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190 points psxuaw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.355s | source
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briandear ◴[] No.43536614[source]
Curious what “home servers” are really for. I’ve gone decades without needing a home server — what am I missing out on?
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1. alabastervlog ◴[] No.43536948[source]
Serving pirated media files in a way that's similar-enough to Netflix for normies in your house to use it comfortably.

An always-on machine to handle recurring tasks (remote backups, say).

Maybe a VPN gateway (you can also just use an AppleTV for that, though, with Tailscale)

Home automation if HomeKit isn't your thing, for whatever reason.

Network-wide adblocking, custom DNS, et c.

You really, really don't need one. But they can be nice.

Also some people just like tinkering. Can't relate (any more) but I've got my thing down to requiring single-digit hours per year.

[EDIT] Of course, part of how I avoid making it more work is that I don't upgrade the core OS, since it has minimal exposure to public networks and everything I care about comes from Docker so IDGAF how old the package collection is. Especially with ZFS in play, upgrades are... fraught. At some point whatever old-ass Debian I have on there will be too old and I'll have to, IDK, image the whole base OS disk as a backup and spend probably a whole weekend screwing with it when it inevitably breaks itself on upgrade. I may just migrate to FreeBSD instead, when the time comes.