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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?

#201
Well, there's three, including the router. Altogether, they host Nextcloud for sharing files between devices and have a place for (one set of) backup files, minidlna for movies and music, an OpenVPN instance that has largely been replaced with Wireguard, several local git repositories, and a build environment for FreeBSD (including a cross-compile one for the Orange Pi also running FreeBSD).

The pi also hosts a Kerberos KDC and OpenLDAP, which I prefer for authentication and account management, not that I ever change my password, but just in case. I also use that for email, which is hosted on a cheap, but reliable VPS, connected to the home LAN via Wireguard.

Eventually I plan on adding Kerberized NFSv4 for a shared home directory across servers, and I might play around with a local ipfs cluster. Sadly, OpenAFS doesn't seem to build on FreeBSD these days, or I would be all about that.

At present, I have a Mastodon instance with its own database server on a free Oracle instance, but I will probably migrate the database to my in-house server, just to tidy things up.

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

#202
Here's what I have:

- A dedicated (hardware) server in an European datacenter running Proxmox. - opnsense (firewall VM that I connect to using wireguard for administration, and home networks connect to for voip, etc) - mailcow - nextcloud - collabora office - asterisk (for VoIP, since I'm living abroad but still need my old local phone# sometimes) - own Mastodon instance - a Windows VM for those times when you really need to test something against Windows

- Back at home; an old gaming PC converted into a NAS, on a speedy 300/300Mbps GPON - borgmatic backups for everything, incl. family - jellyfin - samba for most of my video/music/legacy stuff - home assistant - transmission

- At parents' place - an ancient HP Microserver with 10-year-old hard drives: - borgmatic - samba - transmission - a cellular to VoIP gateway connected to my european Asterisk via VPN

- Another "home" network location interconnected with these two -- mainly for convenience of monitoring home automation and CCTV with Zabbix;

- A separate cloud VPS running just Zabbix for monitoring all this and some other stuff I do as a freelancer.

On my phone, VoIP VM and some other chosen devices I also run Tailscale -- with phone it's mainly because some European ISPs like to block VoIP :). There's a massive inconvenience about it in that Android only allows one VPN tunnel per profile, and I need two...

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

#204
On my NAS (qnap ts453d) I run a few webapps using Docker:

    homeassistant (Home Automation)
    jellyfin (Media Server)
    joplin (Notes Syncing)
    transmission (Bittorrent Client)
The apps are behind nginx proxy manager (which does https termination) and the containers are managed using Portainer. They are automatically updated using watchtower.

And then on a raspberry pi, there's more home automation stuff:

    openhab (my old home automation system, which still interfaces old components like my heating and the photovoltaic system) 
    influxdb (storage for openhab)
    grafana (visualisation and alerting)
    node red (automation stuff like doorbell push notifications)
    mosquitto (mqtt server)
    lots of custom scripts that do stuff and publish the results via http
I probably should move some of this stuff to the NAS, but I have a working and tested backup flow and the NAS takes forever to boot, so I would lose more sensor data by reboots of the NAS than by the SD card of the pi breaking (happend twice in 7 years).

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

#205
post #69

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…

To the new owners: I googled mailcow, got to the web site and found nothing to explain what it is, not even in the docs. Eventually I noticed the "People also ask" section in the Google results page:

> What is Mailcow?

> fully managed by Elestio. Mailcow is a Docker-based email server, based on Dovecot, Postfix and other open-source software, that provides a modern web UI for administration.

Hopefully this is correct but who knows.

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

#206
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2x of docs.paperless-ngx.com/ (one for me and one for my partner) - I scan and destroy most of the letters I get. Ah, interesting. I have been considering finding a solution like that. How do you like it? Are there other alternatives you considered?

There are alternatives. I chose paperless because was the most mature opensource solution. Be aware that there is paperless, paperless-ng and paperless-ngx. When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

> When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

Just FYI, none of those were hostile forks, but in both the community taking over after the former maintainers abandoned the project. NGX is indeed the active version.

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

#207
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the fun for me is the tinkering, and I'm not sure if non-techies "get" the benefit of running a home server. Maybe the tide is turning for the younger generation? I can only speak for most people my age (30-40), they are capable of interacting with technology but they have absolutely 0 understanding of how anything actually works. "Why when I can just use Spotify/Netflix/iCloud/etc"? Is the answer I got when…

I love tinkering but not with my data. For my data storage I want a stable and tested solution. I have done enough "shit I destroyed my RAID array" for my taste.

For important documents (insurance docs, mortgage, etc) I use SyncThing, for media I use my RAID1 array. I'd certainly hope that RAID1 works as I expect it to if one of my HDDs shit the bed! It's a good point though, backups aren't really backups unless they're tested... brb...

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

#208
I have a little home server sitting right behind me as I type this, ticking along.

It hosts:

* My personal site (http://samhuk.com). I use this mostly for just myself as a way to remember tasty recipes and such. It also has a tonne of functionality behind a login that I use.

* Samba server for a little NAS setup. I have to daily drive Win, Linux, and MacOS, so Samba was my go-to.

* CI/CD for some of my projects.

* A minecraft server that me and my friends sometimes play around on when we have a few drinks.

It has an old 8th gen intel i3 that I got for peanuts, 8TB WD datacenter HDD, etc., way more than enough for what I use it for. Could have done with a rpi honestly, but...rpi 4...

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

#209
An Odroid HC4 with

Nginx+Lua (Openresty) on to display the status of my smart plugs that let me turn on and off several devices. One is for the Odroid itself, to really turn it off remotely.

A docker container to let a friend connect over ssh and rsync and perform a disaster recovery incremental backup to a disk connected to the Odroid.

Samba to access movies, music and pictures with VLC from my Android devices.

A second Odroid has a disk that I use to make my backups and send the incremental disaster recovery copy to my friend. By the way, encryption is managed by rsyncing a reverse mounted gocryptfs file system. That is, I keep the plain text and the key, I send the encrypted view.

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

#210

  OPNSense
  Pihole
  Wireguard (server)
  Wireguard (client)
  Jellyfin
  LMS
  Unifi Controller
  Syncthing
  MiniDLNA
  CouchDB (for noteself back-end)
  Mailu
  Zoneminder
  Nginx in front of anything https
  Debian virtual desktop
Most are in docker containers in Proxmox VMs
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