I installed arch (https://github.com/warpme/miniarch) on one of those small android tv boxes (A53 Cpu and 4gbs ram) that usually come with android+spyware and vague promises of piracy and i want to turn it into a small homeserver. I dont really know anything about servers so I dont know where to go from here. Im planning on connecting a 1TB drive to the box. I want some folders from my PC and phone(specifically documents) to be synced to the server automaticly whenever both are connected to my network, but I also have a ton of audio books, ebooks movies that I obviously only want to be accessible (by my TV, ereader, phone) but not synced accross devices. Ive also been thinking about having shared compute running in the background (seti or folding@home or something else). Obviously everything should need as little maintenance as possible, i want to have it sit in a corner and be able to forget about it. Could you point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance
I’m no expert, I just run a small home server and a vps, so take everything with a grain of salt these are just my personal experiences/opinions:
If you want to forget about it maybe a LTS Debian version might be a better choice for the OS? But I have no experience running Arch, so maybe that doesn’t matter much.
I pretty much followed this video to set up cockpit and nginx proxy manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJosY_M0I4 He does a good job of explaining.
As podman containers I host:
Navidrome for music, there are a ton of players you can use for your devices. I use Feishin on my Linux PC and Steamdeck and Symfonium on my phone.
Jellyfin for shows and movies
An enshrouded and an ARK survival ascended server
A teamspeak 6 server
Audiobookshelf for podcasts and audio books (I think it can also host ebooks but I’m not sure)
You can set up cron jobs or systemd services to take care of updates, personally I prefer the systemd way since it’s running on my system anyways and I’ve alley gone through the effort of learning it.
Also cockpit offers some good tools for that.
Not sure about documents but you could host nextcloud or cryptpad for this. I have a hosted nextcloud with hetzner as I don’t trust my own server admin skills enough to not accidentally fuck up all my documents.
Yes I agree debian would be the better and more stable choice, but the version of arch I installed comes with a specific kernel for those android boxes (if i remember correctly) so I dont know if I can get debian to boot on it. If I give up on the shared compute Idea and restrict the androidbox to just my local network, couldnt I get away with just never updating it? I will have a look at your other suggestions. One thing I forgot to mention is that my ereader is really old and still runs on android 4, so while I can install apps that could have access to the server it would probably be best if the server hosted a webpage where I could download my ebooks onto the ereader via its inbuilt browser.
If you limit it to your network it might be ok, but it’s probably still not recommended xD for your ebooks you might be able to just host a samba file share. I’ve put everything behind nginx proxy manager and got a domain so I can use navidrome and jellyfin as my private streaming services in the go.