I am looking to get into self hosting, for setting up a simple plex + nextcloud server. However I also would like to buy a nice desktop pc soon which I would like to access at at least two locations, I think I should be able to combine this with a home server but I unsure what the best way to do this/what are the right software tools for this. The situation currently is: I have a television in my living room on which me and my partner regularly game (for now using an hdmi cable and a shitty laptop) and we have a study room where we work and play games involving a keyboard (currently also on laptop). I would like to be able to access the compute of the desktop in both locations, for this I see two options:
- Setup a small mini pc that is also connected to the tv, use it to always run nextcloud + plex, set the main pc in the study and use steam link to forward just games to the tv.
- Put the pc in the living room connected to the tv and use it as a home server, and setup a small pc in the study connected to the monitors and other peripherals. Then connect to the main pc with a different tool.
Option 1 seems more simple but a bit limited, while option 2 should give a more powerful home server but also increase power draw (I have been thinking if there could be a good solution to this using wake-on-lan when it is not in use) but also needing a more refined way of connecting the two pcs. For sharing the computational power I have found steamlink, a remote desktop (like anydesk/teamviewer), and I have some experience with using SSH which is nice for coding but doesn’t seem to work well for anything graphical. Any advice or insight what would be a good way to set this up would be appreciated!
You don’t mention what you want Nextcloud for specifically, but it sounds like you really just want a NAS for the most part. Off the shelf brands like Synology and Qnap are great, or you can get/build a box to host FreeNAS or TrueNAS.
This streamlines what you intend to do and skips some extra steps.