Agreed. Set up tailscale (or wireguard + DDNS) and a pi.hole for ad blocking on your phone and laptop whenever you’re away from home.

That’ll let you shake out the issues with running a home server. Once it feels stable and you have a feel for running things reliably, you can try out a home music/media server with Jellyfin, an RSS reader like freshRSS, run your own private file server with NextCloud, sync private notes with Syncthing and Obsidian, watch TV shows and movies on Kodi, and so much more.

But don’t get carried away with a million services at first. Just getting a home server up and running takes some trial and error and luck!

Do you pay for a domain? They likely provide dynamic DNS (DNS). If you’re lucky, they have an API for it, instead of an app, and you can configure a cronjob on your home server to run every 1-5 minutes (or more often, if your IP is super unstable!).

And the 80s Dungeons and Dragons movie is… well, it has Tim Curry.

I have very similar requirements, but I’m currently using a Pi with some external drives since that’s how I started out. Would you mind sharing what you ended up buying? My place is pretty small, so the ‘quiet’ requirement is one I care about a lot. Personally I’d love to get something passively cooled, but I haven’t seen much!

You can always funnel all your VPN traffic through a more typical port, like 80, and there’s very little anyone can do to distinguish between your traffic and typical web traffic.

If your ISP causes issues with inbound traffic to your home network, just add another link to the chain to include a cloud-hosted server, or host it all entirely in the cloud (if you find a trustworthy one with a reasonable cost).

Is there some kind of alternativeto astroturfing going on today? I see they just rolled out a website redesign, but I literally only know them as a spammy SEO-bait site I wind up clicking accidentally when I look for software recs. Everything on the site is generic and AI-generated as hell. Tons of ads, AI generated images, and dark patterns.

Mods, take note.

Aha, thank you. Shouldn’t have riffed from memory on that one, I suppose!

But very much agreed: the Zero series has plenty of beef for a DNS server. Maybe when the 3 comes out I’ll add one as a backup for my 4 server.

Funny enough, the Pi Zero uses the CPU from the 3 and the Zero 2 uses the CPU from the 3+, so they’re both more powerful than a 2 anyway :)

Just be sure that the second server in the list is also a black hole. If you don’t, all black holed requests will fallback to the second DNS… which, if it doesn’t also black hole them, will wind up serving you ads and defeating the point!

Personally I find a single Pi is just fine for DNS. It only takes like 10 seconds to reboot. Less, if you use M.2 storage via a HAT or boot from USB! That’s pretty fine downtime. But if you’re afraid you’ll knock over the network and get yelled at by your family or housemates, best to use a backup :)

I use Jellyfin to host my music, and Finamp on my phone to browse and listen to it. Finamp supports downloads as well, so you can listen to your music offline and away from home. Pair that with a self-hosted VPN to access Jellyfin away from home and you’ve got most of your needs covered!

Same. I should really learn to use a simpler one, but I love this model and it still seems rock-solid to me after years of use. The best part is not ending up with sharp, dangerous edges on the lid!

Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP’s quandary a lot easier! I’m looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that’s given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.

2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member’s house for mirroring and backup.

I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I’m sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it’s completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.

Syncthing on my home server, synced with each device I use for notetaking, has been glorious so far. I wish Obsidian would offer Sync for a cheaper rate, because I’d pay if it felt like anything near the cost of actual sync and storage. But Obsidian’s cheapest tier is more expensive than my email hosting!