Curious what “home servers” are really for. I’ve gone decades without needing a home server — what am I missing out on?
replies(12):
My NAS is an eight core server with 64GB ECC ram running a ZFS pool with 8 12TB WD Red Pro drives for storing my collection of curated Linux ISOs, running TrueNAS SCALE, running always-on services inside containers:
- PostgreSQL for a bunch of personal project databases
- TeslaMate collecting data from our EVs into the PostgreSQL database
- Plex for serving up media to the Apple TV
- Tailscale exit node so I can access my home network on the go
- Step CA for managing my personal certificate authority used to issue everything I want to have TLS for with a certificate easily (LetsEncrypt doesn’t work for private network servers)
- Tarsnap for periodically backing up all data, documents and configuration I really do not want to lose
- UniFi controller managing my UniFi APs (four of them)
I’m sure I will have more use cases in the future, but it’s really handy to have always running infrastructure and storage at home you can rely on!
And I don’t spend much time tinkering with it now that it’s set up, it’s just maintenance mode.
From time to time I adjust a few configs or upgrade a hardware component here and there but it’s been stable like this for years (apart from the TrueNAS CORE to SCALE migration which was a bit of a shitshow due to moving from FreeBSD to Linux, had to rebuild all jails into Docker containers).