Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress.
Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work.
Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.
Running a home server seems relatively popular for all kinds of things. Search term "homelab" brings up a culture of people who seem largely IT-adjacent, prefer retired DC equipment, experiment with network configurations as a means of professional development and insist on running everything in VMs. Search term "self-hosted", on the other hand, seems to skew towards an enterprise of saturating a Raspberry Pi's CPU with half-hearted and unmaintained Python clones of popular SaaS products. In my experience — with both hardware and software vendoring — there is a bounty of reasonable options somewhere in between the two.
Admittedly, this is more of a project for fun than for the end result. You could achieve all of the above by paying for services or doing something else.
I'm running Truenas Scale on my old i7 3770 with 16GB DDR3.
Obviously got a bunch of datasets just for storage, one for time machine backups over the network and then dedicated ones for apps.
I'm using for almost all my self hosted apps.
Home Assistant, Plex, Calibre, Immich, Paperless NGX, Code Server, Pi-Hole, Syncthing and a few others.
I've got Tailscale on it and I'm using a convenience package called caddy-reverse-proxy-cloudflare to make my apps available on subdomains of my personal domain (which is on CloudFlare
) by just adding labels to the docker containers.
And since I'm putting the Tailscale address as the DNS entry on CloudFlare, they can only be accessed by my devices when they're connected to Tailscale.
I think at this point what's amazing is the ease with which I can deploy new apps if I need something or want to try something.
I can have Claude whip up a docker compose and deploy it with Dockge.
Unfortunate that hacker news doesn't have reply notifications but I'm curious what you did when retiring it.
Just recycle the parts? Was it your main and only server?
I have that server running Truenas, I have another PC I had built for friends and family for Plex only, and I have a third one running an ethereum validator which is the most powerful but only does that.
It's not stuff that would sell for any price i'd care to get and just throwing it away / recyling it feels bad since it still works.
There's a range. A lot of people treat their NAS as their home server - torrents, downloads, media server, even containers and everything that goes with it.
I played with it as well - it's fun and rewarding and potentially optimized, but also... Can be a lot of work and hassle.
For myself when I say turn key solution, I should specify that I'm also doing more of a "right specific device for specific purpose ", so my NAS is now a storage device and nothing else.
I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.
Any substantial movie/series collection can be more over a TB and thus not cost efficient to host in the cloud.
I've been running a server with multiple TB of storage for many years and have been using an old PC in a full tower case for the purpose. I keep thinking about replacing the hardware, but it just never seems worth the money spent although it'd reduce the power usage.
I have it sharing data mainly via SSHFS and NFS (a bit of SMB for the wife's windows laptop and phone). I run NextCloud and a few *arr services (for downloading Linux ISOs) in docker.
> and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud
I tend to be cloud-antagonistic bc I value control more than ease.
Some of that is practical due to living on the Gulf coast where local infra can disappear for a week+ at a time.
Past that, I find that cloud environments have earned some mistrust because internal integrity is at risk from external pressures (shareholders, governments, other bad actors). Safeguarding from that means local storage.
To be fair to my perspective, much of my day job is restoring functionality, lost due to the endless stream of anti-user decisions by corps (and sometimes govs).
Also ebooks and software installers, but those and movies/music are my main categories.
Cloud costs would be... exorbitant. 19 TB and I'm nowhere near done ripping my movies. Dropbox would be $96/month, Backblaze $114/month, and OneDrive won't let me buy that much capacity.
Another use case is hobby photography. Video storage (e.x. drone footage), or keeping a big pile of RAW photos. The cloud stuff becomes impractical quickly.
How does that work for you? Last I tried, any interruption during a remote Time Machine backup corrupted the entire encrypted archive, losing all backup history.
