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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?

#351
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to use my TVs internal (amazingly slow) web browser to access Jellyfin. Until a couple of months ago, when I was surprised with them announcing that they will release a Jellyfin app for LG WebOS. Works great, the only slightly annoying thing is that they don't seem to cache the posters. Every time I scroll through my library, all the posters load again. Other than that, the things which don't quite work for me:…

In the Android app, switch from one player to another, from internal to the web player in the settings. It solves the 5.1 playback issue. (Of course, it introduces others, eg. manual screen brightness but it's not as a big issue as no sound.)

Thanks for the tip, but I already tried that :(

- Web player: Video works, audio is broken.

- Integrated player or External player: Unable to load media info from server

no idea why it can't load the media info from the server, might have to dig into the logs...streaming via PC or TV works so it's not a network issue.

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

#352
I have an unRAID tower, which is basically an all in one storage + application server with integrated docker. I have a lot of file storage with writing/programming projects, important docs, and a whole lot of video/ebook/manga data hording. I don't watch much of it but my wife and roommate do.

For Linux isos I use radarr + sonarr with Jackett for torrent aggregation, all public sites. Mullvad with wireguard gives great throughput over the VPN. I also use Requesterr which allows people to add new items to the download que via discord bot, which is great because trying to get my wife to use Sonarr was a lost cause.

I run a variety of game servers for friends off the machine, and local applications for myself. Ubiquities network manager for wifi endpoints, redis/sql databases, and backup manager.

I really want to get some home automation setup, so Home Assistant is probably next on my list.

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

#353
post #218

Hardware: old laptop from ~2012 and some external hard drives (~25W total). Occasionally used for things like yahoo answers archiving, fishnet (distributed lichess game analysis), random big computations or downloads, and other things I want to run overnight but don't need a big desktop PC for. Services it more permanently hosts: - email for me and friends - websites of friends - game server (Factorio, OpenArena, cus…

I also recommend using an old laptop as a server. Benefits include the built-in battery backup, built-in KVM, and relatively low power consumption. The other major benefit is that if you're the kind of person who's apt to set up a home server, you probably already have at least one these lying around.

There's just one slightly opaque pitfall, not all laptops have a BIOS setting where you can specify what to do on power-loss and power-resume. So the laptop "server" stays off and you need to intervene manually.

I've had better luck with thin clients ...

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

#354
post #226

NextCloud, Home Assistant, Paperless NGX, Minecraft, Caddy for some Hugo sites/blogs, Unify Controller, Vaultwarden, Traefik, Sabnzbd. Used to do WireGuard but now I use Tailscale, AdGuard home and FoundryVTT. It's all docker-compose. I'm thinking of taking some services off the internet using TailScale, some already are just on the Tailnet (Home Assistant and Paperless NGX), all my SSH ports are now only open to the…

Very cool! Since this is all exposed to the internet, how do you keep it secure? I’ve got a spare laptop and a static IP, but I’m concerned about exposing my home server to attacks. Right now I’ve just got it all running in Tailscale, but I’d like to safely host public-facing apps too.

In addition to the other comment, look into fail2ban: it's a bruteforce protection that isn't application-specific, it can be configured to protect form bruteforce any service that logs login attempts somewhere.

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

#355

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…

This was basically my holiday project - Photo: https://i.imgur.com/2AnP4pu.jpeg.

I'm running Longhorn for storage but haven't figured out backup yet, and haven't got to grafana / prometheus yet.

I put up my work on GitHub as well: https://github.com/inssein/mainframe. I wanted to create a separate ingress controller for internal dashboards, but for now I just setup a separate nginx-ingress for internal, and using traefik for external, feels wrong.

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

#356
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use ZFS snapshots and send & receive. It so good and easy! I backup everything with it, VM's, containers, databases, files.

Where do you backup to?

To my parents, who lives 30 minutes from me. Alternatives would be some other family member or friend you trust.

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

#357
DNSSEC-secured DNS with PowerDNS Federated XMPP chat with Prosody Email with Postfix and Dovecot Prometheus keeping track of it all and Grafana to draw some pretty graphs for how it's all going

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hypothetical new plex box does not need a discrete GPU. Plex makes really good use of Intel Quick Sync, and transcode quality has been indistinguishable or better than NVIDIA since about 5th gen. A Celeron G4900 (8th-gen dual core, 3300 passmark) has been benched as capable of 21 simultaneous 1080p transcodes.[0] TL;DR: pick up a NUC knockoff with an >8th gen celeron or i3; it'll handle anything a casual househo…

The second you want multiple streams of higher quality then 1080p 10mbs you will want a dedicated card. I got a 4k TVs are common, planning for 1080p use is a mistake at this point imo.

This is very true, QuickSync falls over very easily when trying to transcode even a single 4k stream.

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

#359

Rather than listing everything I'm hosting at my home server, I'll just share what saved me the most time, repeatedly: Mirrors of various package repositories I use. I'm currently mirroring npm, crates, Arch packages, clojars, maven and some other things, then all my machines (desktop, servers and laptops) point to the mirror rather than directly to upstream. Some of them are mirroring dynamically (basically a cache…

Can you share a bit about how you set this up? Also curious if anyone has taken this a step further and MITM Squid proxied their whole home to cache all responses >100mb or something like that.

I used to do that for my servers. It works quite well but packages update so frequently you don’t see a major benefit

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

#360
post #253

I will probably get downvoted for this (unless, as I expect, the vast majority are in the same boat), but my answer is: nothing. I don't mean this to discredit people who actually run home servers, just sharing my own experience. I have a "prosumer" grade £120 ASUS gigabit router, which has a perfectly adequate settings UI, firewall, port forwarding, and supports NAS via a USB HDD, or 4G failover if I ever happen to…

> The added convenience is almost zero, and for me wouldn't be worth it considering the £300/yr electricity cost and £300-£1000 initial outlay I can imagine for decent hardware and a few TB of drives if you don't have an old PC lying around. Plus all the time spent configuring

My Two Raspberry Pi Zero W's cost $10 in total - which is less than what you pay Google annually. Adding 500GB SSDs & electricity costs (cents per kWh) has my amortized costs less than your annual 200GB Google bill. Your mental image of "home server" is rather pricey

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