Back in July, two months into my new apartment and still not fully unpacked, I saw my old tower that wasn’t working the last time I had it connected back in 2019 before I put it into storage and decided to see if I could wipe it and get a clean install of Windows 7 on it. To my surprise, I was able to boot into the old Windows 7 installation as if there had been no problems with it (previously, I couldn’t even get to the HP BIOS boot screen). I thought I’d set this up again to run the music portion of my office/studio with Pro Tools and Studio One. It turned out that it wasn’t up to the task of running audio recording/production software; VSTs were killing the CPU and the RAM. So I thought, “I wonder if I could set up a NAS.”
I did a little research and came across FreeNAS and TrueNAS. After two days of trying to get bother of these to install, with no luck, most likely due to the hardware being outdated (this is an 18 year old PC at this point), I did some more research and found out that Linux was the go to for something like this, and I ended up going with Ubuntu Server. This took me a full 6 days to finally get installed; BIOS, boot portions, etc. I learned a lot that week.
While doing my research and finding Ubuntu Server, I decided to make the switch from trying to create a NAS to creating my own personal cloud storage (ditch big Google and Microsoft). So next up was Nextcloud. This took me an entire month to get up and running with no issues.
Linux is new to me. The closest I’d ever come to working with something like Linux (command line only) was in my younger days when my father showed me the basics of how to work with DOS on the old computer that we had running Windows 3.1. So, I was learning a whole new thing. I went through a lot of trial and error and mistakes getting Nextcloud up and running, troubleshooting it, setting up reverse proxies, and more. But I got it working.
Then I thought to myself, “I have a server that accessible from the outside world. How about I ditch Squarespace as well since their prices are going up and no value is being added?” So, I have a web server hosting my own websites (including this one) in this machine as well.
This was a nice fun and stressful project to keep me business while I was waiting to fix some music equipment and waiting for the dates of an anticipated vacation to get here. All of this done with no money spent. But this isn’t the end…
This will continue to be my cloud and web server, but I also plan to still build a NAS for local storage and personal media use in the near future. This Linux thing has been interesting, and I’ve also been considering switching my music recording computer to a Linux based system (Ubuntu Studio sounds nice); that’s if I don’t ditch computer recording altogether, which is a thought I’ve had, but that’s another story for another time.