What's on Your Home Server?

Hi everyone,

Curious to discuss what people utilise their home servers for, built one recently and been trying out all sorts of stuff

For reference, my setup:
OS: W10 w/ Hyper-V (looking to migrate to proxmox)
CPU: i5-11400
RAM: 32GB
STORAGE: 128gb OS M.2 NVMe SSD
128gb VM M.2 NVMe SSD
256gb Cache SATA SSD
4TB File HDD
16TB Media HDD

Power consumption: 24w idle
35w Plex active

Services:
Home Assistant:
- Zigbee2MQTT w/ SONOFF Dongle
- DreameBot Vacuum automation
- Lighting automations
- NVIDIA Shield / Xbox / Chromecast
automations
- Heating / Cooling automations
- Power usage tracking of individual devices

Docker:
- NGINX Reverse Proxy
- AdGuard DNS Server
- File Browser (External access to file hdd)
- Guacamole (web SSH client)
- Radarr/Sonarr/Prowlarr/Tdarr/qBit (media)
- Shlink (link shortener)
- Tautulli (Plex data)
- Documize (knowledgebase)
- MeTube (youtube-dler)

Right now looking into log aggregation and a better selfhosted alternative for Notion / Confluence

Comments

  • +5

    I like your post and your description of everything. It's helpful.

    I still haven't sorted out a server. Finding torrents is still enjoyable, and i wonder how much setup time I save just copying stuff to an external HDD and walking from one house to the other to play in the HTPC connected to the TV. youtube satisfies for music. Adblock on websites makes me wonder if adguard DNS or pihole is worth setting up. I havent seen an ad in years.

    • +2

      Ublock Origin extension or Brave Browser is so good these days that I haven't seen the need for pihole for a while.

      • the point would be a self hosted dns rather than having to use extensions for pop-ups. Also more effective at blacklisting sites and automatically blocking malicious code/adult site filtering for more family orientated homes.

  • +2

    Never bothered- what's the point it's a liability continually outdated.

  • Using like a really old i5 (I think gen 2) with 5 or 6 x 3tb/4tb drives.

    Just use it as a dumping point. ftp and web access.

  • Qnap TVS-951.
    Currently doing little more than a bunch of storage ,sabznb, and surveillance station

  • +3

    I use a Synology NAS. Low power and just works. I use it for some media, music collection and general storage. Setup to Autobackup every night. Managed to get a Plex steam that has all media, so don't have to manage myself.

  • +1

    OS: Unraid
    CPU: Ryzen 1800x
    RAM: 32GB
    STORAGE: 16GB USB stick
    4x 8TB HDD

    Power consumption: No idea

    Dockers:
    Plex
    Sabnzbd
    Sonarr
    Filebot
    Radarr
    Filezilla

    Various Linux VMs

    It's basically just a Plex and storage machine these days. Don't have time to tinker or develop various projects these days. Once the NBN FTTN fibre upgrade rolls out in my area, I'll probably just offload it all and look at a cloud hosted solution.

  • +1

    N40L with 2gb ram running WHS 2011 (don’t laugh)
    OS on an ssd, storage on 3*4gb drives
    I’ve been eyeing off a qnap for sometime but can’t justify the $100s for no practical gain.
    So the HP will probably continue until it goes belly up (or WHS becomes unsupported)

    • WHS 2011

      Lol. That's so 11 years ago!

  • UnRaid, with the following running in Docker:
    * Krusader (file manager - most of my shares are read-only, to prevent accidental or malicious deletion, so this lets me move stuff around right on the server)
    * Plex
    * FileZilla (FTP client)
    * Firefox (sometimes it's handy to have a desktop browser open at home)
    * Handbrake (DVD ripper and video re-encoder)
    * Tautulli (stats for Plex)
    * Tiny Media manager (for renaming TV/Movies so Plex can figure out what they are)
    * Unifi Controller (I made the mistake of buying a Unifi wireless access point before learning that it's almost useless without an always-on admin server)
    * youtube-dl-material (a nice-looking Youtube etc. downloader)

    PiHole ad-blocking/DNS server is running on a separate Raspberry Pi as I don't want that going down if the UnRaid server's SCSI card fails again. This also has WireGuard/DuckDNS set up, so I can VPN in to home.
    Ditto Home Assistant and ESPHome, and also because I got a decent deal on a Pi 4.

    • +1

      Ooo Tiny Media manager looks like a good replacement for Filebot. Cheers.

  • Plex.
    Samba.
    Transmission.

  • Synology NAS and Intel NUC

    NUC (running Proxmox):
    - Docker VM for game servers, random things I want to spin up
    - HomeAssistant with Zigbee Home Automation

    NAS:
    - Radarr / Sonarr / Readarr / Transmission / Ombi
    - Plex
    - Offline Wikipedia
    - Wiki for home
    - NGINX Proxy Manager
    - other random things

    Raspberry Pi 2 (in case NAS or NUC go down I can still remote in)
    - PiHole
    - Wireguard

    Used to have big boy servers but they chew too much power. Nothing wrong with the NAS + NUC combo.
    NUC VMs get backed up to NAS, NAS backs up to cloud (everything encrypted) and big 14TB local drive

  • +1

    NAS:
    OS: TrueNAS Scale
    CPU: Ryzen 5 1400
    RAM: 16GB
    STORAGE: 128gb OS M.2 SATA SSD
    2x 6TB & 2x 3TB HDD in Raidz1 for media and files.

    Power consumption: ~50w. Still trying to figure out how to accurately check this.

    Apps:
    Jellyfin - Media server
    qBit
    SyncThing - as a backup solution

    Router:
    OS: OpnSense
    System: Dell optiplex 790 with i7 2600 and 8GB RAM

    Power consumption: no idea

    Services:
    Adguard home
    OpenVPN

    Moved away from Pihole to Adguard home. still testing quite a few things and what else i can do with it. Will need to keep the running costs down.

    • you could get a kasa energy monitoring smartplug, its compatible with home-assistant-core docker, u can track its energy consumption easily :)

  • I used to have a big server with 14x4TB hard drives in a ZFS array when I was media hoarding. I had all the usual services (Sonarr etc)

    I realised that it was just a massive liability to maintain, keep up to date, deal with the general clusterf*ck of open source software documentation and updates. Ubuntu LTS releases made it easier for operating systems, but over a multi year period sonarr, home assistant etc always had breaking changes that would require me spending hours googling and/or looking through documentation to fix and work out what was going on. The open source guys just don't have the discipline to maintain compatibiity over a multi-year period.

    I sold all the parts individually which i found liberating, and these days i just have an arrangement with extended friends and family where every slot of every streaming service is used up and we all share the cost, which I arrange by sending them a request for about $300 every year.

    I still maintain an intel NUC with docker primarily for home assistant and in particular homebridge which is used to make non-homekit devices appear in homekit. But even that's enough of a pain i'd prefer not to and I lean towards native homekit stuff and bypass it all wherever I can. Wherever I can I just use SaaS or subscription services to things rather than trying to setup all my own.

    It would be better if apple siri shortcuts were more powerful - I find that whatever I want to do always seems to end up roadblocked by a limitation in shortcuts (for example, you can't have a function that waits a half hour before executing something). Pretty sure home assistant wouldn't have a limitation like this.

  • Prowlarr… I'll have to check that out, I've been using nzbhydra2 on a cheap VPS for years.
    I'm currently using a VM on my desktop for my home automations. (5900x, 3080)
    SABnzbd+, Radarr, Sonarr, Kodi on my desktop.
    I'd like to switch to using something more energy efficient but I don't have anything that can play 4K happily.

  • unraid
    2600x
    32gb ram ecc
    gtx1660
    crucial P1 1tb cache, 2x2tb nas drives in mirror

    dockers:
    portainer
    redis
    nordvpn
    mariadb
    xteve
    adminer
    plex
    swag
    prowlarr
    nextcloud
    darrs
    krusader
    firefox
    code-server
    apacheguac
    heimdall
    authelia
    qbit
    searxng
    tautulli

    SCALE:
    3900x
    128gb ecc
    1080ti
    OS: 240ssd mirror, apps 480gb mirror, VM's 1tb, 10x16TB exos-raidz2, 4x16TB exos un-assigned, 4x4tb ironwolves un-assigned.

  • Mate theres no way those PC specs idle at 24w… more like 50w surely.

  • Influx - so I can go back to 3 years ago and see if the light was on at 23:48 on a certain day lol
    Grafana - so we can visually understand from various rooms how warm various rooms in the house are, if we flick on the pyro oven is there enough solar energy to clean it free, if the solar exports have capped etc
    Homebridge for speech interaction - I kinda prefer HomeKit’s responsiveness to Amazon’s, Google’s implementations

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