I have been wanting to self-host recently I have an old laptop it’s a Toshiba satellite m100-221 sitting around it only has 4gb of ram, but I don’t know what is a good starting point for an OS for my home lab I discovered yunohost but heard mixed opinions about it when searching I would like lemmy’s opinion on a good OS for a beginner wanting to start a home lab I would prefer a simple solution like yunohost but would like it to be configurable it’s fine if it needs a bit of tinkering.
I am familiar with Linux and comfortable in terminal, but I am not comfortable networking, and I am not a programmer.
So what do you want to do? What need are you trying to fill?
I want to host a couple of things like email and immich and Nextcloud for privacy and security and money saving needs I currently use Google photos and hosted Nextcloud by adminforge.de its good and privacy respecting and a nice owner, but I would like more than 2gb.
Don’t host email from home. Many ISPs block that to combat spam and most email servers don’t accept mails from home-IPs for the same reason.
Most people will recommend not hosting email at all because it is a pain in the arse to set up so that other aervers actually accept your mails.
As you want to do multiple different things, I recommend you install a hypervisor on the laptop, such as Proxmox. It’ll make it easier for you, as a non-programmer, to manage containers and virtual machines.
You will have to deal some high level networking concepts regardless of what level of self-hosting you do, so you should familarize yourself with it. IP addresses, ports, basic firewalling, etc.
I won’t stop you, but I will strongly discourage you from trying to host your own Email. It is a complicated mess of new standards stacked on top of ancient standards and it’s miserable to work with even when it works. If you misconfigure your email server, you’ll get blocked by every major email provider and there’s no way back from that except starting over with a whole new IP and domain.
Thank you very much I will try out proxmox
don’t do email until you know what you’re doing imo
I used to support a few companies hosting their own email servers (I supported the mail server software). I will never host my own email, not unless I have a gateway between me and world, someone to configure the DNS and all that.
and even when you do know what you’re doing, you’re probably choosing not to host your own. at least not one that faces the public. a private mail ‘server’ that consolidates mail for you from multiple providers (and sends mail back out the same way) is different.
If you’re comfortable in the terminal you’ll be fine just starting out and figuring it as you go. Be ready for a few reinstalls but it becomes part of the fun, albeit sometimes frustrating! Go for a mainstream server os like Ubuntu or Debian (as if you google them with any issue you’re likely to find at answer). Get SSH up and running with keys for security, install tailscale and don’t expose to the internet until you feel more comfortable. Install docker then start on one software you think will be useful, get it up and running then move onto the next. I would recommend homepage as a front end then keep it up to date with new software so you can quickly see what you have and what ports are in use. Vaultwarden is useful for the admin passwords. I use authentik for sso but would try caddy if I was starting now.