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Ask HN: What's on your home server?

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

#141

Post by philippejara »

jstummbillig wrote: post #126
keraf wrote: post #119

Not 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.

In my experience signing up to do it or not is irrelevant because I'll end up doing it anyway since they're my parents, so i'd rather have full easy remote teamviewer/ssh access to the stuff I know works and how it works because I set it up instead of going there to debug some crap they downloaded or bought in the app store/mall that claimed to do x and now it doesn't work and now nothing is working etc etc.

Still can't avoid having at times to go and fix the god damn printer however. Printer driver programmers/designers really make me question if politicians should be the most hated profession in the world.

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

#143

Post by gureddio »

cantagi wrote: post #137

I have 3 rpi4s running my entire home network. One is a vpn router and a wifi AP, it also has Uptime Kuma. I need this to be reliable and rarely touch it except to improve its reliability. - Openvpn - HostAPD - Uptime Kuma (in docker) - A microservice invoked from Uptime Kuma that monitors connectivity to my ISPs router (in docker) - nginx, not in docker, reverse proxies to Uptime Kuma The second acts as a NAS and ha…

Sounds neat. Are you doing anything to mitigate the possibility of SD card corruption with the Raspberry Pis?

I used to use a single RP to run as a media server, and it was great, but stopped using it after suffering from SD card corruption.

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

#144

Post by pooper »

philippejara wrote: post #141
jstummbillig wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience signing up to do it or not is irrelevant because I'll end up doing it anyway since they're my parents, so i'd rather have full easy remote teamviewer/ssh access to the stuff I know works and how it works because I set it up instead of going there to debug some crap they downloaded or bought in the app store/mall that claimed to do x and now it doesn't work and now nothing is working etc etc. Still ca…

> Printer driver programmers/designers really make me question if politicians should be the most hated profession in the world.

Trying not to be snarky but really printers are very mechanical I/O devices. I don't think the driver programmers have much fun with their jobs, having to deal with seemingly greedy product requirements and lots of variation in real world use (humidity, paper type, ink quality, yada yada). When I start thinking about this and couple it with my own stupidity, I am amazed anything works at all. How do you even do automated integration tests on a printer?

I'd like to think I am about an average programmer and I am reminded by my own actions everyday that I know nothing. I am constantly learning (and forgetting) new ideas every week.

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

#146

Post by boloust »

moritonal wrote: post #122
boloust wrote: post #115

Running k3s on a small cluster of mini pcs and RPis. Use Tailscale for MagicDNS and access from any network. Have a custom wildcard domain pointing to my tailscale k3s node ips, and a traefik ingress controller. This means exposing a service from my cluster on a subdomain just requires creating an ingress object in k3s, and it's only accessible via tailscale. cert-manager and let's encrypt handle TLS. All services ar…

Always love seeing someone else create a similar solution as your own (albiet likely better!). I have the same setup with K3S running on a couple PIs. You have a nice CI but I decided to use cdk8s[1] which lets you compile Typescript into K8 files. For access I did almost exactly the same but with CloudFlare Tunnels (might look into Tailscale). Stealing the zigbee2mqtt and room assistant ideas. Where do you store vol…

cdk8s works really nicely with gitops.

> Where do you store volumes?

Back when it was a single node cluster, I just used hostFolder mounts with restic backups. I added Longhorn once the cluster grew, but there's still some local hostFolder mounts left around. For example, zigbee2mqtt needs to be on the node that has the zigbee controller plugged into it, so the node is tagged and zigbee2mqtt has a nodeSelector. This means the hostPath still works and I haven't needed to migrate it to Longhorn.

Longhorn initially scared me off with its relatively high listed resource requirements, but after configuring it to not run on the RPis it turned out to work quite well, most of the time just using a few percent CPU.

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

#147

Post by gureddio »

I run two main devices:

- QNAP TS-253A-4G NAS. What has been a real game changer on this has been container station, which allows you to run any dockerised app. It is however a little underspecced for any real heavy lifting. It's basically the workhorse for file storage, media hosting and downloading.

- MeLE PCG35 Fanless Mini PC. This is a fairly new addition. Is a home web server (nginx) and runs my gitlab instance. Saves me about $20 a month in hosting costs by self hosting instead (nothing important). It also runs Pi Hole. The OS is Debian

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

#148

Post by keraf »

jstummbillig wrote: post #126
keraf wrote: post #119

Not 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.

My choice with their new house was pretty simple. They wanted a smart home, and being the tech son I would inevitably have to help them at some point. So either I debug a system that is open and familiar, with remote access and reliable software/hardware. Or I deal with some closed proprietary trash which will end-up with me on the phone with some incompetent cash grab company. As mentioned in my post, the latter would have cost 3 to 4 times the price of all the hardware we bought (see the link) and we would just get some SBC or cheap tower instead.

With the current setup, I can easily connect via VPN to configure network devices. Ubiquiti also makes it very simple to apply network changes or upgrade it remotely (as long as it's from the same brand). I set up extensive monitoring and alerting to proactively resolve issues. I also gave my parents some training and docs on how to plug things to the Ethernet sockets (if they want to setup a new printer for example) or what to do to bypass the router (rewiring) in case the main router fails.

As a side note to helping my parents. They are both 70, not the most tech literate people but they manage to do all basic things without much trouble. I put them both on Ubuntu 8 years ago, never had any issues whatsoever. I get maybe one message or call in 6 months for a question, but it's usually web related. Once in a while when I get home I update the distro, but that's pretty much all the maintenance I do. I have Teamviewer on all their devices, just in case but never really had to use it so far.

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

#149

Post by tsujamin »

apeters wrote: post #69
cientifico wrote: post #3

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…

Even though I sold mailcow and stopped working on it in the past months, it warms my heart SO MUCH to see people using it. :) Really, thank you. I have some ideas for a proper successor which would be much more scaleable, modern, flexible and would be more focused to use existing transports for piggybacking mail. A fully and safely encrypted mail storage as well as a cool interface to invite for encrypted sessions et…

I absolutely _loved_ mailcow. Worked out of the box way better than my hand rolled solution, and ended up using it for some small orgs too.

Thanks for all your work on it!

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

#150

Post by gureddio »

cientifico wrote: post #3

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…

Thanks for sharing this list! I wasn't aware of nginxproxymanager. This is something I've been doing semi manually for years. It looks like it'll slot right in and save me some work
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