What's on my Home Server?? MUST HAVE Services 2023!

It's been quite a while since I updated my current

home

lab setup and boy, there

have

been a lot of changes even on the dashboard. Here I used to use Heimdall and this is Homer, just one of the many changes or additions now in this video. What we're going to do is do an overview of all the

services

running in my

home

lab and talk briefly about how everything is set up now, unlike a lot of other videos. I won't bore you with talking about my firewall. and configuring the database for the next 15 minutes, instead, most of the things you'll see in this video can be easily spun up with just a Docker container, since most of the things on my network are just those kind of easy to understand front end applications that most people in my household

have

access to and use daily.

Now this video is sponsored by Private Internet Access. I'll talk about that a little more when I get to these download clients here, starting with the dashboard. this is the first thing you're looking at and it's beautiful this is homar one of the reasons i chose this apart from obviously the look is the integration with the r suite which you can see here for example right here . it's a calendar that will actually tell me when new episodes are coming out that links to sonar so we can see

what

I have on my media

server

and let me know when things change.

We have a current download speed. This link up to those download clients, you can see this is my torrent client built in here, so I can see

what

's happening by scrolling up. This is tied to the supervisor, so I can see all the requests on my

server

. This is linked to both Jellyfin. and Plex so I can see what's streaming from my home server and general customization is really good for a while. I've been using the container called home page, which is also pretty but it's set up with text documents or text files that you can go into. edit mode and from here you can continue change manipulate move move things click on an application edit and then have access to everything you need save that output save changes it's very easy to manipulate and configure this also supports docker integration so If you click on Docker, you can see all the containers.

This can read all the containers that are running on the same instance or the same server it's running on, so you can see a lot of the

services

here. Some are missing. we'll talk about it a little bit later, but we can see the ports, we can see its current state, image and much more here, you can actually manage it, start, stop, delete and add it to Homer through here if you want to do it additionally there . There are some additional settings, so if I go here, go to settings, we can change the default search. We could download the settings if we have some customizations here for the layout grid stack up to the appearance you can change here, including custom CSS. which is really cool, plus they have a light mode which frankly I wouldn't recommend and that's what's going to happen in this video.

I'm going to go over all of these apps and give you a very brief summary of what it is and how I use it and if you're interested, leave a comment below and maybe I'll do a full video on something I'm going to cover if you're interested. Now there is one thing you need to understand about my home network, which will help you. Helpful in understanding how everything is set up is that I have three main devices. I have a Synology Nas which we'll talk about at the end. We have a non raid server running on a um I think it's a Terra Master Nas and then.

We just have a standard Ubuntu installation with protainer running standalone on an Intel Nook. Now we're going to start with the Intel Nook because that's what Plex is running right now. If I go to Protainer here, let's zoom in a little bit and live connect to this instance, you can see it has 16 different containers, it's definitely not that pretty of a setup, but it's running the Plex protein there, which we're currently on Watchtower, which is a Really nice Docker app that will automatically scan and update your containers just fine. I'll be making a video dedicated to that, so be sure to subscribe.

Ring the bell. We have both Tesla Mate and Kazam that we're going to dive into, but first, Plex Plex, right here, this is my. main media server and there are many reasons for it. I made a completely separate video mainly going over my reasoning. Plex just works a little better when it comes to external sharing and now that it works better, it works easier for people who don't have experience with similar IP addresses and all that. I could add my grandma directly to my shared home type, for example, she logs into Plex on all my stuff automatically, it just shows up pretty well.

Overall, Plex works very well. I like the features I never use. of the music or your specific live streaming material that you can find down here, never use any of that, these are all my media here, if we go to the activity panel for example, we could see that we have the voice broadcast from a Apple TV, which is another reason I now prefer Plex, of course, you probably saw Jellyfin here. Now I run both and they are just connected. It's pretty easy to connect the exact same library to the same server and Jellyfit is more of a backup service because there's definitely constiplex and that's if you're trying to stream stuff offline Plex doesn't like it to get a little weird this is very useful if for some reason i have network problems i have century link here so it's going to happen jelly pin works great again.

I use it if I have network problems and another reason I like Plex is that it's just a bigger app, there are a lot more third party tools and services and this right here Thule is one of them so I'm going to start session with Plex very quickly and here we go, we get a lot of additional data and statistics about my specific Plex server. We have game counts here. Better Call Saul is super popular on my server. We have bones. My grandmother is watching Roseanne. I've been watching the handmaid's tale and we have a lot more data and if we go to the charts we can see a lot of that here we can see the play count by media type, play count per hour, so if I'm going to do maintenance on the server or something maybe you want to do it between 9 and 10am. m. because those are the hours where there is absolutely no activity on the server game count by the top users of the platform just a bunch of stuff type of streaming total duration of games last 12 months that we could see specific history for that we could see everything that's been streaming here for how long it was paused just a ridiculous, unnecessarily ridiculous amount of data, but that's something I'm addicted to is having access to a ridiculous amount of data, so that's my media playback stuff, at least when it comes to videos, tv shows, music, now I'm going to talk about my download clients and for that we have nzb git and divulge or bulge VPN, this has a built in VPN very fast.

I'm going to go to my unread instance here, which Kyle gave me a better way to explain how this works, so here it is all running on my unread instance, we have the VPN here and we have nzb git, now this has a VPN built in That I'm using. openvpn with private internet access and what I'm doing is feeding nzb git through disclose, so it says the network for the nzb git container is this container here, which means I now have a VPN configured on both of my clients download. The last time I did this, I leaked my password.

I'm not going to do that again. We have the username, the password. The actual VPN provider, Pia, is one of the defaults here and they were kind enough to sponsor this video if you don't. I don't know what a VPN is basically, it's a way to hide your IP address from prying eyes. My main use case is torrents. If I download something like a torrent from Ubuntu for example, I really don't want people to see my IP address when I torrent, your IP becomes public because you are connected to other peers and they can see the private internet access this will do. is to encrypt your connection to one of your own servers and then from there other people who can see your IP address will see It as the server you are connecting to instead of your actual personal IP address.

You can also use it to connect to various places around the world. PA has a ton of different locations you can choose from and basically pretend that's where you're someone else. There is actually a graphical utility for Linux that is very good, not many of them actually do that, including Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, really whatever you need, and this right here is what I'm actually using for the docker container , we have the oh. VPN Files, this is directly from Pia Support, these are the configuration files that I am personally using for my home lab type of setup.

If you check the link below you can get 83 off and four extra months completely free and when As for the actual type of UI this is the torrent client it is very standard when it comes to torrents you can add remove pause , start down if I go into preferences, for example, you can customize almost everything where it goes, at least I have everything. in a data root directory because in many other applications, like sonar radar, I can see all that and move files accordingly, that's very important. If I go to the network here, you can see that it's using ton 0, which is the actual VPN tunnel and if the VPN ever for any reason, like I forget to pay for it or whatever, doesn't work, it will automatically disconnect and i will get a lot of errors which is good now nzbiga is a bit more complicated this uses what are called news servers to search and extract various files for example if you are downloading what is it there's Big Buck Bunny .

The nzb clients are a little more complicated because you need a news server that hosts all the files and you need an indexer. separately, that can actually locate multiple files and put them together, so, for example, if you want to download a large Bug Bunny MP4, you can split it into a variety of locations as a bunch of raw parts files and then mix them together. with your indexer and the new server will automatically download all those separate parts, extract them together and then move them to where they need to be and this is what nzb git looks like, it's very similar to a torrent client except at the back it does a lot more different stuff and I like nzb gets one that is written in C plus plus so it's a little faster than the alternative and two, I like how the interface is set up, we have our new server categories, RSS feeds, everything what we want to put.

Here, those are our download clients and from there I'll move on to the r suite. Some of these I won't open. I'll just give you a brief description of at least Prowler. Prowler is a place where you're going to put your indexers and then you can connect them like a sonar radar to the prowler and it will automatically place your indexers in those two applications. It's really nice, very easy to use. The radar and the probe do exactly the same thing. This is for movies, this is for shows, this right here is kind of a radar default page, for example, what it does is you link it to your media server and it will automatically pull everything for you, so for example, here we can see some of the future ones if I click on this one, for example, it gives you a lot of information about your media so we can see the location, some information here, we could go to the cast, The Crew, we could see the archives there is a search function that you really shouldn't use because you should backup your own media in this and use it for things like preview renaming.

This is really cool, let's say you have a set of friends and you booted up the whole box set and you don't want to go through and rename each file, as long as you can tell what the file is it will do it for you and you can set custom variables and as you want. this to make it work for example I have the quality built into the names this file doesn't have the quality so all I would do is click organize and then it says it's completed and now for the history we have the fact right here that I went ahead and renamed that file for us, so just one of the cool features with this and then sound here is basically exactly the same deal, but for the TV shows now from there, error C will be another really interesting one if we log in. here we log in with our Plex account, there is also a Jelly Fin alternative to this that integrates with that instead of Plex, but here we can see a lot of things that we added recently, we have the recent requests that you may have, such as people who are on your Plex instance, sign inon this and then look to explore movies, so if I go here to movies, for example, this is for descending popularity, so Barbie will be here Indiana Jones Elementary, things like that if I wanted like the flash for For example, what I could do is to send a request to the server administrator and then the server administrator can go out and buy a DVD, rip it and then put it on the server so you can stream it at home without having to plug in the good old DVD player is really cool, although the amount of data and statistics it gives you is like the release date.

The typical income budget like IMDb type things, but finding things is great because we could go to series, for example. You could go to active filters and there are a lot of options, for example, if you're someone who likes Netflix but doesn't have Hulu and you say, I wonder what's popular on Hulu, you can click on that and then we can watch Law. and Order CIS American Dad are the popular things on Hulu, so from there we will go to two more types of media server services, one is an audio shelf and I have talked about this in a whole dedicated video, this is really cool , it's basically your own version of audible if I go to this one here the body keeps score, we can see our audio track separated by chapters.

I could come home here, uh, don't judge my library too much. I have a lot of this here for free, like some of the history stuff and the libertarian mind, but see how David Goggins can't hurt me, you can watch chapters because this was actually one that I bought and imported from audible audible is really cool because you allows you to download the files you need to stream. These are on your own servers, so it's kind of a benefit in that sense, but the audio shelf service is great. I use it quite a bit and if you want to go a little more old school, you don't want to listen to a book you want. read a book, this here is what I'm currently using.

You can see the actual books I have here. I have some textbooks. Cadillac desert was a textbook for one of my classes. I'm reading Walkable City right now and this is good. If I open City walkable we can read it as is or if I click on this, for example, we have a bunch of different options to customize it to make it visually how we would prefer, from the font size, the actual line spacing, the margin, so you can make it substantially thinner if you want and then we have other reading settings that can be useful and then coloring themes, a really cool and nice little reading tool, something I would definitely recommend if you have any kind of electronic looking library.

The alternative to this would be calibrate web, which is also another phenomenal tool, but I think it's prettier. Another service I'm running that I honestly haven't used as much as I should is called Fresh RSS. This is an RSS Reader and aggregation tool of sorts. I'll open it probably once a week or so and flip through it. You can see. I use it for a lot of Linux news. I have games on Linux, oh my god, Ubuntu, so you can see it here. everything that I could check things would turn red if I open it, so, this OMG Ubuntu article, if I click on it, I could see part of the article here or I could click on it to see the whole article if I'm interested in that.

I could bookmark it, so if there are a bunch of headlines that are interesting to me, I can bookmark them and then come back to them later and there are lots of other settings. We have our subscription management here so you can see my Linux category which we have uncategorized here. you can add multiple categories and it's a really great utility, yes you can run an RSS reader on my desktop, but I'm always changing things and uninstalling things, having a service like this always available and ready in a Docker container on my The home lab is definitely the preference and from there, at least in these top two rows, we have a mealy.

Now this is a very, very new addition and by very, very new I mean probably in the last few days I added this and started playing with it. but it looks cool and I'll use it more and more as I learn it. It's a kind of food aggregation tool that allows you to pull recipes from sources on the Internet, for example, here I have roasted broccoli soup. it has all the steps, the ingredients and overall it works great if I go to the original url it will open all the recipes and this is where I got them from and there are ads and everything related to it, it's not a very fun experience . an example, if I go to salads here and I wanted to make, oh, this looks great, let's say I wanted this recipe right here.

I would grab the URL, go back to my self-hosted instance type, click create, import recipe by URL, paste it. Click create and in a matter of a second or two, there we go and of course you don't have to just enter, you can create your own recipes manually, there are cookbooks, tags, categories, timeline, they have lists of purchases you can make based on recipes. you want to cook with a meal planner a lot of different things that I haven't explored as much as I would like, but it's something that I started, like I said, going deeper and deeper from there, we've done Tesla.

I currently have a model 3 got a good deal after the tax credit and all that. I'm going to have to be very delicate because I'm not trying to show you exactly where I am, but here we have a little map showing you my Tesla. the status, the rank, a bunch of different data, but what gets really crazy is that if we go here to the dashboards, we have an atomically large amount of statistics. If I go to statistics, this opens a grafana panel, now here we can see just this. little panel here we have this month, if I go to this month, you could see a lot of things, we have a map of all the places I have traveled to, we have the distance, the Internet network, you, we have the distance, the net usage of electricity, charging.

Compared to the drive time down here, we have links to very specific drives, so I opened up this drive here, this doesn't really have any sensitive information, it's a drive from a recreation center to KFC and we can see here, just say de absolutely comical way a ridiculous amount. of specific distance energy data used in this chart, we have speed, power, rated battery heater range and we estimate we have the tire pressure, if we go here we have the elevation changes in this specific unit and as that we do Chase or Trace through this box, you can see the exact location that the data is collected and if under I can see temperatures and things just an absolutely comical amount of things, there are other third party apps for this, but the problem with them, in my opinion, is that you are simply uploading all your very specific travel data to some third party server somewhere.

Frankly, this is completely unnecessary, but it's cool, it's on my server, so I feel much more comfortable having something that collects all of this, granted to Tesla and Tesla themselves. They're probably collecting it themselves anyway, but you win some, you lose some and just a little overview, these are all the different graphs that we have, statistical statistics timeline, this is in grafana, which is beautiful, as he saw. Drive Status Status drive sufficiency locations right here, which is Great, it gives you an overview of when you were charging, when you're online, when you're actually driving on these little purple brief dots.

I've got it parked 90 to 97 of the time so far, just some really cool stuff here and something that I've literally installed to date, this here is Chasm. Please note that there may be a bit of bias, they are going to be sponsoring a video in the future, so please note that if we go to workspaces, I have a Fedora 38 desktop. In addition to the Tor browser, this is all runs on Docker containers, so for example, if I want to open Fedora 38, I want to open it in the current tab, let's log in. This is great because I will probably replace it. what I currently do, which is a Synology virtual machine for this when it comes to connecting externally to my home network, so we have Chrome Sublime Text, just Fox office buyer, a bunch of different things and it's pretty fast, let's Open Chrome, you can see what it is. very snappy and I think it's VLC or vcl running this, it's very smooth and works very well, for example Gip is a more robust application.

If we open it up, you can see that it really didn't take long at all in remote desktop. This kind of built-in Docker container is really easy to spin up and you can see here if I go back, this is the current instance that I have and it expires in 59 minutes, so it automatically deletes and shuts down that instance, which adds a lot of security. Of course, you could change that you could keep them active for custom periods of time and all that, if I have to go to admin, you can set up a bunch of these if you want, let's go to workspaces, workspaces and if I want to go. for the workspace registry, this is the default registry that they have available Rocky Linux Parrot OS, we only have Office Filezilla Doom, so if I open Doom I just click on Install, it's a pretty quick process, so if I install workspaces and let that do its job.

For a minute, hey, come on, so let's go back to our workspaces and if I'm going to open Doom in the current version, let's do it in a new tab launch session, there we go, we have a little panel of everything here. the ones we have access to and fail, everyone gets the point, it's cool, also the Arch retro is an option so I think it could make n60 or SNES games and such work, so that's basically it when it comes to the standard as type of document container applications, we have everything else which is mainly network infrastructure on the actual panels of our Nas units.

I have the Synology machine and the unread machine and an Intel Nook running this server that I've talked about quite a bit unread in the past. that's my favorite software, bar none, that you can put on almost anything, it's so easy to manage your various shares. We have our dashboard here where we can see our shares, our statistics, all the docker containers that I have running there. I really like how Unray works. Does it if you go to applications, are they actually mostly just Docker containers? You could take them out here if I'm going to install something like super meteors.

I'm not actually going to install it, I'll just show you that it's for the majority. Some of the standard Docker type of configuration that you can configure and then everything is here, it's really easy, just update everything here if you want in general. I love not reading if I have to choose one thing to do every day versus serenology and kind. whichever type of protein or default Ubuntu Server instance I have, it definitely wouldn't be available now, since I mentioned I have a Synology Nas, basically none of the docker containers or anything like that are running through it, this is mostly just a file backup. server mainly chronological photos.

I have many of my phone's similar images automatically synced through Synology Photos. This runs my surveillance system, which is like three cameras set up right now. I used the virtual machine manager quite a bit, you can see I have. a Windows 10 virtual machine which is what I used to connect externally to my home network. I would log into this panel and use that virtual machine and run Windows as if it were on my home network, that's my use case for that. here you see a little verification of the cloud. I have a cloud receiver. I have a similar video project file in Google Drive.

When I move things to the file, it will automatically download to this server, so some pretty cool sync features in that regard, too, I don't have. a very complex setup as a reverse proxy. I'm just using the built-in type of ddens system that will change IP addresses here and there, so there is built-in software that will recognize when your IP address changes and then update a record automatically. to change the IP address on the actual domain you use, I think it is under external access, yes we have ddns here, cloudflare is custom, I probably won't end up using that and then the integrated Synology is really good and with that if I go to the portal of control panel login.

The advanced reverse proxy is hidden here and here you can see the audio shelf and DSM Plex op supervisor. I have all set it up through reverse proxy. This uses, I think, cert bot, so everything has an SSL certificate, so it's very It's a nice system, really easy to use. I am not a network administrator. My skill levels are limited when it comes to that and it's very easy to set up for my firewall and all that. Only usea Synology router, it's connected, they're kind of integrate very well it's simple, it's not complex, it's not even worth diving into.

I have CenturyLink like I said so I'm using a pppoe or something so I don't have a separate modem and router just everything in a really nice setup and last but not least we have the protainer that I'm on I dipped a little bit before, but now since I opened an instance, you could see the cavana, these two here, this one is Doom and this one is Fedora. it will be automatically deleted after 60 minutes as I currently have it set up so that's nice and you can see all the other containers I have running here. Protainer is almost essential on any system where you have Docker installed, it is much easier to use than anything else. as a rancher in my opinion, I don't understand kubernetes, but this just spins like basic stacks so you can see some of the stacks that I have here, so if we go to my fellow Tesla stack, which I'll end up having To blur a lot of this, you can see here that we have services and all the different containers that integrate and are just connected to each other.

Really interesting stuff and that's basically my entire home lab setup, at least as far as the software side goes I'll link to a large majority of everything I talked about including the private internet access agreement below. If you're setting up a lot of these things, you'll want a VPN and that's definitely the one. I recommend it and have been using it for years with all that. I hope you have an absolutely beautiful day. Have fun setting up your home lab. It's definitely addictive and fun. You don't really need anything more than a little zimmabort, a little mini.

PC to start, even an old laptop or desktop that you can probably find on Facebook Market for 100 bucks, get a similar old thinking station or something. It's fun, worth trying. I recommend an Intel machine to get started, especially for like Plex hardware encoding, but even that isn't necessarily necessary because if you have the right formats you don't need to have hardware encoding. I can ramble on forever. I will go and wish you a beautiful day and goodbye