Home Server

A long time ago, when I was working as an IT consultant, a younger colleague asked me if I knew of a book that described how to set up an Active Directory domain so that it’d be ready for production and the setup incorporate all the best practices. I didn’t have an answer for him then. Looking back at what I’ve done in the past 30+ months I realized that I’ve compiled what he asked for - just not on the topic of Active Directory but on building a self-hosted home server that provides all services locally without any reliance on cloud services.

This is my first article in what is poised to become a series on installing, configuring, and running a home server with (dockerized or virtualized) services such as Home Assistant and ownCloud.

I have wanted an energy-efficient multi-terabyte home file server for a long time, but until recently such a system was too expensive for my taste, in terms of both energy consumption and purchase price. But now with affordable 3 TB drives and low power Sandy Bridge CPUs the time has come to build the system I have yearned for so long.