What do you do with your home server?

[Devrij]

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.

 

[Devrij]

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

 

[Devrij]

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

 

[Devrij]

Lighting, security camera, heating.
Running on a HP n54l.
HA is a great alternative to any of the cloud based services.
Google Home Assistant, or what ever its called, was a total ballache because it was auto grouping lights together.

Oh yeah I'd want to do config myself. What do you do for security cameras? I'm considering one overlooking the front of our house after someone reversed into our car and didn't leave a note

 

[Devrij]

you dio have to be carefull with the cctv stuff a few people got burned with it and its not legal in court unless its advertised ect. plus the whople privacy stuff that goes with it.

Okay yeah that makes sense. Public walkways etc

 

[Devrij]

The Police have had footage off me a few times, one time they were grateful some public coverage was available - helps having the correct time (synced by NTP) on your NVR so they can can build the timeline for their investigations. I do have CCTV signs in the front windows, one downstairs and one upstairs and the cameras for the majority of the views from each cover what its meant to on my property, retention is approximately 6 weeks at 10fps, x265 on a 4TB drive with 4 x cameras (2 x 4MP PTZ and 2 x 5MP Colorvu bullets).

How much of that 4TB drive does 6 weeks of footage take up roughly? Just looking to do some napkin maths for what I'd need as I wouldn't want to be hammering my main disk pool with this kind of activity

 

[Devrij]

Thanks gents.

Sounds like home automation and cctv are up next for me

 

[Devrij]

I'm new to servers but I was wondering how you have all of your software displayed like that please? It looks awesome

It's a kubernetes app called homepage. Truenas scale basically has k8s for its apps and I use truecharts to pull apps like this one. It's dead easy to add all your stuff via YAML, and they've even added an integration in truecharts now so they can all be added to homepage automatically to save the setup. You can customise the balls off it with your own CSS if you want, but this is pretty much vanilla