Do you have a Home Server? You should!

[flaxenPhoenix]

I have one but I haven't actually put it together yet

(cries in "this has been the case for going on two years now")

[lilpaladin1]

I actually do have a home server, but work has very much not had me tinker with it a lot. Installed some stuff like Homarr and tried to make a Plex Server, but it just kind of died down.

I still use it to easily transfer files from my Linux Computer and MacBook at the very least, so it's not a complete waste of money

[LugiaBerry]

Oooh, I've gotten into home server stuff recently! There was a business near me that sold refurbished servers, so I bought a 1U HPE ProLiant server with a Xeon E5-2637 processor. It's older but it does the job.

I have a few things on mine though. I run OpenMediaVault as my OS, and I have an SMB server that I use as my NAS. I also have a cron on it to have it back up nightly to S3. I also run Plex in a docker container on the same machine, so it pulls my music library from the NAS. Makes transferring/adding new music a lot easier!

I also have a PiHole on my network for ad/tracking blocking. Even though it doesn't block everything like youtube ads, it makes news websites much more readable.

And I think one of the nicest new things I did was run an instance of WireGuard VPN on my server. That way, when I'm outside my house, I can still get all the benefits of the PiHole ad blocking on my phone, and I can access all my NAS files too. It's pretty fun in all!

[technomancergoddess]

I don't have one myself, but I do have one that's ran by a friend who maintains it for the friend group. It has email stuff, as well as a password manager and storage, as well as encrypted pastebin.

She did have to add Synapse (The matrix homeserver.. thing.) because of Discord being.. Discord.

[Tiro]

I have a small application server in a sense, and similar to many here:

An RPi 4 hosting:

• Home Assistant - combining a few IKEA sensors, Philips Hue lights, a zigbee coordinator from smlight
• Arr stack
• Jellyfin
• Immich

With most data on a two disc array on a Synology DS920+, which also hosts Syncthing to keep directories on my PC and Laptop in-sync.

And although Jellyfin the RPi handles 1080p video fine with a client on an Nvidia Shield, it does stutter and have problems with 4K content (whilst VLC on the Shield handles the same files from a samba share fine).

So I'm considering: moving from an RPi 4 to an N150 NUC or something, I would be curious if people here have advice?

[Eramn Lanif]

I'd like to host a home server, but I don't have any well-fitting hardware. A few old desktop PCs, a few old laptops, and a 10-year-old NAS. The desktops feel simultaneously too bulky and powerful for the job, and the NAS definitely isn't up to the task.

Several people I know have been using HomeAssistant. I haven't really looked into it — the only "smart" things we have are Hue lights — so I'm not sure how much power it needs, either. Even if I did repurpose one of those 2012~2014-age machines, what would I even run on it? I could hook up a local webserver for our place and host NFS shares from it, and maybe HomeAssistant, but after that I'm at a loss.

[plumpan]

So I'm considering: moving from an RPi 4 to an N150 NUC or something, I would be curious if people here have advice?

If you have space but want more power, consider a used office PC. Early Coffee Lake models (Intel 8000 series) can be had for the $100-150 mark and not only have way way more power than the typical SBC/NUC/etc, but also give you some real expandability to work with. For instance, I have an even older Dell workstation running as my NAS by way of a PCIe HBA card connected to a separate enclosure, and an additional 10G NIC for networking. It's got an old quad core CPU but has been sufficient for all of my uses.

They do use more power than a SBC but idle power use is still usually in the sub 20w range. Load depends on which CPU they have and may be in the 100w+ range, but it's probably rare that you'd need to run them at full load for any serious amount of time, and when you do you'd probably appreciate the extra performance.

And if you're specifically looking for something physically small, for doing high compute load tasks on a regular basis with an eye for efficiency, and don't care about expandability at all... may I introduce you to the Mac Mini?

Several people I know have been using HomeAssistant. I haven't really looked into it — the only "smart" things we have are Hue lights — so I'm not sure how much power it needs, either. Even if I did repurpose one of those 2012~2014-age machines, what would I even run on it? I could hook up a local webserver for our place and host NFS shares from it, and maybe HomeAssistant, but after that I'm at a loss.

Generally speaking, actually having a use for a home server is the important and difficult part. Once you know what to do and a general idea of how to do it, the rest is pretty easy.

In your case if you were interested in learning HomeASsistant specifically and have some boxes around, you might consider seeing if they're new enough to run Linux VMs via Proxmox. You could make a VM for HomeAssistant and then more VMs for whatever other projects you'd want to do.

As for power use, looks like it's commonplace to be running HomeAssistant on a Pi 4, so you've probably got plenty of resources for it. Basic web apps and web pages usually don't need much power.

Personally I eventually wanted to control my thermostat over the network but didn't really care about the fancy integration stuff, i.e. "a phone app", so I just got a small ESP32 board that ran micropython and set it up to control a relay and talk over the network to a *very* simple CGI python server on my pi... at least I think that's how it worked. Anyway just an example of a very different path to get to the end result of "I have something in the house I want to control via the network".

[Eramn Lanif]

I don't have a Pi 4, unfortunately. It seems like the 4 and 5 are where they really became more useful as general-purpose machines.

Similarly, I don't think I any use for it outside of the lights. Since we don't own our home, we can't replace the thermostats, or doorknobs, or anything else, so automation isn't very useful outside of the single app we already use.

Good starting points if that ever changes, though.

[plumpan]

I don't have a Pi 4, unfortunately.

I meant less "You need a pi to run this" and more "Even a pi can run it, so it's resource requirements are minimal."

Similarly, I don't think I any use for it outside of the lights. Since we don't own our home, we can't replace the thermostats, or doorknobs, or anything else, so automation isn't very useful outside of the single app we already use.

We don't own this place but it's pretty easy to hotwire a thermostat. You can sometimes even put your own controls on in addition to the existing thermostat, so the old one can act as a "backup" always set a few degrees higher or lower than you'd ever want to actually use, in case your solution has an issue. It's ultimately just connecting a couple of wires together to turn on the heat/AC/fan, simple stuff.

But to me the thermostat is probably the most useful thing to have hooked up to a computer. We were just doing some really basic stuff, i.e. "change the temp from X to Y at Z-o-clock", that a decent new thermostat can do. Personally I don't see a lot of utility in being able to turn the AC on when I'm not home, especially versus the potential security issues that would have.

The idea of "smart door locks" scares the bejeebus out of me.

[Eramn Lanif]

It's more that we don't have anything around that level of power. We'd basically be plugging in a whole new desktop PC to run things, with all of the power that requires.

I know how to handle the thermostat, too, but we don't live in a place with a central thermostat, or even useful ones. This building only has the old one-wire style "comfort zone" types, and I'm not willing to try replacing those here.

I don't have any strong opinions on door locks, either. We just do not have much in the way of home automation and it is a struggle to come up with potential uses for it here.

[beeps]

So what the heck, I impulse purchased a Mac Mini to use as a home server. Probably overkill but all my devices are Apple/HomeKit stuff so using a Mac just seemed sensible for the included synergies between macOS/iOS things.

Any ideas for what I might use it for? Home Assistant? PiHole again? Thinking I could run some online bots off it as well but like, I don't know what I can do with it unless I hear about the things I can do with it!

[plumpan]

Any ideas for what I might use it for? Home Assistant? PiHole again? Thinking I could run some online bots off it as well but like, I don't know what I can do with it unless I hear about the things I can do with it!

If you're the kind of person who ever does media encoding jobs, see how fast they run on there. A M1 Pro didn't run much slower than my 3950X in most jobs, 20% slower for a quarter of the power or something absurd like that. Not sure about audio but video and image encodes were incredibly efficient, I imagine a M4 might be faster than my desktop straight up. And to be clear, this was pure software encodes, no hardware accel.