I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Portainer - For docker containers.
AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.
HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation
SearXNG - private search.
Whoogle - private search.
Shaarli - Bookmarks.
youtube-dl - downloading videos.
PaperlessNGX - document storage.
Trilium Notes - notes app
These are the ones I can’t live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.
Parties.
Is very nice as a personal messenger (WhatsApp replacement) for friends and family. It uses XMPP.
DNS. It’s always DNS
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
Smart garden sounds amazing! My girlfriend would love that… Maybe I’ll set that up with her!
Yes I actually have two of them. My backyard has three outdoor moisture sensors, so it can know if it’s moist enough. It has a drop irrigation system connected to regular plastic pressure for tubing. It has two zones that can be controlled with two solenoids. It also has a 12V pump. All of that is powered by a 12V power supply and controlled by a four zone relay board. Remember to turn the power off to your outdoor sensors so that they don’t destroy themselves when you’re not sensing. You can also add a flow sensor to measure your water consumption.
As someone who has no idea how to do any of this, I think I might need to learn…
If you can do python and you can wire one part to one part, one part at a time, it’s not hard, at least to me. Get the analog sensor, connect it to the analog to digital converter, connect all of their power to a relay, connect the relay and the converter to the pi, connect that to power. Then use Python to check the value in a loop, forever.
I was considering a smart garden setup as well. I ended up going with a dumb version that has no dependency on any electrical power: Blumat. They’re from Austria, if i recall correctly. They feed water as the plants consume it.
The Blumat “carrots” are porous and as the soil dries, pressure becomes negative and opens up the switch that controls the feed water line, which then drips water onto the soil until its reached the calibrated moisture level which closes the switch.
Not “self-hosted” in the traditional sense but definitely hosted in the primitive sense.
My larger system is entirely 12V power and is connected directly into a 2-panel 24V solar system with battery.
But entirely mechanical without external input like power is a really good idea.
Those sound really useful. I like the no power aspect that just works.
Hey that sounds amazing, may I ask what moisture sensors you are using?
Edit: also automating sensor power draw sounds like something fun to work on. I’d love to test if having them power on just before or shortly before taking a reading and power off is feasible. Or if they need more time to get an accurate reading, finding the most optimal power cycle schedule to prolong sensor life while being able to take measurements at sensible times.
ACEIRMC 2set Soil Moisture… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JSND12L?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
They’re just resistive electrodes with an analog sense of the conductivity of the soil, which is linearly correlated with moisture. It does this by applying a voltage to one side and sensing the current load to the other probe. This is exactly the same as electroplating, so if you keep them on 100% of the time, one will essentially dissolve in the dirt.
Instead, I run their power through a relay. I turn one relay on, it turns on all three of my sensors, I wait a few seconds, take three reads off each, one second apart, take the avg of each sensor, and record that. You can the save that to a timeseries database and host that locally too. Then plot that with Graphana.
To read the analog values, I use this: HiLetgo 3pcs ADS1115 16 Bit 16… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPFLSMX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Now that you have logs, you can check moisture levels before activating your irrigation.
The next step is I have a set of float sensors in the rain barrel, towards the bottom. If the bottom one indicates empty it activates a solenoid to refill from the tap until the top one indicates full. They’re about two inches apart.
Honestly? You already hit it. The pihole. Maybe a firewall/router so that they can switch away from the comcast “modem” to a small computer running opnsense and then either ubiquity or omada for easily upgraded wifi support.
For just about anything else? I would honestly say “no” to the “average joe”. Unless you are running a backup solution, it is just a liability. And a backup solution involves offsite backups of the important stuff. Just having a NAS is worse than worthless unless it is solely used for data you don’t want to keep at which point… why do you have it? Because hardware failures will happen and, unless you are regularly checking your dashboards, they will happen in rapid succession.
I agree that an “average joe” shouldn’t be selfhosting unless they firstly understand that they are responsible for their data and are making proper backups.
unless you are regularly checking your dashboards, they will happen in rapid succession
One thing I disagree with though, you shouldn’t be having to regularly check dashboards. And I understand this goes beyond the “average joe” realm of things, but you should have notifications setup to notify you if something is not working. Personally, I use SMTP to Telegram because almost every service has an email option for notifications, but I want to be notified instantly.
So when my healthchecks script runs and fails I’m instantly notified if one of my containers is down. If my snapraid scrub/sync fails to run or has errors or my borg backup script fails to run or has errors, I’m instantly notified of it. If my ddns script fails to update, again, I’m instantly notified of it. I’m even notified if the server has higher CPU load averages or RAM usage than expected of it, and of drive space running out, and of SMART failures. I’m even notified whenever a login to my OpenMediaVault dashboard occurs. My Omada Controller also has different network notifications, and so does HomeAssistant for different integrations.
Basically, I will be notified if any problems arise that need my attention… you shouldn’t be depending on scheduling your time to look at dashboards to ensure services are running properly. And if you setup a good notification system, you can just set and forget your services, mostly anyway.
I use uptime kuma for monitoring - really easy to set up and very versatile
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I mean, that is just another way of checking your dashboards. So is just futzing around semi-regularly.
Unless you are dealing with a high availability setup, it matters a lot less whether you do a push/pull model for notifications so long as you are regularly checking then. The issue is when you have people who just buy a synology or a qnap, shove it in the attic for two years, and then realize they lost three drives AND are infected by ransomware.
I mean, that is just another way of checking your dashboards.
It’s not another way of checking dashboards… dashboards don’t even come into play for me with this notification system. If I get a notification that my backup script didn’t run, I’m dropping straight to an SSH session and checking logs and fixing it. There is no dashboard in this equation.
Unless you are dealing with a high availability setup, it matters a lot less whether you do a push/pull model for notifications so long as you are regularly checking then.
My home is not high availability, it’s just me and my wife, that doesn’t change the fact that this is a better solution over having to constantly check in on services. Also, high availability isn’t the reason for this, it’s having the peace of mind things are working, and doing literally nothing to know it. Right now, I know all my services are working, and how do I know? Because I haven’t received a notification that told me there is a problem so I know, everything is working. Do you know if all your services are working right now? No, not unless you actively check in on them right now. That’s the difference between my way and your way of doing it. I always know the status of my services, you don’t know unless you check in on them.
But listen, I’m not trying to persuade you, if you like to take time to check in and babysit your services to make sure everything is running correctly instead of setup a simple notification system, that’s your preference, but in my opinion it’s not the best way to do it. This is about working smarter instead of harder.
For me it’s 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I’m dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:
- Maps
- Calendar
- Markdown editor (I’m using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
- I haven’t tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
- a bunch of other stuff I’ve never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.
Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren’t in the cloud.
Trillium notes and Bitwarden.
The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things
Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.
Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
If you are into RPGs Foundry VTT is a great replacement for roll 20 or any of the other virtual tabletops.
An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
- Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
- Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I’ve forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.
I should get back into RSS. I used to follow a ton of web comics way back in the day, but once google RSS shut down I never picked it back up. I’ll look into Miniflux, thanks.
Portainer and a decent docker lab box. I use a template list from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xneo1/portainer_templates/master/Template/template.json as a base kit, but beyond that creating a pile of compose scripts and having the ability to put up and down services from a fairly simple GUI just to test them out is amazing. It’s the simplest way I’ve found to just try an app, and either keep or toss it with minimal cleanup and reset of a box.
So many good comments and stuff to try out. Gonna safe this for later and research a bit more!
