Home servers are fun

Posted Sat 10 Apr, 2021.

I have 3 or 4 Raspberry Pis (I know, I should know the exact number), and I'm not doing anything with any of them. So I had that idea of setting up a Minecraft server for my wife. In reality is a silly idea because she can host from her laptop any LAN game in the rare occasions we play together (I'm not into Minecraft, she is), but I digress.

So I setup a DietPI, after some post I read on a gemlog. Being a Debian person, I'm not sure I liked it too much with all the curses based menus, but it really saves you a lot of time and it did work perfect headless over SSH:

https://dietpi.com/

I don't think we will be using the Minecraft server, but the thing is that it brought back some memories, when in 2004 I was hosting my blog in a home server running on a VIA EPIA-PD6000E with OpenBSD.

Stability or QoS wasn't really a thing, it all was about tinkering and learning, and it was a lot of fun for 7 years until I moved everything to a VPS.

When I decided to put my SpaceBeans service live as an excuse to host this capsule, I thought for a second about using one of the Pis and go back to have a home server, but the thing is that I have an underused VPS dedicated to do MX and DNS backup. It is the cheapest VPS you can get at Digital Ocean, but considering that it is mostly idle, deploying the service on that machine was the cheaper option in terms of time spent.

I should go back to host some services at home. It is easier than in 2004. Now you can have a tiny box with a Raspberry Pi with more power that you possibly need, and trust me that my Internet connection in 2021 is faster than what I had in 2004 (in upload bandwidth, of course). But I need a good excuse to spend time on that (not much, admittedly; the couple of VPS I maintain only require attention when I have to upgrade to the next Debian stable).

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