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+layout = "post"
+title = "Thoughts on running my own homeserver"
+date = "2024-06-09T09:47:30+02:00"
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+
+Since finally moving out of "shared housing" and into "my own" apartment I've
+been thinking about finally setting up a homeserver, something I've been
+wanting to do for quite a few years now.
+In preparation for this I've kept my old workstation when I upgraded to my
+current one late 2021. It's one I've had since around 2014 and was getting a
+little slow, but I decided it will be more than enough for a homeserver at some
+point in the future.
+
+Fast forward to a little less than a year ago, I purchased some missing parts
+for the server, mostly storage, and got it up and running with ZFS. I decided
+to cheap out on the boot storage so it's currently running on spinning rust
+instead of flash storage, but I don't really mind.
+
+The server is equipped with an [Intel
+i5-4690K](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/80811/intel-core-i54690k-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz/specifications.html)
+(4C/4T), 16 GB of DDR3 RAM and a total of 20 TB of HDD storage (2x 2 TB + 2x 8
+TB, each set of drives set up in a mirrored ZFS pool, bringing the usable
+storage space down to 10 TB).
+It's running Proxmox (using the 2 TB drives as boot and VM storage drives)
+with a TrueNAS VM to act as a, well, NAS (using the 8 TB drives as storage
+drives, passed through to the VM so it can manage them directly).
+
+While idle, the server draws pretty much exactly 61 Watts, and while under load
+around 85 Watts. With the price of 29 ct/kWh at a constant 61W this would cost
+about 13€ per month in electricity. Calculating in around a quarter of the time
+under load, this goes up to about 17€ a month for electricity. This, of course,
+doesn't include the cost of acquiring (some of) the hardware.
+
+My motivation for wanting a homeserver in the first place was that I want to
+host my data at home, not in a cloud, and run services for myself. The former
+is done with the TrueNAS VM, the second with various VMs and Linux Containers
+(LXC).
+
+Now, what services am I hosting exactly? Arguably, the most important one is an
+OpenBSD VM acting as a firewall and a DHCP and DNS server. It's responsible for
+giving my other VMs static IP addresses and making them accessible through DNS.
+The firewall is responsible for setting up a subnet for all Proxmox machines as
+well as a DMZ for services that are or could be vulnerable for various reasons.
+
+With basic infrastructure out of the way, other services I'm running are a
+Wireguard server, Jellyfin for media streaming (primarily audio and video),
+[rss-email](https://sr.ht/~witcher/rss-email/), a Minecraft server and a Mumble
+server. Of course, all of this is running for myself and just a select number
+of friends.
+
+Almost all VMs and Containers are set up with Ansible Playbooks stored in a
+private repository. There is a huge trend in moving to NixOS and Nix for
+reproducible servers but, after trying it for about half a year before that, I
+ultimately dislike it. It forces me to use NixOS whereas Ansible allows me to
+use any distro of my choice that supports Python. There are other reasons I
+dislike Nix, such as the language and the absolutely terrible or non-existent
+documentation, but I won't dig into that here. If you're interested, there are
+more than enough blog posts about this.
+
+Recently, I've been meaning to set up paperless-ngx, which I did do, but in the
+end I realised it's a bit pointless for me as I don't really need any of its
+features. It's nice and all to be able to search through your documents, but I
+never actually have had to really do this in my life before and if I had to, I
+would find a specific document in about a minute as I sort my documents and
+don't have that many to begin with. Thus I decided to not bother maintaining a
+paperless-ngx instance, at least until it's actually worth it for me to do so.
+
+While trying out paperless-ngx I couldn't help but wonder if all of this is
+really worth it to me. I liked learning while setting all of this up and it's
+nice to have my own server, but the server is essentially never under full load
+and I couldn't help but notice the trend of hosting everything using containers
+(i.e. Docker, Podman, etc.) which I personally just can't get behind and have
+no fun maintaining.
+Ideally, I would like what I currently have but a little downscaled. Then
+again, that would cost much more money than I would pay for just the
+electricity bill so that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
+
+In the end I'm happy that I do have all of this set up and will keep it around.
+There are still things to do, like migrating my Nextcloud instance or finally
+finding an alternative as I'm incredibly unhappy with Nextcloud. It also gives
+me a space to play around and try things which I value a lot.