Tell me about your dream home server
Curious to hear what folks on HN have (or dream of having) as a home server.
- Which hardware?
- Which OS?
- Any indispensable apps running on your server?
I got an HP proliant ML350 G6 for free, so I want to use that for my server. The problem is it has a firmware issue. It thinks it's overheating when it's not, and kicks the fans onto their highest setting.
Software wise I want to run my own local music and video streaming, filesharing, and be able to run whatever I need to practice network/cybersecurity/webdev. I'm very new to everything involved, so it's going to take me a long time to figure out.
The main thing is that I want to upgrade my 42TB Spinning Rust NAS to be 100TB+ NVME. I would ideally like triple mirrored storage, but that would be pretty expensive, so I might raidz2 with some striping if it won't wear out the drives too early. I would need prices on SSD to fall another 75%, which I'm estimating to be another 3-4 years.
I'd say zero moving parts, extremely scalable storage, and very low standby power with the ability to burst up greatly when needed. It should also look relatively attractive and not require a rack mount. Just needs to run Debian.
Among other things, it should have an AI accelerator for hosting models for stuff.
So... probably a 3090 or 4090? Or more exotic budget options like an A770 or a tenstorrent pcie card.
I would run Clear Linux or CachyOS (depending on if I need Nvidia driver support).
For one thing it needs to be a router so it can have the public IP.