Hi all, new to Lemmy but this seems to be the best community for this that is decently active. Apologies if not!

I got into home servers in my first house a couple years ago, but our stay in that house was unexpectedly brief and everything got put back into boxes. It’s time to setup at the new place, and I have many improvements in mind from the first implementation - so while I wait for server parts to arrive, I decided to update the diagram for planning.

In no order, here’s a list of lessons I learned from V1:

  • The blade form factor doesn’t work for me. I enjoyed getting one and learning about them, but my use cases are small (&quiet) enough that a tower and a small network rack works better.
  • In the quest for automatic home lighting, I shouldn’t have gone all-in on smart bulbs rather than switches. There get to be too many in the house, and when a couple start inevitably failing, expensive bulbs and misplaced warranty info are a gigantic pain. So now the bulbs are just for special things like ceiling fans and floor lamps.
  • I need to put more attention on storage. That’s what gets used the most, by multiple users, so I will use TrueNAS Scale as my host instead of ESXi. I was not enough of a power user for that to be important to me. The rest of it is mostly for play and doesn’t need to be perfect.
  • My media streaming needs are very simple, so I think I may like Jellyfin better than Plex.
  • I need to be ‘a little’ more lax about security. I don’t think my server is realistically likely to be heavily attacked, and when I tried to go all out on best practices, more often than not I just broke things and upset my family users. My server will not have an outside access except via VPN, and my IOT devices will not speak unless spoken to - I think that will be enough.

In particular, I tried so hard last time to have a tagged management VLAN in UniFi and always just broke connectivity between something that required a hard reset. I’m planning to skip that this time but if someone has a pointer to a good setup guide, I could try that again.

Thanks for reading/looking, all comments or suggestions are welcome! I also still need to find more applications I can selfhost so I will be keeping an eye on the community for ideas.

  • mr47
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    51 year ago

    That’s a really nice setup! I run most of my things on a docker swarm (the docker hosts are VMs running on Proxmox hosts), though that was an overkill in retrospect, and causes more problems with no practical advantages.

    The range of services I run is similar to yours, but I also have a bunch of services for personal finance (beancont/fava, as well as automatic importers and such), a more extensive media setup (with qBitTorrent and *arr apps), a gitea server, and a vaultwarden instance.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      I’m curious which part you think is overkill and how you would redo this? I have a proxmox cluster and run docker amongst other things, but haven’t set up any sort of high availability.

      I don’t need live migrations, but something that could help with load balancing and reducing any potential downtime if a host fails would be great.

    • @maunsOP
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      21 year ago

      Thanks! My last setup was quite similar to you, just with ESXi - definitely wanted to cut out as many problem points as possible this time.

      Personal finance has come up twice now, I hadn’t thought of it but will go check out the services now, I bet I could find a use as well.