Re:Ask HN: Always on low power home server
by toast0 on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:11PM
(#26295502)
My home servers do the following things:
a) raise my power bill and heat my home :p
b) run a PPPoE client (ugh) and firewall/nat, and handoff the PPPoE session (custom client, available on github, email me) and firewall state (pfsync) if the primary goes down (which is usually for reboots); redundant dhcp, recusrive DNS, and automatic failover to LTE as well.
c) host a samba share for household documents and media. With automated backup to the secondary server (but if the main server is offline, you can't use the share). The samba share also accepts backups from the windows hosts (veeam free edition), which means I actually have backups that are easy to restore from.
d) publish selected data from the share (on change) to my DO droplet, because my connection isn't reliable enough to host from home (I used to serve my lame webpages, and my DNS from my home servers, but when I moved, it became a non-option due to the DSL going offline when the DSLAM loses utility power)
e) record over the air TV with MythTV and HDHomerun network tuners
f) host local development because my frontend systems are Windows and I'm not developing there (not interested in a windows hosted Linux environment thanks, putty works well for me)
g) PXEBoot server, which is mildly useful, at times.
Are there other ways to do that stuff? Probably, but this is what worked for me. I used to have all these things running on a single server, but having multiple means I can reboot them for kernel updates without losing my internet, so that's pretty nice.
a) raise my power bill and heat my home :p
b) run a PPPoE client (ugh) and firewall/nat, and handoff the PPPoE session (custom client, available on github, email me) and firewall state (pfsync) if the primary goes down (which is usually for reboots); redundant dhcp, recusrive DNS, and automatic failover to LTE as well.
c) host a samba share for household documents and media. With automated backup to the secondary server (but if the main server is offline, you can't use the share). The samba share also accepts backups from the windows hosts (veeam free edition), which means I actually have backups that are easy to restore from.
d) publish selected data from the share (on change) to my DO droplet, because my connection isn't reliable enough to host from home (I used to serve my lame webpages, and my DNS from my home servers, but when I moved, it became a non-option due to the DSL going offline when the DSLAM loses utility power)
e) record over the air TV with MythTV and HDHomerun network tuners
f) host local development because my frontend systems are Windows and I'm not developing there (not interested in a windows hosted Linux environment thanks, putty works well for me)
g) PXEBoot server, which is mildly useful, at times.
Are there other ways to do that stuff? Probably, but this is what worked for me. I used to have all these things running on a single server, but having multiple means I can reboot them for kernel updates without losing my internet, so that's pretty nice.