Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Honestly I was in the same boat. I ended up just buying a raspberry pi and following the dead simple tutorials on this site and now I can stream my audiobooks or TV wherever the hell I want
https://pimylifeup.com/
Again though, why a server? I don't understand the concept of streaming really (I mean why I would want it, not how it works). I have some music files but they are on my laptop's internal SSD (plus a few on my phone). No need for streaming. The idea of a server is generally to run some network services 24/7, or serve multiple clients, or have more hardware resources than would normally be found on a client PC. I don't see a raspberry pi at home helping with much of that.
I guess I could imagine wanting some kind of centralized media server at home if there were multiple people using it, but it's just me, and I'm generally not into video so I don't have a huge video library or anything like that.
You don’t understand the concept of not having to carry your laptop everywhere with you to listen to your music? What?
I mostly listen at home, but I do have some music files on my phone. I could put them all there in principle. The phone has 256GB of local storage and an SD slot that can take a 2TB card. It's a cheap phone too (Moto G series). I have a few GB of music that I listen to plus some archived.
If I'm going to stream to my phone away from home though, that means the streaming server has to be on the internet, and wasn't one idea of a home server to be off the internet? I do have a bunch of such files on a bare metal dedicated server at OVH. They have better things to do than examine my files and delete stuff with the wrong kind of lyrics. I do understand not wanting to use stuff like Google Drive where they do mess with the files.
Even if I wanted to totally control the hardware I'd probably look into colo. But dedicated servers always end up being cheaper.
No, home servers aren’t made to be off the internet.
Well that was one idea mentioned by one of the other posters: better security by having the server off the network.
I think my luddite tastes in software are part of it, but if I have a server on the network, it might as well be in a data center where I don't have to worry about space, power, noise, ICE raids (my servers are in several countries so they'd at least have more work to do), etc. I can add or delete new hardware with a few clicks. I actually do have an old Supermicro 1U server in my kitchen but it's just sitting there unpowered. I had intended to colo it but it's just not worth doing that. I had forgotten about it.
Even if I have a server at home, I probably want to back it up over the network, so then what? There are remote copies of the files then either way.
The benefit of having it at home on your hardware is that you have way more control, and it is on your local network so it can control local network stuff without going through the internet, while also being connected to the internet for things that are internet-requiring.
Yeah that is kind of vague though. I don't really have other stuff on my LAN (https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired) right now unless you count my phone.
I'm in another thread right now where a guy is running a simple encrypted chat server on his phone under tmux. That is pretty cool and using an old phone is an interesting alternative to a razzleberry pi if you don't mind running Android and don't need much compute or storage.
I think I see, you're suggesting using a local server as sort of a jump box to the internet, with otherwise disconnected clients. I guess that has some attractions, though in practice I use web browsers all the time, with the usual bug-ridden software stack that surrounds such things. If I were doing anything really sensitive I wouldn't use that approach.
It’s not vague at all. You can run many services on your local server that you can then use while also on your home network, but you don’t want/need them to be accessible from outside your network - home assistant for example. Others would be things like NZBGET/SABNZBD, the *arr stack, and many, many more.
Your home server can also expose whatever you want to the internet, it’s up to you. It also means you can troubleshoot/update/upgrade everything yourself at any time, and you’re not trusting some company you’re paying $4/month for a VPS to do it and be secure/a conscious.
Also I would never run a phone as a server over a raspberry pi, that’s a terrible idea unless you’ve taken it apart and have it running off mains power without a battery in it.
It just sounds like you have no need for a home server, which is fine - but it’s hard to believe that someone who even knows what a VPS is doesn’t understand the use cases for a personal physical home server.
Home Assistant is kind of interesting for solar power I guess, though I haven't looked into it much. Otherwise it's a smart home thing right? See the biggaybunny link I posted ;). I had to look up NZBGET and so on, but yeah, if I was trying to keep it private I certainly wouldn't want to connect to it from home internet. I used to have a server in Romania that would have been a good candidate for stuff like that if I were into it. Download to that and then scp to home.
Nothing stops me from upgrading/downgrading VPS software any way I want afaik. Although it might less secure than a dedicated server. I have had dedis in various places at different times though my main beater machine is a VPS. I tend to think hosted servers are more secure against physical intrusions than a home server is, though who knows. The software is basically the same, and the DC's have good DDOS protection.
Yeah you're probably right about using a phone as a server. It's a cool re-use though.
For me personally, I share this with several other people. So my wife can stream movies or TV that we own from anywhere. We can share the same audiobooks like as if it were audible but I only need to own one copy. Things like that it's really a convenience thing. That and digital backups of my failing DVDs is a bit of comfort
Aha, yeah, sharing with people at home is an attraction and it's good to not have to rely on your home internet being up for that. DVD backups though (unless they're being shared too) seems like they can be handled either with client storage or remote servers. You want off-premises copies of your backups anyway.