hi there, comrades! just curious, what do you all actually host for yourselves?
i currently run a two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers and am looking at adding a Raspberry Pi 400 that i was gifted and don’t know what to do with. i have ideas though!
anyway, i’d love to hear what you’ve found useful, helpful, and/or fun to run. my own answer will be in the comments.
We’re doing Christmas dinner this year.
- Openhab (smarthome controller)
- Zigbee2mqtt (converts zigbee devices to talk mqtt)
- Mosquitto (Mqtt server)
- frigate
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr
- Radarr, sonarr, lidarr, bazarr, prowlarr
- transmission + a VPN tunnel
- Uptime Kuma
- Prometheus, Telegraf
- Grafana
- Influxdb, chronograf
- Three PiHole instances, synced with Orbital Sync
- Unifi Controller
And some small services to pipe metrics into Grafana dashboards for apps that don’t have native support for metrics. Most of this is managed through Docker with a Traefik reverse proxy with letsencrypt certs for https.
My most useful so far has to be openhab. I’m barely using it to it’s full potential but it’s so freeing to be able to buy (nearly) any smart device and know I can integrate it with the rest of my system. It also allows me to block Internet access to most of my smart devices completely for added privacy.
Second most useful is probably the Jellyfin/*arr stack to manage and view my collection. Soon I’m planning on adding either Calibre or something similar for books to sort my ebooks and old digital textbooks.
And once you have two or three services, monitoring obviously helps. I honestly wish I had set it up earlier, in particular Uptime Kuma for general uptime tracking. It would have saved me so much time pinging all my services to try to diagnose issues.
Saving! Lots of great homelab ideas in here.
DNS, web, mail, WireGuard, etc. I wrote the webserver in about 700 lines of Go and the other software is by other people. Currently I’m rewriting everything in Rust and will write an authoritative DNS server in Rust. Eventually I want all my services to run on my own software (except for WireGuard, which is best in-kernel).
My first professional mailserver was around 1996, with 400 users, up to over 3000 users by 2001. It was awesome then but now mail is the last thing I’d recommend anyone self-host. The ecosystem has been deteriorating for decades at this point.
I used to work for a major shared environment web hosting company that also hosted mail for its customers and the mail was the absolute worst. Both in terms of day to day support of users wanting to connect mail clients and in the bigger scope of keeping our mail gateways in good reputation on global blacklists. All it took was a couple bad actors to ruin mail reputation from an entire cluster of servers, and in shared hosting you’re bound to have well more than a few bad actors.
We had methods in place to try to keep it in check, but it was like herding cats. I left that company several years ago but even then they had been trying to ramp down and discourage mail hosting by offering Google Apps, not sure if they still host mail or not.
Vaultwarden, forgejo and nextcloud. I tried matrix and email, but couldn’t get them to work, comrade.
I actually use a real owned server, and host all kinds of my own stuff, along with
Matrix (synapse + element web)
Nextcloud
Etherpad lite
Gitea (have yet to switch to Forgejo)
And gaming servers. AssaultCube was very successful, as it has incredibly low pings, it was full multiple times, and it was incredible fun.
Could you point me to the documentation you used to get etherpad lite going? I’ve had a hell of a time getting etherpad running and usable on my server.
https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite#manual-install
I just do the straight up git clone && run.sh inside a systemd unit.
Thank you!
- portable development environment with tmux + neovim + whatever toolchain I’m working in
- various projects I’m developing such as bots or web tools that need uptime or I just don’t want to tie down to my local machine
- BOINC
- immich
- minidlna
- nginx reverse proxy with various personal websites behind it
- rsync backup jobs on systemd timers
- rtorrent
- veilid node
On an old raspberry pi 3b, a copy of a blog by one of my favorite writers (the original is long gone and was never archived, I happened to grab a copy with wget when it came back up briefly) so I can read it when I’m on my home network. And a pi hole dns adblocker.
I’m hoping to set up some kind of media system for streaming eventually, but we currently use a PS4 as our media center and it doesn’t look like our options for compatibe apps are great.
I’d definitely like to get a local Mealie instance going in the next year
i have two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers running the latest LTS version.
machine the first: - Taskwarrior - Taskserver - Docker and Docker Compose - local media and stuff on a 2TB NAS
machine the second: - Docker and Docker compose - Jitsi Meet server - Rustdesk server
coming soon: - PiHole - Unbound DNS - Plex (maybe) - Mealie (possibly with a dedicated ancient iPad that will live in the kitchen) - BirdNET-Pi
also possibly a home weather station built out of a Raspberry Pi 4B that is on order; i love the idea of having one of these in my backyard to track our microclimate.
Love those project ideas! Birdnet sounds really cool.
- Gitlab
- Gitlab Docker Runner
- Minecraft Server
- Discord Bot (wrote my own because I couldn’t find a good one that ran on arm)
- Jellyfin
- Fluidd
pi 4 with yunohost:
- freshrss
- nextcloud
- navidrome
- transmission
I self host whatever I can within reason. Like I don’t host my own email, used to though! Currently I have the following services on Proxmox:
- Nginx reverse proxy
- Authelia
- Technitium
- Paperless
- FreePBX
- Immich
- LibreNMS
- Gitea
- WikiJS
- Ntfy
- Vaultwarden
- Kasm
- Portainer
- Matter most
And a few smattering of others that I spin up as needed or for testing things.
Would you recommend WikiJS? I’m looking for a wiki solution to document my homelab setup.
I do recommend it. It’s easy to setup and does everything you need in a documentation knowledge base. I used to use confluence before their enshitification; WikiJS is much nicer for my use case.
What a list!
Nextcloud, Synapse + bridges, Adguard Home, Uptime Kuma, Home Assistant. Thinking about spinning up Gitea, Forgejo or Gitlab again.
GitLab is really nice, just needs like 6-8gb of ram, vs 1 for GitTea. Are you working with other folks, or is it just for personal stuff? I run a small GitTea server myself for super private stuff. The rest I just put on GH.
At this stage I’ll probably just mirror my stuff from GH. I have a feeling they’ll be doing something stupid soon, forcing people to look for alternatives.
Would be nice to collaborate with others, but getting started is hard when you don’t have enough free time.
It seems Gitea has basic CI + package registries now, that will be plenty for my needs.
Yeah, their runners are GH Actions compatible, which is great. I think GH is too smart these days to mess with devs. MS has too much skin in the cloud and OSS game these days to pull shit like they did in the 90s. Do wish they didn’t bork Windows 11 so bad, made me switch to Ubuntu. They don’t really care about desktop anymore TBH. Very happy Steam works great on Linux.
just wanted to update that i’ve added PiHole and Unbound DNS to my running stuff. thinking about doing a Wireguard VPN now… but that’s a 2024 project now.
good night and happy new year!
NixOS on an AMD mini itx board.
- NGINX for reverse proxy
- Jellyfin
- Syncthing node
- Homeassistant OS on a VM (QEMU/KVM)
OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi4