Ubuntu 24 home server
Digging through some old boxes, I found my old trusty Lenovo laptop. Wow! This thing had been hiding in a box for months…maybe 8 months? But the battery was still at 33%!
I had replaced this laptop only because its keyboard started acting up. I immediately started thinking about how I could give it a second life. Having previously listed it for sale on Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace and eBay, it slipped from my mind as no one wanted this little bad boy. So, let’s turn him into a home sever. You know, just for fun! 😁️
It’s been a while since I’ve setup a server and this was a great (re)-learning experience. I installed Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, completing the install in about 15 minutes. I performed some hardening steps such as enabling UFW etc. and left this as local-only for now.
I recently started winding down my VPS which is due to expire in December. Whilst I’ve been using and enjoying Kodi mainly, there was a deep longing to have Jellyfin running once again on a dedicated server. Additionally, I have a bunch of Python scripts running on my VPS which eventually need to be moved somewhere.
My shared hosting service does include the ability to run Python scripts on CRON, but it has always been a bit hit-and-miss. For example, I once noticed that a job had stopped running on time. Upon investigation, my CRON had been changed, and not by me. A ticket was opened and the admission came back immediately from my host: they changed the CRON as “it was impacting the server resources”. I remember scratching my head a bit that day…it was a simple Python script to send out an email once a day to myself with reminders. ONCE A DAY! They moved the CRON to run once a week. Anyway, I had pushed all my scripts to my VPS after that and never looked back at the shared host solution for any CRON jobs.
I digress. I’ve installed Jellyfin and added all my scripts, set the CRON jobs and away we went.
Power
One worry when running a home server is the cost of electricity. I have a few Tapo P110 plugs which have come in handy as they monitor the power draw. The server is plugged into one and it is using an average of £0.02 per 24 hours. The power draw is averaging around 2 watts when idle and whilst there are spikes when in use, so far, so good or rather, so far, so cheap!
Watching an episode of something or other on the TV’s Jellyfin pushed the draw up to about 6 watts for the duration, but that’s still fractions of a penny.
I also killed the power for a couple of hours, leaving it running on battery and it was just fine. I checked in to see the power status and it was on about 80% with 19 hours of life before the battery died. Nice, a server with a built-in UPS!
upower -i `upower -e | grep 'BAT'`
I’m going to leave this running for a week non-stop and see what happens.