Looking to put together a small home server for some basic tasks.
We currently have an old Rasberry Pi B+ which sits quite happily running PiHole and I want to be able to access and use PiHole on my phone werever I am. I have tried a few times to get it to run NordVPN so I can access PiHole using Meshnet but the Pi B+ seems to be unable to run it, although this is no surprise considering it's probably 10 years old now.
I've dug an old PC out of the attic which I built back in 2012 when I was a lowly apprentice electrician on apprentice electrician wages. The PC was considered a very decent specification when I built it and even seems okay by todays standards.
The PC spec is as follows...
Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 Motherboard
Intel i7 3770
12GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM (I think I originally built it with 16GB as it was the maximum the motherboard could support but one of the two 8GB modules failed and I had a 4GB on hand so I threw that in)
256GB SATA SSD
The PC does have a graphics card but I think I'd pull it and run on the on board graphics as the graphics card fan is quite loud.
Other than PiHole duties and being able to access it via Meshnet I'd also like to use it to share storage and the internal CD/DVD writer drive.
So I'm thinking of using Ubuntu Desktop with PiHole, NordVPN and Samba.
Would there be any benefits to be running a server based OS like Ubuntu Server? I'm quite comfortable working in command line but if there's no real benefits then I'll stick with Ubuntu Desktop and make use of the GUI.
And is there anything else I should consider or do?
We currently have an old Rasberry Pi B+ which sits quite happily running PiHole and I want to be able to access and use PiHole on my phone werever I am. I have tried a few times to get it to run NordVPN so I can access PiHole using Meshnet but the Pi B+ seems to be unable to run it, although this is no surprise considering it's probably 10 years old now.
I've dug an old PC out of the attic which I built back in 2012 when I was a lowly apprentice electrician on apprentice electrician wages. The PC was considered a very decent specification when I built it and even seems okay by todays standards.
The PC spec is as follows...
Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 Motherboard
Intel i7 3770
12GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM (I think I originally built it with 16GB as it was the maximum the motherboard could support but one of the two 8GB modules failed and I had a 4GB on hand so I threw that in)
256GB SATA SSD
The PC does have a graphics card but I think I'd pull it and run on the on board graphics as the graphics card fan is quite loud.
Other than PiHole duties and being able to access it via Meshnet I'd also like to use it to share storage and the internal CD/DVD writer drive.
So I'm thinking of using Ubuntu Desktop with PiHole, NordVPN and Samba.
Would there be any benefits to be running a server based OS like Ubuntu Server? I'm quite comfortable working in command line but if there's no real benefits then I'll stick with Ubuntu Desktop and make use of the GUI.
And is there anything else I should consider or do?