What do you do with your home server?

Devrij

Devrij

Devrij

Soldato
Joined
23 Jul 2009
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Bath
I have a little box (a big box tbf, but in terms of spec, little) running TrueNAS with a bunch of the usual k8s apps on there (Plex, servarr stack, various monitoring apps, a minecraft server, home website etc) but I feel like I wanna do more with it and need ideas. I feel like the next step is getting a VPN set up (dw, the torrents are nothing dodgy), but not sure what else to do.

What do you guys do with your servers?

here's all the stuff I currently have on mine (for the most part at least). Excuse the wife.

Screenshot-2024-01-07-180740.png
 
I use both my two servers to catch the dust in my office. I think I've switched them on twice in the past 12 months. Just to make sure they still work.

I used them as a test lab during Covid but can't think of any use for them now. My Dell R720 has 128Gb RAM and is full of SSD's. All my home stuff runs on my Synology 1817 with about 45Tb of storage. I'd love to find a use for the servers but the power consumption is the issue.
 
Mine (Two HP DL20s) run a Storage Spaces Direct lab, allowing me to test things that I want to do at work.

On top of that I’ve three Synology units, two that run in a high-availability cluster providing storage, backup and other services to family mobiles, media services in the house, PC snapshots and Active Directory for home-user authentication (including 802.1x for our WiFi, a combination of 802.1x and mab for physical network ports). The third Synology handles CCTV. Technically I have a fourth Synology, but it’s off-site acting as an rsync target for irreplaceable stuff on the main Synology cluster.

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paradigm said:
Mine (Two HP DL20s) run a Storage Spaces Direct lab, allowing me to test things that I want to do at work.

On top of that I’ve three Synology units, two that run in a high-availability cluster providing storage, backup and other services to family mobiles, media services in the house, PC snapshots and Active Directory for home-user authentication (including 802.1x for our WiFi, a combination of 802.1x and mab for physical network ports). The third Synology handles CCTV. Technically I have a fourth Synology, but it’s off-site acting as an rsync target for irreplaceable stuff on the main Synology cluster.

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Oh swanky. Mine currently looks like a DIY doomsday device.
 
I use Unraid. File storage, PC Backup, Media Storage for Plex, SABnzdb and Wireguard so I can access my home network from elsewhere.
 
Oh and mine is the usual servarr setup, asterisk, home assistant, portainer (with various docker containers) and network monitoring stuff. I've got a mini PC in transit to migrate some of that off of a NAS to a more dedicated (and beefy) setup.
 
Thanks chaps. That is helpful to know I'm not miles off track.

If everyone didn't use discord these days I'd have hosted a mumble server or something, but that feels very old hat now
 
paradigm said:
Mine (Two HP DL20s) run a Storage Spaces Direct lab, allowing me to test things that I want to do at work.

On top of that I’ve three Synology units, two that run in a high-availability cluster providing storage, backup and other services to family mobiles, media services in the house, PC snapshots and Active Directory for home-user authentication (including 802.1x for our WiFi, a combination of 802.1x and mab for physical network ports). The third Synology handles CCTV. Technically I have a fourth Synology, but it’s off-site acting as an rsync target for irreplaceable stuff on the main Synology cluster.

img_2322.jpg


img_2328.jpg
Click to expand...
This should be pride of place in the living room :D
 
Devrij said:
Thanks chaps. That is helpful to know I'm not miles off track.

If everyone didn't use discord these days I'd have hosted a mumble server or something, but that feels very old hat now
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The one thing that I have started to do is spin up self-hosted replacements for services that I would have used third party closed source things for in the past. Like recipe management or notes / wiki apps. But it does mostly end up being media or running the house related!
 
Beyond what OP has I think the containers that get most used are my iCloud photo backup (icloudpd and Immich to view) and self hosted password management with Bitwarden.
 
On my small 'recently returned from RMA' Beelink U59 Pro (uber small miniPC that very cheap to run - perfect for me) I run a few Dockers and file storage. Some of the non-obvious ones below.

  • Samba shares for storing my KeePassXC database (I do use Bitwarden but have stored some important things in KeePass) and Obsidian notes (considering to move away from this).
  • I also run FreshRSS + FullTextRSS (fivefilters) for my RSS feeds (then us NewsFlash or Feedme depending on platform). I haven't fully been able to switch to running everything through RSS as some websites are unavailable or difficult to get away from (i.e. forums, reddit, NFL.com etc.).
  • Linkding - for bookmark storage
  • Speedtest-Tracker - hourly speed-test. Been running this Docker for a few weeks now, useful as it displays the latest results on my Homer page. Super rare but sometimes the connection on one side of the house has dropped to Fe (100mbps) rather than Gbe and this allows me to quickly see it (might be an issue with the Ubiquiti Switch but so rare I don't know - either way this is a simple way to watch it)
 
I run Undaid on mine:
  • 32TB total storage on the array (+ 1TB M2 Cache drive + 1.5 TB Downloads drive (torrents are put on here, so seeding only spins this drive up, rather than the rest of the array))
  • Plex Server
  • Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr etc
  • Unifi Controller
  • Pihole
  • Home Assistant
  • Syncthing - syncing my photos folder with onedrive for a mixture of redundancy & easy access outside the house
  • Duplicati - backing up my more important data to onedrive in case of server failure etc
  • A couple VMs, one Ubunutu desktop to run as a local (internal network only) webhost, one ubuntu server to run as a VPN gateway for my *arrs. I used to also have a libreelec VM, but currently using a Raspberry Pi instead.
 
What are you guys using home assistant for? I love the idea of it, but I'm coming up short on what I'd actually do. I have a couple leap motion cameras and I was thinking it world be cool to trigger lighting profiles with gesture by having them dotted around the house plugged into an RPi, but then that feels a bit meh
 
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Devrij said:
What are you guys using home assistant for? I love the idea of it, but I'm coming up short on what I'd actually do. I have a couple leap motion cameras and I was thinking it world be cool to trigger lighting profiles with gesture by having them dotted around the house plugged into an RPi, but then that feels a bit meh
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opening closing certains / lighting / temperature/heating / garage doors / robot vacume cleaners
are sort of the norms but music / tv / kettle / amongst other things are possible to
 
Devrij said:
What are you guys using home assistant for? I love the idea of it, but I'm coming up short on what I'd actually do. I have a couple leap motion cameras and I was thinking it world be cool to trigger lighting profiles with gesture by having them dotted around the house plugged into an RPi, but then that feels a bit meh
Click to expand...
Pretty much everything around the house for me, I used to have propitiatory kit around the house needing different apps etc. but moved to home assistant with native zigbee devices and pretty much everything in the house is automated to some degree. I've got motion sensors that will turn on lights in areas when it is dark, alerts that will happen when devices are running out of batteries, location based automations, temperature sensors etc. Essentially, imagination and time becomes the limiter for a lot of these things for me! I've still got google home speakers dotted around and even the convenience of being able to ask for lights to be turned off from bed / a different room is useful (I'll move to local voice automation at some point I'm sure!), I've also got them tied into automations so I get alerts when people are at the door etc. across the entire house.
 
Devrij said:
What are you guys using home assistant for? I love the idea of it, but I'm coming up short on what I'd actually do. I have a couple leap motion cameras and I was thinking it world be cool to trigger lighting profiles with gesture by having them dotted around the house plugged into an RPi, but then that feels a bit meh
Click to expand...
I don't have many "smart" devices around the house, so don't use much of it's potential. My main use is as a Hue Emulator. This allows me to simulate a smart bulb (in this case a Calex bulb, running on the Tuya system) as a hue bulb for my Harmony remote, meaning I can control the Calex bulb with the smarthome buttons on my harmony. I've also added an automation to turn off the smart bulbs in the living room 5 minutes after the hamony activities are turned off (as long as it's after 9PM), so we can turn the TV off with the remote, but still have light in the room to leave & head to bed etc.

I may increase my usage off it as time goes on & I get more "smart" devices, but I can't determine any other use cases that are worth bothering with for me at the moment.
 
Mine is primarily a Plex server/file server, but I also run Home Assistant and AdGuard on there too. Around 60% of my house is "smartified" and I'm keen to get the remaining part upgraded too. Having control over lighting, heating, motion, controllers, weather, 3rd party services, power monitoring and usage etc from one place is really nice when you start getting into automations. They can be as simple or complex as you like but they all serve a purpose. My goal here has been to add smart devices while retaining old fashioned manual control too, so I can still flick a light switch and turn a light on or turn power sockets on and control heating if my server is dead.
 
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