this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
32 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40329 readers
419 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I've got a Lenovo M720q running as my main server in my home and it's more than powerful enough for anything I could be doing right now. However, I also have a Le Potato lying around that I'd like to do something with. Any suggestions?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)
  1. DNS resolver, like pi-hole, unbound with adguard, diversion, etc.
  2. RMS server: a lot of Remote Desktop software has the option to install a listener on a low power device elsewhere on the network that can use wake-on-lan to access computers within the network without keeping everything on 24-7.
  3. Log aggregator: would be useful for anyone who troubleshoots stuff regularly, but historical info of any kind can come in handy.
    Simplest form might be a scribe server. Network gear often has an option to send logs to a particular URL, so if you added the scribe server IP/port to the field you’d have historical network logs.
  4. Additional loggers: could also be run on-device, such as a wifi connectivity checker, smart home or energy monitoring state data, decibel meter with USB microphone
  5. RADIUS server for managing enterprise WPA keys
  6. Mobile home: due to the size and power draw, when paired with a hotspot and battery the potato could be useful as a mobile service repeater, a VPN client that deploys your home services on the go (e.g. in a vehicle, hotel room, family/friends’ houses, etc) to arbitrary client devices. If you use the same SSID/PW and encryption type, personal devices would use it automatically during travel.
  7. Home theater box like kodi or jellyfin client

At the level of individual apps, the list explodes. Many progressive web apps can be hosted essentially for free on the potato, so you could shunt your always-on services to this machine to allow low power states on a beefier machine. For example:

  1. Network management or security software like Fing
  2. Low throughput NAS or incremental backup management server like rdiff, TimeMachine, etc
  3. inventory management like partkeeper, storaji, etc
  4. Smart home bridges like homeassistant or homebridge
  5. Bookmark aggregator or landing page like heimdall, raindrop, pinalist, etc
  6. Retro game emulators or ROM libraries like retropie
  7. Photo libraries like photoprism
  8. Book libraries like calibre-web

Edit: list subitem formatting messed up
Edit: add common micro services, mobile deployment
Edit: add home theater suggestion
Edit: add always-on and PWA examples

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Add to the list running a Kodi home theater box.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Since we’re open sourcing your comment (🇨🇳 our comment, comrade), may I suggest you split the list? A lot of the services are things that can run on an SBC but OP already has extra computing power on a mini PC, so are likely better hosted there. A subset of them offer clear benefits being hosted in a small appliance.

Edit: to be clear, I’m thinking OP wouldn’t consider items 7-13 a strong enough case to spin a separate machine.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 2 days ago

Good point, comrade. App services split to separate list.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)