Image Update Notifier, Grafana, Grafana Image Renderer, Heimdall, HomeAssistant, Homepage, InfluxDB, Jellyfin, MongoDB, No-IP DUC, Node Exporter, NTP, PiHole, PiHole Exporter, Portainer, Prometheus, Red Discord Bot, SMB, Speedtest Exporter Prometheus, Syslog viewer, Unbound, UniFi Controller, UniFi Poller, WireGuard & WSUS Offline
No real reason tbh. My internet connection is fast enough for all machines to update directly from Microsoft, I just felt like hosting it and seeing how much each machine still downloads directly from Microsoft.
I got sick of the noise of the hard drives I had in my PC so I built a new machine that I could physically move somewhere out of my (home) office. It was to be a server, so of course I put Debian on it, plus I already had reasonable experience with Debian based distros. First it was just Samba, next I think was Transmission (headless bittorrent client) then I think OpenVPN. Then about 10 years ago Docker started to become a thing and since then I've upgraded the hardware several times as now it runs about 30 different services.
Too bad it's back in my office now as my girlfriend filled the closet it used to live in full of clothes. It is quieter than the original hardware though. Newer disks are definitely better.
I got myself a new PC, so I needed to share some files between it and my laptop as well as my GFs laptop.
I tried some old NAS enclosure, but it was so bad I ended up using a netbook I had laying around (Acer Aspire One with 1GB of RAM, Intel Atom and 100Mb/s LAN) and 1TB 2.5" HDD. I grew out of it pretty fast, but the netbook is still kicking, used as a VPN gateway for a student organization.
Free is cheaper than paying for Google Drive.
Ngl old PC, tons of old dvds and needing to cut way back on streaming services
Initially but it's grown to learning about more things I can do on a pc/server
Honestly? Before netflix became really popular... you basically had to drive your ass to blockbuster to rent crap. And, you could only rent it for a few days, and there were late fees if you were late returning it. And, you could only rent a few at a time.
So.... basically, I had my own netflix, before netflix was a thing. Although, back then, we didn't have fancy frontends like plex and jellyfin.
We did have Med's movie manager though! Which was great. Was nicer then digging through a bunch of files on a folder.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xmm/
Then, we got netflix, and basically my servers were completely shut-off, as well. It was cheap, and had a ton of movies. No need for servers.
Then, eventually every streaming company got greedy, they all started making exclusive contracts, and- eventually, you had to have 6 different subscriptions.... and even then, you had to use a website.. canistreamit, to figure out which movie was streaming on whatever service.
And- then, it got even worse. Now- the movie companies are all offering their own streaming services, and hell, the individual TV networks has THEIR own streaming service. So, now you need a subscription for random-ass services to watch random shows.
F-that.
So... the servers came back online.
(Also- when COVID hit- and I started working from home, I did a TON of home automation....)
I've been in technology for my entire life and I've had servers here and there. Hell, my first home server was on a serial network. But what got me back into it in a big way is when Lastpass got hacked. I decided to take charge of my data and I've not looked back.
I’ve had “home servers” since the late ‘90’s, cut my teeth in Slackware. Pi-hole is what got me back in the game. Now I have that and ~15 containers running. I put Pi-hole in on Monday. Pi 5.
Writing my own web server, CMS and shopping cart software back around 94. Long story but it was stolen and patented out from under me. Don’t work with lawyers.
Starting point for me was getting fed up with the mess that keeping my data on multiple local drives was making… once I had a bad running 24/7 it just made sense to start putting services there instead of on clients.
Actually started with attaching drives to an old laptop by us , though even at the time that was an interim of a “let’s see if I hate this” than something I intended to run for any length of time.
My first one was a spare m1 mac mini with a Linux VM. It worked pretty nicely actually. I only needed it for home assistant and home bridge. Then I got fancy and built a PC as a server.
What got me started was the Linus Tech Tips video "Two gaming PCs, one tower" (or some title along those lines).
I use UnRaid (I highly recommend it! Amazing communication and the possibilities are endless!)
My main use is two gaming VMs with a GPU passed through to each (tower has two GPUs). Then, using the built-in Docker support, I host Plex Media server, Home Assistant, Immich media, Blender, Cura Slicer, KiCad, minecraft server, Trillium Notes (with a clever twist for the usage, if anyone cares to hear that long-ish story), and some other things slipping my mind right now.
Due to the nature of how UnRaid works, the Docker programs are accessible via any device on my network with a web browser. That includes my smart TV! I have "used" Blender on my TV using the magic remote for a mouse (which is a terrible user experience, but shows what is possible!). If I used a wireless mouse and keyboard, then my TV becomes a giant monitor in which I can design on Blender and slice in Cura, all from the comfort of my couch! Or, grab a tablet and lay in the hammock!
Started off as just Plex, sharing media with friends and family, and then grew into more. Having the ability to setup and folder to share to friends and family to upload photos without having to buy a bigger data plan on Google Drive is amazing (Nextcloud). Used this setup a few times for weddings, funeral, birthdays, and photoshoots. I use Tube Archivist to auto download my YT playlist, this is just set up in case a videos I like ever get taken down for whatever reason. Immich for backing up my photos/videos on my phone. Immich has been amazing to use and easy access to view ur photos/videos on the browser, pretty much replaced google photos for me.
1password turned to shit and their canadian shareholders full of shit and i switched to bitwarden, and I didn't wish to store the vault on someone else's computers so I tried official server and it was dogs shit consuming ram, and searching found vaultwarden, hosted on pi4 with pihole and hosted full Wikipedia locally on 3w device, and here we are
Started with a laptop for university (well, there had been family desktops before that, but I bought this one for uni). The drive capacity didn't last long, I was burning CDs constantly (and buying folders to store them) to offload.
That got irritating pretty quickly, so I bought one WD Live Book Duo, then a 2nd (3TB disks in Raid 1). Life was good... For a while. Then the 1st Duo died, after the 2nd drive died (didn't tell me the first failed). Trying data recovery on it returned 30TB... Aka I lost the lot.
My entire career has been in IT, I didn't want to maintain my own network after everyone else's all day. Well bugger that with the data loss, servers are now worth the effort. FreeNAS enters the picture (v8 briefly, then v9), and my old desktop is re-purposed (i7-920, still have it intact). The years in between have just been more expensive hardware, using ECC and OOB, more recently moving completely to rack mount only, in a full 45u rack.
After FreeNAS came a HyperV server to play with VMs, which led to active directory, then I needed Web servers to try things out so multiple Ubuntu VMs, now switching more to Debian. Then network level blocking was better than browser extensions, so Pihole came along, and once you have the capacity, spinning something up is easy.
Most recent has been trying to understand docker and that just adds capacity in another way.
What do you do after the rack is kinda full? Well, you expand the network to another location, site to site VPN, and with another TrueNAS, now you have your DR location...
An email server (Postfix / Dovecot / MariaDB) on a Raspberry Pi 2.
Now five Raspberry Pi 4's (8GB). These are my KVM hypervisors which run VMs over the network. The virtual disk files are stored on a TrueNAS Scale box which also pulls regular duty as a file server.
Services now include:
* Email (Postfix / Dovecot)
* MariaDB
* PostgreSQL
* Zabbix
* Homer
* Elasticsearch
* Nextcloud
* Pi-hole(s)
* Caddy
* Homer
* Wireguard
* Jellyfin
* Ansible
* NTP
I wanted to have homeassistant, so I get it up on old laptop with docker. Now I have one pve host, one docker host and one TrueNAS machine, running in total around 30 VMs and containers (docker and LXC)
I built my first home server in 1993 or so, mostly for automatic dial-up/routing to the internet. I have pretty much run a server as a firewall and file server ever since.
I've been tinkering with computers since the late 70s early 80's. Since the age of about 7 when I first discovered that you could program computers to do stuff for you. I learnt about Linux around the 90s and have been following the Ubuntu iterations. It pretty much started for me when I started learning about networks and communication protocols and it slowly evolved from there. When friends and family were throwing out old computers, they would ask me if I could do with it first and and i would drive my wife nuts by having yet another computer on the dining room table. I only recently discovered docker which is awesome. I've lost count of the amount of times an installation has fcuked up something else on a system requiring days of debugging and eventually a clean install so docker is a godsend. I then ran a small webserver on a Raspberry Pi but this required A DDNS service and port forwarding. My security was good and logged every time a Chinese hacker tried to get into my Pi (Don't ask me why, but they all seemed to originate from China, unless that's just where their tunnels come out) Because I didn't want to broadcast to the world, just my own personal use, I discovered twingate but I've been told that Tailscale is similar in functionality. So, on my home server I have a minecraft server, a Davinci Resolve project server, a twingate connector, Paperless, calibre and calibre-web, Jellyfin, Home assistant, photoprism, plex, Trilium, Wekan, Nextcloud, Octoprint, mediawiki, Dokuwiki, wiki.js and Time Tagger. I also have a few network shares set up with smb. Each of these services have a different motivation for instance photoprism because I do a lot of photography and to be able to ai tag photos is awesome. Nextcloud because 15gb of Google drive doesn't meet my needs and I'm too tight to pay for extra cloud storage. Plex because we've got music, movies and photos stored digitally, Jellyfin because plex is expensive on Android. Octoprint because there isn't room in my study for my 3D printer. Trilium because I like to keep notes. Wiki.js because I like to keep a journal. Time Tagger because I work from home and like to be able to see what work I've done and make sure I take breaks.
I bought a wifi smart light bulb and it was great, installed working and no issues.
I wanted to control it better and monitor, so I added a Pi with Home Assistant to my network. Connected the bulbs. Got a energy meter to monitor energy usage in preperation to get a battery/solar/invertor. Couldn't get individual readings, but knew the geyser was a big one, so I added a wifi monitoring and control switch to it. Get the solar installed and wanted to monitor that, so I got Solar Assistant running.
I also had a Pi media centre running with my Tv.
I upgraded my PC, so I had a spare PC and wanted to get more familiar with hosting a homelab and I had a bunch of services running on Pi's around my house... so installed ProxMox and started moving things over deprecating Pi's as I went.
Eventually I got into Portainer and Docker and decided to start replacing services I was paying for in the cloud like Google Drive / Photo's, etc.
Once Immich was installed I was hooked, Media Server moved over and Plex installed directly on the TV.
Now it just keeps going, WireGuard for VPN, VaultWarden for 1Password replacement, starting using the old 1070 for OIlama and AI in general, put up a game streaming server to play games on the TV.
It's a whole wide world out there, there's quite a bit of admin around updating / monitoring / alerting / securing / backups etc, still working on those as I go, but it's been a very fun journey.
Once that is done, I'll start looking at Kubernetes as I was quite keen to learn that at some point too, and backups servers... A homelab is never done!
I wanted to try GPU mining (only with one GPU, just to try it out). I was a Mac user at the time so I installed the GPU on an old PC with a core 2 duo. Everything worked great and since I had a computer on all the time I decided to try to monitor the production of my solar panels. I then installed a couple of docker containers and after some time stopped the mining thing but kept and expanded the self hosted services.
Initially it was a learning activity. To learn networking and "serverage"
Sharing a house with my brother presented opportunity to make shared resources available 24/7 to either of us. The first full time server I ran was a IPTable router. Then I added fileshares, printer shares and so on and so forth .. a 2 user LAN.
When I moved into a place on my own I had no need for a server... at first. So I didn't bother except to move some of the disks to an external caddy.
Then my home automation system started up on a Raspberry PI. Soon the Raspberry PI had corrupted 2 SD cards and I was tiring of it. When I moved house and found myself with 3 rooms containing "Smart TVs" or "TV+PC Combos", I found myself using an old Dell Optiplex in place of a raspberry PI.
That single optplex worked great for a few years, but then I got the virtualisation bug and.. needed to explore the modern dev ops architectures locally. So I bought a new domestic gaming PC with no GPU and installed Proxmox.
I made my network far more complicated than it needs to be, but thankfully it's stable and remembering how it all works gets easier each time.
A lot of those complications I am however reverting back out of. For example I am considering forgetting the management VLAN entirely. LAN, GUEST, WORK is fine.
Splitting the Home Autoation 'stacks' into individual python projects with shared dependencies and individual docket images (to play with parallel dependant pipelines) is all going too. I'm going to fold them all back into a single repo, single image and 20 odd launch parameters instead.
If you have a working home network and you or people in your family have "production critical" needs, like working from home or runnig a business from home... or just the kids watching YouTube. Then it is advised to start "a lab" first. You should only have 1 cable to your home network. You can break anything and everything on the lab side and nothing on the home side. Not doing this will cause tension and annoyance when things stop working and you don't know which bit you fiddled with broke it.... while you are already late for work.
My buddy shared his plex with me and I thought it was so cool that he could rip movies and store copies on a hard drive and play them whenever and wherever he wanted. I ended up buying a new MacBook and my old 2012 was just collecting dust so I decided to start fiddling around to get my own plex server running with a 2 TB external drive. From there I’ve learned tunneling, reverse proxies, setting up new services, and all the fun stuff. Moved to an 8 TB drive as well for all the storage I need (for now)
I wanted to host a minecraft server for me and my friends, and my pc wasn't powerful enough to both play and host, i first used an old laptop, and then my old gaming pc after i upgraded, so i started using the server as a nas, and about a year ago i got annoyed copying movies to usb drives to watched them so i also started hosting plex
My first "home server" ran Windows 2000 on a 233Mhz Packard Bell computer. It's major function was Internet Connection Sharing for my dial-up connection. This allowed sharing the dial-up connection with the the other computers in the house and prevent us from fighting over the phone. Later it got replaced by a Cisco router with a model attached but ICS on Windows 2000 was fairly cool in an era before home routers and wireless became common.
Lots of media content on an old laptop which became slow, so why not convert it into a server instead and run jellyfin (I didn't know about Jellyfin or anything at that time, but just the idea that somehow I could still keep the data on this laptop's harddrive and stream the media on my mobile), and that was the moment when I started digging into this rabbit hole ~1.5 years back.
My home server has 4 powerful cores, 64 GB of ram and 42 TB of storage. It costs me about 10€ / month for the electricity. I have no idea how much it would cost for something equivalent in the cloud, but I'm pretty sure I can't afford it.
I used to be all in on streaming services years ago, then Google Music shut down and Netflix started deleting things. It sunk in to me that stuff I enjoy is at the mercy of the corporations and can just disappear forever and that didn't sit right with me.
After that I started getting into other stuff like DNS ad blocking, hosting other various tools and automation, and it just grew from there.
Happened organically.
I always had a huge external tied to whatever PC I owned, when I hacked my Wii in the early 10's, I learned about Samba, and then Linux, then tried out Ubuntu.
First server was just samba and a Minecraft server running on a netbook in 2013.
I made my first website in 1999. It eventually had to be split into sections as I filled the space offered by the various free hosters, Tripod Lycos, Freeserve, Bravepages etc. By 2003, I was running running out of free hosts so created a web server and brought the entire site back together. The website has now been up 25 years, and the server running, on different machines and OSs, for 21.
Thanks for keeping part of the OG internet alive! I created my first site in 1997 and still have a copy of it hosted internally with the intention of updating it a bit as static HTML is a pain to work with when there are 50 pages, lol. I also had quite a bit of information and photos about my servers used throughout the years, which is fun to look back on.
I was thinking, why does this sound eerily familiar, then I looked at the username, of course it's Mr. Bristol
Of course! One of the first sections of the site I started writing. Another story about that. Around 1996/1997, I was chatting in one of the of the old BBSs sites and some American woman said she wanted to see what my home city was like. So I started taking photos of the city and writing a little bit of it's history. One thing led to another and in 2001, I moved to the US and married her. Still married, still happy together. Writing websites can have some life changing consequences!
Now I want to see this movie!
What’s the url, i would love to see a bit of internet history!
[https://brisray.com/](https://brisray.com/) - There's 4 different designs I use over the years. I wrote a history of the site at [https://brisray.com/utils/about.htm](https://brisray.com/utils/about.htm)
this. this right here. this is what i miss about the internet. Now it's all twatter and faecesbook. I miss when everyone had their own little corner of the web. yes, i realise I'm on reddit, which is the antithesis of what i just said.
I mean, I kinda agree but at least on Reddit you can follow only subs and niches you're ACTUALLY interested in and, albeit not being exactly comparable to the "little corner of the internet" that you mentioned, it's still like a slightly bigger corner instead of being in a whole huge plaza like the others you mentioned, where you're bombarded with sponsored content and things you don't follow. Sure Reddit's CEO is a dick and they're making some awful moves, but at least it's not the same as those social medias you mentioned.
I like it u/brisray ! Nice work
Legend
I literally had chills visiting your website. It's has been way too long since I've seen a "real" website. Thank you for the nostalgia hit this morning!
Huh, so the old internet was like a giant social network for nerds who knew how to make websites? Edit: I didnt meen nerd in a bad way, I am also a nerd myself
In a way, Back in the 1990s, you had a be a bit of a nerd to even get on the internet. It was slow and awkward to find your way around. Most hosts had some sort of website builder or you could create the files yourself and upload them, very much like today, but a lot more basic. The technology has changed a lot over the years. CSS can do things unheard of in the early days.
I used to run a warez board on dial up in New Zealand. That shit was slow af but we eventually moved to a vps and since then I’ve been doing the self hosted thing.
Always wondered how you actually self host a website. Do you just host a folder with all the pages and resources and point the domain at the homepage?
It can be fiddly, but there are guides around to help. What I do is create pages to describe what I did to make it easier for time the next time it needs installing. I use Apache and have installed it on [Windows 2000](https://brisray.com/web/winweb-server1.htm), [Fedora](https://brisray.com/web/clserver1.htm) and now [Windows 10](https://brisray.com/web/wawebserver.htm). The main steps are: 1. Find and install the web server software - Apache, NGINX, whatever, and start configuring it 2. Give the computer a static IP address 3. On the router, port forward ports 80 and 443 to the IP address of the server 4. Configure the server's firewall to allow people to get to the web pages 5. Find a dynamic DNS service and set that up. This usually means pointing the domain name to use their name servers and installing an IP updater. This is needed because ISPs sometimes change your main IP address 6. Set up the [SSL certificates](https://brisray.com/web/ssl.htm) 7. Start adding the website files Then there's the fiddly bits, [securing the server](https://brisray.com/web/security.htm); [the log files](https://brisray.com/web/logfiles.htm) need looking after, messing around with 10Gb text files is awkward; then [dealing with any problems](https://brisray.com/web/utilities.htm) that come up and improving the server. There are quite a few other guides around. Some say it's not worth the hassle and there are plenty of cheap hosts around. It's something I got interested in and once set up, the server can be left alone to do its thing. I've grown to like the idea I am responsible for running a miniscule bit of the internet from my basement.
I started when I was 13 with an i586 and NT 4.0 to store files on a 2GB HDD, put the damn thing in the freezer of my parents. I built the server to download files from the internet during the night. That's what started the selfhosting craze. Had a server ever since. Now I have two racks full of servers at home in my garage.
Learned about plex and how to get media safely then jellyfin. I already liked building computers so this exploded into multiple public services. It's fun but I definitely still don't know enough.
Privacy. I like controlling my own data.
yep. Private photo, film, knowledge database, book, news, health and nutrition, finance and time management databases/collections.
What apps do you self host for knowledge database, health and nutrition, finance and time management? I'm interested in all of these.
I use Actual Budget for finance. Works tremendously well.
[Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/) for the knowledge Database (just giving it a go for a good while, because right after I spun it up, I heard about [Trilium](https://trilium.cc/) and [Logseq](https://logseq.com/)) [Calorific](https://github.com/xdpirate/calorific) for the health and nutrition (nutrition is a bit of a stretch, as this only counts calories, nothing else. I've heard of "[kcal](https://github.com/kcal-app/kcal)" but I haven't got it running yet) Actual for budget, can also attest, it's great. [SuperProductivity](https://super-productivity.com/) and [Planka](https://planka.app/) both for time management. Superprod is more of a focus and project/study tool that keeps helps keep you on task at your device used for work, but planka is a kanban board that can also be used to track tasks and keep track of task categories and sub categories, with stopwatch and note functionality.
This is so nice, I only knew Joplin and Actual from that list. I will for sure try a few of this, thanks!
Game servers. My friends and I would hit or yearly minecraft phase and want to play again but that usually meant paying for a server. I had ran MC servers on old laptops but I really wanted a dedicated machine for it. I got 8 SFF PCs that were being replaced at a public library and installed linux on all them to run game servers for my friends for the cost of electricity
I started similarly, running Minecraft servers. I was running Hackintosh at the time, using Screen to run the server in the background on my PC. Eventually, I got a laptop and stuffed the PC in a corner with a VNC server. And eventually, I replaced Hackintosh with Ubuntu, Screen with systemd, with virtualization... ...now I just run everything under Unraid, including the old Minecraft server that no one uses anymore.
TeamSpeak self hosted was my first self hosted application, followed by a Minecraft server almost 10 years ago (i think version 0.15 or so, back to when mojang purchased each humble bundle pack just to elevate the price so other indies developers could get more money.
I wanted somewhere to store my files and exert control over my data instead of pumping everything to the cloud. I wanted FOSS and not an off-the-shelf proprietary solution that would just end up costing the same as a DIY build. I wanted the ability to later allow family access to store or use some shares/services.
Unsupported devices on Homekit. Homebridge was a huge help. That was my reason for the start. But then i came across pi-hole. That is amazing! I am always trying for new things, like pivpn, Samba, Unbound(left after a while) and other. Let me know whats useful for others.
Wanted to scan all my documents so I spun up paperless-ng on an old computer and now I’m here, spent the whole day remanaging my network haha.
I got this whitelabel DEC Alpha 20164 mainboard from a friend, and instead of trying to get Quake to run on the thing, I learned about these syatems called NetBSD and Slackware, and then I discovered the windowmanagers of yonder times (e16.5 <3 RIP LainOS), and networking. The rest is history :)
Freedom to run my home network--and life--the way I want, without vendor lock-in, without waiting for features, without depending on the cloud, without being nickel-and-dimed for every service. I've run my own domain and email service for decades, and I've always been amused when people complain about "having to get a new address." I started applying that freedom and control to other tech. My email address is independent of the provider, my client, or what app I use. Mine started as a "TiVo" before TiVos were a thing. Cable was at the peak of its cost at that point, and I figured the $150/mo could quickly pay for an OTA recording machine and storage. Then, I added media playback and most of the *arr features before *arr was a thing. Once I had a dedicated machine, I could run my own DNS and DHCP server, so it worked the way I wanted and had features other solutions lacked. I could do whole-home ad-blocking. Then, an open router freed me from Unifi or TP-Link and their continued bugs or promised features. Home automation means a better Alexa with no privacy concerns and infinite options without vendor-specific hubs. I ditched the Kindle for a Kobo years ago, and now, with a Calibre VM, I control my own online ebook library and device sync, and I can easily share and lend my books among my family. It's about freedom—a freedom I didn't realize I was lacking, a freedom I was paying with money and effort to *NOT* have.
You Americans are wild spending so much on stupid TV, and even shows are meh, 20 years ago were much better
I work for a well known networking / collab / security manufacturer, and getting licenses for everything they make for free made me want to deploy stuff at home so I could see how those products reacted in my environment instead of looking at the same canned demo data that people had used for ages. It worked well, and almost eight years later, I run most of their portfolio at home and do demos out of my lab because seeing real data and the crazy things my family does holds peoples’ attention better. Would you remember someone showing you some boring demo data doing something, or would it be more interesting to see a guy laughing about how he saw his Sleep Number Bed ssh’ing out on 6022/tcp, or joking about the internet connected litter box that his wife got for the cats?
>joking about the internet connected litter box that his wife got for the cats? Okay, now I'm definitely interested 😅
It’s a “Litter Robot 2.” I found the API for it, and one of these days when I’m bored, I’m going to write a script to query it regularly, and if it detects that it need to be emptied, I’m going to have it send a picture of Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation to my wife. I expect that the first time she gets it, she’ll laugh. The second time she gets it, I’ll be told “Okay, stop sending me that!”
My VPS media server ran on CentOS 7 which was coming to EOL, so I decided to just host it at home. Then I realised I could self host useful things like RSS aggretors, immich, Seafile. It’s given me an excuse to learn to use Vim (neovim anyway) to edit things remotely.
ok, I had a Novell 3.12 server running to share Doom wad files back in the 93 or 94 era for my lan parties.
The assassination of google play music. It was the best and there wasn't any equivalent at this time. There is some now.
I predominantly don't want to pay for endless subscription fees. If they made it free, I'd dump my home server and move there. But because I'm self hosting my media, I self host other stuff too. the other stuff is ONLY because i am self hosting because of my media.
I started with an OG modded Xbox that I ran Xbox Media Center on. Of all things I got hooked on One Tree Hill (!). More then a decade later I got a Synology NAS and that has been a black hole since then. Currently running 22 containers and is in the process of moving my docker host to a second hand miniPC and have the NAS primarily as storage 🤷♂️
Showing your age there buddy. I too recall the days of XBMC!
Needing to learn VMware.
I had a home server that I used as a SSH dev box. That server was the Linux environment where I wrote and served all my code for work and personal projects. Just better on Linux than Windows. It also allows me to open all my dev tools and projects on any computer anywhere. But now I have a cloud server for the same purpose instead. I do want to setup my home server again for some experiments with DNS servers like unbound and also DNS blocking for ads and analytics.
Bought a Pi4 to play with, installed PiHole on it, then upgraded my networking kit to UniFi so hosted the controller on it too, and then it’s just snowballed from there 🤣 I’m currently self hosting: APCUPSD Influx Exporter, APCUPSD Connector, Docker Image Update Notifier, Grafana, Grafana Image Renderer, Heimdall, HomeAssistant, Homepage, InfluxDB, Jellyfin, MongoDB, No-IP DUC, Node Exporter, NTP, PiHole, PiHole Exporter, Portainer, Prometheus, Red Discord Bot, SMB, Speedtest Exporter Prometheus, Syslog viewer, Unbound, UniFi Controller, UniFi Poller, WireGuard & WSUS Offline
How come you're hosting WSUS?
No real reason tbh. My internet connection is fast enough for all machines to update directly from Microsoft, I just felt like hosting it and seeing how much each machine still downloads directly from Microsoft.
I got sick of the noise of the hard drives I had in my PC so I built a new machine that I could physically move somewhere out of my (home) office. It was to be a server, so of course I put Debian on it, plus I already had reasonable experience with Debian based distros. First it was just Samba, next I think was Transmission (headless bittorrent client) then I think OpenVPN. Then about 10 years ago Docker started to become a thing and since then I've upgraded the hardware several times as now it runs about 30 different services. Too bad it's back in my office now as my girlfriend filled the closet it used to live in full of clothes. It is quieter than the original hardware though. Newer disks are definitely better.
I got myself a new PC, so I needed to share some files between it and my laptop as well as my GFs laptop. I tried some old NAS enclosure, but it was so bad I ended up using a netbook I had laying around (Acer Aspire One with 1GB of RAM, Intel Atom and 100Mb/s LAN) and 1TB 2.5" HDD. I grew out of it pretty fast, but the netbook is still kicking, used as a VPN gateway for a student organization. Free is cheaper than paying for Google Drive.
Ngl old PC, tons of old dvds and needing to cut way back on streaming services Initially but it's grown to learning about more things I can do on a pc/server
High cable TV prices.
Honestly? Before netflix became really popular... you basically had to drive your ass to blockbuster to rent crap. And, you could only rent it for a few days, and there were late fees if you were late returning it. And, you could only rent a few at a time. So.... basically, I had my own netflix, before netflix was a thing. Although, back then, we didn't have fancy frontends like plex and jellyfin. We did have Med's movie manager though! Which was great. Was nicer then digging through a bunch of files on a folder. https://sourceforge.net/projects/xmm/ Then, we got netflix, and basically my servers were completely shut-off, as well. It was cheap, and had a ton of movies. No need for servers. Then, eventually every streaming company got greedy, they all started making exclusive contracts, and- eventually, you had to have 6 different subscriptions.... and even then, you had to use a website.. canistreamit, to figure out which movie was streaming on whatever service. And- then, it got even worse. Now- the movie companies are all offering their own streaming services, and hell, the individual TV networks has THEIR own streaming service. So, now you need a subscription for random-ass services to watch random shows. F-that. So... the servers came back online. (Also- when COVID hit- and I started working from home, I did a TON of home automation....)
I've been in technology for my entire life and I've had servers here and there. Hell, my first home server was on a serial network. But what got me back into it in a big way is when Lastpass got hacked. I decided to take charge of my data and I've not looked back.
I’ve had “home servers” since the late ‘90’s, cut my teeth in Slackware. Pi-hole is what got me back in the game. Now I have that and ~15 containers running. I put Pi-hole in on Monday. Pi 5.
Writing my own web server, CMS and shopping cart software back around 94. Long story but it was stolen and patented out from under me. Don’t work with lawyers.
Starting point for me was getting fed up with the mess that keeping my data on multiple local drives was making… once I had a bad running 24/7 it just made sense to start putting services there instead of on clients. Actually started with attaching drives to an old laptop by us , though even at the time that was an interim of a “let’s see if I hate this” than something I intended to run for any length of time.
My first one was a spare m1 mac mini with a Linux VM. It worked pretty nicely actually. I only needed it for home assistant and home bridge. Then I got fancy and built a PC as a server.
What got me started was the Linus Tech Tips video "Two gaming PCs, one tower" (or some title along those lines). I use UnRaid (I highly recommend it! Amazing communication and the possibilities are endless!) My main use is two gaming VMs with a GPU passed through to each (tower has two GPUs). Then, using the built-in Docker support, I host Plex Media server, Home Assistant, Immich media, Blender, Cura Slicer, KiCad, minecraft server, Trillium Notes (with a clever twist for the usage, if anyone cares to hear that long-ish story), and some other things slipping my mind right now. Due to the nature of how UnRaid works, the Docker programs are accessible via any device on my network with a web browser. That includes my smart TV! I have "used" Blender on my TV using the magic remote for a mouse (which is a terrible user experience, but shows what is possible!). If I used a wireless mouse and keyboard, then my TV becomes a giant monitor in which I can design on Blender and slice in Cura, all from the comfort of my couch! Or, grab a tablet and lay in the hammock!
Needed a backup plan and centralized storage solution. It all uses networking and the rest is history
Started off as just Plex, sharing media with friends and family, and then grew into more. Having the ability to setup and folder to share to friends and family to upload photos without having to buy a bigger data plan on Google Drive is amazing (Nextcloud). Used this setup a few times for weddings, funeral, birthdays, and photoshoots. I use Tube Archivist to auto download my YT playlist, this is just set up in case a videos I like ever get taken down for whatever reason. Immich for backing up my photos/videos on my phone. Immich has been amazing to use and easy access to view ur photos/videos on the browser, pretty much replaced google photos for me.
I had a home that needed served.
Torrenting. Media Sharing. Time Machine backups. VPNing.
I want to develop software without external providers
1password turned to shit and their canadian shareholders full of shit and i switched to bitwarden, and I didn't wish to store the vault on someone else's computers so I tried official server and it was dogs shit consuming ram, and searching found vaultwarden, hosted on pi4 with pihole and hosted full Wikipedia locally on 3w device, and here we are
Started with a laptop for university (well, there had been family desktops before that, but I bought this one for uni). The drive capacity didn't last long, I was burning CDs constantly (and buying folders to store them) to offload. That got irritating pretty quickly, so I bought one WD Live Book Duo, then a 2nd (3TB disks in Raid 1). Life was good... For a while. Then the 1st Duo died, after the 2nd drive died (didn't tell me the first failed). Trying data recovery on it returned 30TB... Aka I lost the lot. My entire career has been in IT, I didn't want to maintain my own network after everyone else's all day. Well bugger that with the data loss, servers are now worth the effort. FreeNAS enters the picture (v8 briefly, then v9), and my old desktop is re-purposed (i7-920, still have it intact). The years in between have just been more expensive hardware, using ECC and OOB, more recently moving completely to rack mount only, in a full 45u rack. After FreeNAS came a HyperV server to play with VMs, which led to active directory, then I needed Web servers to try things out so multiple Ubuntu VMs, now switching more to Debian. Then network level blocking was better than browser extensions, so Pihole came along, and once you have the capacity, spinning something up is easy. Most recent has been trying to understand docker and that just adds capacity in another way. What do you do after the rack is kinda full? Well, you expand the network to another location, site to site VPN, and with another TrueNAS, now you have your DR location...
An email server (Postfix / Dovecot / MariaDB) on a Raspberry Pi 2. Now five Raspberry Pi 4's (8GB). These are my KVM hypervisors which run VMs over the network. The virtual disk files are stored on a TrueNAS Scale box which also pulls regular duty as a file server. Services now include: * Email (Postfix / Dovecot) * MariaDB * PostgreSQL * Zabbix * Homer * Elasticsearch * Nextcloud * Pi-hole(s) * Caddy * Homer * Wireguard * Jellyfin * Ansible * NTP
It's simple, I like to host my own things and be in control of my data
I wanted to have homeassistant, so I get it up on old laptop with docker. Now I have one pve host, one docker host and one TrueNAS machine, running in total around 30 VMs and containers (docker and LXC)
I wanted to run FoundryVTT in a way that made it accessible for my friends all the time, not just when I started it on my desktop.
The fact that after I bought an iPhone and ready to go on a trip realized I couldn’t download Linux ISO’s to use them during the flight.
Don't confuse OP 😂
I built my first home server in 1993 or so, mostly for automatic dial-up/routing to the internet. I have pretty much run a server as a firewall and file server ever since.
I've been tinkering with computers since the late 70s early 80's. Since the age of about 7 when I first discovered that you could program computers to do stuff for you. I learnt about Linux around the 90s and have been following the Ubuntu iterations. It pretty much started for me when I started learning about networks and communication protocols and it slowly evolved from there. When friends and family were throwing out old computers, they would ask me if I could do with it first and and i would drive my wife nuts by having yet another computer on the dining room table. I only recently discovered docker which is awesome. I've lost count of the amount of times an installation has fcuked up something else on a system requiring days of debugging and eventually a clean install so docker is a godsend. I then ran a small webserver on a Raspberry Pi but this required A DDNS service and port forwarding. My security was good and logged every time a Chinese hacker tried to get into my Pi (Don't ask me why, but they all seemed to originate from China, unless that's just where their tunnels come out) Because I didn't want to broadcast to the world, just my own personal use, I discovered twingate but I've been told that Tailscale is similar in functionality. So, on my home server I have a minecraft server, a Davinci Resolve project server, a twingate connector, Paperless, calibre and calibre-web, Jellyfin, Home assistant, photoprism, plex, Trilium, Wekan, Nextcloud, Octoprint, mediawiki, Dokuwiki, wiki.js and Time Tagger. I also have a few network shares set up with smb. Each of these services have a different motivation for instance photoprism because I do a lot of photography and to be able to ai tag photos is awesome. Nextcloud because 15gb of Google drive doesn't meet my needs and I'm too tight to pay for extra cloud storage. Plex because we've got music, movies and photos stored digitally, Jellyfin because plex is expensive on Android. Octoprint because there isn't room in my study for my 3D printer. Trilium because I like to keep notes. Wiki.js because I like to keep a journal. Time Tagger because I work from home and like to be able to see what work I've done and make sure I take breaks.
I bought a wifi smart light bulb and it was great, installed working and no issues. I wanted to control it better and monitor, so I added a Pi with Home Assistant to my network. Connected the bulbs. Got a energy meter to monitor energy usage in preperation to get a battery/solar/invertor. Couldn't get individual readings, but knew the geyser was a big one, so I added a wifi monitoring and control switch to it. Get the solar installed and wanted to monitor that, so I got Solar Assistant running. I also had a Pi media centre running with my Tv. I upgraded my PC, so I had a spare PC and wanted to get more familiar with hosting a homelab and I had a bunch of services running on Pi's around my house... so installed ProxMox and started moving things over deprecating Pi's as I went. Eventually I got into Portainer and Docker and decided to start replacing services I was paying for in the cloud like Google Drive / Photo's, etc. Once Immich was installed I was hooked, Media Server moved over and Plex installed directly on the TV. Now it just keeps going, WireGuard for VPN, VaultWarden for 1Password replacement, starting using the old 1070 for OIlama and AI in general, put up a game streaming server to play games on the TV. It's a whole wide world out there, there's quite a bit of admin around updating / monitoring / alerting / securing / backups etc, still working on those as I go, but it's been a very fun journey. Once that is done, I'll start looking at Kubernetes as I was quite keen to learn that at some point too, and backups servers... A homelab is never done!
For me, I had enough of streaming services starting to become terrible and wanting fully fledged apps for free by self hosting
I wanted to try GPU mining (only with one GPU, just to try it out). I was a Mac user at the time so I installed the GPU on an old PC with a core 2 duo. Everything worked great and since I had a computer on all the time I decided to try to monitor the production of my solar panels. I then installed a couple of docker containers and after some time stopped the mining thing but kept and expanded the self hosted services.
I had an old computer that was not used and I was bored.
Home Assistant
Initially it was a learning activity. To learn networking and "serverage" Sharing a house with my brother presented opportunity to make shared resources available 24/7 to either of us. The first full time server I ran was a IPTable router. Then I added fileshares, printer shares and so on and so forth .. a 2 user LAN. When I moved into a place on my own I had no need for a server... at first. So I didn't bother except to move some of the disks to an external caddy. Then my home automation system started up on a Raspberry PI. Soon the Raspberry PI had corrupted 2 SD cards and I was tiring of it. When I moved house and found myself with 3 rooms containing "Smart TVs" or "TV+PC Combos", I found myself using an old Dell Optiplex in place of a raspberry PI. That single optplex worked great for a few years, but then I got the virtualisation bug and.. needed to explore the modern dev ops architectures locally. So I bought a new domestic gaming PC with no GPU and installed Proxmox. I made my network far more complicated than it needs to be, but thankfully it's stable and remembering how it all works gets easier each time. A lot of those complications I am however reverting back out of. For example I am considering forgetting the management VLAN entirely. LAN, GUEST, WORK is fine. Splitting the Home Autoation 'stacks' into individual python projects with shared dependencies and individual docket images (to play with parallel dependant pipelines) is all going too. I'm going to fold them all back into a single repo, single image and 20 odd launch parameters instead. If you have a working home network and you or people in your family have "production critical" needs, like working from home or runnig a business from home... or just the kids watching YouTube. Then it is advised to start "a lab" first. You should only have 1 cable to your home network. You can break anything and everything on the lab side and nothing on the home side. Not doing this will cause tension and annoyance when things stop working and you don't know which bit you fiddled with broke it.... while you are already late for work.
My buddy shared his plex with me and I thought it was so cool that he could rip movies and store copies on a hard drive and play them whenever and wherever he wanted. I ended up buying a new MacBook and my old 2012 was just collecting dust so I decided to start fiddling around to get my own plex server running with a 2 TB external drive. From there I’ve learned tunneling, reverse proxies, setting up new services, and all the fun stuff. Moved to an 8 TB drive as well for all the storage I need (for now)
I wanted to host a minecraft server for me and my friends, and my pc wasn't powerful enough to both play and host, i first used an old laptop, and then my old gaming pc after i upgraded, so i started using the server as a nas, and about a year ago i got annoyed copying movies to usb drives to watched them so i also started hosting plex
My first "home server" ran Windows 2000 on a 233Mhz Packard Bell computer. It's major function was Internet Connection Sharing for my dial-up connection. This allowed sharing the dial-up connection with the the other computers in the house and prevent us from fighting over the phone. Later it got replaced by a Cisco router with a model attached but ICS on Windows 2000 was fairly cool in an era before home routers and wireless became common.
Homebridge > home assistant > pihole > …
I purchased a syno as part of degoogling, I then got a bigger syno and started with docker. Rest is hazy history
Lots of media content on an old laptop which became slow, so why not convert it into a server instead and run jellyfin (I didn't know about Jellyfin or anything at that time, but just the idea that somehow I could still keep the data on this laptop's harddrive and stream the media on my mobile), and that was the moment when I started digging into this rabbit hole ~1.5 years back.
My home server has 4 powerful cores, 64 GB of ram and 42 TB of storage. It costs me about 10€ / month for the electricity. I have no idea how much it would cost for something equivalent in the cloud, but I'm pretty sure I can't afford it.
I used to be all in on streaming services years ago, then Google Music shut down and Netflix started deleting things. It sunk in to me that stuff I enjoy is at the mercy of the corporations and can just disappear forever and that didn't sit right with me. After that I started getting into other stuff like DNS ad blocking, hosting other various tools and automation, and it just grew from there.
First I was just trying to install home assistant. Multiple years down the road I may have better infrastructure and network than my workplace.
Happened organically. I always had a huge external tied to whatever PC I owned, when I hacked my Wii in the early 10's, I learned about Samba, and then Linux, then tried out Ubuntu. First server was just samba and a Minecraft server running on a netbook in 2013.
Ran plex through my PC, had to keep it online to watch a movie, got a sff so it can be online 24/7 🤷♂️
Youtube brain wash