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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?

#381
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…

My inlaws built a new house 3-4 years ago, a fairly nice, modern house. But, the whole tech side felt like it was using technology that was dated in the '90s. TV going into a Receiver in the next room, and DVD+Apple TV connected to that receiver. 5 channel audio from the receiver. Several zones of in-ceiling speakers also run by the receiver. Some "knock off" Logitech-like smart remote control, because it's easy for…

The setup your inlaws have probably doesn't rely on the cloud, and report everything they watch to advertising companies, unlike your setup.

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

#382
For my router PC, I run vyos [1]. Dinky little 9th gen Core i3 machine, but consumes Everything else is on a separate server running Fedora. I used to run applications inside k3s, but got tired of the constant 10% CPU usage from the control plane trying to keep track of its state. Also didn't like that the containers I used weren't being rebuilt for security updates in packages (eg. openssl). Now, I just use plain old RPMs inside VMs.

The stuff I run:

* [Host] ssh: For CLI access and git hosting (just `git init --bare`; no fancy UIs like Gitea or Gitlab).

* [Host] samba: For all file access.

* [Host] zrepl: For zfs snapshot replication.

* [Host] syncthing: For syncing KeePass databases. Also for syncing pictures from my phone.

* [VM] jellyfin: For easy access to rips of my physical media collection. VFIO is very unstable with the 13th gen iGPU on my hardware, so I custom ffmpeg wrapper that SSH's back into the host for remote transcoding in a bwrap sandbox.

* [VM] pdns-auth + dnsdist: The powerdns authoritative server handles the internal DNS. I have DNSSEC set up and SSHFP records for everything, so I don't need to worry about ~/.ssh/known_hosts. All of my computers that rely on this run systemd-resolved and do the DNSSEC validation locally. I run a daemon [2] on every host, which handles pushing new A/AAAA records via TSIG signed updates to the DNS server.

dnsdist acts as a proxy which only allows access to the specific TXT record needed for ACME DNS challenges originating from Let's Encrypt's IP addresses. I may switch to a custom CA in the future when the name contraints x509 extension is better supported (so that a custom CA wouldn't be able to issue trusted certificates for domains that aren't mine).

* [VM] miniflux: For RSS.

* [VM] unifi-controller: For managing Ubiquiti wireless APs.

[1] https://vyos.org/

[2] https://github.com/chenxiaolong/ddns-updater

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

#383

I have a pretty elaborate media downloading setup. Though this is a cheap 16TB server that I brought on the cloud for myself. I use Radarr and Sonarr to automatically download movies and tv shows. I use mdblist.com to autogenerate movie lists based on criteria like imdbrating, number of votes etc. And use these lists directly in Radarr, one plus point is that these lists are autoupdated with new movies and Radarr aut…

I'm confused about Radarr / Sonarr, is that what's directly sourcing the torrents you're downloading or are they being sourced from separate tracker(s)?

[deleted]

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in doing some sort of hybrid mirror / cache of a few repos, if I could do them just in time style. I don't need all of pypi (nor do I want 13.5TB of packages). I probably only ever use a few hundred packages at most. I would like to point all my systems at my server. And if I `pip install pandas` and its not on my server the server grabs it and passes it through and syncs that package locally fr…

Maybe DevPi would work? https://devpi.net/docs/devpi/devpi/stable/%2Bd/index.html https://blog.jcharistech.com/2022/08/13/how-to-run-a-pypi-mi... another option is https://pypi.org/project/python-pypi-mirror/

It looks like DevPi may just work as a caching proxy as well. I also found Bandersnatch too. https://github.com/pypa/bandersnatch which is a configurable mirror with allow / block lists.

Essentially want something like DevPi but add the package to the bandersnatch allow list and mirror it from then on. With some extra large packages in the deny list.

Probably possible to wire that all up reasonably well, but probably just using a caching proxy is 90%+ of the improvement anyways. So may just stick with that.

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

#385

I have two raspberry pi's 8gb, with SSDs. Running Portainer for Docker management. I have everything containerized with docker-compose. - Most importantly, Cloudflare tunnel for exposing my services without opening ports on my router. - Tor relay (non-exit) - Pi-hole for DNS and ad blocking - Homepage dashboard - Audibookshelf - Jackett - Sonarr - Radarr - Jellyfin - qBittrorrent - Backup Pi-hole - Uptime Kuma Monito…

> - Sonarr

> - Radarr

What indexers are you on?

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

#386
post #251
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

I had a few questions if you don't mind answering as I'm doing something similar for a vacation home (and my own, but this is more relevant to the remote one). How many IoT devices are you working with? I don't have the best router up north and some of my lousier routers can't handle more than about 25 devices before they start crapping the bed. Do they disconnect often from your router (and do the successfully recon…

I only have only few (less than 10) IoT devices using WiFi and they are spread over 2 fairly good access points. The rest are either wired or using ZigBee. My router doesn't have WiFi functionality itself, it's a Unifi Dream Machine SE[0] with the APs and cameras connected in PoE. It's plugged on a UPS, so hopefully the internet should still work if the electricity cuts.

Regarding your issues, I'm not an expert but I would recommend deploying more access points (pick some good ones) on the areas where your IoT devices are. Best advice I have is to wire your access points, I always had bad results when bridging them wirelessly. Although if you are in a remote area with little interference, you could get better results.

[0] https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-unifi-os-cons...

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

#387
Main server is a pretty wimpy i3 with some removable drive cages running FreeNAS Core. That runs various things like Plex, FoundryVTT and NextCloud in FreeBSD jails, as well as SMB services to the rest of the house. I used to run my own dnsmasq server with an adblock list, but gave in and set up a small Ubuntu box on a SFF server to run pihole in Docker. Turns out pihole makes some very Linux specific assumptions -- I couldn't really get it working in FreeBSD, and rpi hardware has been hard to come by.

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

#388
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

There’s another aspect though - when you come to sell the home it’s easy to market Crestron, Control4 and others specifically because they are standard (albeit expensive) solutions and have a whole ecosystem of consultants who can be brought in to diagnose and fix issues, upgrade stuff. With DIY you are usually left with at best ripping it all out and selling it without any “Smart Home” promises, you can I guess stil…

Yeah that's a good point. In our case, all smart systems can work independently (via their own app or physical controls) or be integrated with other smart home platforms. It's true that if they would ever move out, the HA instance might be gone, making the house loose a bit of its brains when it comes automation. But the base to build on is there, still has value I guess. And the rack with Ethernet in all rooms has some value too.

Edit: The only "problematic" part would be the cameras. Not sure if Unifi cams can work with other platforms than Ubiquiti's. But in any case, the wiring is there (Ethernet) and the cameras can be replaced or a new owner could bring their own Unifi surveillance console (or we could sell it with it).

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my Raspberry Pis netboot, which means I never have to worry about a card burning out, and I can change what they boot into by just renaming a symlink on the server.

Seems like a smart way to do it, but that relies on having another always-on system standing as the server. OP's solution only requires the one device, the rPi unless something needs to be changed.

That's true. In theory you could use an extra Raspberry Pi itself as the netboot server. But since my home network already has a fileserver it was an easy choice.

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

#390

I've got a slew of different computers doing different things. All of them are networked together via Tailscale. Ubuntu 22.04 Server for the host, everything else runs in LXC containers. This is all setup on ZFS. - https://znc.in/ IRC bouncer - https://caddyserver.com/ Caddy Webserver for a few personal websites - https://github.com/AndroidKitKat/waifupaste.moe/ My personal pastebin - https://transmissionbt.com/ Torr…

Do you automate your Linux ISO seeding? Like getting updated torrents when a new version is released. I have been thinking about this from time to time, and haven't come up with a solution other than scraping.

I just do this. Update the ubuntu line every 2 years or so. This runs as a cronjob on my synology with the working directory set to a directory that the Synology "Download Station" is watching. It picks up the torrents and does its thing. I come in every now and then and clean out the dot releases. It's not the best but it's not the worst either.

  #!/bin/bash
  wget -nH --cut-dirs=4 -r -l1 --no-parent -R "*.tmp" -A "*.torrent" https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-dvd/
  wget -nH --cut-dirs=4 -r -l1 --no-parent -R "*.tmp" -A "*.torrent" https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-cd/
  wget -nH --cut-dirs=4 -r -l1 --no-parent -R "*.tmp" -A "*.torrent" https://releases.ubuntu.com/22.04/
  rm *-DVD-{2,3}.iso.torrent debian-mac-*.torrent *.tmp *.loaded
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