Calling All Home Server Owners -- What Do You Use Your Servers For?

Just curious how many of you guys out there have any machines running at home (big or small) and what you guys are using them for. Here’s a few of my uses:

Server: Dual E5-2670 / 64GB RAM / 2TB HDD + 6TB NAS
Purpose:

  • Apache Guacamole - for web browsing and such while away form home
  • Plex - not used much anymore since I rent a dedi in Chicago and my upload speeds are terrible
  • Subsonic - streaming 100+ GB of music while at home/work/on-the-go
  • Eclipse Che - self-hosted cloud IDE for coding (not used too often)
  • Nextcloud - mostly for school work and such where I’m not always working on the same machine so need to sync the files around
  • Deluge - for my Linux isos
  • Gitlab - private git server for some stuff
  • Mining while idle

Server: Dual E5-2670 / 64GB RAM / 2TB HDD
Purpose:

  • Mining

Server: i3-7100 / 16GB RAM / 3x RX 570
Purpose:

  • GPU Mining

Server: 4x Raspberry Pi’s
Purpose:

  • An all-home self-hosted Sonos-alternative to play music throughout the house wirelessly using Logitech Squeezebox/Squeezelite

What’s everyone else got laying around creating heat?

2 Likes

Never heard of Apache Guacamole, very interesting, shall try it soon.


I got no servers at home other than a small useless RaspBerry :\

1 Like

It’s pretty neat. Basically a teamviewer alternative that you use with your browser instead of needing any additional software. Supports VNC, RDP, and SSH.

Proved to be extremely helpful for a group project for school where I set up my spare server as a Machine Learning testbed for our project. Created a user for each group member and gave VNC access to the server so we were all working from the same machine. Just had to give each person the URL and their user/pass to get in – piece of cake :slight_smile:

Very interesting, seems to be Linux only tho? Haven’t checked much.

Yeah, you’d install guacamole on a Linux box, then set up all your connections (can be a Linux box with GUI using VNC, or a Windows machine/server using RDP). The Guac box would just be your gateway to your other machines that you have set up

1 Like

Will check it. For now I had some fun installing windows on a hetzner cloud instance. :grin:

I have a few odroid xu4 systems and I treat them like my home servers. I can shove them in a closed cabinet because their fans and the room temperature keep them running without overheating. I have 1TB USB drives attached to two.

Can’t remember how many I have sitting around and they’re often in various states of plugged in and being actively used, but these are the main ones:

  • Local web application server
  • Media server (emby)
  • Development box (mostly python automation work)
1 Like

I’ve been thinking about picking up some of the other popular SBC’s to play around with. I think I was looking at a Orange something-rather (or maybe Banana?) that was similar pricing as the RaspPi, but with beefier specs. The odroid XU4 looks pretty rad too.

I have a bunch of raspberry pis sitting around and they’re useless, the XU4 can encode video while streaming it. I found the RPI just wasn’t powerful enough for me to have as a box I remote into, better for specific projects that it fits.

1 Like

I have an old 17" MacBook Pro without a battery in it that I wanted to turn into a home server but haven’t found anything I really want to run on it. Plus it’s quite old, has a 2.9GHz C2D.

The 17" 1920x1200 display is beautiful though, so I might turn it into a HUD type thing to track crypto market prices or network monitoring for my mission critical stuff. Gotta find an easy way to wall mount it, maybe a couple shelf brackets to sit on.

I have so much hardware (owned & rented) in datacenters that it’s kinda pointless to have anything running at home. I considered setting up my Plex server here awhile back, but I have so many friends/family members using it at this point that it would cripple my 15Mbps upload from 6pm to midnight daily.

1 Like

Yeah I feel you on that one. There’s nothing really stopping me from turning off all my home boxes and putting everything on stuff I’m renting. But something about hosting some stuff at home seems cool to me.

I tried doing this as well but at most I could get a 720p stream out reliably so ended up renting a box. I’m moving in the next 6 months or so and am hoping that the area I’ll be moving to has fiber. If I can get a symmetric 1gbps link, then I’ll definitely be moving a good amount of stuff locally instead of renting gear.

But for now, I’ll just happily mine away on my machines. My electric company probably thinks I’m growing pot or something since my usage spiked up a few months ago – I always laugh at the usage summaries I get where it’ll show typical usage for my neighbors, energy efficient neighbors, and then my usage :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’m waiting for my building to get word back on our fiber installation. Once that’s in place I’ll be able to get 300Mbps symmetrical business line for not much more than I’m currently paying. $5/mo more for a static /29 as well. So I could see myself getting some low powered gear to run from home at that point, but with 100/15 Cable it’s just not worth the hassle.

Every use case I come up with to justify a home server, I come to the conclusion that I can just do it on my colocated gear. I don’t even run serious local backups anymore, just mission critical stuff via Time Machine and then everything else gets sent to my colo box 20ms away, replicated to another rented box on another continent and then replicated up to my unlimited GDrive business plan.

Only thing I may start doing is copying some media down in case of an outage. But even then I haven’t seen a serious (>2hr) internet outage in over a decade, and maybe get 2-3 minor overnight maintenance outages a year. :man_shrugging:

1 Like

I have a E5-1640v4 32GB RAM 1 x 256GB SSD + 6 x 8TB for plex. (Room for 5 more drives)

5 Likes

I… don’t have anything important, or do anything important.

Hopefully they’ll leave my 10+ year hardware alone and steal the Arduino stuff instead. :smiley:

1 Like

Damn. Location?

My apartment, specifically my closet

3 Likes

I’m running a more low end Dell R210 II in a closet in my hall way.

E3-1240
16GB Ram
1TB HDD (I am about to add 128GB SSD that I purchased from a specific LET member (jh).

I am currently using it as my router (PFSense) and was also using it for encrypted storage that automatically uploaded to GDrive but for some reason my NFS is broken and I haven’t been able to connect to it for a while, really need to get around to finding out why it’s not working. I plan to also use Apache Guacamole soon so I can access Discord from work as Firefox is bugging out Google captcha for some reason (probably the proxy they use).

I thought about Nextcloud aswell but Google has worked better for me in terms of reliance. Unfortunately I also have a rather slow fiber connection (40 down, 8 up) so I can’t run Plex locally and run it from a Hetzner server, would definitely be handy to one day get FTTP so I can get 100/40 or 100/100 and cut my Hetzner box.

1 Like

Raspberry Pi2 with Kodi, use it as NAS and steaming box. Severely under-powered, skips frames for large video files. Have to upgrade to Pi3 sometime.

Pavin.

2 Likes

Even the Pi3’s sometimes have issues with Kodi or at least did when I tried it with OSMC. @Jarland has some ODROID XU4’s that are the same form factor but with better specs for streaming/encoding/etc. If you’re using it to push video, I’d probably steer clear from Raspberry Pi’s since there’s a good amount of other SBC’s that has better specs for slightly higher pricing.

1 Like

Mm… Odroid is good, I have a cheap Orange Pi PC lying around somewhere. The hardest part about changing the box is setting up everything new and configuring it just the right way :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like