Ask HN: What's on your home server?

#1

Post by _moof » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:00 AM UTC

It's been years (over a decade?) since I've had a server at home but I'm setting one up for media and I got to thinking: what else should I do with this box? So I was wondering what cool/nerdy/weird stuff you all are using home servers for. DNS and file sharing seem like obvious applications I could set up. I already run email and web on a VPS so that's taken care of. What are you doing with your home server?

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

#2

Post by rektide » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:01 AM UTC

It's absurd but I always thought it'd be so great to have FreeIPA set up. Having my computers actually be part of a real network would be neat.

I do wish it were a little less coupled. I'd rather be using better known moderm pieces like cfssl instead of dogtags for CA, OpenLDAP instead of 389ds for ldap. But FreeIPA has one of the hardest worst most terrifying jobs on the planet & it's amazing it can interoperate so deeply, and there's like, next to no hope ever we improve beyond this particular thing, unless we can somehow just ditch AD & SMB. Maybe some day Windows & filesharing will have alternative viable directory systems, but hard to imagine.

I also ran into this project on setting up Kubernetes atop FreeIPA though, and wow is it ever terrifying. https://github.com/zultron/freeipa-cloud-prov

Some more basic answer for you, Jellyfin for media-sharing. A small GoToSocial server for ActivityPub/Mastadon. Prosody for XMPP. WireGuard for vpn. Frigate for security cams. Rygel for upnp/dlna MediaRenderers (there s other good options too). Mpd/mopidy for music jukebox. Nextcloud for groupware-ish.

If you want a lot of ideas, there'a a pretty active k8s-at-home microcosm, and there's a website that indexes the projects they get up to. Even if you dont want to run kubernetes, the projects they have cover the whole gamut of services people might find useful or fun to run at home.

A while back I had a bunch of home sensors reporting to Prometheus. Temperature/humidity gauges, ambient light sensors. My favorite was making my laptops battery & charge status show up. The 2-in-1 had two batteries & was extra cool to watch drain one, then another, then see levels charge back up.

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

#3

Post by cientifico » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:14 AM UTC

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 I get.
  snibox.github.io/ - my terminal companion
  pi-hole (together with wireguard I don't have ads on my devices)
  uptime.kuma.pet - to be sure that things are online
  mailcow.email/ - for non priority domains
  docs.postalserver.io/ - mail server for apps and services

At home (small 6w nic with):

  HomeAssistant - To control home lights
  Cups - share printers
  Wireguard - (connected to the cloud)

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

#4

Post by dusted » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:23 AM UTC

It's right behind me, unfortunately, due to lacking ISP, I'm currently jumping some hoops[1] to have online.

I have OpenVPN and Docker, rest runs as containers.

Mail (Postfix, Dovecot, Spamassassin)

Web: Nginx (serving sites and doing reverse-proxy for other containers)

Various containers running nodejs sites (served through nginx reverse proxy)

MySQL, Mongo, Apache/PHP,

Apparantly a minecraft server too.

- 1 http://dusted.dk/pages/aWayOut/

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

#5

Post by stephen_g » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:44 AM UTC

At the moment I just have the UniFi controller running on a Raspberry Pi. But I really do want to set up a good NAS for storage, and do some kind of encrypted snapshot backup to cloud for important things I currently just have strewn across some external hard drives and SSDs (generally at least two copies, but all the drives are at my house which isn’t great if there’s a fire or something).

I might get a small server (maybe the HPE Microserver) instead of something like a Synology, set Proxmox up on it, and then if I ever have the time I’d quite like to get a Samba 4 Active Directory controller going so I can control my few Windows machines better (and so it stops trying me to link a Microsoft account and all that).

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

#6

Post by litoE » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:48 AM UTC

Backups. All my Linux computers back themselves up every night to the server. The server itself mounts the Windows PCs disks and backs those up. I use dirvish to do the backups.

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

#7

Post by mike_d » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:48 AM UTC

The standard DNS and local network services, plus security cameras.

Being in California, I have tried to push as much as I can out of my home and into datacenters to save on power. That said storage is one of the most expensive things to do "in the cloud," so everything I have is backed up to my house where I can shove a ton of drives into a NAS and spin them down when idle.

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

#8

Post by shakna » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:53 AM UTC

Automatic compiling for my code and book hobby projects. So that there's always a latest version that I can open via file sharing.

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

#9

Post by frellus » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:57 AM UTC

Me too, it's been a lot of years since I bothered with a home lab, but just recently I put NixOS on a triad of Intel NUCs work was throwing away. They're fanless, quiet and decent enough for Linux with their 16GB memory and 8 cores. Way better than a RasberryPi.

Now I can do some experiments I wanted to do, but not use VMs on my laptop. Feels more real when I can see a little stack of servers I can pull the power on. All are running tailscale so I can get to them from anywhere and run some simple tests. Example: I wanted to play with a quorum of FoundationDB nodes and see how things can fail. Also I'll run k3s and do some experimenting with that. Can I use minicube on my laptop? Sure, but this is more fun.

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

#10

Post by jszymborski » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 7:02 AM UTC

On my Synology NAS, I run the following using Docker:

- Jellyfin: Streams my movies and shows

- Paperless-NG: Where I keep OCR'd scans of my paper docs

- Airsonic: So I can stream my music using the Subsonic protocol

- Photoprism: Where I store my photos, auto-labelled with AI and geotagged

- The Synology Surveillance Suite: NVR for my home security cameras.

- Wireguard: So I can access all this on the go

It feels pretty cool to stream music and videos from my personal cloud using Wireguard while I'm e.g. travelling or in the car.