any other cool uses for home servers?

[eternalworm2008]

i like hardware. i dont know much about it, i cant even build my own pc, but its really cool how these chunks of metal compute things!!! im not 100% sure what homeservers are for, from the little research ive done they are for making your own personal netflix, data storage, and of course, servers, like for minecraft. i dont really have a use for something like this, but i would like to own a home server,,,just for the coolness factor,,,i just need to muster up the 2000 something dollars to buy one


look how cool this looks!

i will be living with other people by the time i can own one of these, and ill be living in an apartment, so im unsure how much theyll mind the constant fan-like sound coming from it, i dont mind it, i like white noise.

[Dan Q]

You absolutely don't need to spend $2000 to get started. A Raspberry Pi 4B plus an SD card should set you back under $50 and be a fine starter kit! Or, indeed, you can repurpose any computer you've got lying around.

All a "server" is... is a computer that runs services on behalf of other computers. A Web server sends Web pages to browsers. A Minecraft server keeps track of a Minecraft world on behalf of copies of the game. A Samba server stores files on behalf of computers on your network.

[Dan Q]

But to answer your actual question: here's a list of the services I am, or have previously been, running on my home server architecture:

• MySQL and Postgres database servers (supporting some of the below)
• 4+ WordPress/ClassicPress blogs
• μlogger server to power my geo-tracking
• HomeAssistant, Huginn, and MosquitoMQTTBroker to do home automation and similar stuff
• Calibre-Web for eBook library sharing and management, plus format conversions
• Couchpotato, Lidarr, and Sonarr to monitor films, TV shows, music etc. and get copies of them
• qBittorrent and sabNZBd to help download things; linked to the above
• CrashPlanPRO to do network backups
• Syncthing to do network file synchronisation and feed the above
• Foundry (tabletop RPG server)
• Minecraft servers
• CUPS as a printer server
• Dohnut (basically a "Pi-hole") for ad blocking etc.
• A YT-DLP frontend for downloading YouTube, Nebula etc. videos for offline consumption
• FreshRSS as an RSS reader
• Gitea git hosting
• OpenTrashMail as a throwaway email service (love this!)
• Owncast for streaming
• Owncloud for web-based "dropbox-ish" file storage
• UptimeKuma for uptime monitoring
• YOULS for URL-shortening
• Generic website hosting
• Mastodon server (I'm running GlitchSoc)
• Mayan EDMS as a document storage solution (so I can just put my post into my scanner and it all gets digitised, OCR'd, and made available to me via my RSS reader)
• CCTV video storage and recovery
• Motion tracking on the road outside my house to try to estimate how frequently people are breaking the speed limit on our street
• Development environments on-demand
• A reverse proxy server so that I can point lots of different domains/subdomains at my home IP and correctly route them to the right service from the list above

[BlazingCobaltX]

You absolutely don't need to spend $2000 to get started. A Raspberry Pi 4B plus an SD card should set you back under $50 and be a fine starter kit! Or, indeed, you can repurpose any computer you've got lying around.

All a "server" is... is a computer that runs services on behalf of other computers. A Web server sends Web pages to browsers. A Minecraft server keeps track of a Minecraft world on behalf of copies of the game. A Samba server stores files on behalf of computers on your network.

Are you able to run a PiHole and home server at the same time? Currently I have a 4B attached to my modem for this purpose. I'm always on the fence about home servers - how much more technical do I want to make my daily tech usage? But I'm willing to try, especially in my search for alternatives for Google Drive and OneDrive.

[Dan Q]

Are you able to run a PiHole and home server at the same time?

Absolutely. It's your network, you can put whatever you like on it!

Remember that a server is just a computer. How many computers can you put on your home network? As many as you like!

The only limitation is that if there are servers that you're making available to the public Internet then you'll need a way to differentiate between them. That could be different IP addresses, but most ISPs won't give you multiple IPv4 addresses so if you run multiple services accessible from the public Internet then you need to differentiate them e.g. by port number or (for protocols that support hostnames, e.g. HTTP/1.1+, HTTPS, Gemini etc., but not e.g. SSH) with a reverse proxy server.

But if you're only interested in accessing your servers from within your own network (or while VPN'ing into your home network from elsewhere in the world), there's absolutely no limitation, no!

[pepper]

...

• Couchpotato, Lidarr, and Sonarr to monitor films, TV shows, music etc. and get copies of them
• qBittorrent and sabNZBd to help download things; linked to the above
...

• A YT-DLP frontend for downloading YouTube, Nebula etc. videos for offline consumption
...

• A reverse proxy server so that I can point lots of different domains/subdomains at my home IP and correctly route them to the right service from the list above

Dan, I'm planning on seriously revamping my entire server setup and I'm super interested in these items! Currently I'm just running an old Windows 10 Home PC (my old gaming rig that my new gaming PC replaced last year) with around 10 TB of media, it just sits there running Plex and Qbittorrent and yt-dlp, but I use qbittorrent manually, haven't gotten around to setting up Sonarr or the like. (Also I had no idea yt-dlp would work on Nebula too! :0 I mostly use it to avoid actually being on youtube and don't mind Nebula's UX, but that's still good to know!)

I was planning to migrate the server PC from Windows to something Linux, I switched my laptop over to Linux Mint from Ubuntu and I love Mint so much I also just replaced Windows on my gaming PC, but I'm wondering if you could recommend a better (Linux-based) OS to run on my server?

Also, do you have any recommended resources for setting up Couchpotato, Lidarr, and Sonarr, and for setting up personal NAS services? 

* edit: OH Also I'm currently hosting my site on Nekoweb and i do really like them, but I wouldn't mind learning about self-hosting a static website (or maybe even some PHP or smth so I can have a comments section and the likes   )

[Dan Q]

Dan, I'm planning on seriously revamping my entire server setup and I'm super interested in these items! Currently I'm just running an old Windows 10 Home PC (my old gaming rig that my new gaming PC replaced last year) with around 10 TB of media, it just sits there running Plex and Qbittorrent and yt-dlp, but I use qbittorrent manually, haven't gotten around to setting up Sonarr or the like. (Also I had no idea yt-dlp would work on Nebula too! :0 I mostly use it to avoid actually being on youtube and don't mind Nebula's UX, but that's still good to know!)

Okay, let's talk about this part of my stack.

SabNZBd (optional, but recommended)

Okay, so let's start with Usenet, because it is, in my mind absolutely, the best way to download backups of certain kinds of media. (Obviously you could use all of the techniques we'll talk about for piracy, but we're not here to talk about that. I'll be assuming that you have a legitimate right to the media you want to download and that you're in a part of the world where doing so would be legal. Also: you should pay for your media anyway, as an ethical consideration - for me, at least, the vast majority of the media on my NAS is stuff that I'm paying for by some means or another... I'm just choosing to keep a downloaded copy for reasons of convenience. Okay, that's enough disclaimering.)

Usenet was invented to be message boards, and indeed it's kinda the granddaddy of Web forums. Some people still use it for that (you'll find me lurking in newsgroups including comp.infosystems.gemini and rec.games.frp.dnd)! But in some circles, nowadays, it's perhaps better known for being a place for people to upload "binaries" to: effectively, newsgroup posts with attachments. (I hear that when it gets used for piracy it tends to out-perform Bittorrent etc. for new and recent content, but underperform for niche and old content, so there are probably folks who dual-wield both Usenet and Bittorrent for piracy purposes.) Because these attachments are spread over many messages it can be convenient to have a metadata file that says "this download...? it's spread over all of these messages"; that's what an NZB file is. (An NZB file might also reference some number of "parity" files that can be used to repair broken/partial downloads, but that's beyond the scope of this intro.)

SabNZBd is an open source tool that you can install almost anywhere (I'm using it via Docker on my UnRAID homelab, but I previously had it running on a Windows 10 box somewhere). You give it (a) the credentials for your Usenet provider and (b) a directory where you'll dump NZB files... and it downloads things for you. It has an API so it can integrate directly with many tools, including some of the ones I've listed.

A Usenet provider is a service that provides Usenet access. ISPs used to do this as-standard but nowadays you need a third-party one... but this tends to give a good benefit in retention (how long they hold on to binaries for: many providers now keep them for years!). I have a subscription (monthly payment) plan with Astraweb, and I have a "block" (pay-as-you-go, by the gigabyte) plan with Blocknews as a backup (barely used, but a "block" account somewhere is a nice cheap fallback!).

It's up to you where you get NZB files from. There are free search engines, but there are paid ones that tend to be better: I use DogNZB - they're not accepting new registrations right now but I have invitations if you need: DM me.

qBittorrent

It's one of several Bittorrent clients that provides a Web interface and an API. You can use it "manually" by giving it .torrent files or magnet links, or you can have one of the tools below integrate with its API.

I run it as a Docker container on my Unraid NAS. I actually barely use it: so infrequently that I manually start it when I need it.

Sonarr/Radarr

I'm currently using CouchPotato, BTW, not Radarr, but I'll probably switch at some point because Radarr's UI is better. Let's pretend I already did.

Sonarr and Radarr are tools that help you keep abreast of your TV (Sonarr) and movies (Radarr). (There's also Lidarr for music, but I've not used it.) So for example you can connect Sonarr to the TVDB API, tell it what shows you're following, and it'll keep track of what new episodes are coming out when.

They also integrate with the APIs of torrent and NZB search engines, so Sonarr can, for example, periodically run searches for episodes that are "missing" from your collection (from their release date onwards). And they can integrate with your downloaders (qBittorrent, sabNZBd, or whatever), so the whole thing is... pretty seamless.

For example, suppose there's a TV show called Dan's Digital Life. A new episode broadcast this morning, and Sonarr knows about it because it checks the TVDB page for Dan's Digital Life about once a week. So Sonarr runs a search via DogNZB and finds that somebody's uploaded a copy of the episode: it passes the NZB file to SabNZBd, which downloads the episode (extremely quickly, I might add: much faster than if it were a torrent, because Usenet is blazing fast). It names the resulting file in accordance with my preference about how such things are stored, in a directory it shares with Jellyfin. Jellyfin spots the new file and makes it available to stream to my devices. Meanwhile, Sonarr sends updates to my home assistant (via Huginn), which puts a note on an eInk display in my house to let me know about the new episode (if it's a show that I follow "actively") and/or pings my phone.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a a bit like Plex, but free and open-source. Point it at one or more media directories and it provides a web interface to play that media. It also supports live transcoding and all that jazz. Oh, and it has an API that tools like those above can "ping" to let it know about new content.

If you're happy with Plex, Emby, or whatever, then stick with what you know. I migrated to Jellyfin for the freedom. You do you!

Don't forget to pay for your media in whatever form is appropriate.