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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?

#391
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run pihole in the cloud? That is very useful information.

You could also use https://nextdns.io . It’s basically pi-hole in the cloud.

I pay $20/yr for their service it’s so good, and I can turn on/off quickly per-device when I need normal dns to work, instead of having to ssh and tweak pi-hole or whatever across the whole network

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

#392
post #158
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the Joplin mention. I’ve been looking for a secure, gdpr compliant and preferably selfhosted note app for some time! Bingo, I guess

Joplin is old but gold in terms of open source not taking. However, I always found the experience to be a bit too clunky even after writing 100s of notes. Obsidian is much nicer but you gotta set up your own sync or pay. Same basic premise of markdown files on your local file system. I've been enjoying it a lot and written more since switching.

Thanks, will look into it

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

#393
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And RAID1 isn't a backup. If you delete a file accidently, it doesn't help you.

I have snapshots on my NAS, so nothing is really deleted. I supposed in another 10 years I'll have to start pruning old files, but disks are cheap and I don't really have that much data. For that matter I generally don't delete anything. If I save it to my computer odds are it is something I want to keep for the rest of my life (that is family pictures). There are a few distro images that I download once in a while a…

RAID and snapshots aren't a backup either: lightning strikes/house fires/earthquakes/floods kill all the disks together.

A backup is a restorable copy in some location not sharing much fate with the primary location. Right now you might consider "all copies in one city" to have too much fate in common, but "all copies in one country" to be acceptable, or "all copies on Earth".

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

#394

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.

1) if your device plays 4k, then what are you transcoding from? That's going to be the determining factor, not the 4k output stream. Certainly in a home situation, that's likely to be direct stream. If your source files are 8K or higher, I wouldn't consider you a normal home user.

2) quicksync on a 10g or newer cpu is benchmarked at 4-6 4k simultaneous streams, but a lot depends on the details: container format in particular matters a lot, and so do your transcode options. Color matching for example, is only ever done on CPU. And IIRC AV1 and VP9 are not supported by quicksync (or older discrete GPUs).

That said, it's completely correct that you should measure all advice against your actual output device capabilities and source quality.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the details of your transcode:

- what's the source/destination quality?

- what's the container format? Quicksync doesn't support them all; even the newest gen is missing av1 and VP9 IIRC. But then, the same can be said for discrete GPUs.

- what filters are you applying. Many (most?) filters are CPU bound, which will kill you really quick.

But for supported formats without filtering, 12g Intel quicksync is regularly benchmarked at 4-6 streams.

One should always measure internet advice against one's actual use case. Personally I would argue that if you have a library of 8K video and more than 4 4K devices, you don't qualify as a "regular" home user. But of that's the case, hardware up my friend!

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

#396

On premise I have: - Fritz!Box 7530 AX (purchased router, connected to fiber endpoint hardware from ISP) - OpenVPN - Dynamic DNS update of domain name - Synology DS220+ (bought new with 2x4TB, running striped/RAID0, uses ~30W under load) - Download center with various RSS feeds - Plex - Primary media collection - Adguard in a Docker container - Google Cloud/... drive sync - Backup target for all non scheduled backups…

If you don't mind me asking, what did you use for the cross backups? I'm looking to set up some home servers at my house and parents house to get us all off Google but want our data to be geographically replicated (terrified of a house fire destroying all our phots

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

#397
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have snapshots on my NAS, so nothing is really deleted. I supposed in another 10 years I'll have to start pruning old files, but disks are cheap and I don't really have that much data. For that matter I generally don't delete anything. If I save it to my computer odds are it is something I want to keep for the rest of my life (that is family pictures). There are a few distro images that I download once in a while a…

RAID and snapshots aren't a backup either: lightning strikes/house fires/earthquakes/floods kill all the disks together. A backup is a restorable copy in some location not sharing much fate with the primary location. Right now you might consider "all copies in one city" to have too much fate in common, but "all copies in one country" to be acceptable, or "all copies on Earth".

There are many levels. Raid with snapshots is a useful level, though not perfect.

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

#398

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 place you specification is a thread posted in 2019 talking about a Dell prebuolg. Do you mind posting the link for the nucs? Or is it in that thread somewhere? Or is that dell actually a nuc.

The thread has the benchmarks, links to ebay searches, and lists of prebuilt machines (like the dells) that meet the requirements, since they're often the cheapest way to meet the spec (according to TFA). you may have to scroll up.

I just searched ebay for used celeron NUCs, and got lots of options like this one, with a 9th gen Celeron, for a hundred bucks. NB that the generation matters much more than the CPU, but some operations are still done by the CPU so if you can get an i3 or i5 it will make a marginal difference.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115640978606?hash=item1aecbd4cae%3A...

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

#399
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I religiously keep everything up to date, for anything exposed to the public I use https (Traefik does let's encrypt, caddy as well) and set 2FA for Nextcloud for example, there is also a brute-force protection app for NC. Some services, like HA, my minecraft servers, Paperless, in fact most of them, I would indeed feel less comfortable exposing, and I don't, but for NextCloud I also use it to share large files with…

Thank you for the explanation! It sounds like a pretty solid system.

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

#400
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.

One extra layer I put on my externally facing sites is a simple auth prompt (after redirect to https!) as an unlikely-to-have-a-compromise gate before any logon for a self-hosted service. You can make it a fairly easy to remember username/password for anyone you want to share your self-hosted apps with, since its a mostly irrelevant extra step just to guard against exploits in more complicated software stacks
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