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Ask HN: Always on low power home server

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Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#71

Post by callesgg »

600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

I have one that i use for various things firewall, router, file sharing, prototyping web systems, torrenting. Backup of images. A 1000 different small things. I guess I could do without it but it is very convenient to have somewhere where I can run small scripts test various things and make the result publicly accessible over the web.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#72

Post by kingosticks »

If you do decide to give the pi another chance, move the root partition to an ssd and avoid the SD card woes. Or, boot from a USB device and have no sd card at all on the Pi 4. Both work well and a cheap option as you probably already habe all the stuff.

You've still got a load of wires to deal with though (unless you shell out for a fancy case).

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#73

Post by m463 »

I would recommend low-end intel. You get things like a clock with a battery, a power switch, transcoding, and many distributions.

Zotac makes some nice fanless machines that take an ssd, and they run linux fine. They come with a vesa/wall mount

They can be very low cost, for example the zotac zbox ci325 or ci329 ~ $160-170 (add memory + ssd). You can pay more all the way up to fanless i7 machines.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#74

Post by shijie »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #68

What's your budget? My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I play (minecraft, KSP dark multiplayer, halo ce, etc.). It does PiHole and steam/origin/blizzard/uplay download caching (steam game install from a bonded dual-10G server is fun) as well. I picked up a SuperMicro mini-ITX 8 core Xeon-D based server board on eBay…

This is a great list of suggestions. Also, Halo CE is one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time. My friends and I still play Halo CE (NHE) on LAN all the time.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#75

Post by 600frogs »

vinay_ys wrote: post #70
600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

For a household with 2+ people – each with personal phone and personal laptop plus a bunch of common devices like TVs, streaming speakers etc you would need a bunch of useful local LAN services: 1. Local Backup storage server – always have a local+cloud back – neither one is good enough just by itself. 2. Local streaming service – photos, music, home videos etc. 3. Internet gateway – a. filtering firewall, b. privacy…

I suppose the only thing here that really interests me is the backup server, and even then I've got enough (potentially misplaced) faith in iCloud/Dropbox/Google photos to not spontaneously combust at the same time as I lose/break my devices. Out of interest, what software do you use for the backups? Is it something like Borg/rsync and a cron job, or is there a nice batteries included solution?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#76

Post by npteljes »

600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

I was annoyed that my media is only available on my main machine, if I wanted to watch something on my phone or show a photo to someone, I needed to boot it up. So a home server to host files for me and my household seemed logical. Since then I went on a degoogling trip and as part of that, I installed Nextcloud, also very useful. I also do my backups to the homeserver (and then back up the homeserver too).

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#77

Post by 600frogs »

DoktorDelta wrote: post #69
600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

I have an old desktop running Plex, so I can stream my personal movie and TV library to any of the Roku devices in my house.

I've never heard of or used Roku before, from a quick search it seems to be a chromecast style stick to plug in to a TV to watch stuff, is there any reason you couldn't plug an RPi or your desktop straight into the TV to watch from?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#79

Post by B5C8ECB24DB47D1 »

ohuf wrote: post #24

I left the RasPi behind for a 2nd hand Lenovo m93p tiny for about $100. (An alternative HW would be the Dell Optiplex 9020 micro). You can upgrade the RAM on these and they use standard SSDs. I'm booting the Proxmox VM environment and it's currently running a VM and a LXC container, with lots of future opportunities. Proxmox allows you to reserve a vm's access to the USB ports, which comes in handy if you want to att…

In the same form factor, there is also the HP EliteDesk 800 micro.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#80

Post by toast0 »

600frogs wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

My home servers do the following things:

a) raise my power bill and heat my home :p

b) run a PPPoE client (ugh) and firewall/nat, and handoff the PPPoE session (custom client, available on github, email me) and firewall state (pfsync) if the primary goes down (which is usually for reboots); redundant dhcp, recusrive DNS, and automatic failover to LTE as well.

c) host a samba share for household documents and media. With automated backup to the secondary server (but if the main server is offline, you can't use the share). The samba share also accepts backups from the windows hosts (veeam free edition), which means I actually have backups that are easy to restore from.

d) publish selected data from the share (on change) to my DO droplet, because my connection isn't reliable enough to host from home (I used to serve my lame webpages, and my DNS from my home servers, but when I moved, it became a non-option due to the DSL going offline when the DSLAM loses utility power)

e) record over the air TV with MythTV and HDHomerun network tuners

f) host local development because my frontend systems are Windows and I'm not developing there (not interested in a windows hosted Linux environment thanks, putty works well for me)

g) PXEBoot server, which is mildly useful, at times.

Are there other ways to do that stuff? Probably, but this is what worked for me. I used to have all these things running on a single server, but having multiple means I can reboot them for kernel updates without losing my internet, so that's pretty nice.

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