Ok, this isn’t my first post on the subject, but bear with me.
Saturday I set sail through these unknown waters with nothing but a dream, a few hundred gigabytes of movies and shows and this tutorial.
I wasn’t a complete noob when it comes to Linux. I used Ubuntu from around 09.10 through 14.04, or something like that. But I have never used a server edition or any text only distro, not even in my wildest weekends dual booting weird systems.
I won’t be too lost in this, I thought, as the OS installed in the machine. All set up, Ubuntu booted up and to the tutorial I go. Three minutes in and I already made a mistake. I installed with the SET THIS DISK AS AN LVM GROUP, better reinstall the right way.
Keep in mind that I DO NOT know what I am doing, all of this is new and didn’t want to have to restart it all in the end due to a misstep on the first… well, first step.
Freshly reinstalled OS, first part done, now I’ll set up this DHCP thing. Oh boy, this was an adventure. Until now, I have no idea of what I did. I got into my router settings and dove into this DHCP config. To my knowledge, I did nothing but change the last number in the IP address from 0 to 133. All connection went down.
I typed my regular IP to get into the router settings to change back that damn number, but no way. The Windows tray said I had internet, but nothing came up when I tried it. Phones, tablets, TVs, all went dark.
It was a Saturday night. My mom was watching YouTube on her phone, my sister and her boyfriend were watching a movie in their room, and I nuked the internet a few minutes before the pizza arrived. It was not cool.
I got my phone and started looking up ways to fix this. No luck whatsoever. After an entire hour of dead-end tutorials and a bunch of nagging, I just made a hard reset on the router.
But I am not such an unprepared man, oh no. I knew I would eventually screw the internet over. So when I installed our mesh Wi-Fi, and had a few similar problems with it, I made a backup of all the connection names and password changes I made. This way I could get everything to work as before, even Alexa could turn everything on and off easily.
Crisis averted. That one, at least.
I still had no static IP! That’s when I found this guy! My savior!
Following his steps, I set it up and got back to the Kalos tutorial. It all worked fine until the very end. Wireguard just kept putting me down. Jellyfin worked OK when the phone I was testing it with was on Wi-Fi, but nothing else worked. And then that stopped working too. I was destroyed. I was already 1AM and my eyes were closing on their own. Time to sleep.
I woke up at 5h50 AM, after a series of dreams of me almost solving the problem and just said to myself, maybe PLEX is easier?
I followed some written tutorials for the PLEX install and set up (sorry, couldn’t find those to link here) and BOOM, it worked!
I turned off my phone’s Wi-Fi and still worked on cellular data, great! Now it is 07h30AM, and I am calling my brother to give it a test since he lives in another state, get a REAL out of local network test. AND IT WORKED! I was in a frenzy.
Great, right? All working, time to rest a bit. Went to a friend’s house and played a few hours of Cuphead and came back home. I just knew the movie I was going to buy next to put on the server. Got home, made a cup of coffee and logged in. Where’s my shared folder?
I simply cannot log into my server’s folder anymore. The server still works fine, but I can’t add or remove anything from there. I keep getting the error 0x80070043 on Windows. Disconnected from the network and tried to set up again, and that’s when the error started, before it said the server was offline, when it clearly wasn’t, PLEX worked fine.
Now it is 10PM here where I live and I just gave up for the weekend. I have no more ideas of how to write my problem on Google to try a new answer. I am lost once more.
But I lost the battle, the war’s still going. This server will work. I will have a movie and shows drive, a music drive and a files drive. (no idea how to set up more drives, though. I installed the OS on a SSD and the movies for PLEX are on an external hard drive. But I’ll find out)
If anyone has any tips on how to go on, please, enlighten me.
That’s all for now, and see you guys in the next chapter of this crazy little project.
My advice - don’t test on a production network.
If your router supports it, setup a DMZ, or a subnet (depending on the brand they call it different things, like virtual LAN, or some such, though I dislike that terminology).
Failing that, buy another consumer router, set it up with a different local network address range (say your current net is 10.x, use 192.168.x), set it’s internet port to use DHCP, and connect that to your current production network.
This new router will keep your test stuff segmented, and should route to your current production network for stuff you need over there (or to get to the internet). Verify, sometimes consumer routers can act weird when setup this way.
Also, don’t make multiple changes simultaneously. Do one thing, well planned out with notes, first. Then verify and verify. Let it simmer for a few days. Then do the next thing.
FYI, even when you borked your DHCP setup, your router most likely would come up on 192.168.1.1, or 192.168.0.1, even if your network is a different range (e.g. 10.x), as most companies configure consumer routers to always listen on that address, even when the local net is a different IP range.
Oh man, I’ve managed to get far enough into all this that I have a few things working well but i went through so many periods exactly like that.
The family nagging really hits home! “This should be working, I did everything it said” only goes so far haha.
My latest one was that I was helping my neighbour with their internet setup so was on their WiFi. Of course I completely forgot so when I was home trying to SSH into my headless server, it just would not work but I knew my server was working because I was watching Plex on my TV. It took my way longer than it should’ve and I even restarted the server manually before realising I was just on the wrong network…
Man, this is what I fear trying to get into homelab’ing. I’m just so naive to networking I’m afraid I’ll break everything. The most I’ve ever accomplished was Plex on my PC, Plex app elsewhere and PC has to have Plex running to work. That and I built a NAS (when really I just wish it was a DAS I could tether to multiple PC’s at once), and I barely made it though tutorials to get that working.
I feel like I need to buy a textbook because I’m so clueless on the basics I can’t even get started, since almost any tutorial online assumes you know the bare bones basics. Like I literally don’t know what DHCP is, how it works, or even what it stands for.
At the very least your post has inspired me to try to start trying again. Maybe there’s a textbook I can pick up to start learning this super basic groundwork, or maybe a course online.
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ) is a communication protocol that is used to coordinate a network via a server. The server in most home cases is your internet router. It coordinates the network.
Think of your network as a town with streets, every street has a unique name aka network address. So when a new device gets into the town it gets a unique address in a certain format, when requested by the clients. Mostly IPv4 i.e. 192.168.178.20.
Second there are ports. Ports are the house numbers of the streets. So if two devices use the same IP they still can be differentiated by using different ports. To address a specific port you write it behind the IP, in our example 192.168.178.20:80. So we use port 80.
To come back to the beginning the router coordinates the IP addresses and the ports from your internal network via DHCP and makes sure every device is accessible and no doubles.
There is a lot more but very briefly this is it.
Thank you 🙏🏻 this is a great ELI5 for my smooth brain!
If I remember correctly from my CCNA, it is also responsible for configuring routes from one network to another, because configuring static routes in routers is not fun.
You are correct, there is a lot more to dive in like NAT, IPv6, static or dynamic address, UPnP, MAC address, subnet space etc.
But I wanted to keep it simple.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation Plex Brand of media server package SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
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