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.
Looks awesome. Would you ever consider replacing the server with a cloud hosted solution? I know it kinda defeats the point of hosting it yourself, but wouldn’t it be easier/cheaper/more flexible? Of course it could also be slower to transfer data.
I have a project on mind and I was planning on using nomnoml directly. https://kroki.io/ seems to a better way to interact with it. Thank you for sharing.
I enjoy making diagrams, and I spent as much time on this as I did because my internet has been out for 2 days and counting and it was an offline tool I already had. Nevertheless, thanks for the link to a new tool to look at
Hey. That looks great. How did you mange to make it that pretty?
Just one Question: is your Modem really part of VLAN 1? I am running a pretty similar setup and my modem just runs into my USG and terminates my internet connection there (so my public IP is at my USG).
Good point, mine might be the same. I was linking things up from memory since it’s been >1year since I last had the server interface up, and I can’t remember how the modem was represented now that you mention it - I’ll have to fix that up
Good point, possibly - I haven’t set one up before (new house has a wider range to cover) so I threw it in the diagram and didn’t think further. I’ll fix it up :)
My Home Automation and Home Assistant brain is asking “Why two concurrent Zigbee networks?”
Phillips Hue is based on Zigbee and should work with your Conbee setup. Running them separately weakens both of them. Especially since the line of sight that light bulbs have makes them some of the best Zigbee routers in your household.
You’re definitely right, I’m going to remove the Hue hub and connect everything to the ConBee. They were separated before because Hue came first, and I didn’t want to rebuild my lighting setup at the time. HA automations were set up to use Hue-side groups, rather than HA-side groups. The thought hadn’t occurred to me yet that I can unify them now - but I definitely will.
I did think I remembered that Hue bulbs don’t work properly as ZigBee routers, but could be wrong there
The only bulbs I know of that don’t are SengLED bulbs because it was a deliberate (and misguided) choice by the manufacturer. I have some Hue bulbs mixed in with my network and they work the same as everything else.
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.
I see you have a container for a Space Engineers server, would you mind telling me what you are using? I would love to have a container for it instead of running torch on the desktop.
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Looks awesome. Would you ever consider replacing the server with a cloud hosted solution? I know it kinda defeats the point of hosting it yourself, but wouldn’t it be easier/cheaper/more flexible? Of course it could also be slower to transfer data.
Fast data is priority 1, and learning how to host and administrate is priority 2, so I wouldn’t consider it - but it’s a fair question!
I hope you’re generating your diagram from code and not editing it by hand like a caveman? If not I suggest https://kroki.io/
I have a project on mind and I was planning on using nomnoml directly. https://kroki.io/ seems to a better way to interact with it. Thank you for sharing.
unga bunga
I enjoy making diagrams, and I spent as much time on this as I did because my internet has been out for 2 days and counting and it was an offline tool I already had. Nevertheless, thanks for the link to a new tool to look at
Hey. That looks great. How did you mange to make it that pretty? Just one Question: is your Modem really part of VLAN 1? I am running a pretty similar setup and my modem just runs into my USG and terminates my internet connection there (so my public IP is at my USG).
Thanks! Too much spare time on the weekend, haha
Good point, mine might be the same. I was linking things up from memory since it’s been >1year since I last had the server interface up, and I can’t remember how the modem was represented now that you mention it - I’ll have to fix that up
Should the wifi range extenders be represented as an extension of the APs?
Good point, possibly - I haven’t set one up before (new house has a wider range to cover) so I threw it in the diagram and didn’t think further. I’ll fix it up :)
Thanks, now I know exactly how to hack you.
My Home Automation and Home Assistant brain is asking “Why two concurrent Zigbee networks?”
Phillips Hue is based on Zigbee and should work with your Conbee setup. Running them separately weakens both of them. Especially since the line of sight that light bulbs have makes them some of the best Zigbee routers in your household.
You’re definitely right, I’m going to remove the Hue hub and connect everything to the ConBee. They were separated before because Hue came first, and I didn’t want to rebuild my lighting setup at the time. HA automations were set up to use Hue-side groups, rather than HA-side groups. The thought hadn’t occurred to me yet that I can unify them now - but I definitely will.
I did think I remembered that Hue bulbs don’t work properly as ZigBee routers, but could be wrong there
The only bulbs I know of that don’t are SengLED bulbs because it was a deliberate (and misguided) choice by the manufacturer. I have some Hue bulbs mixed in with my network and they work the same as everything else.
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.
I see you have a container for a Space Engineers server, would you mind telling me what you are using? I would love to have a container for it instead of running torch on the desktop.
Howdy! I have used this one in the past: mmmaxwwwell