Project home server: Part 1

Emil Lykke Grann

August 12, 2024

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamt of having my own NAS server. Why? Honestly, just because. The idea fascinated me.

It all started back in high school when a friend of mine had a server at home where he could host websites. He proudly showed me one of his movie website projects, and I was instantly hooked. I wanted my own server, my own movie project, my own little piece of the internet. The only problem? I had zero experience with servers, networking, or anything remotely close to that. And trust me, this became painfully obvious very quickly.

Determined to make this dream a reality, I turned to YouTube and found a tutorial on installing Ubuntu Server on an old computer. Luckily, I had my younger brother’s old PC lying around, so I decided to give it a shot. But let me tell you, it was much harder than I’d anticipated. I ended up re-downloading Ubuntu Server 14 times before I even began to understand what was going on. However, through this frustrating process, I learned a ton about Linux and how to install operating systems from USB sticks. It was a steep learning curve, but I was making progress.

With Ubuntu finally up and running, I now had my own server. The next step was figuring out how to access it from my other computer – first on the same Wi-Fi network and later from a different one. That’s when I discovered SSH. After setting up SSH with a custom port and a secure password, I could remotely access my server. SSH skills unlocked!

Feeling pretty accomplished, I moved on to the next part of my dream: hosting my movie project on the server. It was exciting to see everything come together, but there was one big problem – I couldn’t access the server from my school’s network, and I had no idea why. I spent a month troubleshooting every day, trying to figure it out, but eventually, I had to admit defeat.

After taking a six-month break, I returned to the project with fresh motivation. I reviewed every setting on my router and server, forwarding every port I could think of, but nothing worked. Just when I was about to give up again, I stumbled upon a forum post from 10 years ago. It was on a national forum for my internet service provider, and it mentioned something called a “static IP.”

And that, my friends, is where I’ll pick up in the next post.