Oh this post could become very large. So I’m going to try to keep it brief. Perhaps I’ll pad it out with a few more posts over the next few days or weeks. But here goes.
My home server set up for 2022.
First of all, what’s all this for. Why do I need a home server? What is it used for?
My requirements for a home server have changed a lot over the past 20 years. Home servers for me started as Email and web servers then progressed into DHCP and DNS servers as well as firewalls with big noisy and powerfull beasts running under my stairs then running in self contained cabinits that were custom built for the task.
However, About five years ago, I decided I would move away from hosting my own DHCP and DNS servers and instead I would just go back to off the shelf solutions. Such as those provided by my ISP router and the Ubiquity controller for my wireless network. That has been fine. In fact, it has worked very well. However, it required a few small servers from time to time for testing technologies or ideas that I had. Raspberry Pi 4 has been my tiny compute platform of choice. But this started to get a bit messy. For example: I got more into home automation. So a Pi was dedicated to that. Previously, a Pi was running my Ubiquity Unifi controller and the code for some of my light automation. I was also frustrated a lot by the lack of decent customization in relation to DNS on the Fritzbox router. So here’s what I’m running right now.

• PiHole for DNS. This is primarily working as an add blocker for all phones, tablets and computers on the network.
• HomeAssistant. This handles all my home automation. I no longer even have a Philips or Aqara gateway / hub. I’m instead using a Combee ii USB stick as the Zigbee gateway. This will require some more explination.
• The Unifi controller software for my Ubiquity wireless access points.
• RClone. This is handling the processing and access to my cloud files.
• Navidrone. This is my new audio server software. I’ll need to explain why that is needed in another post.
• Bonob. This is a bridge between Navidrone and my Sonos. Used to let me play the media directly on my Sonos. Okay. I’m going to give you a quick overview of what I’m doing here because in my opinion, it’s kind of cool.

I’m running a large NAS in the house. But it’s getting old. It’s probably 8 years old by now. But it’s reasonably large. Running at 8tb usable storage space in RAID 5. Replacing that NAS isn’t something I’m very interested in doing for two reasons. Firstly. The cost would be huge. But second, it’s a big noisy thing. I could go for a quieter model but to get that kind of storage from solid state disks would cost a lot of money. So again. I suppose it comes down to cost. I’m going to need a NAS. That is unavoidable. But But thanks to an idea from a friend, I will need a lot less space.

So. How am I going to use less space while not removind a lot of files? Simple. Cloud storage. But that leads to another problem. How do you integrate cloud storage into your every day work flows and systems. For exmaple. If you store your music on Google apps or OneDrive, how does Sonos access it? It’s simple. It can’t. Not directly anyway. So here’s where for me it get’s interesting.

Firstly, understand that I wouldn’t just dump all the music up there. Because I have privacy concerns. I have aquired this music on CD over a very long time. It is mine but I would have a concern that if I start uploading 2tb of music, Microsoft or Google are going to start getting suspicious. Actualy, this is a founded concern. Paul Thurrott had this problem with OneDrive about four years ago. So I encrypt the files before sending them to the cloud service of choice. This really complicates things because now there’s really no hope of something like my Sonos reading the files because now they are on the cloud and they are also encrypted.

So. here’s how I get around it:

1. I use RClone to encrypt and copy all files before I copy them from the old NAS up to the cloud storage.
2. Now I mount the encrypted volume from RClone.
3. I have set Navidrome up to look at this volume for it’s music
4. Bonob then connects to Navidrome.
5. Sonos is configured to use Bonob as a music service. Bonob is connected into Navidrome so the flow is: Sonos asks for musi c from Bonob. Bonob get’s that music from Navidrome. Navidrome get’s the file from the encrypted mountpoint by RClone. This encrypted mountpoint in turn goes to the cloud storage. All this happens within a maximum of four seconds. But although this sounds like a lot of time, it’s really not and also that 4 seconds is only really an issue when starting playback for the first time. When the Sonos is moving to the next track, it allows plenty of time to pre-cach the next track before playing it.

Have you read this far? Good. You’re officially a geek / nerd. Well done. I’m genuinely proud of you. There’s one more thing to just edge the geek factor up another notch.

Twenty years ago, this would have been running on several physical servers. Ten years ago it would have been running on one big beafy computer with several virtual machines dedicated to each function. In this generation of containers, this is all running on a mini-pc with an I7 processor, 16GB RAM and a 512GB NVME drive. Before the enterprise compute gurus jump out of your skin to tell me that there’s no redundancy here. You are absolutely right. But settle yourself down for a second. I’m going to talk about redundancy and backups now in a second.

Everything is running on Docker containers. So once I have backups do I really care if the computer dies? well, yeah. I would care because this little computer is really nice and it runs way faster than I had expected. But realistically if it dies, all I do is build a new host operating system, bring my docker containers back over to it, bring the containers up, configure networking and everything is back again. It’s not an enterprise environment with 100% up time. The main thing that matters is that it’s cheap to run, quiet, runs at a cool temperature and if something really goes wrong, I can update easily. I have the encryption password and salt saved somewhere safe completely disconnected from the server so once I can decrypt the encrypted backups, all is good. … I hope.