Ask HN: What is your Personal/private server setup?

3 points by sweetsweetpie ↗ HN
There seems to be a trend to personal/private clouds, especially with YC comapnies like Protonet. VPS are nice, but are fully accessible by the owners of the server and offer little in way of physical protection.

I've been doing research into server setups, especially with boards that are libreboot compatible but many are above my needs or too costly. Moreover, component and energy cost are factors to consider for personal users more than for businesses, and yet don't seem to be very talked about.

What are you personal server setups? Do you use a special OS, BIOS etc?

4 comments

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I've got an Intel NUC with Ubuntu 14.04 on it. That probably doesn't get me too much nerd cred, but you know what? It works and that's all I really care about.

Currently I use it as a seed box, media center (xbmc), and Syncthing host.

I intend to do more with it in the future, things like hosting a personal email server, but at least for that, I'm assuming that I need to figure out a reverse proxy for SMTP so that I can actually send email without it getting marked as spam. (I don't want an SMTP relay server because the point is that I want the plain text of my emails to only exist within my network and devices.)

I also need to figure out how to only VPN my torrent traffic and not the rest of the traffic.

Mail-in-a-Box is a wonderfully easy to setup (self-hosted) email server that I've been using for the past year.
I've got a Drobo 5N for storage. Works great.