Welcome to my self-host server! and Progress.
Initial journey
I always wanted my own website. I decided that if I need a website, I need my own server. On December 2022, I kept looking for a cheap server.
Originally, I was set to use the Raspberry Pi, but during that era the price of the Raspberry Pi 4B was so inflated that it was suppose to sell for $50SGD but sold for $250SGD.
I ended up thinking if there was anything else I want to host on the server, and thought of a Minecraft Server. This made me realise I needed something better than just a Raspberry Pi. I needed something with a few cores and about 16GB RAM, so that it can run a Minecraft Server and render it well.
Buying the server
I ended up buying the Topton Pocket PC NUC Gaming, costing $543.27. The mini PC have the following specifications
CPU: Intel i7-1060NG7 (4 Core, 8 Threads 1.20 GHz)
GPU: Intel® Iris® Plus Graphics from CPU
RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200MHz
SSD: 1TB M.2 NVME FanXiang S500
Wifi: Wifi6E support
Bluetooth: V5.2 I guess?
Ports: USB-C charging port, 1xHDMI, 1xDP, 1xRJ45, 3xUSB3.0 (Or they call it SS USB), 1xHeadphone Jack
Others: 3x4K HD, whatever that is
My order came at 16th Jan 2023, and I was ready to do business! Except, I got lazy due to school work, and my friend recommended me to use Guacamole and Docker, and I have no idea how to even use Docker or Docker compose at all. It was too hard and overwhelming and I ended up scrapping it, letting the server just sit there for months.
A few days after, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 (GUI) on the server.
First initial use
During one of my university course, which is Applied Cryptography, my group needed a server. My server ended up finally being used as a email communicator. While I cannot remember to what extent it was used, but it was used at one point, then of course got scrapped to a better device.
Today
Today, at about 16/12/23, I decided to start meddling around the server while being quite alone at home. I realised from my university course by now that I have extensively learnt how docker works and realised its such a good and fun idea without the need to destroy the OS the server resides. So began my journey, except...
The crash
Until 21/12/23, I had been half debugging why the server suddenly shuts down and setting up components. My first original thought was that it was because my CPU is overheating, especially when my server is left to rot for a year and the thermal paste has to have dried up. There was no proper answer. The only info I had was running.
The Jorunalctl command only told me that x11 has no access to a file like /etc/x11/pem/priv.key (Can't remember), and the last command reveals to me that indeed there's a crash.
Inspecting /var/crash and ls -la tells me the crash logs do not fit when my server crashes, so nothing there could provide.
The temp fix
I ended up fixing by changing the $XDG_SESSION_TYPE from x11 to wayland. It worked well for 2 days until it crashed again (23/12/23 3:00PM). Before it crashes I managed to configure a few things.
New Services
Minecraft
On 21/12/23, I decided to make a minecraft server. The original issue when making a minecraft server was that nginx proxy server is not exactly compatible with hosting minecraft as minecraft don't use http or https protocol. Rather, it uses just a more pure TCP.
I ended up being able to host the mincraft server, just that it is a little sketch. Its nice that EssentialsX have whitelisting, which prevent random strangers from griefing my minecraft server.
This is successfully done around 21/12/23 4:30AM
Update 8/1/24 5PM: Successfully implemented the java minecraft server to work with bedrock clients, and added a couple of plugin that improves QoL. A bit tedious but fun to configure anyway.
Guacamole
On 23/12/23, I successfully configured guacamole, after around 6 hours of debugging only to realise the instructions from the github is a bit wrong. Yeah, it was a typo that for some reason I could not see
The debug was so long that I decided to have my 1st official public issue. Like not to a school work repository, but a real repository.
Anyway the guacamole completely works and now I can RDP or SSH into my server through the web, pretty neat.
Calibre
On 25/12/23, yes, lonely boring Christmas, I want to host a library server for my friends, since I bought a lot of humble bundle cybersecurity books. It was surprisingly easy to setup, thanks to linuxserver.io
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