# Idea

## Abstract

Ever find yourself Googling "how do I build a home server" only to get
overwhelmed by enterprise-grade documentation? Welcome to our journey from
confused beginner to building a home server that's actually useful.

Join us as we walk through real-world projects that solved actual problems:
backing up family photos, hosting private Git repositories, running local AI
models, managing home media, and yes—even running multiple Minecraft servers on
a single box. We'll explore hardware choices, operating systems,
containerization vs VMs, and the pain points that motivated each decision.

This isn't a theory-heavy presentation—it's a story-driven exploration of
building infrastructure for real people with real needs. When you're done,
you'll leave with a roadmap for your own server that balances automation,
redundancy, and the "I just want this to work" factor.

Some prior sysadmin knowledge required. All projects are from personal
experience, with stories about what went wrong and how we fixed it.

## Structure

"I'm lazy, I don't want my family to kill me, and it works"

1. I want this in my house
2. I want to connect outside my house
3. I want my friends to connect
4. I don't want this to go down
5. I want to recover if there's an error
6. My house burned down, what now?

## Thoughts

Give 2 ideas per section. First for "I can't let this break my family will kill
me". Second for "I have an understanding partner who is my cat and won't care."

Story driven presentation

I have decided to make a strong home server. Where do I even start?

Hardware: you find a box (old laptop, rpi) you're set.

- Operating system (proxmox, truenas, fedora, arch linux)
  - Alex: truenas apps
  - Reese: Fedora, osbuild

1. Install native app (npm, pip, apt, dnf, etc)
2. Containerized (kube, docker, podman)
3. VM (vm, pick one or two)

- Ingress (nginx, caddy, haproxy)
- Backups (rsync, borg, btrfs send, zfs send)

1. I want to install a new app while I'm at friend's house
   1. Truenas web portal (app page, both official and community)
   2. VPN and I need access to my computer
2. I want to check my server status on my phone (updates, disks, memory pressure, error logs, services running)
   1. Truenas web interface
   2. Cockpit web interface
3. I want to add more storage
   1. Truenas ZFS storage pools
   2. BTRFS pools
4. I want to install a new alpha app without much support
   1. Truenas custom docker compose images
   2. Fedora clone and run (in a VM for style)
5. I want to backup my photos
   1. Google Photos: don't use git, images aren't meant for git
   2. **Immich, with backups (tell stories about losing my image data)**
6. I want a local copy of my code
   1. Github
   2. Gitea/Gitlab (talk about that transition)
7. I want private document editing
   1. Google drive, Obsidian (forces use of markdown as my standard)
   2. VSCode + pandoc (commit markdown files as your documents)
   3. Nextcloud (Collabora)
8. I want a local, offline LLMs
   1. llama.cpp, stable diffusion cpp, bifrost
   2. Ollama is switching to cloud based models
9. I want to watch media I own
    1. Plex boi - I know that ruffles some jimmies. Give example: add letterbox support into Plex.
    2. Jellyfin if you're cheap
10. I want to know when something goes wrong
    1. Uptime Kuma!
    2. Truenas sending emails if there's an error
    3. Fedora requires a custom solution.
11. I want "reasonable availability"
    1. Truenas hits 90%+ availability. Updates take it down for reboot (5-10
       minutes). Disk failure requires full shutdown, disk swap, and rebuild.
       This could be half a day.
    2. Fedora hits 90%+ availability. Updates take it down for reboot (<1 min).
       Disk failures can be ignored by rebalancing. Disk failures still require
       full shutdown and resilver. This can take half a day.
12. I want to host multiple minecraft servers (SRV records)
    1. AWS Route53 for automating SRV records.
    2. Pihole is in the territory of making your family mad
13. I want to automate my house
    1. Home Assistant (raspberry pi or green)
14. I want backups of all my data
    1. No backups is an option
    2. Local weekly backups to usb drives via Truenas data replication
    3. Borg backup via CLI or Pika.
    4. Full disk backups, app directory backups, hybrid model
    5. Backblaze and S3 integration for Truenas
    6. 3 copies of your data, 2 different media,1 off site.
15. I want a private VPN
    1. Tailscale, moved from wifiman, also moved from pivpn
    2. unifi wireguard server, rawdog wireguard on a pi