Apologies for the poor grammar, English IS my first language and so I’m rather flagrant with runons.
I’m really not half as tech literate as half the people on the fediverse, but my noia about the state of online cloud hosting and lack of control over my data has led me far out of my depth. I’m wanting to set up a LibreCMC router and connect it to some type of home server (made of local office E-Waste) for media storage, email hosting, and fucking Minecraft servers or something. I promise I’ve tried my best in searching for the problem but often find myself floundering in 3-letter acronyms, and relations between systems I don’t understand (like dockers, or the Jellyfin vs Plex argument.) I don’t need an explanation but maybe some orientation on where I am to look for resources on these topics that assume I’m the 6 celled neurobase I am.
Thank you for your help, or your chastising.
Edit: thank you everyone for your replies! I’ll hopefully keep you all updated as I work through learning Linux terminals, and destroying terabytes of data in horribly predictable mistakes : )
I hope someone else can pitch in with a more indepth instructions, but two things I wanted to mention:
First, forget about hosting your own email from home. Seriously. Even those who do it professionally don’t want to deal with that at home. You’ll find people on fediverse who do it but I’m sure plenty will give you this same recommendation/warning. It’s a huge hassle and it’s so easy to get your domain blocked/ending up on a blacklist and way harder to get out of it.
Second, I can personally recommend https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/ if you are really starting from scratch ( there’s a community here: !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev ). This is how I started and set up my own linux server and started self hosting stuff on it. It’s really basic and won’t teach you everything you need but it’s a great start for setting up your own server. You can do everything with a local server at home that you have set up.
Oh shit that first link is exactly something I’ve wanted for years. I’ve been linuxing from gui for a while and would like to know more, especially as I fuck around with my home server
Do it, 100% worth it! Also has some extra stuff for already-experienced users if it gets too easy :)
Yeah, email at home sucks. Even if you wanna selfhost you wanna do it with a static ip and an rdns pointer to the email server and good luck getting that at home.
Omg thank you so much for providing that first link. I’ve wanted to try Linux and to run a home server, but I am like OP. I’m not as tech illiterate as most, but I also don’t know nearly as much as others here. I know just enough to not fuck up my pc, but I had trouble finding a start from the basics instructions.
The Linux skill challenge looks like exactly what I wanted,
I had the same issue, this is indeed perfect for that level and a nice cozy start for your server admin journey :) I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
I run my email server, but not at home. Running it at home is not all all more difficult, but it will only work for internal traffic and inbound from the internet. Residential IPs are simply blacklisted by ISP and as such - nothing will reach external recipients. Still useful, but is limited.
To have your smtp reach everyone globally you need to run it on a business IP. I use Linode, has worked very well since the setup in 2019, although they did get acquired by Akamai, which might become an issue at some point.
Been running my email server on a resi IP for two decades, without PTR records, and never had to deal with a blacklist by any major players. Maybe because I’m not on some big ISP.
Huh, TIL that’s still possible. Wasn’t in my case at the time.