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Ask HN: What's on your home server?

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Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#151
A old 2011 mac mini with 80GB HD and 16GB RAM. Everything via Docker:

- Jellyfin: As a media server for movies and tv shows.

- Navidrome: My own music streaming service so I can listen to my FLAC collection anywhere (you can use any subsonic compatible app or its own web UI)

- Radarr: Automated movie torrent download

- Sonarr: Automated TV shows torrent download

- Nextcloud: For document and file sharing. It does allow calendar, contacts, etc.. but so far I am doing that just via my own regular Fastmail account

- Photoprism: I upload all my photos to it, via WebDAV.

- FreshRSS: RSS reader

- PiHole: No ads anywhere in my network

- OpenVPN: So I can access all the above from outside my network

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#152
Emby, NextDNS, Mastodon, Navidrome, Gitea, RSS Bridge, Miniflux, ZNC, Klaxon, Wiki.js, Radicale, Jupyter.

It has 1050Ti, so I was using it for some gaming earlier, but moving that to the Steam Deck now (got the dock for it).

I have some more details at https://captnemo.in/setup/homeserver/, and the source code at https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/nebula/

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#153

- Self hosted LanguageTool instance. Spell/grammar checker like Grammarly, but the self hosted version avoids the privacy problems. - Write-only file upload under an obscure domain. A bit dangerous, but a life saver when someone wants to send you a 200MB file. "Just go to frequentrain.com and upload there". With desktop notifications on my side, text upload for quick note taking from any computer, etc. - Custom RSS f…

> - Write-only file upload under an obscure domain. A bit dangerous, but a life saver when someone wants to send you a 200MB file. "Just go to frequentrain.com and upload there". Keep in mind that DNS records, including subdomains, are public. Consider putting the service on a random page instead (e.g. "frequentrain.com/sunnysometimes") and/or using something simple like http basic auth if you're not already. That sa…

The code is all custom and there are no instructions on the page itself, so its very unlikely a stranger would ever find and figure it out. But if it gets popular, that's a good idea!

A few more details if you want to make your own:

- The public page accepts drag and drop anywhere for file upload, and has a text field that uploads its contents immediately upon Ctrl+v. Coupled with a short domain name, it's extremely low friction to upload files or notes from any computer. You can't see what you upload (write-only), so it's not useful to abuse.

- It also opens a Server-Sent Events channel and executes all incoming messages as Javascript code. I use it for redirecting users, sending files, showing text, and pranks. It's only a couple lines of code, massively flexible, and surprisingly reliable.

- The authenticated page can see a list of all uploaded files, along with links to download and delete them. A service worker shows desktop notifications when somebody uploads something.

- Finally, the authenticated page also has a live list of all visitors (SSE channels), with buttons to send them code to execute, or to make them authenticated sessions.

It's the kind of stuff that would horrify me if it was a commercial product, but works marvelously between friends and family.

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#154
I recently got a ~3-year-old Thinkstation with 72 ht cores and 64 GB of RAM for relatively cheap and it has become my home server. It's overkill but I could not resist it. I do not run much on it yet but I have it with FreeBSD 13 and:

* ZFS for secure and reliable document and photo storage. Exposed via Samba. Backed up via ZFS snapshots to a drive I keep in a safe and another drive I keep in the office.

* PostgreSQL for development of personal projects.

* minidlna to serve some videos to the living room Xbox.

* Local development. I connect to it via SSH to work on my Rust projects, all through tmux and Emacs. But...

* bhyve for VMs. VSCode doesn't like FreeBSD as a target, so when I want to use VSCode on the client machines, I connect to a very large Debian VM. I'm planning to run other VMs as well.

I do not serve anything publicly though, other than SSH. My personal projects are hosted on Azure.

The previous machine I used as a server (a 10+-year-old PC) is currently running pfSense and acting as my router + local DNS + DHCP server. I want to replace this with a small box instead but haven't had the chance yet.

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#156
On a RaspberryPi 4b I have installed in my living room:

- Wireguard

- A Python script I created myself for providing a dynamic DNS ala DynDNS.

- Bind9 for the split horizon DNS.

To be added at some point later this year: Self hosted bitwarden (vaultwarden or the official one, I have yet to decide)

Edit: formatting

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#157
post #86

Reading this thread, someone needs to put the home server in a tiny box, preinstalled with all the apps and put a slick user interface on it. I think https://umbrel.com is a thing but it's not packaged with hardware. Something that packages the hardware and software together would be pretty killer. Plug and play. Instant email. All the apps. Easy migration from existing services.

I would love for something like this to become mainstream, mostly from a privacy PoV. But, I think there are just too many different use cases, pitfalls, user problems and limitations. Something like a plug and play box could work for the very small intersection of "technically inclined and understands how to port forward and how to fix minor problems" and "not interested in tinkering with self hosting". As someone else already mentioned, a big part for people self hosting seems to be the tinkering aspect. For me tinkering and privacy are the main motivators.

On the potential problem side you have far too much friction compared to cloud services. It starts with getting a public domain and IP for sharing data with other people. Then you need to setup port forwarding, need a somewhat stable network and internet connection, run into problems with upload bandwidth being usually far less than download. Once you have the connection side taken care of, what about user onboarding, password recovery ("just mount the partition and overwrite the password" will not work), backups? How do you make clear the distinction between my self hosted Spotify and someone else's? Why can they not see my music? Why is there a difference in the first place?

I know all/most of this can be solved in some way, but it is hard. There is also never going to be a big (think billion dollar) company involved with creating such a solution as there is no monetization model. You can not go for a subscription (imo), because then you just pay someone to host something at your home using your power and bandwidth. You could say you only pay for support and maybe a relay to workaround NAT, but how would the support look like? Full access via an admin account? Privacy just got downgraded. What happens if the company hosting the relay goes under? Enjoy your brick (local would still work, but the user experience would be far worse).

Apart from all these software and user experience problems, we still need the hardware. It needs to be reasonably cheap (US and EU market maybe 200-300USD), but it needs to be reliable (it will live in the worst possible place, like a hot, dusty cupboard) and support some more advanced use cases. Of course >90% will only use it for some light file storage, music streaming and voice control, but 10% will make heavy use of transcoding, invite others to their services, store TBs of media, run their entire home automation on it. How do these 10% know they are in the 10% and need to buy different hardware? Why can the box not do automatic quality adjustment like Netflix does? Do you have a hardware migration path?

And what about cross compatibility? In this thread alone you got multiple different systems. This just multiplies user support issues or will lead to vendor lock in, just a different kind.

Lastly, you need marketing to bring this to the mainstream. And you need a big selling point to make people migrate from "free" cloud services to something they need to pay upfront.

I hate to be this negative about this topic, but I just do not see this being viable outside a relatively small, interested community. Please, correct me here, I would love to see this become real and mainstream!

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#158
post #67

- Router in VM - Main workstation in VM with GPU passthrough (saves power by not having an additional machine running) - Nextcloud for files, calendar, contact sync - Joplin server for notes sync - Samba NAS for me and everyone else who lives in the house - Occasionally one or more Minecraft servers for friends - Jenkins CI for my open source projects - Mail server (using the ISP's mail proxy for outgoing) - qbittorr…

Thanks for the Joplin mention. I’ve been looking for a secure, gdpr compliant and preferably selfhosted note app for some time! Bingo, I guess

Joplin is old but gold in terms of open source not taking. However, I always found the experience to be a bit too clunky even after writing 100s of notes.

Obsidian is much nicer but you gotta set up your own sync or pay. Same basic premise of markdown files on your local file system. I've been enjoying it a lot and written more since switching.

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#159
Got my old pc up as a home server, probs overkill but was sitting collecting dust. Ryzen 2700x, Crosshair Vii, 970 evo plus 500gb 64gb ram and an Nvidia quadro p4000 32TB WD Red as Nas Storage.

Currently Running all as VMs/LXC via proxmox Adguard Home Assistnat Plex, sonarr/ radarr/ bazarr / deluge. TrueNas using HBA passthrough for my drivers Bitwarden Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring Traefic reverse proxy Ubiquity Controller

Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#160
post #54

In a cloud server (hidden from the public) www.keycloak.org - auth mostly for outline www.getoutline.com - my personal "notion" nginxproxymanager.com - to proxy things Wireguard - remote access and interconnection between zones cockpit-project.org - to manage VMS github.com/coder/code-server - To remote develop 2x of docs.paperless-ngx.com/ (one for me and one for my partner) - I scan and destroy most of the letters…

How do you keep the server hidden from the public?

I just don't assign public Ip addresses to private VM.

Public (with different public ips) I have:

  * Mailcow
  * Postal
  * Code server (just a dev machine with public ip)
  * Wireguard
  * NginxProxyManager
Private (without public ip) I have:

  * PiHole
  * containers (where i run most of the staff)
  * Monitoring
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