
Ask HN: What do you use as your home server? - memset
I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t had much luck with my raspberry pi: it often loses ethernet connectivity, or the filesystem goes into &quot;read-only&quot; mode, and it&#x27;s incredibly slow.<p>Years ago I used to just keep an unused computer running, sitting under my desk. But today, now that I&#x27;m paying for my own rent and electricity, I don&#x27;t have any unused hardware lying around, and if possible I&#x27;d like something a little less power-hungry.<p>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?
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kelnos
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...](https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/19/4x-sata-hat-nanopi-
neo-m4-nas/)

~~~
memset
Hm, so after looking at it, I think my raspberry Pis are version 1 - I got
them more than 5 years ago! I just don't know how to ascertain how much of the
issues are due to using older hardware versus limitations of, for example,
using SD as the primary storage.

~~~
kelnos
Hard to say, of course. It _is_ important to buy a good quality SD card;
there's definitely flakiness to be expected if you don't. The other thing is a
high-quality power supply that actually provides the current the Pi needs. If
you don't, that can cause all manner of problems as well.

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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.

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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.

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gaspoweredcat
an old thinkpad. cheap, reliable and well supported across the board, i know
many people using them for such purposes

