I’ve been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I’ll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?
Additional notes:
- I’m already using Tailscale (it’s what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
- I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
- I’m planning on using Proxmox
Thanks in advance for the advice! :)
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When you upgrade your desktop PC, plan for it to be the home server after that.
I got a rackmount case to transplant my old desktop montherboard into every 5 years. I also got a 4-port NIC so it can also be a router. My server is a 4th gen Core i5 and it’s still plenty of power for a home server.
If you’re a laptop guy, I’m not sure what you’d do. Maybe ask friends for their old desktops. The Win10 discontinuation next month would be a great opportunity to snap up some business PCs destined for landfill.
For Home Assistant, I think you either need Docker or a dedicated box. I kinda hate how there isn’t a .deb package for it like literally every other service on my server.
If you can, I’d skip the laptop and go for a used workstation SFF now. $250 or so would buy you plenty of server.
That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.
All my backups are tested, so upgrades (or recovering from a failure) are usually straightforward. The only thing I don’t back up is my collection of Linux ISOs, but that I can easily reacquire.
