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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?

#401

Post by grepfru_it »

DrPhish wrote: post #400
jckahn wrote: 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.

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

I started using traefik as my loadbalancer which supports authentication middleware. I rigged up keycloak and forward-auth to handle external services that either do not support authentication or has a weak security profile. A poor man’s zero trust setup.

Here is the blog I used to get things started: https://geek-cookbook.funkypenguin.co.nz/docker-swarm/traefi...

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

#402

Post by nixgeek »

keraf wrote: post #388
nixgeek wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

RE: UniFi, they need to each be flipped into "Standalone" mode and then you just follow the instructions over here:

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/221314008-UniFi-Video-...

I mostly ended up and recommend Axis for IP surveillance, it has nice MQTT integrations and recessed mount options (https://www.axis.com/products/axis-t94s01l-recessed-mount) but almost anything which can do RTSP will work with either a COTS NVR, or something like Frigate (https://frigate.video).

Another thing to read up on and use when shopping for IP surveillance is ONVIF and the various profiles offered!

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

#403

Post by DrPhish »

grepfru_it wrote: post #401
DrPhish wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I started using traefik as my loadbalancer which supports authentication middleware. I rigged up keycloak and forward-auth to handle external services that either do not support authentication or has a weak security profile. A poor man’s zero trust setup. Here is the blog I used to get things started: https://geek-cookbook.funkypenguin.co.nz/docker-swarm/traefi...

Neat! Thanks for the tip. I might integrate this in some of my auth, but I'll probably keep using simple auth at the very front due to its old age and absolute simplicity making exploits unlikely

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

#404

Post by karlshea »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #395
karlshea wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

10th-gen i5 could not handle a single stream with most of the 4k content I tried, even though it was benchmarked as working. So if you're trying to transcode from varying sources I would imagine most people will end up wanting a discrete GPU.

If you're ripping your own content and can ensure that everything is set up right so that the integrated GPU can handle it, sure, it will probably work.

That being said they could have made giant strides in this area on 11th-12th gen, I have no idea.

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

#405

Post by cassianoleal »

BanjoBass wrote: post #345
LeoPanthera wrote: post #341

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.

If you run an open source router distro like OpenWRT or OPNSense, you can use it as the PXE Boot host. That's a device that needs to be running anyway.

I've seen a lot of people running their routers as a VM on something like Proxmox and that gives you even more flexibility but it does require a beefier server - one that could potentially replace all the RasPis, potentially making the PXE boot redundant. :D

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

#406

Post by scottLobster »

thomasjudge wrote: post #311
scottLobster wrote: post #304

I've got a 20 TB self-built RAIDZ2 (ZFS RAID with two-disk redundancy) plex media server that hosts my media collection. Also serves to store backup snapshots/images for my family's devices, as well as a family SMB share to move files between devices.

Can I ask a couple questions about this server? Hardware config? Software? (OS + any monitoring) I am curious about ZFS but have never implemented it, are there good administration resources for whatever your setup is? my account at gmail if you prefer to reply directly. TIA

Sure!

It's a repurposed gaming PC, so a 1st Gen Ryzen 1800X, 32 GB RAM. Took out the good GPU and bought the cheapest card I could find to support a tiny monitor for maintenance, but generally I manage it from my primary windows machine with X2Go (just a remote X server/client over SSH for Windows), and ssh directly if I'm on one my linux boxes.

I use this SATA expander card to fit 8 4TB HDDs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008J49G9A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...) for the main array, and have a 64 GB SATA SSD for the OS.

OS is Arch Linux, which I'm partial to for the AUR and documentation. For the root drive I just use ext4. I initially got started with Arch's ZFS wiki pages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS/Virtual_disks

Note if you go this route, I've had bad luck with the DKMS builds of ZFS where they sometimes fail to install during kernel upgrades, so I use the binaries from the archzfs repository. Sometimes I have to wait for the repo maintainer to build new packages to keep up with arch kernel releases, which is annoying, but it's preferable to getting a broken system back up and running. I've also had bad luck with ZFS-on-linux native encryption, with my system intermittently seg-faulting when reading from an encrypted dataset under heavy load. So I use LUKS/dm-crypt on top of ZFS (the LUKS volumes are unlocked at boot, then the ZFS pools are imported). However I suspect this is a hardware peculiarity with my system, as I can't find any mention of the same issue online. So YMMV

Some resources for dm-crypt/LUKS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/System_configurati... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_enti...

Hope it helps, with the exception of the native encryption issue I found ZFS to be remarkable easy to use and bombproof so far. Have fun!

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

#407

Post by sorenjan »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #341
lxgr wrote: post #305

I've been using a Raspberry Pi as a home server, and it's been holding up amazingly well, given everything I've thrown at it: - The excellent Home Assistant, for unifying across Homekit and Google Home and tracking historical temperatures and a couple of automations. The RPi has Bluetooth built in, so I can capture the data from a few Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers running custom firmware ( https://github.com/pvvx…

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.

Can you netboot from a desktop computer that's not always on? If the desktop is running when the pi is booting, does the pi then need the "server" (desktop pc) again until it needs to reboot?

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

#408

Post by viraptor »

viraptor wrote: post #140
newuser46547 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the cheap NUCs let you install more than 8GB RAM?

Define cheap. I'm running an Intel NUC d54250wyk (launched 2013) which takes up to 16GB DDR3L. You can't definitely find that class of hardware got cheap on eBay these days. Update SSD and memory and it's still great.

Stupid auto-correct. Should be: "You can definitely find that class of hardware for cheap on eBay these days."

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

#409

Post by linsomniac »

dublinben wrote: post #381
linsomniac wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have cable for their primary viewing, which means that, sure, Google isn't seeing it directly, but their cable provider has all the details of what they are watching then. Honestly, I'd trust Google with that information over Xfinity or whoever they have for cable. Verizon?

I realize that is a concern for some, that is not a concern for me.

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

#410

Post by greggyb »

joejoesvk wrote: post #366
lxgr wrote: post #305

I've been using a Raspberry Pi as a home server, and it's been holding up amazingly well, given everything I've thrown at it: - The excellent Home Assistant, for unifying across Homekit and Google Home and tracking historical temperatures and a couple of automations. The RPi has Bluetooth built in, so I can capture the data from a few Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers running custom firmware ( https://github.com/pvvx…

i'm trying to buy rpi but can't decide which configuration. what are minimum requirements to run airplay bridge, home assistant?

If you want a Pi (or alike) for specific reasons, go for it!

But, if you are looking for cheap and relatively low-power compute, I strongly recommend looking at used ultra small form factor PCs. You can get much more computational power and expansion, often for cheaper than a Pi. And eBay is riddled with these things, unlike recent Pi availability.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/171957/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%28len...

The pricing gets even better if you want to buy them in a lot.

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