Ask HN: What's on your home server?

Currently I have a hybrid setup, where stuff that needs more compute or storage (which are cheaper if you buy hardware) runs locally in my homelab, whereas the things that need better uptime or more bandwidth are available in rented VPSes. I've actually played around with what is hosted where, depending on what I need: for example, uptime monitoring currently runs locally, checking whether I can reach the remote sites from my residential connection.

LOCALLY (in my homelab)

- Startpage, with Heimdall: https://heimdall.site/

- Backups, with BackupPPC: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/

- Twitch stream and YouTube video backups, with PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/

- File sharing for larger files, with Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/

- Chat solution, with Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

- Project management, with OpenProject: https://www.openproject.org/

- CI runners, with Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/

- Minecraft servers, with docker-minecraft-server: https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server

- Static code analysis, with SonarQube: https://docs.sonarqube.org/latest/

- Uptime monitoring, with Uptime Kuma: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

PUBLICLY (in rented VPSes)

- Code repositories, with Gitea: https://gitea.io/en-us/

- CI, with Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/

- Package/container management, with Nexus: https://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus-repository

- File sharing, with Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/

- Link shortener, with Yourls: https://yourls.org/

- Mail server, with docker-mailserver: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

- Analytics, with Matomo: https://matomo.org/

- Container management, with Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

- Server monitoring, with Zabbix: https://www.zabbix.com/

- Blog, with Grav: https://getgrav.org/

My homepage and some other projects as well. I manage most of these as Docker containers (with Swarm, though K3s is great too), so thankfully handling data backups and resource limits is pretty easy. Currently, I use Apache as the reverse proxy in front of all of these (lots of modules for a variety of features, as well as Let's Encrypt integration with mod_md). So far it seems to work decently, isn't too expensive, helps me avoid e-waste (homelab nodes run 200 GE CPUs with 35 W TDP), although updates are always a pain.

The blog has more information about some of these pieces of software, in case anyone is interested: https://blog.kronis.dev/

For example, previously I ran GitLab, but Gitea + Drone + Nexus proved to be a better solution for my needs and workloads.

Any particular security camera that you use?

I have been considering building a bespoke home system with Elixir and am slowly building some APIs and ideas.

Do the cheap NUCs let you install more than 8GB RAM?

For people that aren't getting free boxes from work, you can usually find used micro/tiny form factor Intel machines for around $120. That's more than a Raspberry Pi, but you can get a Core i5-6500T with 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and it'll use around 10 watts at idle (and top out around 50 watts). You'll get an M.2 PCIe 3.0 4x slot and a bay for a 2.5" SATA drive and support for up to 32GB of memory.

You can put Proxmox on them if you want to run a bunch of VMs or use Windows or any of the many Linux distros that support x64 rather than dealing with less known hardware.

While 10 watts is more than the 1-2 watts of a Raspberry Pi, it comes out to around $13/year for me leaving it on 24/7. A normal desktop idling at 50-100 watts would cost me $65-130/year so it is a big difference. In fact, if you're leaving a normal desktop on 24/7 as a home server, it might make financial sense to grab a micro/tiny machine. If it costs you $120 and saves you $50-120/year in electricity, that seems like it would be worthwhile.

They're not fanless, but they are very quiet compared to most desktops.

I ended up going this route because Raspberry Pis are so hard to come by these days. A Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM will cost $75 and then you'll need to supply your own storage (MicroSD), buy a case if you want to protect it, and a USB cable and power adapter (though you probably have that sitting around). Between the Raspberry Pi and MicroSD card, it's basically $100 and way less powerful than a Core i5-6500T (which should be 3x faster) and you're using a MicroSD card rather than a nice PCIe flash drive. Plus, if you want, you can load the micro/tiny machine up with 32GB of RAM for not that much ($40 to get it to 24GB, $70 to get it to 32GB) and you can make that decision in the future. Plus, for a lot of purposes, standard x64 hardware can be nice. Plus, you can actually get your hands on a micro/tiny form factor PC while I haven't seen Raspberry Pis in stock in a long time.

One could easily disagree, though. The operating costs are likely to be an additional $10-11/year and one could get a 1GB RAM Raspberry Pi for $35 (if they had them in stock) and get a small MicroSD and maybe only spend $40-45 instead of $120, but it feels like the utility of a $45 machine with 1GB RAM is a lot more limited and I'd (personally) rather spend the money on something I know I can use.

How do you do backups?

I’ve had a homelab for a decade and I could never figure backups out properly.

I use proxmox with containers, VMs when I have no choice, and a portainer machine that runs docker containers when I have no choice.

I use ansible so in each playbook I have a task to backup periodically to rsync.net

But that requires a lot of work because it must be setup for each service, doesn’t work with the docker machine because docker is weird to me and I can’t use ansible to setup stuff within th container, and proxmox’s backup are too big for my rsync account. Besides I only need the actual data in the backup, not the whole OS.

Any insights?