HACKER Q&A
📣 memset

What do you use as your home server?


I've gotten into the habit of writing lots of little web apps for myself. I have one which is a little personal finance software. Another which is a fulfillment dashboard for my side-business selling notebooks. And a pi-hole ad blocker. And bitwarden. The list goes on.

I'm hesitant to put some of this software, such as my finance software, on a VPS, because it has my bank account credentials to download data. I also haven't had much luck with my raspberry pi: it often loses ethernet connectivity, or the filesystem goes into "read-only" mode, and it's incredibly slow.

Years ago I used to just keep an unused computer running, sitting under my desk. But today, now that I'm paying for my own rent and electricity, I don't have any unused hardware lying around, and if possible I'd like something a little less power-hungry.

What do you all use? Old laptops or desktops? Raspberry pi alternatives (preferably something with storage built-in?) Do you put your projects on VPS boxes? What would be inexpensive and easy for me to get up and running with shell access?

  👤 kelnos Accepted Answer ✓
I'm surprised you've been having trouble with Raspberry Pi. I have a RPi2 running OpenHAB for some home automation stuff (with a Z-Wave USB stick), and a few other things on it, and it's been running rock-solid for a good two years so far with no issues. I keep meaning to install Pi-Hole on it, but haven't gotten around to it.

I have a RPi3 with WiFi connected to my very-old-school door buzzer so I can let people into my building without going to the door, and it also have it set up so it can be opened remotely via SMS code for guests.

I have another RPi3 up in my bedroom, connected to an old set of powered speakers, running Shairport (an Airplay server) and Roc (an efficient network audio streamer with PulseAudio support), and Bluetooth so I can play music from my laptop or phone, as well as have better audio if I'm in bed watching a movie or TV on my laptop.

I also have an old ReadyNAS NV+ for storage, that I'll occasionally run some lightweight things on (like a torrent or USENET NZB client), but it's mainly just for storage (4x 4TB in RAID5).

I've been debating building my own NAS[0], which might let me reduce my footprint to just one machine, but haven't really been able to justify the effort since the current setup works really well.

[0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/19/4x-sata-hat-nanopi-n...

👤 blantonl
An Mac Mini works perfectly for your use case, either older or newer. It has a really small profile, and runs Ubuntu well, and runs headless super quiet. You could pickup a pretty decent one for a few hundred bucks and attach an external USB drive and you’d be set for your use case.
👤 taylodl
A Mac Mini that I picked up used for super cheap. My use case is different from yours though since I'm using mine primarily as a media server.
👤 gaspoweredcat
an old thinkpad. cheap, reliable and well supported across the board, i know many people using them for such purposes