What do you do with your home server?

Devrij said:
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
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Thank you :) I'll look into that because it looks really well organised and really useful.
 
Backing up Windows clients
Storing photos
Music storage for my streaming preamp
NVR for two cameras
 
Windows Server running Hyper-V on a MSI Cubi 5, OS on an NVME and a 4TB SSD for data storage. Runs Plex at OS level (mainly for the H/W acceleration and easy transcoding), then I run a couple Ubuntu Server VMs, one with ADGuard Home and another with Docker Compose running quite a few containers (HomeBridge, OpenVPN, CloudflareDNS, AirConnect). Have a couple of Windows VMs for testing. Also have a Raspberry PI 5 running Docker, with a 2nd ADGuard Home container running as a backup should the CUBI go down.

It's barely used these days other than to host my RAW file photo backups (simple robocopy to SMB share from my main PC) and the very occasional movie from Plex. It's useful to quickly spin up a Windows VM for test purposes when I want to try something funky, or quickly deploy an Ubuntu Server for testing. I could easily get away with just rebuilding it as a Proxmox server or even an Ubuntu Server with Docker Compose and KVM or similar.
 
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I've got a little HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini, which is just an i5-7600 with 16GB RAM, 256 m.2 root disk and a 1TB SSD mounted as additional storage, running Debian. I've got AdGuard Home (did have PiHole), Jellyfin, and a Minecraft server set up as Docker containers at the moment. For Jellyfin I'm very ad-hoc with media - I've considered getting the full *arr stack going but not sure how much I'd actually use it; regardless, it's handy to play through the Rokus/Firesticks around the house.

I would like to do more, I'm just not sure what to do yet. I'm looking at paperless-ngx for taking copies of all my physical documents although that's about it for the list of definite plans. I've also been paying for a VPS and domain name that I'm yet to do anything with - I was considering a single-user Mastodon instance but I'm not sure I use Mastodon enough to go through all that. Maybe I'll set up a blog that no one will read just to do something with it!
 
After running a hp ml310e for as long as I can remember that had all sorts run off of it over the years I have finally re-purposed an old b450i board with a 3400g and 32gb of ram in to a makeshift home server. Now compared to the hardware I was using, this thing is fast! The issue I have is trying to get truenas to work correctly on it. Has anyone else had issues with failed installations on a b450 and 3xxxG before and if so, how did you fix it?

When I say failed installations, I mean that it all finishes and goes to reboot only to be back in the exact same position again, the start. Incredibly friistrating.
 
I run Plex, home assistant, pihole, and mqtt server on mine.

Iv not been brave enough to go the proxmox truenas route and am on windows 10
 
These days I have 2 dell r720s and hp gen 10 server but all remain off due to power costs since the pandemic and I use a qnap for day to day. Unless I need the computing power
 
Have a ds 923+ which runs plex and the various Arrs along with nvr for my camera, photo back up, tailscale for remote access and use it as an exit node too. Can also use my steam deck to remote into my ps5 via tailscale too. Hoping to get home assistant running in it sooner than later.
 
Story Time!
so we were decomming some 1U full depth HP banshee's at work, did some research and figured i could strip the cpu's (E5-2690 V4's) and ram into an empty Dell r7910 chassis that i picked up off fleabay for about £140
Giving me a Dell r7910 with dual 14core cpu's and 256gig ram. i could have got 384gig in there, but it would have down clocked the ram to 1866Mhz for that extra physical bank of 128gig... anyway... also upgraded the quad 1gig mezzanine NIC card to a dual 10gig SFP+dual 1gig RJ45 card for £50, and i upgraded the front plate to a dual 8x drive bay enclosure instead of the default single 8x. i think that extra drive bay mod cost more than the rest of it all put together by the time i figured out what stuff was compatible with that gen of "PowerEdge" chassis!
I needed the ram speed as was evidenced when i switched from an old Athlon Phenom (DDR2) to a Dell precision T3610 (DDR3), and now to DDR4 platform, that my VM's hosting games benefit massively from ram bandwidth. going from 2channel 800Mhz to 4channel 1866Mhz was night and day performance uplift, 4 channel to 8 channel not so much, but it's nice to know that's not a bottleneck anymore.
I have one Minecraft server VM, two Valhiem server VM's, one VM for home assistant, one VM for a personal windows installation i can remote into from anywhere, one for a web server and one for a mail server for a startup company, and one VM for video grunt work. oh! nearly forgot - one VM for SophosXG Firewall. I don't know if Sophos are doing the free edition anymore, but it's a good piece of kit, if maybe a bit dated now. plus i needed it to host the Sophos WAP's i acquired when we upgraded to Aruba wifi kit at work. however that Sophos means i can't run a pi-hole without monkeying about with the DNS. that'd be fine if i lived on my own. but i have family and guests. Family can't handle it if things don't work, and guest just freak out with automations for things like lights, and fans etc. so Keep It Simple Stupid, as not everyone has a script to flip a vlan for a device if it "just stops working" plugging it into a different part of the house.
Also, never ever run dynamic memory for VM's hosting game servers (or any VM's really)

I've currently got my drives as a hardware raid1 mirror pair of 1TB ssds for the system drive, and a hardware raid 5, 5 drive set of 1TB SSD's for the VM's to live in, and a "hot spare" 1TB drive that'll get auto assigned to any of the raid arrays if a drive craps itself. i love enterprise hardware having this functionality baked in to firmware. this machine is young enough to have a decently recent version of iDrac baked in as well.
i HATE windows server "storage spaces" it just seems to amplify the negative aspects of multiple drive management, with no real upsides. if the OS volume craps itself, then you loose your storage spaces data drives as well. yay. that was fun. Thanks Microsoft. One damn reg key in windows2019.

apps that will be running natively on the host OS when i get some data drives for the new box to take over file server duties - will be "drive bender" to manage the data drives into a single storage volume, and EMBY to farm out all the hosted media to the TV's and stuff around the house.. just need those 8TB sata ssd's to come down in price instead of going up and up and up like they have been of late... :( those 4TB spinners on my current Dell T3610 file server are not getting any younger)

home assistant is good. you can run it on a pi, though a pi will start to choke if you start bringing in a lot of camera video feeds. so sticking homeassistant in a VM on something with some horsepower will benefit it massively here

i did have this grand vision of hosting everything in the server rack, sat boxes, games consoles, BR players, PC's you name it. even bought a load of "JustAddPower" HDMI over IP gear. started to get it kinda hung together, then streaming kicked off which means every TV just needs a cheap firestick/appletv/googlesomething and you install all the apps on there you want locally on that device, and you're done. HDMI matrix switchers are seemingly redundant - be they direct HDMI, or HDMI over IP, or whatever.
All you need in your server rack now is a server, a switch, and some patch panels. the server doesn't even need to be monstrously powerful looking at some of these pi Nas'es...
Sonos/alexa/google/bose/sony/even apple? have their own walled gardens for multiroom whole-house audio, again, integrates with homeassisant. i mean ok sure, so you're locked into a single vendor's eco system. but at least that eco system doesn't need you to call out a crestron or control4 engineer to add/remove devices/modify your configuration at ££££$$$$ per hour.

N.B.
anyone want some JustAddPower HDMI-over-IP Gen2 kit?

sorry for the brain dump
 
Hello, I am a total n00b when it comes to IT, networking etc. but my brother in law is an senior reliability engineer and has set up a home server for me using TrueNAS. It's completely changed my life! No more random memory sticks and HDD's floating around with various pics. Everything in 1 place and backed up, plus being able to rip all my DVDs and watching them on Jellyfin is amazing.
I'm going to slowly start getting myself more familiar with home networking, TrueNAS, TrueCharts and playing around with it.
 
I'm tempted to spin up my Dell T320 as a Plex server. Take that load of my NAS. I've got 6 SSD's in my R720. Tempted to stick 4 in the T320 and give it a go. I can stick a 10gbe card in the NAS and the server so it should be pretty rapid.
Getting pretty sick of having to restart Plex on the Synology when it slows down.
 
At the moment Plex, qbitorrent, radarr, wikijs, a couple of VMs, couple of different MQ containers and some random odds and ends.
 
Plex, Home Assistant, usual *rar apps, storage, backup etc. Plus a few boxes I run a full VCF stack on from time to time for lab/work stuff.
 
I also run a R7910. 2*44 cores Xeon; 768GB of DDR4 ECC, also the 2*10Gb+2*1Gb card, one system NVME, 2*1100W PSU, and the 8*2.5" SAS disk bay (8*1.2TB 12Gb/s disks). I use it for building linux distros, it is not on all the time tho. Uses about 125W at Idle, and 500+ in full flight (but darnit, it churns thru stuff :-))

I also have an external 15*3TB 3.5" SAS disk array (2 RAID6 arrays) for general backup (I image my other machines via network block devices on it)
Also a 16*LTO 5 tape changer for backups of everything really. That is a recent addition. It it far from the latest gen, but that's 1.5TB per tape, uncompressed. New tapes are 10 quid top. And it is a ROBOT so there :-)

Rack units are cheap! All that rack is on/off selectively.
 
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