Hi all, new to Lemmy but this seems to be the best community for this that is decently active. Apologies if not!
I got into home servers in my first house a couple years ago, but our stay in that house was unexpectedly brief and everything got put back into boxes. It’s time to setup at the new place, and I have many improvements in mind from the first implementation - so while I wait for server parts to arrive, I decided to update the diagram for planning.
In no order, here’s a list of lessons I learned from V1:
- The blade form factor doesn’t work for me. I enjoyed getting one and learning about them, but my use cases are small (&quiet) enough that a tower and a small network rack works better.
- In the quest for automatic home lighting, I shouldn’t have gone all-in on smart bulbs rather than switches. There get to be too many in the house, and when a couple start inevitably failing, expensive bulbs and misplaced warranty info are a gigantic pain. So now the bulbs are just for special things like ceiling fans and floor lamps.
- I need to put more attention on storage. That’s what gets used the most, by multiple users, so I will use TrueNAS Scale as my host instead of ESXi. I was not enough of a power user for that to be important to me. The rest of it is mostly for play and doesn’t need to be perfect.
- My media streaming needs are very simple, so I think I may like Jellyfin better than Plex.
- I need to be ‘a little’ more lax about security. I don’t think my server is realistically likely to be heavily attacked, and when I tried to go all out on best practices, more often than not I just broke things and upset my family users. My server will not have an outside access except via VPN, and my IOT devices will not speak unless spoken to - I think that will be enough.
In particular, I tried so hard last time to have a tagged management VLAN in UniFi and always just broke connectivity between something that required a hard reset. I’m planning to skip that this time but if someone has a pointer to a good setup guide, I could try that again.
Thanks for reading/looking, all comments or suggestions are welcome! I also still need to find more applications I can selfhost so I will be keeping an eye on the community for ideas.
What tool did you use for that Diagram? It looks awesome!
Thank you! It’s draw.io
I hope you’re generating your diagram from code and not editing it by hand like a caveman? If not I suggest https://kroki.io/
unga bunga
I enjoy making diagrams, and I spent as much time on this as I did because my internet has been out for 2 days and counting and it was an offline tool I already had. Nevertheless, thanks for the link to a new tool to look at
Moving to Caseta for lighting from the random mix of bulbs which never quite work was amazing. It’s also much cheaper to put in one controllable switch than replace the 6 bulbs in the light fittings connected to the wall switch. Those bulbs always fail in weird and non-debuggable ways.
I use Crafty Controller (https://craftycontrol.com/) to manage the minecraft servers. It runs in a docker instance and gives you a nice web UI to manage each minecraft server. I use it to delegate control to my kids to create and manage servers as necessary.
Finally, if you’re not using a config mgmt tool, I’d start looking, so you can make everything easily re-doable. Personally I’m using Ansible, but puppet, chef, salt, etc all work too. Ansible is easiest given it does need it’s own infra. I like it so if something dies I can redeploy everything onto a different server.
Wow that’s a cool setup, I’ll definitely steal some ideas.
I’m used to slinging lots of data around and one of the more helpful tools for general purpose automation has been n8n. Though it might have limited use if you’re not trying to glue all kinds of services together. I also host actualbudget to keep track of finances. Both are running comfortably in their own little docker containers.
I’m currently looking into setting up Nextcloud and experimenting some more with presence detection for Home Assistant. I’m considering CO2 sensors, which will either tell me my home is ventilated properly, or which rooms are occupied.
That awesomebudget looks nice! I’m more of a beancont/fava guy, and too invested in my setup to try something vastly different - but it sure looks like a cool option for people starting out.
Thanks for the ideas! I hadn’t thought about budget apps but that could be a good one.
Not sure if I have use cases for n8n or not, but I’ll go learn about it and find out!
Do you use home assistant?
It integrates with everything smart, gives you a central management dashboard and automation. You won’t even need a Phillips hue bridge if you get a USB ZigBee stick.
I do! I am hosting HAOS as one of my VMs, I love it. I’m planning an upgrade to have a wall mounted tablet with the dashboard this time.
That’s a good point - I had Hue first, then got a ZigBee stick to add later devices, but left Hue alone because ‘not broken/don’t fix’ - but this time, I would like to ditch the Hue hub and set up everything on the proper ZigBee network. Thanks for reminding me!
That’s a really nice setup! I run most of my things on a docker swarm (the docker hosts are VMs running on Proxmox hosts), though that was an overkill in retrospect, and causes more problems with no practical advantages.
The range of services I run is similar to yours, but I also have a bunch of services for personal finance (beancont/fava, as well as automatic importers and such), a more extensive media setup (with qBitTorrent and *arr apps), a gitea server, and a vaultwarden instance.
I’m curious which part you think is overkill and how you would redo this? I have a proxmox cluster and run docker amongst other things, but haven’t set up any sort of high availability.
I don’t need live migrations, but something that could help with load balancing and reducing any potential downtime if a host fails would be great.
