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Do you guys run a home server? If so what do you self host?
Right now I'm only running a raspberry pi 3 b+ for Pihole and Plex (I wish I could run Jellyfin, but no dice on ARM).
I also have a VPS where I host Alltube and Zerobin for personal use.
I have a few. They're almost all raspberry pi's running Rasbian. The usual media centre/NAS/torrent/test web platform machines, but my most interesting one is the garden server, which monitors my indoor garden and controls all the hardware therein. There has been some interest expressed elsewhere on tildes about my indoor growing setup and I'll put together a more in-depth post about it soon.
100% interested. I want to set up an outdoor garden to grow hot peppers, but I know myself, and unless its almost completely automated, they will all die horrible deaths. Luckily I'm also very into tinkering and digging holes. Any insight would be much appreciated.
here you go. Happy to try to answer any questions you might have.
How do you run NAS? I thought about setting it up so I have another backup place (so far I only encrypt & backup to google drive, but I have to do it manually). I'm worried about SD card lifetime, so I thought about plugging in a flash drive (I just need to store few GB of important files when zipped, no movies or such), thought it's not probably ideal. I don't want to use hard drive, because it's big and loud - on the other hand, it's cheap, big and has basically unlimited lifespan.
"NAS" is a very strong word for what I have, really. I have a USB HD attached to my HTPC, so it is technically "network attached storage" but it's little more than that. I occasionally run rsync jobs to that system for backup, and it's where my torrent server downloads to. The drive is in my front room but because it's mostly in standby it doesn't really make any noise until I attempt to read/write to it. When it's serving TV/movies the sound is covered by the noise of the TV.
You're right about SD card/flash drive reliability, but if you don't need a lot of space why not get an SSD? As far as I understand it SSD lifetimes are comparable to spinning disks these days, and smaller ones are pretty cheap.
That sounds very interesting!
I run a bunch of stuff on a machine that's probably way underpowered. All of these run under docker, with docker-compose so I don't have to remember my volume bindings and port mappings.
I also use it for general Linux work like having a remote shell. I'll occasionally make a chroot if I want to test some random combination of packages that I don't want to remember and can happily nuke afterwards.
The machine itself is an old, old media PC that was retired from service when we discovered it couldn't actually play any useful media. It has two cores (no hyperthreading) and 3gb of RAM, so obviously the performance is not stellar. It's running Debian 9 since it's comfy and stable, but ultimately that only matters for what I personally use it for since all my services just run under Docker.
Have you looked into wireguard at all? It's way lighter than OpenVPN. Scales almost 0(1) with clients as far as I can tell.
Might have to move to a more edgy Debian for it though. As it's a kernel module.
I've never heard of it, actually. Looking into it, it seems fairly simple to use, and even has an app in F-Droid, which is a big tick for me. Debian-wise, the installation instructions just add unstable as a source and install it from there, so I doubt it would be an insurmountable issue.
If it's a socket 775 processor you could get a "modified" 771 Xeon (assuming your motherboard chipset supports that). Something like this would probably run just fine.
I'm quite surprised at that price! I have no idea what the existing socket is of course, but that would be a pretty considerable improvement. Thanks for the link, it's definitely worth considering.
Yeah, it's super cheap!
I'm getting my parent's old desktop soon and right now it's got a socket 775 celeron in it and thankfully the G41 chipset supports slotting in that Xeon, which is what I'll slot in (along with an air cooler from aliexpress, can't be worse than the old intel cooler)
I've got a homelab that runs 1x freeNAS for storage, and 3x custom built servers (for low power usage) that run a proxmox cluster with failover.
The actual services are (all running Debian):
My most recent project on my homelab was to add redundancy to everything possible. I have redundant servers, switches, and disc drives, but lack redundancy on the power (one UPS only), NAS server (one server, but it runs 6x4Tb in RAID 10), and internet connection. I just couldn't justify the costs to duplicate those tasks, when failure only means going offline, but no actual loss of information (configs are all backed up).
It's a fun little setup that has filled my 24U rack, but only uses <200W, and is fairly quiet. Always gives me something new to learn though. And no matter where I am, I can work on until I break the remote connection (which happens way too often).
How hard was it to set up an email server? I've read before that it's tricky to get everything working correctly.
And sorry to be nosy, any details on your lower power servers? I currently use a Intel NUC as a Hyper-V host (that I'm hoping to move over to a linux distro within the next few months) along with separate machine with a FX-8150 that I think are a bit power hungry from what I remember.
Email was the hardest by far.
So a bit of context for why email is difficult before I tell you how it is difficult, which doesn't occur to some people.
Email is a federated system, so in theory, anyone can host their own server with their own users, and then the servers talk to each other, passing the messages from their users to other servers, who then pass it to their users. It's why a outlook user can send email to a gmail user. But such a system can be exploited, because a user that is on an arbitrary external server doesn't really have a way to be verified. So we need checks to make sure that emails cannot be forged (otherwise I could set up a server, and send an email with my address being "president@whitehouse.gov"). Ideally, to prevent MITM, we need messages to be encrypted too. But we also have spam, which can follow all protocols to the letter, but where the message itself is the issue. How do we automatically differentiate these messages from messages that we do want, without creating a whitelist that prevents new email servers from jumping through hoops for literally every other email server? There are many opening in such a federated system that can be exploited, and is partly the reason why federated systems in general aren't terribly popular.
So to start off with setting up an email server, you require an IMAP service that is set up for the email accounts you want. In my case, I wildcard all addresses into a single account (e.g. ebay@example.net, amazon@example.net for ebay and amazon logins respectively). Because most IMAP services are design to be flexible, there are often many configuration setups and options to specify how to store incoming emails. Multiple users? Multiple accounts forwarding to one user? Storage restrictions? virus scanning? All highly configurable to support use cases from 1-10 users, up to thousands users with redundancies from network layers 1 thru 7, multiple domains, etc. And to combat SPAM, the IMAP service will look at like a dozen different things such as certificates, domain names, white/blacklists that are constantly updated, if the relay is authorised to send on behalf of that domain (according to DNS records), reverse DNS lookup, message & header content, and more. So receiving email is quite complex.
Sending emails requires the other side of the coin - getting other server's trust. Setting up certificates, setting up the domain such that it specifies which IP address can be trusted to represent the domain, having a good history from the specified IP/domain, and a few more. But security is an issue, because SMTP is simply a relay, and if misconfigured (often the default config), it can relay messages from less reputable domains (user@spam.net might want to send a message to user@gmail.com, but rather than sending directly to gmail, they try to use your relay, thereby potentially using your good credentials for their nefarious purposes). If the SMTP is misconfigured, it is also possible to forge mail from that domain (e.g. change the 'from address' from user@spam.net to admin@yourdomain.net). Each of these misconfigs that gets abused by an attacker reflects poorly on your domain's history, eventually getting you on blacklists, and unable to send email.
Another facet is reliability. If your server goes offline for whatever reason when someone sends you an email, then you may never get that message. In theory there a bunch of retransmit attempts that should happen (up to a month later or something by memory), but not all servers abide by the protocol.
So yes, it can be complex, but that is exactly why I did it. My homelab is for learning, and email is a very interesting set of protocols, especially considering how important it is to the world. I now use my email server for all non-essential emails, and am reasonably confident I could fix it in a timely manner if something went tits up. I did specify many problems above, but they are all mostly solved for people that want to host their own. The only one i have trouble with is a reverse DNS entry, which my ISP doesn't provide me with.
Oh, you need to set up DNS, and as i'm sure you've heard when there's a problem - "It's always DNS" (though it is another quite interesting protocol itself).
As for the power usage, I just run 2x 24 port GbE switches that dont require fans, and the cpu/mobo are fairly lightweight DDR4-era consumer hardware. Pretty much cpu/ram/mobo/network card, and a cheap SSD to run the proxmox OS only (network storage over GbE for the virtual servers). Commercial servers have many more 'enterprisey bits and pieces' on them that all suck a little bit of power, which is not much concern to a large business, but made them a bad fit for my efficiency goals. SoC is probably good also, but I dont have any experience with them. But the main thing to remember is that most CPUs will draw almost no power if they can reach idle states, so a fast CPU that works fast, and gets to idle quicker will use less power than a slower one that constantly sits in a higher state. And if your servers are mostly idling, then the power will come from the mobo/expansion cards etc rather than the CPU. I also have a xeon that has no support for iGPUs, and there is no dedicated GPU (unless i'm working on it), so that thing idles like a laptop.
Basically, buy things that aren't noisy, because noisy means it has fast fans, which is probably due to lots of heat generated. Switches and routers are an example of passive cooled devices being lower power. But obviously check that your performance requirements are met too.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that doesn't sound like a failing of federated systems inherently, just systems where the protocol lets you spoof arbitrary "From:" headers.
Well, a federated system is pretty much a bunch of servers running in conjunction with each other, but without any hierarchy in which to judge trust. There is no central database of who owns which domain, unless you resort to hacking around with a separate service (putting TXT and MX entries in a DNS service). It has a usable workaround, but it isn't as 'neat' as something like discord for example, where one entity can specify who is/isn't trusted on their service, without requiring DNS records to be changed.
How come federated services like Mastodon don't seem to suffer from that kinda hacky workaround-ish verification?
It's been a while since I looked at the architecture (so correct me if I'm wrong), but IIRC Mastodon doesn't really have the same concept of "relays" that SMTP does.
Each instance/server is authoritative for its own content, and reaches out to each other instance directly to get or share content. If server A is asking server B for the latest updates, B won't respond with the content from server C. If A wants to hear from the users over at C, it must ask C directly rather than waiting for just anyone to say "hey, here's the news from C" and trusting that they're telling the whole truth.
You may have me there; I don't know enough about it to be able to give an answer sorry. I could make some guesses, but without installing it I can't give experience-based knowledge.
I've got a beefy server with 32 cores and 196GB of memory, a 1KW power supply, and 32 drive bays. The only bad part is those drive bays are full of ever-failing seagate 1TB disks that are 10+ years old (from my old file server). Let's just say my raid protection levels are very aggressive. I have about 8TB actual in there. This is my VMWare lab, running the esx hypervisor. It's full of a ton of VMs.
I have an EQ server, a WoW server, 10 video encoding VMs for crunching a lot of video in a hurry, a wide array of various linux distros I was fiddling with, a domain controller. There's a 'ripper' VM tied into the many DVD drives so I can just pop in a disc and have it auto-imaged. Mostly this is where I play with new technology when I have the urge or the need to learn something.
I have a Synology DS1815 which is the main 'data' storage that replaced my old file server, packed with 4TB WD Reds. I've a pfSense firewall running on a small computer built just for that and network switches all over the house. Every TV has its own HTPC attached and tied into my Synology via NFS.
I don't actually have any internet-facing servers anymore. I'm stuck on a VZW 'unlimited' internet connection at the moment and that 70kbps is just too limp to be good at that. I've been meaning to set up a full Owncloud infrastructure and once the fiber or 5g wins the race to get to me I'll dive into that. There are so many other interesting toys being talked about in this thread I can see I've got some catching up to do.
Jesus, that's some enterprise grade stuff
How much does this whole set up cost in electricity per month?
Have you looked at Nextcloud? A large portion of the dev team (including the founder) split off from OwnCloud after it started focusing more and more on "paid" stuff (themes, services, etc).
Also from what I've read due to most of the dev team splitting of NC is more actively developed.
If Nextcloud is a decommercialized Owncloud, that's all I needed to hear. ;)
That server takes a bit of coin to run, but I've got the power management dialed up to 11 and it's really quite good at throttling itself down to what it needs rather than the full 1KW. I built it with that in mind. It comes in around $10/mo in the bills.
Huh... that's... a lot less than I thought. That's amazing!
Yeah, ownCloud has a limited "Standard" edition and a paid "Enterprise" edition, whereas Nextcloud only has one edition with optional paid support from NC's side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud#History_of_the_fork_from_ownCloud
It is mostly idle all the time. If a system is configured properly, idle should be pretty close to 'off' in the power use. When I get those VMs encoding and cap all 32 cores the fans get busy.
Ah, makes sense. Most of my experience with managing servers comes from the last few months where I worked with 24/7 loaded servers, so I never really thought that if there's no real load, there's no real power usage.
I'd like to, but l'm not really an lT nut and have no idea where to start. I'd like to run a custom image uploader + personal wiki or something.
In all honesty you could get a simple web app up and running with a few hours now a days - thanks to docker.
The bigger issue is if your ISP gives you dynamic IP addresses, in which case you'd need to use a tool that hooks into a dynamic dns service.
So I have a dynamic IP, but noip has a program, that also runs on my Pi, that updates my address to whatever my IP changed to.
I'll probably need a "hosting stuff on server For Dummies"-For Dummies style book to get me started on this but l'll keep this in mind.
I can give you a TL;DR version
*Install a Linux distro (Ubuntu or CentOS are the most popular ones for servers)
*Install Docker and Docker-Compose (Find a guide for whatever distro you go with)
*I recommend going with DokuWiki, it's what I used in the past (https://hub.docker.com/r/bitnami/dokuwiki/)
*Follow instructions on the docker hub page
And you're done for local use.
For external use you'd need to forward the DokuWiki ports (80 and 443) on your router to point to your server machine.
Once you start throwing more web apps into the mix it gets a bit more complex (you'd need a reverse proxy set up for it to not be a tangled mess)
I've tried setting this up using an old RPi I had lying around, probably one of the first settings. Seems pretty slow, not sure if it'd host whatever tools I need nicely. It's probably just too low-power for that. I guess I'll have to look into something else that's also got wifi capabilities since patch cabling my way into the Pi is a huge hassle.
I have a NAS (DIY) at home and a dedicated box at Hetzner. The NAS runs largely media applications like Plex and organized all my data (29TB available, 15TB used), the dedicated box hosts a variety of services; an Airsonic server for my music, though I'll have to move that to my NAS eventually, a Mastodon instance, Gitea for Code, a e2e encrypted pastebin, Nextcloud (with passthrough to the NAS), invoicing application, TTRSS for RSS/Atom feed reading and some more.
I'll be moving some of this stuff into local territory on the NAS where it's closer to the data (like Airsonic server).
THe NAS itself is a 5~ year old desktop computer stuffed into a NORCO case, which I obtained for very cheap. It runs Unraid as a NAS OS because I need the flexibility it offers. I want to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB RAM in the near future since I'm running tight. Also a CPU upgrade or some transcoding GPU would be a nice to have at some point.
I have 2 raspberry pi's
I will be adding a third server shortly to act as a Network Intrusion Detection System. Another Pi would be plenty powerful to do most of this for my home network but some of the visualisation stack (ELK) looks like it would need more than 2Gb of RAM to run properly so this might mean that I need a slightly more powerful host.
Have you looked into Odroid single board computers? Similar to Raspberry Pis but generally with better specs.
Thank you! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
The Odroid H2 looks dope to me for a next tier up from running stuff on a Pi. It's got two ethernet ports so it could also work as a nice firewall/router.
I had the Odroid C1, which I used variously from a media center to a pihole. While it was plenty powerful, it was also unreliable. For example, it would sometimes it would randomly lose Ethernet connectivity, which would cause problems on the network if it was assigning DHCP addresses. The only solution was a reboot, and thanks to no network connection, that meant killing the power. Obviously not an ideal situation.
That said, this H2 model looks fantastic. I'm super excited by Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10 working out of the box. The C1 needed special images provided by Hardkernel, and they were never up-to-date. I may have to give Odroid another shot.
I'd love to know more about the torrent pi. What does it do? How do you find a VPN that lets you run torrents through it? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
I use the transmission-daemon cli torrent client. This runs a web server which allows me to manage torrents via the browser - I can add new torrents and see progress when connected to my network.
The Torrent Pi runs OpenVPN which is configured to use Private Internet Access VPN. Several of their exit nodes support port forwarding which is needed to allow proper seeding. I have a script which runs every 15 minutes to reforward the port to ensure it stays up. I keep meaning to add a dead-man's switch to it to disconnect when the VPN drops but I haven't gotten around to this yet (it doesn't happen too often, really).
Once the torrents are completed they are moved to a specific folder (on a USB drive on the Pi). That folder is available via Samba on my network, so I copy the completed files locally to use as needed.
The advantages are that I can maintain a decent ratio on private trackers (hi bB!) without having to have my everyday computer VPN'd and torrenting (which impacts browsing).
The Pi just sits quietly seeding whilst I manage it via ssh as needed.
I guess the only disadvantage is that I don't think a torrent client really stresses the Pi, but for about £50 it's not a big deal. I suppose I could actually run the torrent client on my PiHole but I don't like the idea of them being on one device because DHCP and DNS is critical day-to-day, whereas torrents aren't.
I have a Dell R720 racked in my garage and symmetrical gigabit Fiber-To-The-Home to feed it.
My Windows PC is always on (powers on automatically after blackouts too) and has media collection in LAN shared folders other devices access. Probably the least "servery" server in the topic. But it just works for my needs. No problems with uptime except blackouts, performance is great, files are on SSD, fans dead silent most of time
I've got a computer basically doing the same thing that I remote log into for various miscellaneous things. The difference is that it randomly crashes and I don't really care enough to find out what is causing them.
It's actually my gaming PC, but I don't play graphics intensive games very much so I usually play on my laptop instead.
Is it overclocked? Mine is (CPU) and there was 1 crash in 2 years. Wanted to go to bios and increase voltage by 0.01V to avoid more crashes but it still didn't crash again and seems fine under tests so that was just a phantom crash...
I don't bother with overclocking. I'm pretty sure it's a software problem. I think that some of the hardware I have running on it may not have very good support for Windows 10.
This is a home/work lab, but I haven’t done anything like this for years and I’m really having fun.
I just got a fanless quad core Celeron with 4 Ethernet ports, I installed pfsense on it which is super freaking cool. I had to set this up to learn a bit about it for work, but now it’s gotten me all nerding out. I setup the FW Rules on it to where devices on the LAN port can only route internet traffic through a vpn service, if the vpn connection is down then no internet.
Next I need to understand if I can setup dynamic DNS by using pfsense, an old domain I own, and my personal AWS account. So I can always go to lab.mydomain.tld and get access to it. I know that is possible, but can I vpn into this network(pfsense has OpenVPN server capabilities too) while it’s connected to the anonymous VPN?
The whole point is that I need remote access to the 2 Intel NUC servers work loaned me which run VMware ESXi, but these servers should only have somewhat anonymized access to the internet.
So I’m learning a bunch about stuff I haven't thought about in about a decade.
Edit: added links
I run my e-mail on a small Soekris machine. It's got an AMD Geode processor and 512MB of RAM. It sips power and has no moving parts. It runs OpenBSD like a dream.
I highly recommend running your own mail server if you have the means. It's easy as long as you keep things simple. I just have Postfix running with Postscreen handling DNS RBLs to block spam, and Dovecot to do IMAP since the rest of my family has no interest in logging into the server directly to get their mail. My server uses like 100MB of RAM tops and doesn't use more than half of the CPU except for when I'm generating TLS keys.
Don't bother with webmail, it's for losers. Don't do virus filtering; have faith in your own ability to not run random crap on your computer.
If your server goes down, the sender's mail server will queue the mail and will redeliver. The RFC dictating mail delivery says servers should retry for like a week if they can't deliver mail.
I'm currently in the process of setting mine up. I have a gnubee nas for storage and then a raspberry pi 3+ which will do the server hosting.
6 raspberry pi’s and a pbx server on an old i3.
I've repurposed an old laptop as a media center/server, it has the following:
I think my next project will be to set up a wiki on it.
Laptops make great homelab servers - built in UPS, low power usage, and quiet. As long as they are cleaned every few years of dust, so that noise/temps stay down.
My old homelab setup actually had 3x 'consumer hardware' servers in a rack, with a laptop hooked up inside it (but not visible through the glass door). I forgot it was there after a couple years, until my email went down and I was like "Huh? where is this server? What is this server?" Took me a while to remember because it was so unobtrusive.
Few small things:
I have a couple more Pi's laying around atm which I plan to use for home automation.
How well does Nextcloud run on the Pi?
I'm guessing you don't use the WebUI. When I tested NC on my Pi the WebUI ran really poorly.
For my purposes it runs fine. Granted I only use it for picture backups from my family's cell phones so even poor performance is fine as long as pictures do indeed get sent to the Pi. I have a script that copies the Nextcloud data over to my primary Ubuntu machine so my weekly backup includes them as well (for offsite/offline backup). I do have the WebUI available and it is slow, however I only use it for configuring user accounts so I don't mind.
I have an old laptop running Nextcloud. I switched from an rPi running Nextcloud because I thought the laptop would be faster but I don’t believe I actually got any speed increases. I might switch back to the rPi.
I had no idea Pihole on a raspberry pi was so popular! I have one running away too. Otherwise, I don't know if this counts, but I use tigervnc over ssh to my home desktop for about half of my computing needs. I have a chromebook / ipad, both of which are used about 90% as a VNC client. Tigervnc isn't good enough to stream movies, but it's good enough for everything else.
I have a VPS, and I'm always looking for more helpful things to do with it. Currently, it just has a page you can curl that returns your public IP, which I use a surprising amount at work.
Currently just a PiHole, but trying out FunkWhale is on the to-do list. Wanted it to be my backup server, but the Pi doesn't have enough juice in it to power my USB3.0 hard drive. So I guess that'll stay on my desktop PC.
A cheap externally powered USB 3.0 hub would allow you to power both the external drive and the pi.
I guess this is considered a homelab but its my friend’s beefy server that he lets me have a vm on. Its just gentoo with ssh for remote development and building large projects + a mail server.
I'd love to, eventually. The way I see it, it renders my costs of running the mere electricity bill, plus the initial charge of build a server hardware.
For my needs – a forum or two (forum RPG kinda thing), my own website, some utilities – I feel like something small, like a Pi, should be more than sufficient.
What are the requirements for such a thing? What is something that a noob like myself should know about?
Perhaps a single pi might be a tad underpowered for two forums + other stuff, especially if the forums will be more active. Now there are so called altPis which are generally stronger (and more expensive) while keeping the same general form factor.
Odroid makes good ones, I've also heard of OrangePi, but I have no experience with those.
Alternatively you could reuse an old computer if you have one (in the end of the day, servers are just beffier PCs), but beware fan noises if you want to have it in the same room that you'll sleep.
Surprised to hear that. I didn't think running a forum takes any significant resources. What would be the issue in terms of lacking power here? Is it the CPU? the RAM?
No expert on this, but I feel like 1GB of RAM the the 3 B+ has might not be enough for everything you want.
I have two Olimex Lime2 eMMC boards (it’s an open source hardware A20 board of industry-grade quality) in the same box.
On them together I run:
… I have some more ideas, but lack the time right now. Also the Allwinner A20 ARM boards are quite spiffy (esp. compared to my old GuruPlug’s Marvell Kirkwood), but still not powerful enough to handle e.g. Nextcloud Talk.
I used to run a raspberry with some small services but it was never really useful. I host two VPSs already so they cover my needs and don’t have the issues of hosting from one’s personal IP.
Quite a number actually.
Qnap arm based box running a web server, sabnzbd, sickrage, twonky media and nzb clients.
Desktop running plex, deluge, and pass through proxy for some of the networks wireless devices.
Occasionally theres an IOT gateway on an older raspberry pi, though it's mostly turned off as I can rarely be bothered coding for it and the bits it talks to.
Yeah, I have a homelab running on an R815 that was given to me by an old workplace. I use it mainly to prototype and test new stuff for work before implementing it there, but I have some basic infrastructure VMs that are permanent; LDAP server, DNS (pihole), Plex, gaming/general workstation VM, Unifi Controller, etc.
Anything that requires a higher degree of stability (personal domains e-mail, self-hosted password manager), I have living in VMs at Digital Ocean.
I just got a Raspberry Pi purely so I could run it Pi-Hole without worry about keeping it online if I kill one my my Hyper-V hosts (learned a decent amount for work). Otherwise I've been chugging along with a NUC and an older lower tier gaming rig that I stripped down.
I used to run a Linux box in my living room with a Quassel server, my site + a public http fileshare, email relay and a bunch of other fun stuff (dnscrypt etc).
Then one of its hard drives crashed and I haven't bothered doing this again. It was fun at the time, taught me a lot, but as soon as it became a chore there was really no reason to keep doing this, especially when it has the potential to impact work.
Some of my data on said hard drive was improperly backed up, so I lost tens of thousands of screenshots from my early MMO days and something like 15 BTC (worth like $200 at the time, now quite a bit more, live and learn).
I am still in the process of setting my new server up. So far i have SABnzbd, radarr and plex on ubuntu server.
Check this out for securing your server it helped me a lot.
https://github.com/imthenachoman/How-To-Secure-A-Linux-Server
I have two Raspberry Pis in my network. A 2B and a 3B+. Their purposes:
I have, at home, an 2009 Xserve (Dual 2.93 GHz Xeons) and an 8-bay Drobo, in a 6U XRackPro2 in my garage.
The primary uses are for:
I'm probably going to be the only person in this entire thread that uses a rack mounted Mac for their home server. 😅
I have one RPi 3 that I use as a CUPS and scand server, for using my cheapo HP printer/scanner w/o having to fiddle with cords and stuff. I mostly use it to scan my annotations on books and stuff I read on paper.
I was planning to use the pi as a backup server w/ rsync like another user here, but because my digital footprint is quite low for todays standards (varies between 10 to 20 gigabytes) I just do full backups every weekend. But I should be encrypting and copying them somewhere for added safety. Maybe I'll use they RPi for that.
Check out Tarsnap for backups. It works like tar so there's no weird software to get used to and it does backups to the Amazon cloud. It's fully encrypted and deduplicated too. The best part is, it's cheap as heck since you're only paying for what you use. I've been backing up my mail server for over a year and have paid less than five dollars in that time.
Would you mind if I ask how big is the data for the mail server, roughly? I don't recall what was the cost I calculated for myself the last time it was not affordable for me, but I am horrible with these calculations. If I can manage to store 10-20 Gb for $5-10/year that'd be great.
I host e-mail for five accounts and 20 gigabytes of space easily handles things. The mail itself probably accounts for a gigabyte of mail tops. I moved things onto a physical server, but I had been using a $2.50/month account at Vultr and it worked great. I think they have a minimum of $5/month now which gets you a bit more disk space. It's all overkill though, e-mail takes up barely any disk space.