Self hosted by… windows..? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 19:14 Looking to upgrade the very old PC in my living room for younger family members to use when they come over. From what I understand, many games will not run in virtual machines (Rust ) and some games like valorant require the anti cheat be started with the OS and kept on to check for cheats at a kernel level. This presents three problems: 1. The computer needs to run windows 2. Kids don’t come over *that* often 3. Kids might download stuff like “fReE rUsT chEatS” and/or expose the network/machine to vulnerabilities (this will be a concern no matter what, but would like to worry the least about it) My second point leads me into wanting to dual purpose it as a server, aswell as a crypto miner, but then that comes back to problem 1. I know that not all my services will work on windows, but what ones should/could I use for this? I have/plan to have: Multiple game servers Plex Next cloud Bitwarden Some type of NAS Some type of photo storage Some type of file organizer Would love to hear your thoughts if you have time; thanks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- flicman · 2023-12-28 19:36 You want to mine crypto, have some random children play games, serve movies and music and be a backup server all at overlapping times, amongst other things all on the same machine? I suppose this is what the term "workstation" was meant for, so you can absolutely make it work. Windows will work fine for this task - no need to worry about things on that score. I guess just start throwing drives in the thing and install Steam. What else is there? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Square_Lawfulness_33 · 2023-12-28 19:45 Most likely the computer will get infected from the kids downloading stuff which mess up the other things running on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zarlo5899 · 2023-12-28 19:49 rust runs on linux you are just limited by what servers you can connect to valorant well just dont play it every thing else runs better on linux by a lot ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lesigh · 2023-12-28 20:05 Just dual boot windows and proxmox ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dion615 · 2023-12-28 20:06 Why on Earth would you want all of this on 1 device? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tubbana · 2023-12-28 20:07 I also use windows for everything else, but everything selfhosted is on hyper-v Linux, accessing disks via samba. Works perfectly and can use backblaze personal backup ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jiltanen · 2023-12-28 20:21 Propably one of the worst idea I have ever heard is have nas and box where kids might install malware in same computer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AceHighness · 2023-12-28 20:21 Hmm I think the crypto mining is a little weird one in the mix. Especially if you think there will be security issues in the future. Here is how I would set this up: Windows with a special user account for the kids. Severely restrict what this account can do. Setup a mandatory profile and restrict what they can launch. Ideally only let them launch the game. If they must be able to install mods into the game, this could be impossible to setup Ina safe manner. If they launch a restricted app, it will prompt for admin pw. The have to get your help at that point, maybe you can double check if what they want to do seems safe. If they are the type of kids that destroy your setup every time they touch the computer, maybe something like deepfreeze (not sure this still exists, if not there will be alternatives). All the server software listed runs on Windows but will require some fiddling. You could run them inside a VM running Linux. That will also protect it up to some point against malware running on the Windows machine. Then the crypto mining. First of all, I hope you get cheap electricity somehow, otherwise it's often not profitable, unless the coins go up in value. I guess you want to earn back the GPU you are buying so the kids can play Rust... Its probably best to have a wallet (or at least the keys to it.. The wallet doesn't really exist) on another seperate machine. Then every so often, transfer what you mined to that wallet. Or if you work in a pool (more likely), get the pool to send payout to that wallet. If you ever see your hash rate halved, you probably have a crypto miner infection =( Did I miss anything? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Scaredy14 · 2023-12-28 20:47 What you want is UnRaid! Check them out on unraid.net (not dot com) I can't speak for valorant, but my partner and I play League of Legends on Windows 10 VMs through UnRaid and have never had an issue with their anti-cheat. Im guess that you have multiple younger family members who visit and want to play games. With UnRaid, I have two VMs that my partner and I use for daily driver/ gaming. Then, through UnRaid's built-in Docker and their Community Applications plugin for UnRaid, I run Plex, Immich (photo backup and has a phone app), Blender and Cura Slicer for 3D modeling and printing (both are accessible on ANY device on my network with a web browser. And that includes my smart TV, just FYI), a minecraft server, Home Assistant, and Trilium Notes. So 2 gaming VMs, Plex, photo backup, game servers, Home Assistant, and note organizer. That's just the things I have running and that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what UnRaid is capable of and all the crazy things other people run, such as Next cloud, PiHole, Sonarr and Radarr, NGINX proxy manager, and tons of other programs. Just search for a program you'd want to self host on their Community Applications page, or browse categories under the filters drop down to see all of what's available. https://unraid.net/community/apps I looked, and there is a Rust server under the Game Servers category (lots of rust programming language tools, too). So, if you only want them playing together and not with random people online, you could host your own Rust game server! My hardware is: CPU: Ryzen 5 3600X Motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus Ultra X570 GPUs: RX580 and RX570 (need one GPU for each VM that you want to game on. You can have more VMs without GPUs.) RAM: 32GB HDD: 2x 2TB SSD: 1x 1TB NVMe and 1x 4TB NVMe So, I don't have any particularly powerful hardware, and it all runs just fine! It requires 2 GPUs (or more if you want more) and a motherboard that has enough PCIe slots with 8 lanes/channels (many secondary PCIe slots fit a 16ch card, but only have 1, 2, or 4 channels which CAN bottleneck your GPU depending on the game). Here's some links to some tutorials by a guy on YouTube called SpaceInvaderOne. Look through his channel for UnRaid videos (most of his content actually) to get an idea of what UnRaid is capable of. Here is an UnRaid basics video to give you an idea of how it works. The UI is a little dated in this video, but don't worry about tutorials showing older versions of UnRaid. As long as the video is using version 6.9 or newer, the concepts should still hold true (though button click for button click may not be the exact same). https://youtu.be/NEkgAhFI_GM?feature=shared Setup gaming VM (this is part 1. Part 2 is if you are having GPU issues, he goes over common issues and fixes): https://youtu.be/miYUGWq6l24?feature=shared I'm not sure if it will help with any anti-cheat, but an easy way to test it is that you can boot a bare metal Windows install as a VM through UnRaid. Makes it easy to give their free 30-day trial a go and test if valorant works or not. Here is a tutorial on doing that bare metal boot: https://youtu.be/fnIn6GnA87c?feature=shared Lastly, check out r/unraid. The community for UnRaid is the best I've ever seen! Everyone is willing to help if you ask nicely. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SeirWasTaken · 2023-12-28 21:02 yup, OP should make another account for the kiddos, one without admin perms ---------------------------------------------------------------------- null-count · 2023-12-28 21:35 The game machine (client) is its own box. It should only run games and malware on the windows partition. You might even consider to wipe it clean and fresh install windows and Steam after each visit. When the kids are gone, you can boot this box into a proxmox partiton on to run some things or even act as a backup server for the other box. Everything else runs on a separate box (server). Siloed away, runs 24/7, backs up data to the game box when it's not running windows. If everything could run on one box without issues, then we wouldn't need server racks to stack our boxes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 22:34 Why are you getting downvoted? Was hoping this would be the solution and someone would explain it lol. Can some services be running on another admin account while the kids log into a kid account ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 22:42 I have other machines and no I don’t want it to do all these tasks. The point of the post was to see what tasks (if any) could be delegated to the pc since it will hardly ever be used for its main purpose as a kids gaming computer. Judging by the replies, it’s nothing so I’m just going to run windows 11 and set it to mine crypto when it’s idle ---------------------------------------------------------------------- flicman · 2023-12-28 22:44 Sounds good to me - I've run a windows machine as my base server system for 20+ years and I wouldn't game on any of them. You're planning to mine because... video card? I wouldn't wait much longer. Mining is... unprofitable bordering on irresponsible already and is only going to get worse. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 22:46 I don’t, I was just curious what services could run on this machine so it’s not spending most of its time idle ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 22:47 Hmmmmm interesting ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lesigh · 2023-12-28 22:54 It's not the best solution and anytime you boot into windows your services will go down, but like you said a lot of games don't like to be ran in VMs. Then you can lockdown the browsers or force windows to go in steam picture mode ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Extension_Flounder_2 · 2023-12-28 23:05 Thanks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CupofDalek · 2023-12-29 01:04 I had a box doing similar Windows, running docker desktop for hosting stuff, and also did some crypto mining. Your issue with the kids is not something to be solved with a virtual machine. That would only be enabling shit behavior. Part of me says this to root against unfair play in games, but I'll meet you in the middle and say if you can teach them how to actually make their own cheats/hacks to some degree I respect that shit and go for it lol. But don't just let them download whatever into your network. If your concern is actually eliminating risk set a specific account without localadmin perms for them. Also set up some group policy to really lock down what can be done/ran on this device. Want to install something? needs to be ran by you as admin so you can control what is being ran and what isnt. Ideally, if this server is hosting publicly accessible services you're going to want to place it in a proper DMZ to protect your LAN net as well. Regardless of the gaming. Whether it is the kids installing malware, or your actual hosted services becoming compromised, you are opening this device to lots of risk, and you should isolate it on the network appropriately. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HighMarch · 2023-12-29 01:26 Sounds like you need an XBox or PS for the living room for the kids to play on. For Plex, and basic file storage, you can probably take that old PC, install one of the lighter Linux distro's on it, and use it. You'll eventually want to upgrade to something with more oomf, since it isn't going to handle that laundry list of tasks, but it'll get your feet wet enough that you should have a better idea of what you do/don't need. ​ Oh, and have you done the math on crypto mining? You'd likely need to setup a machine JUST for that, and the last time I looked, the profit margins were very very low unless your power is super cheap. But I am out of date on the crypto market. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pocketenderman · 2023-12-29 09:33 whats wrong with being idle?