Hey all. I have a bunch of physical and digital media I want to condense into a home server, and maybe add a few new things along the way.

I have several TBs of working HDs sitting unused, and just got an old HP elitedesk 800 very cheap.

I was originally planning to use Debian, and set up jellyfin. But I've never used Linux, or really a terminal in general. I also work full time, and have 4 young kids, so I don't really have hours to spend learning a whole lot of complexity. The sever also won't always be in use, mostly when the kids or wife are home in the evening and want to watch something.

Is something like Open media vault or unraid going to be better for me, or should I put in the work and try and figure out Debian?

Appreciate your time.

Hey ya’ll i was struggling to find a semi decent open source book tracking site so decided to build my own, and added some other optional features like vocabulary tracking, notes, etc:

www.bookplate.eu

Would love to hear thoughts!

I ended up trying Syncthing to be my "dropbox" equivilent between my ZimaOS server and my various computers.

I followed the Zima guide for it (https://www.zimaspace.com/docs/zimaos/app-store/syncthing-install) exactly.

But when I tried to run the app it started with "Starting Up, Please Wait..."

then later "Service Unavailable."

I checked the logs and it ended up saying this over and over:

syncthing | [start] 2026/10/16 00:53:40 INFO: Generating ECDSA key and certificate for syncthing...
syncthing | [start] 2026/10/16 00:53:40 WARNING: Failed to load/generate certificate: save cert: open /config/cert.pem: permission denied
syncthing | [start] 2026/10/16 00:53:41 INFO: syncthing v1.29.7 "Gold Grasshopper" (go1.23.9 linux-amd64) root@buildkitsandbox 2025-06-14 02:23:10 UTC [noupgrade]

Not sure what I did wrong, or what I missed....

I'm still trying to figure out the whole home server thing. Got an HP Prodeck running Zima OS. Trying to set up Seafile through the AppStore. However, when it comes to setting it up, whenever I look at walkthroughs, it does things differently, going into the code and making changes there.

But the app has a Settings section, and I think everything I need should be accessible there, right?

So is there a walkthrough that will help me set things up through here? If not, can you recommend an "idiot's guide" version of setting Seafile up on a home server (and connecting other computers to it, set up so files are stored locally as well, not just on the server).