I needed a server to act as a backend between my devices. I wanted something to make it easier to sync up photos, documents, and anything extra. I also had a (somewhat) old Dell all-in-one at my disposal that my roommate got for free.
I decided on Arch Linux as my distro of choice, even though its not really designed for server use. I chose Arch for a few reasons. 1. I know my way around the system and I know pacman fairly well, and I know how to tune the system to my needs. 2. I wanted to host some AUR builds, and I know that the Arch repo has tools designed for this. And, 3. Even though its rolling release, I've never had any stability issues with arch and I get the benefits of being on the bleeding edge.
To sync files between my devices, I ultimately decided on ownCloud Infinite Scale. I had a pretty rough experience with Nextcloud, since the PHP backend was fairly buggy and would consistently crash. After a bit of research I came across OCIS, which is a complete rewrite of the backend in GO, I knew this would be the best path moving forwards. I'm using rclone to handle client syncing.
I'm using Apache as my HTTP server since I have a little experience working with it.
To connect to it locally, I needed to set up a DNS server since my router doesn't support NAT hairpinning. I originally tried to use dnsmasq, but got caught up in the fact that my phone requires DNS over TLS/SSL to use it properly. So I went with BIND, which is completly overkill. My router also doesn't support local DNS servers for some reason, so to use it I need to manually add the private IP address as a DNS address on each device. This still doesn't work properly with my phone, and its been driving me nuts. If anyone has any advice feel free to contact me.
The driving factor for this project was to migrate off of OneDrive. I had switched to linux in 2022, and OneDrive doesn't really have a capable client for Linux. I also wanted full control of my data. This is the primary objective.
A fairly small secondary goal of mine was to set up a CUPS server, since my printer isn't web-enabled and I work off of more than one machine. I'm still working on getting it to patch through Apache, but that shouldn't be too difficult.
It was only recently that I decided to also use it to build and serve AUR packages (thanks ari!) and thats been very useful. I don't really want to openly link to my website, but its not that difficult to find since I have an A record for it.
While I'm not done adding things to this server (I'm now using it to also serve some gifs for Discord), I've reached a point where I'm happy with the results. Currently, the main limiting factor is my home wifi, since I don't want to pay a server hosting company.
I currently have around 200 GB of data on it, most of which is from OneDrive.