Ask HN: What's on your home server?

I had a few questions if you don't mind answering as I'm doing something similar for a vacation home (and my own, but this is more relevant to the remote one).

    How many IoT devices are you working with?  

I don't have the best router up north and some of my lousier routers can't handle more than about 25 devices before they start crapping the bed.

    Do they disconnect often from your router (and do the successfully reconnect)?

Similar router problem, though I've found some of the more finickier devices I own can have problems in my home where I have a number of options for connections.

    If you haven't had these problems, what router are you using?

    What about "the internet is down"?

This was less of an issue when everything was Z-Wave/ZigBee, but all of the cheap stuff is WiFi. This mostly only concerns "the lights" and "the plugs". I don't want a switch to stop being able to control devices it's not directly attached to if home assistant or the target device can't reach the internet. All of the ones that I own broadcast state and can accept commands via UDP over the local network so I was thinking of writing something that HA could call, locally, which would issue those commands and receive the statuses (so they'd always be local-only).

I will probably get downvoted for this (unless, as I expect, the vast majority are in the same boat), but my answer is: nothing. I don't mean this to discredit people who actually run home servers, just sharing my own experience.

I have a "prosumer" grade £120 ASUS gigabit router, which has a perfectly adequate settings UI, firewall, port forwarding, and supports NAS via a USB HDD, or 4G failover if I ever happen to need it. No need to overpay for fancy business/enterprise grade networking equipment - plug it in, and it works.

Photos/videos are stored in Google Photos for £1.99/mo - I'd happily pay more if I exceed the 200gb limit I currently have iirc, but most of this is junk I won't ever access again that got backed up from my phone, eg screenshots that I took to send in Messenger/WhatsApp and forgot to delete afterwards.

Pretty much anything else that I do with a computer only has to be done when the computer is turned on. Having a separate server running drawing 100-200w at all times (even when we're in the office or sleeping, which is >2/3rds of the day) considering current energy prices, seems like a massive waste of money. 100w 24/7 for a year costs £300 at the current energy price cap (which most tariffs are currently at or around). I can't remember the last time me and my partner needed simultaneous access to the same files via the network, or I needed instantaneous access to a file on my MacBook or Android phone that is on my Windows/Fedora desktop, so another reason I don't see any need a NAS or server.

Wrt movies (Plex/DLNA/Kodi) there's very few films I like enough to want to watch again, that aren't included in Netflix, Amazon, or Disney's library. Hence there are very few that I own physical disc copies of, and I can just play the disc on the PS5, or my PC's bluray writer, or the upstairs TV, so no need to back these up onto a HDD or stream around the house. Any content that is already on my PC just requires me to switch it on (via either Wake on LAN, walking 10m upstairs and pressing a button, or bluetooth switchbot) temporarily to stream to my TV via a DLNA server. No need to leave anything running permanently.

Really the only way I can see home servers making sense, is if running the server itself is your hobby. The added convenience is almost zero, and for me wouldn't be worth it considering the £300/yr electricity cost and £300-£1000 initial outlay I can imagine for decent hardware and a few TB of drives if you don't have an old PC lying around. Plus all the time spent configuring, monitoring, and maintaining - most on this site do enough of that at work already, and I have enough hobbies as it is ;D

The range is indeed poor, and it depends a lot on your house/flat. Would definitely recommend using another machine with something like this.

In terms of throughput, right next to an AP, I just got 65Mb/s.

Hi André.

First of all, thanks. I used hosted my own email 20 years ago, and when I saw how easy it was with mailcow, I decided to try again.

Looking forward to the mailcow successor. Is there anything up already?

Cheers.

On my home server running on a fitlet2 with no public access except through my wireguard vpn:

- jellyfin :: Media server for streaming music, tv, movies to my phones, ipads, and rokus

- nextcloud :: Storage, carddav, caldav

- frigate :: Object detection on my custom home cameras

- homeassistant :: Notifications/Automation (used with frigate)

- freshRSS :: RSS feed reader

- vaultwarden :: Bitwarden server

- bookstack :: Wiki

- yacy :: This is a distributed search engine, but I use it in non-distributed (robinson mode), and use it instead of bookmarks. Any interested page, instead of bookmarking, I add it to my yacy index

- smashing :: Dashboard. I have written some custom addons. This is shown in my front tv to track the real time location of buses at the stops near me.

- photoprism :: Photo manager

- snapdrop :: Airdrop replacement

- imapfilter :: Advanced mail filtering, like taking news letters and converting to RSS feeds

- dolibarr :: ERP for my side business

I run wireguard and pihole on a separate raspberry pi.