Recently the water pipes in our barn exploded because of a hard freeze. None of us thought to leave the water trickling over night as we should. In response, I wrote a script that sends me an alert via ntfy that explicity says "Leave water trickling, it will be freezing tonight", as well as "Roll up windows, rain expected". I use sqlite to track notifications already sent and not spam myself, and for historic forecasts in case I ever want to play with that data.
Ask HN: What's on your home server?
231–240 of 467 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#232In 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…
You can run pihole in the cloud? That is very useful information.
You could also use https://nextdns.io. It’s basically pi-hole in the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#233Define "home server." Consumer-grade NASes are so powerful they can pretty much do anything you'd do with a "home server."
On my smart TVs, I installed Kodi. I have an off-the-shelf NAS that serves the files via NFS. It can do Plex, if that's your cup of tea. (But I prefer Kodi, because most of things I do are audiophile grade and I don't want the kind of transcoding that Plex does.)
The NAS is basically a super-powerful server in a tiny footprint. I just use it for files, because I just don't care to take the time to learn how to do anything else. One critical feature is that it's point-and-click RAID. I've hot-swapped drives after a failure with no downtime; all point-and-click over the web interface.
But, one thing I want to do is self-host my own website, and self-host a mastodon node. Maybe if I was independently wealthy I'd take the time to figure it out, like when I ran a dial-up BBS when I was younger.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#234NextCloud, Home Assistant, Paperless NGX, Minecraft, Caddy for some Hugo sites/blogs, Unify Controller, Vaultwarden, Traefik, Sabnzbd. Used to do WireGuard but now I use Tailscale, AdGuard home and FoundryVTT. It's all docker-compose. I'm thinking of taking some services off the internet using TailScale, some already are just on the Tailnet (Home Assistant and Paperless NGX), all my SSH ports are now only open to the…
“It's all docker-compose.” Are you using a utility to manage docker-compose or just setting it up on the CLI (e.g. started with a systemd service)? I run docker-compose via CLI on my server but it’s not always convenient to ssh in to check on something.
Since it's all a yaml file I just use vscode's remote-ssh to check (files opens in vscode, one click opens a shell at the bottom (ie for docker-compose ps), nice thing is that remote-ssh also allows dragging and dropping files to the server without needing anything else, rarely need that though). If you add the `restart: unless-stopped` line, all containers just come up again after crashes/reboots.
On Arch I just `sudo systemctl enable docker` (after `sudo pacman docker docker-compose`), I wrote a bit about it here: [0]. This starts docker automatically, and docker automatically starts any containers with the above mentioned line in their service entry.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#235NextCloud, Home Assistant, Paperless NGX, Minecraft, Caddy for some Hugo sites/blogs, Unify Controller, Vaultwarden, Traefik, Sabnzbd. Used to do WireGuard but now I use Tailscale, AdGuard home and FoundryVTT. It's all docker-compose. I'm thinking of taking some services off the internet using TailScale, some already are just on the Tailnet (Home Assistant and Paperless NGX), all my SSH ports are now only open to the…
Very cool! Since this is all exposed to the internet, how do you keep it secure? I’ve got a spare laptop and a static IP, but I’m concerned about exposing my home server to attacks. Right now I’ve just got it all running in Tailscale, but I’d like to safely host public-facing apps too.
I religiously keep everything up to date, for anything exposed to the public I use https (Traefik does let's encrypt, caddy as well) and set 2FA for Nextcloud for example, there is also a brute-force protection app for NC.
Some services, like HA, my minecraft servers, Paperless, in fact most of them, I would indeed feel less comfortable exposing, and I don't, but for NextCloud I also use it to share large files with friends so it needs to be internet facing, as do the blogs, but Hugo generates static sites, so that is quite secure (like earlier mentioned blog).
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#236Rather than listing everything I'm hosting at my home server, I'll just share what saved me the most time, repeatedly: Mirrors of various package repositories I use. I'm currently mirroring npm, crates, Arch packages, clojars, maven and some other things, then all my machines (desktop, servers and laptops) point to the mirror rather than directly to upstream. Some of them are mirroring dynamically (basically a cache…
Can you share a bit about how you set this up?
Also curious if anyone has taken this a step further and MITM Squid proxied their whole home to cache all responses >100mb or something like that.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#237Not my home but my parent's (as I'm a "nomad"). They recently built a new house and put me in charge of the tech with a handsome budget, so I built a rack just like it would be my place. Ended up costing 1/4th of what other "smart home" companies quoted. We got way better bang for the buck and software capabilities. On the server/NAS, a QNAP TS-464eU (4x 4TB HDD RAID 5 + 2x 1TO SSD RAID 1), I'm running Container Stat…
As someone who gets caught in the occasional "could you just fix x – what do you mean y is not working? It always worked before you got here"-trap, essentially signing up to run your parents entire smart home setup, indefinitely, feels like some special kind of hell.
I thought the same. Having run HA at my own home for a couple years now, theres no way I would take ownership of someone elses install. I love the setup, its just not a "non-tech savvy friendly" ecosystem. Thats what I assume you pay for on the COTS ones.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#238Technically I have 3 that do the following
* Local arch Linux mirrors
* Iptables/routes/rules/vlan tagging as a router
* Vpn client
* Ldap for authn
* DNS
* Kerberos for authz
* Postfix/dovecot for email
* Nfs for home directories
* Git repos via vanilla ssh/bash scripts
* Other temporary odds and ends.Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#239Rather than listing everything I'm hosting at my home server, I'll just share what saved me the most time, repeatedly: Mirrors of various package repositories I use. I'm currently mirroring npm, crates, Arch packages, clojars, maven and some other things, then all my machines (desktop, servers and laptops) point to the mirror rather than directly to upstream. Some of them are mirroring dynamically (basically a cache…
Can you share a bit about how you set this up? Also curious if anyone has taken this a step further and MITM Squid proxied their whole home to cache all responses >100mb or something like that.
Basically just a bunch of shellscripts for most part, that is run with systemd timers on a PC-like server (consumer components), served via Caddy.
Npm registry is using verdaccio, arch packages is using https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/blob... + what is outlined at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DeveloperWiki:NewMirrors, clojars is just reading the list of packages and downloading them one by one each day.
Not a unified or nicely done setup by any means, just thrown together to solve the problem at hand.
Re: Ask HN: What's on your home server?
#240Reading 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.
Synology NAS products (using their quickconnect service) get pretty close to this. You have to install their apps from an App Store but that feels reasonable for even the average consumer.
Seconded. Just get a Synology NAS. I'm incredibly happy with mine, they really seem to make a great product on both the hardware and software side.