From Dead NAS to DIY: My Journey Into Self-Hosting

I was a tech enthusiast from birth. From the Pentium machines my dad owned, to the fancy lights that came from scanner and the sound of Dot Matrix always amazed me.

In 2021, my uncle gave me a dead WD NAS. It had some hardware issue and didn't boot. The device itself was EOL, and I couldn't find a solution. I looked into new NAS but they were expensive, and thought of a DIY solution.

My journey began with a Raspberry Pi, trying to create network file shares. I learnt about enterprise stuff like RAID and block storage, file storage and a lot more. I started by flashing Debian on a SD card and attaching 2 HDDs to the Pi, installed OpenMediaVault, created Raid 1 and got a SMB file share running.

It was my first exposure to Linux, connecting to Pi via SSH was magical, I had never remoted into a machine, and gosh that master-hacker feeling while running commands was a whole another thing xD. It was fun, and all it took was one sleepless night.

I was naive, I got the network share up on LAN, and thought the major work was done, and would be easily accessible from the internet. I was so wrong. I was behind a CG-NAT and had a dynamic IP. I thought I misconfigured something on the Pi, and then re-installed everything. I thought OMV was the problem, installed Nextcloud manually and then came across Docker. It took me over 2 months to learn and understand Linux and Networking.

I built a case out of WPC, connected a external USB HDD, and attached a 80mm fan for cooling. The result was amazing.

This was the moment I discovered my passion and committed to pursuing my career.

I fell down into the self-hosting rabbit hole, from a single Pi, to a multiple nodes running on various places. It grew gradually since 2021. My HomeLab taught me Automation, containerization, networking and so much more!

Join me in this journey where we do things like deploying our own simple file shares, to deploy complex things like networks.

Stay tuned!

Peace✌️