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.

  • SleepyBear
    English
    5·
    1 year ago

    Moving to Caseta for lighting from the random mix of bulbs which never quite work was amazing. It’s also much cheaper to put in one controllable switch than replace the 6 bulbs in the light fittings connected to the wall switch. Those bulbs always fail in weird and non-debuggable ways.

    I use Crafty Controller (https://craftycontrol.com/) to manage the minecraft servers. It runs in a docker instance and gives you a nice web UI to manage each minecraft server. I use it to delegate control to my kids to create and manage servers as necessary.

    Finally, if you’re not using a config mgmt tool, I’d start looking, so you can make everything easily re-doable. Personally I’m using Ansible, but puppet, chef, salt, etc all work too. Ansible is easiest given it does need it’s own infra. I like it so if something dies I can redeploy everything onto a different server.

    • LittleLily@shinobu.cloudEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I personally use Pterodactyl for my Minecraft servers because it’s versatile enough that it can host any game server, not just Minecraft. It’s pretty much guaranteed that any game you’ll want to host will already have an install script someone has made for it.

      • SleepyBear
        English
        3·
        1 year ago

        That’s cool. I’ve used crafty for years, but mainly because I outgrew my scripts to manage each server instance and my kids need instance responses to restarting servers. So I went looking for something Minecraft specific to give them restart and reset commands.

    • mauns@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      This is awesome, I didn’t know there were game server managers. I definitely see the point as I did some ugly file hacking a few times. I’ll check out both Crafty Controller and Pterodactyl!

      I’ve used Ansible for other stuff but never thought about it for server config, definitely going to figure that out too, been bitten there before as well.

      Thank you!

      • SleepyBear
        English
        1·
        1 year ago

        I try to keep each service separated and then all configs are in ansible, which is in git (and GitHub) so I can track what I did and always have “official” configs available.

        Eg, for Lemmy I wrote up here: https://lemmy.myspamtrap.com/post/51

        Which includes a rough set of ansible tasks I typically use.

        I do need to find a way to backup my OPNSense and Unifi stuff and stash the configs so they’re repeatable.